Happy Holidays.
Happy Holidays everyone.
To everyone, I wish the best.
Sincerely.
With love and appreciation to the people who have been in my life this year, and excitement for what happens next.
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duran
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duran
An excellent summary of what’s going in Health care, and Finance reform right now.
Bill Moyer interviews Matt Taibbi and Robert Kuttner
Amidst fading hopes for real reform on issues ranging from high finance to health care, economist Robert Kuttner and journalist Matt Taibbi join Bill Moyers to discuss Wall Street’s power over the federal government.
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duran
Fuck this season
If I see one more holiday/seasonal commercial talking about love and gifts and giving… I’m going to punch something…
And they’re usually diamonds… so I wonder how many one armed african kids are behind them also.
*sigh*
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duran
Few things make me cry.
One of them is having perspective on the universe I live in.
This blog post at : http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/12/11/incredible-vista-of-the-cosmos/ has done that to me today.
Here’s another phenomenal picture. It’s an amazing 2 x 1.5 degree field toward the center of the Milky Way, revealing about a million stars! It’s taken completely in the near infrared, just outside of what the human eye can see, and shows dust and stars mostly invisible in optical light.
Click here to see that amazing image, and fathom that most of it is invisible to our naked eye, but is there, sitting there, in our galaxy…
Yeah, tears in my eyes, at how amazing our existence is.
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duran
still trying to figure this one out.
rephrasing : this is awesome, but its worth watching a few times.
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duran
Beautiful Women, Beautiful Motorcycles
http://www.bikeexif.com/elizabeth-raab
http://www.elizabethraab.com/Portfolio/Photography.html
duran
Because the muppets are awesome.
You really need to watch this in High Resolution on youtube –> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgbNymZ7vqY
duran
Wisdom
“The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.”
duran
Two quotes a friend shared with me, I want to share with you.
Even after all this time,
the sun never says to the earth,
“You owe me.”
Look what happens with a love like that.
It lights the whole sky.
- Hafiz
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Now
That
All your worry
Has proved such an
Unlucrative
Business,
Why
Not
Find a better
Job.
- Hafiz
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Known also as Hafez.
Some info on the poet
duran
Eloquence in description. An awesome write up on something I’ve been unable to put words too.
http://reddit.com is one of those nerd/geek websites doing social news aggregation. Its much more geeky then digg or others, so the content seems to be of higher quality, if not focused more in to my spectrum of interest. A lot of it can be tripe, but every so often, a diamond comes out of the rough.
A few weeks ago one of the members posted this simple sentence.
I’ve had 4 “real” programming jobs in my 5-year career. They’ve all ended the same way: innovation isn’t allowed, new features are all emergencies, and development ends up the least of my responsibilities.
Sounds like some self pitying whining talk to me… except every so often I wonder if I’ve been in the same boat as well… Then my optimism and naivety kicks in and I forget about complaining, and just do the best job I can. But it still was there, scratching at the back of my head… Something is wrong, at a larger level then I can identify…
A friend of mine, who follows reddit as well apparently noticed one of the comments on in the thread. I’m reposting it here in full, but please visit the thread to at least give reddit a few more hits in their ad counters 
If you are talking about the US, no, it’s not just your job – it’s most medium to large corporations, and too many small companies. The last decade of corporate strategy can largely be characterized at all levels of operation as a “fear strategy”.
The company I used to work for has been in pure fear mode for most of this time – it is economically imploding now largely due to its own mistakes caused by this fear, not for lack of market opportunity as they tell their shareholders. Most other companies I visit as my customers or suppliers are also.
Fear strategies are characterized by irrational risk fear and reduction efforts, by inward looking diminished goals and reduced scope of activity and outlook, by general pessimism and CYA.
The negativity is so pervasive that we now are gaining major advantages over far larger competitors with just our small modicum of optimistic planning, strategy and execution. Most of our competitors have literally lost the capacity to innovate as far as I can see. I like it but it’s scary for others who depend on them to be otherwise.
There are two coupled reasons: most Fortune 1000 companies are in their terminal phase of life cycle “fade”, and various major events have triggered fear. Each of these feeds on the other in a positive feedback loop (taking them in the wrong, fatal direction).
The first is the diametric opposite of corporate start-up and being on a leading edge of something productive which is dominated by optimism. Just as corporations are born, they can and usually do die. There is usually a small cluster for key mistakes that get made that transition the company into a declining, trailing edge organization – most of corporate America is in that phase.
One of the big ones was to abandon manufacturing almost entirely and embrace financial services. Remember that before the crash, FIRE was 70% of US GDP. The Fortune 1000 was 70% of GDP. Not always the same 70% but close enough when it’s the majority of economic activity.
The events are the obvious ones such as the displacement of Cold War fear attention, the dot-com crash, 9-11, general fear-mongering by politicians, over-reliance on single point, profit-driven news sources (the Internet partly ameliorates this), the Wars, Peak Oil, Boomers reaching a similar biological terminal life cycle phase, etc.
Only creative destruction and embrace of their deaths will ever fix anything. The Fortune 1000 is largely not repairable and trying to do so is akin to putting a terminal, comatose 90-year-old on life support; mostly a futile and wasteful effort despite the superficial emotional satisfaction of false continuity and false permanence it brings.
Individually, join or start a small, new company. Consider emigration. Be responsible for your own destiny – the Fortune 1000 never really cared about that and certainly won’t now. Downsize to what really matters, which once you try it you’ll discover is a whole lot less material and less expensive.
My wise father said that you can tell what part of a corporate life cycle a company is in by the credentials of the CEO and executive staff: start-ups have creative professions which include engineers and scientists to imagine new ideas, products and markets for a new company; young adult companies have sales and marketing people to take advantage of the leading edge profit opportunities; the middle-aged company is led by process people and accountants because there is no growth left and every dime of profit comes from cost control and efficiency; and terminal phase is led by lawyers and politicians because the company must do merger & acquisition to grow, lie about its products’ value and have legal cover, or must go through “probate”.
Think about why the Fortune 1000 “needs” to own the political process at all these days – this is why we have the political corruption they’ve caused: if they could compete at all it would be easier and cheaper for them but they can’t so they have to “buy” political cover to survive. Have to have bail outs from the government to survive. It’s pretty obvious.
… join or start a small, new company. Consider emigration…
How about both?
An interesting read, that helps cement some things I’ve been thinking about pretty hard.
Matt! 5:43 am on December 26, 2009 Permalink
<3 you too. /etc/hosts greetinks from mother cincinnati.
Bartholomew 7:28 pm on September 27, 2011 Permalink
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