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diff --git a/Birds.txt b/Birds.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 9416093..0000000 --- a/Birds.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,6 +0,0 @@ -Birds - -Red tailed hawk -Cardinal -Blue jay -Yellow bellied sapsucker
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/Brakes-.txt b/Brakes-.txt deleted file mode 100644 index b485f07..0000000 --- a/Brakes-.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,5 +0,0 @@ -Brakes- - -Wheel cylinder - available via Napa for d300 trucks, call Monroe napa, ask for Kenny (tell him Mike Wall sent me) - -When you change master cylinder, change wheel cylinders and rubber hoses.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/I've been hanging around various places internet communities for years, others I've come to more rec.txt b/I've been hanging around various places internet communities for years, others I've come to more rec.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 56ad937..0000000 --- a/I've been hanging around various places internet communities for years, others I've come to more rec.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,7 +0,0 @@ -I've been hanging around various places internet communities for years, others I've come to more recently. For years I've followed the ERE community, recently I started following the indie web camp community. I'm also in the middle of a deep dive into something i neglected in five years of professional cooking -- fermentation. - -All of these things are related. - -# another post is going to be about https and privacy and how privacy is a conceit of the rich, but one that we should aspire to grant to everyone. the more money you have the more privacy you can get but the more disconnected from your neighbors you become. privacy is not without tradeoff, of course those of us in the industrialized world were born without a chance to even know that tradeoffs had been made. we already had houses that afforded us privacy, or some measure of it, yards screen off, cars humming the highway alone. Maybe you grew up in new york, no car, no yard. That's precisely what I mean, you expectations of privacy are different. you might have more community, joining your building neighbors on the roof to enjoy the sun, or grill up something tasty for instance. - -What's different about this notion of privacy and the notional idea of privacy on the internet is that in the first case you are getting some privacy from your fellow humans, in the case the net you are getting some privacy from government perhaps, but more obviously and more worryingly, privacy from corporations. That is a very different sort of privacy in my view than our traditional notion of privacy. I might not care if my nest door neighbor knows what I had for dinner because we both happened to be out in our years grilling at the same time, but it does not follow that I want Google, Kroger, Proctor & Gamble or any other corporation to have that same info. diff --git a/Speakers 16.5 tall 11 deep 10 wide.txt b/Speakers 16.5 tall 11 deep 10 wide.txt deleted file mode 100644 index a8666b7..0000000 --- a/Speakers 16.5 tall 11 deep 10 wide.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1 +0,0 @@ -Speakers 16.5 tall 11 deep 10 wide
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/apocalyptic daze.txt b/apocalyptic daze.txt deleted file mode 100755 index cf73449..0000000 --- a/apocalyptic daze.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,55 +0,0 @@ -title: Apocalyptic Daze -date: 20140728 22:20:29 -tags: #art #apocalyptic #writing - -Interesting look as why we as a culture seems so obsessed with apocalyptic scenarios. Not sure I agree with some of it. It seems to be solely on the side of life imitating art when in fact I think there's a credible argument to be made in the other direction -- that it might be art's way of telling us life has gotten pretty bad. At the same time, the apocalypse never arrives it seems - --- - -[source](http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_2_apocalyptic-daze.html) - -As an asteroid hurtles toward Earth, terrified citizens pour into the streets of Brussels to stare at the mammoth object growing before their eyes. Soon, it will pass harmlessly by—but first, a strange old man, Professor Philippulus, dressed in a white sheet and wearing a long beard, appears, beating a gong and crying: “This is a punishment; repent, for the world is ending!” - -We smile at the silliness of this scene from the Tintin comic strip _L’Étoile Mystérieuse_, published in Belgium in 1941. Yet it is also familiar, since so many people in both Europe and the United States have recently convinced themselves that the End is nigh. This depressing conviction may seem surprising, given that the West continues to enjoy an unparalleled standard of living. But Professor Philippulus has nevertheless managed to achieve power in governments, the media, and high places generally. Constantly, he spreads fear: of progress, of science, of demographics, of global warming, of technology, of food. In five years or in ten years, temperatures will rise, Earth will be uninhabitable, natural disasters will multiply, the climate will bring us to war, and nuclear plants will explode. Man has committed the sin of pride; he has destroyed his habitat and ravaged the planet; he must atone. - -My point is not to minimize the dangers that we face. Rather, it is to understand why apocalyptic fear has gripped so many of our leaders, scientists, and intellectuals, who insist on reasoning and arguing as though they were following the scripts of mediocre Hollywood disaster movies. - -Around the turn of the twenty-first century, a paradigm shift in our thinking took place: we decided that the era of revolutions was over and that the era of catastrophes had begun. The former had involved expectation, the hope that the human race would proceed toward some goal. But once the end of history was announced, the Communist enemy vanquished, and, more recently, the War on Terror all but won, the idea of progress lay moribund. What replaced the world’s human future was the future of the world as a material entity. The long list of emblematic victims—Jews, blacks, slaves, proletarians, colonized peoples—was likewise replaced, little by little, with the Planet, the new paragon of all misery. No longer were we summoned to participate in a particular community; rather, we were invited to identify ourselves with the spatial vessel that carried us, groaning. - -How did this change happen? Over the last half-century, leftist intellectuals have identified two great scapegoats for the world’s woes. First, Marxism designated capitalism as responsible for human misery. Second, “Third World” ideology, disappointed by the bourgeois indulgences of the working class, targeted the West, supposedly the inventor of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. The guilty party that environmentalism now accuses—mankind itself, in its will to dominate the planet—is essentially a composite of the previous two, a capitalism invented by a West that oppresses peoples and destroys the earth. Indeed, environmentalism sees itself as the fulfillment of all earlier critiques. “There are only two solutions,” Bolivian president Evo Morales declared in 2009. “Either capitalism dies, or Mother Earth dies.” - -So the planet has become the new proletariat that must be saved from exploitation—if necessary, by reducing the number of human beings, as oceanographer Jacques Cousteau said in 1991. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a group of people who have decided not to reproduce, has announced: “Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom. When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth’s biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory.” The British environmentalist James Lovelock, a chemist by training, regards Earth as a living organism and human beings as an infection within it, proliferating at the expense of the whole, which tries to reject and expel them. Journalist Alan Weisman’s 2007 book _The World Without Us_ envisions in detail a planet from which humanity has disappeared. In France, a Green politician, Yves Cochet, has proposed a “womb strike,” which would be reinforced by penalties against couples who conceive a third child, since each child means, in terms of pollution, the equivalent of 620 round trips between Paris and New York. - -“Our house is burning, but we are not paying attention,” said Jacques Chirac at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002. “Nature, mutilated, overexploited, cannot recover, and we refuse to admit it.” Sir Martin Rees, a British astrophysicist and former president of the Royal Society, gives humanity a 50 percent chance of surviving beyond the twenty-first century. Oncologists and toxicologists predict that the end of mankind should arrive even earlier than foreseen, around 2060, thanks to a general sterilization of sperm. In view of the overall acceleration of natural disorders, droughts, and pandemics, “we all know now that we are going down,” says the scholar Serge Latouche. Peter Barrett, director of the Antarctica Research Centre at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington, is more specific: “If we continue our present growth path we are facing the end of civilization as we know it—not in millions of years, or even millennia, but by the end of this century.” - -One could go on citing such quotations forever, given the spread of the cliché-ridden apocalyptic literature. Environmentalism has become a global ideology that covers all of existence—not merely modes of production but ways of life as well. We rediscover in it the whole range of Marxist rhetoric, now applied to the environment: ubiquitous scientism, horrifying visions of reality, even admonitions to the guilty parties who misunderstand those who wish them well. Authors, journalists, politicians, and scientists compete in the portrayal of abomination and claim for themselves a hyper-lucidity: they alone see clearly while others vegetate in the darkness. - -The fear that these intellectuals spread is like a gluttonous enzyme that swallows up an anxiety, feeds on it, and then leaves it behind for new ones. When the Fukushima nuclear plant melted down after the enormous earthquake in Japan in March 2011, it only confirmed a feeling of anxiety that was already there, looking for some content. In six months, some new concern will grip us: a pandemic, bird flu, the food supply, melting ice caps, cell-phone radiation. - -The fear also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the press reporting, as though it were a surprising finding, that young people are haunted by the very concerns about global warming that the press continually instills in them. As in an echo chamber, opinion polls reflect the views promulgated by the media. We are inoculated against anxiety by the repetition of the same themes, which become a narcotic we can’t do without. - -To wake people up requires ever more extreme rhetoric, including a striking number of analogies to the Holocaust. Noël Mamère, a French politician in the Green party, has accused another politician, Claude Allègre, of being a _négationniste_ about global warming—a French word that refers to those who deny the Jewish and Armenian genocides. Economist Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has explicitly compared the Danish statistician and eco-skeptic Bjørn Lomborg to the Führer. The American climate scientist James Hansen has accused oil companies trying to “spread doubt about global warming” of “high crimes against humanity and nature” and called trains transporting American coal “death trains.” _Boston Globe_ columnist Ellen Goodman has written that “global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.” - -A time-honored strategy of cataclysmic discourse, whether performed by preachers or by propagandists, is the retroactive correction. This technique consists of accumulating a staggering amount of horrifying news and then—at the end—tempering it with a slim ray of hope. First you break down all resistance; then you offer an escape route to your stunned audience. And so the advertising copy for the Al Gore–starring documentary _An Inconvenient Truth _reads: “Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet’s climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced—a catastrophe of our own making.” - -Now here are the means that the former vice president, like most environmentalists, proposes to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions: using low-energy lightbulbs; driving less; checking your tire pressure; recycling; rejecting unnecessary packaging; adjusting your thermostat; planting a tree; and turning off electrical appliances. Since we find ourselves at a loss before planetary threats, we will convert our powerlessness into propitiatory gestures, which will give us the illusion of action. First the ideology of catastrophe terrorizes us; then it appeases us by proposing the little rituals of a post-technological animism. But let’s be clear: a cosmic calamity is not averted by checking tire pressure or sorting garbage. - -Similarly, we are told that “our power exceeds our knowledge,” as the German philosopher Hans Jonas once put it—yet we are also told, with a certainty puzzling from such skeptics, that we must change our diets, cut back on air travel, consume fewer material goods, and stop driving gas guzzlers. This is the central aporia of green neo-asceticism: it attributes a wildly exaggerated importance to ordinary human behavior, thus weakening its appeal to the very humility that it tries to instill. - -Another contradiction inherent in apocalyptic discourse is that, though it tries desperately to awaken us, to convince us of planetary chaos, it eventually deadens us, making our eventual disappearance part of our everyday routine. At first, yes, the kinds of doom that we hear about—the acidification of the oceans, the pollution of our air—charge our calm existence with a strange excitement. The enemy is among us, and he waits for our slightest lapses, all the more insidious because he is invisible. If the function of ancient rites was to purge a community’s violence on a sacrificial victim, the function of our contemporary rites is—at first—to dramatize the status quo and to exalt us through proximity to cataclysm. - -But the certainty of the prophecies makes this effect short-lived. The language of fear does not include the word “maybe.” It tells us, rather, that the horror is inevitable. Resistant to all doubt, it is satisfied to mark the stages of degradation. This is another paradox of fear: it is ultimately reassuring. At least we know where we are heading—toward the worst. - -One consequence of this certainty is that we begin to suspect that the numberless Cassandras who prophesy all around us do not intend to warn us so much as to condemn us. In classical Judaism, the prophet sought to give new life to God’s cause against kings and the powerful. In Christianity, millenarian movements embodied a hope for justice against a Church wallowing in luxury and vice. But in a secular society, a prophet has no function other than indignation. So it happens that he becomes intoxicated with his own words and claims a legitimacy with no basis, calling down the destruction that he pretends to warn against. You’ll get what you’ve got coming!—that is the death wish that our misanthropes address to us. These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to listen to them. Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy. It is a short distance from lucidity to bitterness, from prediction to anathema. - -Another result of the doomsayers’ certainty is that their preaching, by inoculating us against the poison of terror, brings about petrification. The trembling that they want to inculcate falls flat. Anxiety has the last word. We were supposed to be alerted; instead, we are disarmed. This may even be the goal of the noisy panic: to dazzle us in order to make us docile. Instead of encouraging resistance, it propagates discouragement and despair. The ideology of catastrophe becomes an instrument of political and philosophical resignation. - -What is surprising is that the mood of catastrophe prevails especially in the West, as if it were particular to privileged peoples. Despite the economic crises of the last few years, people live better in Europe and the United States than anywhere else, which is why migrants the world over want to come to those places. Yet never have we been so inclined to condemn our societies. - -Perhaps the new Green puritanism is nothing but the reaction of a West deprived of its supreme competence, the last avatar of an unhappy neocolonialism that preaches to other cultures a wisdom that it has never practiced. For the last 20 years, non-European peoples have become masters of their own futures and have stopped regarding us as infallible models. They are likely to receive our professions of environmentalist faith with polite indifference. Billions of people look to economic growth, with all the pollution that accompanies it, to improve their condition. Who are we to refuse it to them? - -Environmental worry is universal; the sickness of the end of the world is purely Western. To counter this pessimism, we might list the good news of the last 20 years: democracy is making slow progress; more than a billion people have escaped absolute poverty; life expectancy has increased in most countries; war is becoming rarer; many serious illnesses have been eradicated. But it would do little good. Our perception is inversely proportional to reality. - -The Christian apocalypse saw itself as a hopeful revelation of the coming of God’s kingdom. Today’s has nothing to offer. There is no promise of redemption; the only hope is that those human beings who repent of their errors may escape the chaos, as in Cormac McCarthy’s fine novel _The Road_. How can we be surprised, then, that so many bright minds have become delirious and that so many strange predictions flourish? - -_Pascal Bruckner is a French writer and philosopher whose latest book is _The Paradox of Love_. His article was translated by Alexis Cornel._ diff --git a/being and doing are not at odds.txt b/being and doing are not at odds.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 4c49c94..0000000 --- a/being and doing are not at odds.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,68 +0,0 @@ -title: Being and doing are not at odds -date: 20131118 10:14:34 -tags: #life ---- - - - --- - -From <http://www.raptitude.com/2013/05/doing-and-being/> - -# Being and doing are not at odds - -by David Cain - -Every time I write something on the topic of [personal productivity](http://www.raptitude.com/2013/05/how-to-cross-every-item-off-your-to-do-list-in-one-night/), a few people suggest that maybe doing more isn’t appropriate at all. - -As a friend of mine suggested on the [Facebook page](http://facebook.com/raptitudedotcom), Western society has an obsession with productivity. We grow up being taught that we want to “do well” but we’re not often taught explicitly what that means. Success is a vague word, and in the absence of a meaningful definition it seems to refer to little more than having an above average income and a lot of phone calls to return. - -We know that there’s something very near-sighted about taking busyness and career success for compass-North in our personal quests for happiness, so it’s understandable that the discerning person might be suspicious of anyone that appears unusually preoccupied with their personal productivity. - -Last summer, I was more socially active than I’d ever been. Over the winter my focus shifted totally, and as the recreation season returns I find I’m spending most of my spare time at my desk. I’ve been turning down a lot of social invitations, giving vague reasons most of the time, but those who know me best know I am working. Some of them may be wondering, in my conspicuous absence, if I’ve lost touch with the values I espouse — staying present, connecting with other human beings, and enjoying the in-between moments. - -A certain amount of personal productivity is absolutely necessary, at least enough to feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, and maintain some semblance of stability and autonomy. But I’ve been achieving those minimum productivity standards my whole life, so the question “Why do you need to do more than you’re already doing?” is a fair one. - -Well, I don’t need to do more. Other than the physical essentials of life, I don’t strictly need anything. But it makes no sense at all to cease all activity except the minimum necessary to survive. After I earn enough to pay my food and rent, “unnecessary” productivity becomes any activity other than sleeping, eating, going to the bathroom and meditating. We each decide how much time to apply to any given “electives” in our lives: how many movies to watch, how many barbecues to attend, how many blogs to read, how often to make coffee, and of course, how much we work. Right now I want to accomplish more work than I have been, and I think I have good reasons. - -### Productivity is not the problem - -There is a lot of undue criticism of productivity itself. We see the mounting consequences of thoughtless, irresponsible productivity in the forms of pollution, invasive advertising, mass-produced food, atrocious overseas working conditions, and the death of our own manufacturing sector, to name a few obvious problems. - -These are serious issues, but they’re not caused by productivity, they’re caused by thoughtlessness and irresponsibility, a confusion of what it is we really value. For example, a recurring [theme](http://www.raptitude.com/2011/12/how-to-get-rich-without-making-more-money/) on this blog is that money is attractive only because it is traded for what we value, which actually only amounts to certain [pleasant feelings](http://www.raptitude.com/2012/07/what-you-want-is-never-a-thing/). The result is that many people believe it is money that they value, driving the thoughtless kind of productivity that regularly annihilates animal species, erodes personal freedoms and poisons the tap water. - -Productivity is often thoughtless, yes. I understand the suspicion that arises whenever we talk about how to be more productive, because we don’t often talk about whether that’s even a good thing. The way our culture reveres growth and profit, it’s easy to assume that whatever we’ve been doing, we ought to get more of it done if we can. As author Richard Carlson quipped in [_Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff_](http://amzn.to/XKKvXP), “People are no longer human beings. We should be called human doings.” - -Western society certainly does carry an enormous deficit in the attention it pays to _being_, as opposed to doing. Meditation and mindfulness, at least when done intentionally, are still fringe activities associated with hippies and new-agers. We don’t think of “being” as a verb. - -Doing nothing is taboo in our culture’s productivity-focused ethos, even though conscious periods of non-doing are proven to improve health, reduce stress, and make it easier to be happy. In my experience, the habit of periodic non-doing actually lends itself to becoming _more_ productive, and makes it easier to notice when your productivity is aimed in the wrong direction. - -### Presence is a basic need - -At least for now, time spent simply being, rather than doing, is not part of a normal person’s day. Yet we all have a persistent appetite for mindful states, even if we don’t realize it. The thousands of different activities we indulge in our off-days might have little in common except that they quickly put us into a present-moment state. All of them — lounging at the beach, watching movies cycling, needlepoint, off-roading, taking drugs, backpacking overseas , music-making, writing, having sex, and having a picnic — relieve us temporarily of the mind’s insidious habit of drifting into the future, which only exists as imagination. - -The experience of mindfulness, whether cultivated intentionally or derived as a side-effect of what we normally do for fun, is as visceral a need as any. Our Western societies could benefit from being more aware of that need. If we were, we’d make sure that we have those mindful experiences by engaging in activities that produce something useful for ourselves or others — such as writing, exercising, practicing a skill or building something — instead of baking on the couch in front of the television, having been drawn there by intrinsic needs we don’t understand or try to understand. - -Personal productivity doesn’t need to be at odds with mindfulness. Being doesn’t need to be separate from doing. In fact, if the work you’re engaged in is highly resonant with your values, a mindful state arises naturally, because there’s nothing to escape from, nowhere you’d rather be. - -The feeling of being productive is different when what you’re producing isn’t truly important to you. For most of us, our jobs are a perfect example. When you’re just trying to pay the bills, work achievement feels more like a fleeting relief, a hit of something temporary, rather than a clearing of the mind. - -At my job, I’m always pleased to get a batch of work done. It is gratifying, but it only the sense of feeling like I’ve pushed away something I don’t want for a little while. When I’m making progress on my own personal projects, it feels like I’m moving through the world. - -My personal quest for productivity has been more of a struggle to make sure that the most important things do happen, rather than making sure that I make as much happen as possible. There is a difference. Over the last few months, particularly the last few weeks, I’ve been more focused on my personal projects than ever, because they’re beginning to generate their own momentum in a way job-related work never has for me. - -The goal of all this is to be able pay my living expenses doing what I love, which is writing. The moment I reach that benchmark, I can cut loose my fifty-hour-a-week commitment to an employer, along with all of its related burdens such as buying work clothes, waking up and going to bed at inflexible times and having to ask permission to get on a plane. - -I am partway there. This is worthwhile productivity, if anything is worthwhile. It is certainly more worthwhile than reporting to a full-time corporate job for forty years, just to pay for what I do on my evenings and weekends. - -### Smelling roses - -Last weekend was Canada’s May long weekend. It rained every day. I spent most of my three days off working on my own projects. It was one of my most productive weekends ever. I wrote every day. I culled all my files. I cleaned my stove. For the first time I can remember, I have no resistance to getting down to work. For a seasoned procrastinator, this has been a transcendent experience. - -The most surprising part of this burst of productivity is that it came with a more mindful, relaxed state. I felt like time was slower and life was more spacious. I got a lot more work done, but I also did a lot more leisure reading, went for more walks and did a lot more mindful sitting — much more rose-smelling, and more of an inclination to take a moment to do it. - -This state is lingering. Every action is more conscious, I’m more patient at my job, I enjoy waiting in line and [walking across parking lots](http://www.raptitude.com/2011/09/how-to-walk-across-a-parking-lot/) more than I ever have. As it turns out, productivity — at least when I’m working on the right things — makes it easy to stay in the moment, to be where I am. - -When it’s applied to what’s most important to you, an increase in productivity is not tantamount to sacrificing the quality of the present to improve the quality of the future. It’s not an a deferral of today’s happiness for tomorrow’s. - -We don’t need to “strike a balance” between being and doing, between work and repose. These are not separate categories of living, as they’re often made out to be. Doing the work that serves your real values improves the _present_ reality of your life. It makes life better right now, and later, and probably forever, as all worthy goals should. diff --git a/book a cheap flight.txt b/book a cheap flight.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 8a26e38..0000000 --- a/book a cheap flight.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,90 +0,0 @@ -Book a cheap flight - -tags: travel
date: August 12, 2013 7:48:50 PM ----
- -![An airplane departs Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix.][1]Joshua Lott/Reuters An airplane departs Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix. - -It used to be so simple. You wanted to go to Paris, so you called a travel agency, gave them your dates and budget, and with any luck, you soon had in your hands a real paper ticket with a real dollar value. Even in the early days of the Internet, it was easier. You went to one of the few booking sites — [Travelocity][2] or [Expedia][3], most likely — searched for your route, paid with a credit card and that was it. Maybe you even got a paper ticket in the mail. Those were the days! - -Today, however, booking a flight is a total mess. Travelocity and Expedia have been joined by [Bing][4] and [Orbitz][5] and [Dohop][6] and [Vayama][7] and [CheapTickets][8] and [CheapOair][9] and [Kayak][10] and [SideStep][11] and [Mobissimo][12] and and and … I could go on and list every single Web site out there, but I won’t. There are just too many. Instead, I’ll lead you through the steps I make when I’m booking a flight myself. - -I’ve covered this territory a bit before — [here][13] and [here][14] — but today I’ll try to go into more detail. For this experiment, let’s imagine a simple domestic trip: a weekend of snowboarding in Jackson Hole in Wyoming at the beginning of March. - -My first stop is, as it’s been for years now, [Kayak.com][10]. It’s the simplest airfare search engine — minimal graphics, no discount vacation deals to confuse me, and it searches almost every other site out there — and also the most flexible. I can not only choose a window for my departure and arrival times but also decide where I want (or don’t want) to spend a layover, or which frequent-flier alliance to stick with. - -Kayak gives me two decent-looking options: $231 on American Airlines (Newark to Jackson via Chicago) and $241 for Delta (via Atlanta); taxes and fees included in both figures. I’m lucky here — I have gold status on American, so I can avoid the checked-baggage fees for my snowboard. - -Of course, I don’t stop there. Next, I’ll check [ITASoftware.com][15], a somewhat complicated site that makes it feel as if you’re a travel agent tapping into unusual, semisecret routes. Maybe there’s a faster way to Wyoming, perhaps through Minneapolis? Not this time. For the Jackson Hole trip, ITA finds the same American Airlines itinerary, pricing it at $230 instead of $231. Frankly, it’s a pretty normal trip, so there are no surprises. And anyway, ITA doesn’t let you book tickets, instead directing you to other sites or travel agents. - -So, I check out another site: [cFares.com][16], which has a twist. For a $50 annual membership, you’ll get small rebates if you book through them. Each rebate may be only $8 or $20, but if you fly several times a year, that can add up quickly. And last spring, cFares found me a flight from New York to Paris for $543.17, or about $200 less than any other search engine found. - -For my theoretical ski trip, cFares knocks that $241 Delta flight down to $229 via the rebate (clicking the link sends you to Orbitz to book), but it doesn’t bring up the American flight at all. - -And so, finally, if I were going to book this trip, I’d go straight to [AA.com][17], login with my frequent-flier account and buy my ticket right there. Except … I’ve waited too long! In the couple of hours between when I first started searching and when I eventually decided to book, the fares have gone way up — the flight is now $298. Still, because I have status on American, it’s the better deal. - -![][18]bing.com - -Or is it? Will the price go down? For that, I check [Farecast.com][19] (which has been absorbed into Bing) and [Yapta.com][20], which track airfares and can predict — based on historical data and knowledge of the airlines’ pricing systems — if a price is going to go up or down in the near future. In this case, Bing/Farecast says buy, so I guess I will, even though I’m a little skeptical of their methods. In light of volatile oil prices, pandemic panics and the generally unpredictable future of travel, I don’t know how much to trust these virtual prognosticators. At some point, I have to perform an important, very personal calculation: is it worth my time to keep searching — and to keep worrying that I’m missing out on a better deal? Or should I just go for it and accept that I’ve found a decent fare? - -For an international flight, things are slightly more complicated. Let’s imagine I’m going to Bangkok in early April (as I very well might be). For this trip, my dates are a bit more open-ended, as is the amount of time I’m willing to take to get to Thailand. So, I’ll again start with Kayak, checking out its airfare matrix, a calendar-based grid that appears when I enter my origin, destination and the month I’m traveling. - -![][21]Kayak.com - -Each day of the calendar has a dollar figure showing the lowest possible fare with a departure for that date. Click on the day (April 1 in this case) and a long list appears, with fares ranging from “$950%2B” to “$1400%2B” and boxes that let me specify how long of a trip I want: 1-4 days, 5-9 days, 10-14 days or 15%2B days. Ten to 14 sounds reasonable, a choice that lands me a one-stop flight (there’s no longer a nonstop, alas) with Cathay Pacific at “$1,165%2B.” That plus sign is important, because now I have to click “Check now” and find out what the fare will really be … Surprise! It really is $1,165. - -If, however, I do the search again, specifying flexible dates, I come up with a bunch of $1,000 options on Air China. Which do I go for? - -That’s when I start checking other sites. First is [Vayama.com][7], a booking site that specializes in international flights and claims to have access to private deals unavailable elsewhere. And Vayama comes through pretty well, finding a $1,048 fare on Asiana (taxes and fees included) and, intriguingly, a $1,230 fare on a Oneworld Alliance airline. Which one? I won’t know until I book, but since American Airlines is a Oneworld member, my frequent-fliergold status might garner me an upgrade, or at least the chance to earn a bunch of miles and request a better seat. - -Meanwhile, cFares finds that same $1,048 fare on Asiana (actually, it finds it on Vayama, and on CheapoAir.com) and offers a respectable $30 rebate. Not bad. Now I just need to decide: would I prefer to fly through Seoul (on Asiana) or Beijing (on Air China), or do I want to plump an extra $200 for several thousand frequent-flier miles on American? - -Honestly, I don’t know. But I should probably make up my mind soon, before the airlines get wind of my plans. - -![][22]SeatExpert.com The seat plan for an Air China -Boeing 747-400. - -Still, however, there are a few more little things I do to game the system as much as possible. I try to fly on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, when fares tend to be a little lower (though not always) and fewer people mob the airports (though not always). I go to [SeatExpert.com][23] to find the best spot in the plane to park myself. (Sorry, [SeatGuru.com][24]!) And I try always to buy the ticket directly through the airline, partly to maximize frequent-flier miles, partly because the airlines sometimes have special deals that don’t show up on Kayak, but also so that if things go wrong at the airport (as I’ve heard happens on very rare occasions) the airline won’t be able to blame some third-party booker. - -None of this, of course, is foolproof. Fares go up or down seemingly at random, routes change or evaporate or come into being according to no logic I can discern, and what I imagine would be an empty flight could turn out to be full of rowdy high-schoolers on a class trip. (They’re worse than babies, seriously.) But traveling well (and frugally) means being ready for the unexpected — even when it happens long before you ever get on the plane. - -**Related** - - * [Sites That Do Your Fare Digging][25] - * [How To Find Cheaper Flying Dates][26] - * [Travel Web Sites: A Click-On Showdown][14] - * [Research: The Traveler’s Best Friend][13] - * [A New Way to Nab a Better Seat on the Plane][27] - * [Handy Airline Surcharge Charts][28] - * [Save With B-List Airlines][29] - - [1]: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/02/17/travel/17frugal/17frugal-blogSpan.jpg - [2]: http://www.travelocity.com/ - [3]: http://www.expedia.com/default.asp - [4]: http://www.bing.com/ - [5]: http://www.orbitz.com/ - [6]: http://www.dohop.com/ - [7]: http://www.vayama.com/ - [8]: http://www.cheaptickets.com/ - [9]: http://www.cheapoair.com/ - [10]: http://www.kayak.com/ - [11]: http://www.sidestep.com/ - [12]: http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/click-it-and-ticket-booking-a-flight-the-frugal-way/Mobissimo.com - [13]: http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/research-the-travelers-best-friend/ - [14]: http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/more-links-in-the-research-chain/ - [15]: http://itasoftware.com/ - [16]: http://www.cfares.com/ - [17]: http://www.aa.com/homePage.do - [18]: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/02/17/travel/17frugal/17frugal-custom1.jpg - [19]: http://www.bing.com/travel/ - [20]: http://www.yapta.com/ - [21]: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/02/17/travel/17frugal/17frugal-custom2.jpg - [22]: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/02/17/travel/17frugal/17frugal-custom3.jpg - [23]: http://seatexpert.com/ - [24]: http://www.seatguru.com/ - [25]: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/travel/21Prac.html - [26]: http://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/how-to-find-cheaper-flying-dates/ - [27]: http://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/a-new-way-to-nab-a-better-seat/ - [28]: http://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/handy-airline-surcharge-charts/ - [29]: http://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/save-with-b-list-airlines/ -
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/bus crash.txt b/bus crash.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 7982c8a..0000000 --- a/bus crash.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1 +0,0 @@ -At least you didn't get hurt, and you're more important to me than any bus
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/concrete.txt b/concrete.txt deleted file mode 100755 index c797727..0000000 --- a/concrete.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9 +0,0 @@ -Concrete - -DIFFERENT TYPES OF CONCRETE CLASSIFIED BY TEXTURE: - -ANCIENT very rough old hand made concrete often chipped and faded almost to tan, large chunks of gravel abound, cracks plentiful and often show signs of plant growth - -OLD mixed in towable cyclinders, rough but lacking in the abundance of chalky gravel. Cracks tend to form from center of one side to the center ofthe the side opposite. Provides excellent traction even when wet. Very thin spaces between sections - -CONCRETE MODERNITY: SMOOTH WHITE CONCRETE laid in very rich areas, huge gaps between segments in which cigarette butts, dirt and gum often accumulate. Less porus surface provides little traction when wet.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/daypacks for travel what kind, how to use, and what to fill it with.txt b/daypacks for travel what kind, how to use, and what to fill it with.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 637b409..0000000 --- a/daypacks for travel what kind, how to use, and what to fill it with.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,50 +0,0 @@ -Daypacks for Travel- What Kind, How to Use, and What to Fill it With - -tags: refx, travel -date: November 20, 2013 9:42:18 AM ---- - -From <http://www.vagabondjourney.com/daypacks-for-travel-what-kind-how-to-use-and-what-to-fill-it-with/> - -# Daypacks for Travel: What Kind, How to Use, and What to Fill it With - -by Wade Shepard - -The daypack is the most used bag a traveler will have. This is the bag that travels not only on the long journeys but on the short ones as well. Daypacks carry just about everything a traveler will need to access during the course of a day of exploring, it is the place to keep the gear that is used regularly and needs to be perpetually at hand. The daypack is like a giant pocket. - -My daypack is full of my daily use supplies, the things I use regularly as I travel and collect content to blog about. The daypacks I use vary between 15 and 26 liters in size. I recommend getting a high quality daypack as the zippers on the cheaper models are prone to premature breakage (advice which I don’t usually follow myself, and know the consequences of first hand). I recommend [Lowe Alpine bags](http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/lowe-alpine-tt-tour-is-the-ultimate-travel-backpack/), but my current daypack is a Chinese no name that I picked up for $12. It does the job for now, but I question its long term endurance. If you have the cash, dumping it into a high quality, water resistant, [lockable daypack](http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/how-to-lock-a-backpack/) could prove worth it in the long run. - -Whatever bag I’m using as a daypack I always keep it packed up and ready to go. I like the idea of being able to jump out of bed in the morning, snatch up my bag, and walk out the door. Screwing around in a hotel room debating over what gear you’re going to need or not need for a day out is a real buzzkill when you’re excited to just get out in the streets to check out a new place. I’m comfortable making two or three day trips solely on the contents of my daypack. - - - -Daypack - -I don’t move gear between my bags, each thing has its place. What’s in my daypack stays in my daypack, it does not migrate to other bags or to other places in my room. My daypack has the items that I used each day when outsite exploring a place, my rucksack contains the gear that I use in my room. In this way I always know where all of my gear is at all times, and I don’t end up 25 km out of a town to discover that I left something that I want to use in a backpack that is locked up inside my hotel. - -### The crap that I fill my daypack with - -#### Travel supplies - -Notebook with destination information Water bottle -Pocket knife -Headlamp/ flashlight ([flashlight travel tip](http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/headlamp-or-flashlight-travel-tip/)) -Compass ([compass travel tip](http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/compass-navigation-through-guatemala-city/)) Hand sanitizer Wet wipes Extra t-shirt, underwear, socks Rain jacket Spoon and/ or fork -Snack -Toothbrush/ toothpaste - -#### Blogging supplies - -Notebook Digital voice recorder Camera Mini tripod Sunglasses video camera Pens and pencils Waterproof float bag for electronics -Flash drive -Extra camera battery - -### Being prepared saves money - -It would be a real pain in the ass to carry around all of the gear that you need to be prepared for a day traveling around a village or city in your hands. It is unbelievably awkward just carrying around a jacket in your hands — let alone a water bottle, food, a camera etc … and everyone learns before the age of 9 that pockets are not good places to store a lunch. The choice is thus put forth: carry a small bag full of what you need and want for the day or go unprepared. Going unprepared means relying on your surroundings for sustenance: i.e. you need to buy everything you need and want each time you need or want something. - -### Being prepared is convenient - -Having what you need with you as you travel around a place is, simply put, convenient. If you need to go find a restaurant or food stall every time you’re hungry you’re going to find yourself blowing huge amounts of time that could otherwise be spent checking out a new place. Having to find a quicky mart to buy a bottle of water every time you’re thirsty is going to delay whatever plans you have. If you need to duck for cover and wait for every little rain shower to pass because you’re not carrying rain gear you may miss out on experiencing something more interesting. Traveling so light that you’re left unprepared is a hassle. Having a daypack filled with daily essentials is an excellent way to strip down the [work of travel](http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/how-to-enjoy-traveling-strategy/) and allow for a more refined, full experience each day out on the road. - -[vagabondjourney.com __](http://www.vagabondjourney.com/daypacks-for-travel-what-kind-how-to-use-and-what-to-fill-it-with/) * by Wade Shepard diff --git a/dolphins.txt b/dolphins.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 3e95344..0000000 --- a/dolphins.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,5 +0,0 @@ -Dolphins - -Dolphins only sleep with one brain hemisphere at a time. - -Amputees feel things in long gone limbs
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/expertise does not have units.txt b/expertise does not have units.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 299b835..0000000 --- a/expertise does not have units.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ -Expertise Does Not Have Units - -From [Expertise Does Not Have Units](http://bettermess.com/expertise-does-not-have-units/): - - -Sometimes, the problem with achieving a goal set for you by a ten-year-old is that you have no idea what to do at the finish line. The world changed and I missed it. I was an expert and I was tired and bored. For me, the sweet spot of expertise hovered around the 70% mark. Being an expert is boring. While there’s always more to learn and new problems to solve, nothing is so thrilling as problems that make me fail. The moments when I struggled the most were the moments when I was scientist. I was at my best when comprehension was just out of reach. - -Expertise is a funny thing. There’s no way to measure our progress towards obtaining it, yet we always feel far from our goal. When I did finally feel like an expert it hardly felt valuable enough to hold on to. I only learned afterward that expertise is not a destination but a vehicle. It’s the golden ring that makes us jump higher and reach further. In the end, it’s just a ring. - -I can’t blame that little boy though. How could he know that he was already a scientist?
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/gap toothed scotsman.txt b/gap toothed scotsman.txt deleted file mode 100755 index d3e8d47..0000000 --- a/gap toothed scotsman.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10 +0,0 @@ -gap toothed scotsman - -Gap toothed scotsman with hound dog -jowles -- no one will come -away a complete delight This -tango is half a life spent -A sun a father a departure -Grease pencil smeared cups (eyes) -Always coming always going around -write to stay awake
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/how I failed my daughter and a simple path to wealth.txt b/how I failed my daughter and a simple path to wealth.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 29339ea..0000000 --- a/how I failed my daughter and a simple path to wealth.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,129 +0,0 @@ -How I failed my daughter and a simple path to wealth - -From <http://jlcollinsnh.com/2011/06/08/how-i-failed-my-daughter-and-a-simple-path-to-wealth/> - -# How I failed my daughter and a simple path to wealth - -Literally since the day she was born people have been complementing my daughter. Her looks, her brains, her charm (she takes after her mother) and her behavior. - -For that last one I sometimes get credit. Not that I deserve it. Mostly I’ve stood by and simply watched in awe and tried not to get in the way. - -A few years back I actually lost a friend over this. He was so insistent I take credit and so upset when I didn’t, he hasn’t spoken to me since. But the truth is the truth. - -In fact, I have this vision of the Birth Angel approaching God in ‘91 and saying, “Hey there, God, we’re planning to send a little baby girl down to that Collins guy.” - - - -And God saying, “Ah, man. Really? Did I authorize this? I did?? Guess this day hadda come. Well, send him the easiest, best one you’ve got. He can’t handle much.” - -And so, I got Jessica. - -You might be thinking I’m overstating this. Not so. In the one area I actively tried to influence her, I failed miserably. [Money.](http://jlcollinsnh.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/what-we-own-and-why-we-own-it/) - -See, I hold a few core beliefs. One is that this whole civilization thing has been a huge mistake and we’d all be better off as hunter/gatherers. (More on that in a future post.) - -Another is that, since we do live in this complex, technical world you had best learn about money. Money is the single most important, effective tool in navigating it. - -I started her early. Allowance. Envelopes for spending, saving and charity. “The Richest Man inBabylon.” Checking account. Saving account. Mutual fund. Endless conversations (ok lectures) on the subject. What child wouldn’t love this stuff? - -[](http://jlcollinsnh.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/girl-bored-studying1.jpg) - -Now she’s in college and, home from one recent break, I brought it up again. She stopped me. “Dad,” she said “I know this is important. I appreciate money. I know I need it. I just don’t want to have to think about it and manage it.” - -Yikes. The one thing I tried to instill…. - -But then I thought about it. This likely describes most people. Financial geeks like me are the aberration. Sane people don’t want to be bothered. So is there a simple way for folks who have better things to do with their time? - -Yep, there is. Below is what I created for her, and she’ll get better results with it than the vast majority active money managers. - - [](http://jlcollinsnh.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/simple-path.jpg) - -**The simple path to wealth** - -It starts with **nine basics**. She doesn’t have to read any further than these to make it work. Just do it. - - 1. Avoid fiscally irresponsible people. Never marry one or otherwise give him access to your money. - 2. [Avoid money managers.](http://jlcollinsnh.wordpress.com/2012/06/06/why-i-dont-like-investment-advisors/) It’s your money and no one will care for it better than you. - 3. Avoid debt. - 4. Save a portion of every dollar you get. - 5. The greater the percent of your income you save and invest, the sooner you’ll have [F-You money](http://jlcollinsnh.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/why-you-need-f-you-money/). Try 50%. With no debt, this perfectly doable. - 6. Put this money in the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund (VTSAX) This is the fund you already own, so just keep adding to it. - 7. Realize the market and the value of your shares will sometimes drop dramatically. People all around you will panic. They’ll be screaming Sell, Sell, Sell. Ignore this. Even better: Buy more shares. - 8. When you can live off the dividends VTSAX provides you are financially free. - 9. The less you need, the more free you are. - -[](http://jlcollinsnh.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/freedom.jpg) - -Willing to go a step further? - -**Notice what you are not doing:** - - * No expensive money managers - * No fancy strategies - * No exotic, hard to understand investments - * No weekly, monthly or even yearly management - * No effort; just keep adding to the pot. - -More? I thought you’d never ask! - -**The Details:** - -**1) Avoid fiscally irresponsible people.** Nothing will destroy your wealth faster than letting someone else have access to it. Fiscally irresponsible people have squandered their money and will happily squander yours. They will try every dirty trick possible to get their hands on it. Kick them to the curb. Look for people who will add to your efforts. **_This applies to more than just money._** - -**2) Avoid Money Managers.** They are expensive at best and will rob you at worst. Google Bernie Madoff. Seek advice cautiously and never give up control. It’s your money and no one will care for it better than you. But many will try hard to make it theirs. Don’t let it happen. - -**3) Avoid debt. ** Never borrow money. Never carry a credit card balance. Almost everyone else you meet will be borrowing money to buy this or that. It will look normal. You might be mocked. You don’t want to run with this crowd. People still refuse to believe I have never had a car payment. - - * The only exception **_might_** be for a house. But don’t be in any hurry. Think long and hard before taking out that mortgage. If you are a disciplined saver, [renting is damn near always the better fiscal choice](http://jlcollinsnh.com/2012/02/23/rent-v-owning-your-home-opportunity-cost-and-running-some-numbers/). (If you are not, a house can act as a forced savings plan. A poor one, but at least a plan.) - - * A house is not an investment. In fact it has the [very worst characteristics of an investment](http://jlcollinsnh.com/2013/05/29/why-your-house-is-a-terrible-investment/). It is only place to live and an expensive indulgence. Buy one only if you can easily afford it and want that particular lifestyle. - - * Most people will argue this strenuously. They are wrong. [This is why](http://jlcollinsnh.com/2013/05/29/why-your-house-is-a-terrible-investment/). This guy got it right too: [http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/03/why-i-am-never-going-to-own-a-home-again/](http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/03/why-i-am-never-going-to-own-a-home-again/) - -** 4) Save a portion of every dollar you get.** 50% is good. With no debt, this perfectly doable. Think this is too extreme? Check out the conversations here: [http://earlyretirementextreme.com/manifesto.html](http://earlyretirementextreme.com/manifesto.html) - -The most valuable thing you can buy with money is not cars or clothes or vacations or houses. It is your financial freedom. So pay yourself first. Most people spend every cent they make and borrow to spend even more. This is nuts. Those who do are slaves to their employers and slaves to their debt holders. You weren’t raised to be a slave. - -**5)** **The greater the percent of your income you save and invest, the sooner you’ll have [F-You money.](http://jlcollinsnh.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/why-you-need-f-you-money/) **The obvious reason this works is that the more you save the more you’ll have. The less obvious reason is the less you learn to live on the less you’ll need to be financially independent. See point #9 and [http://jlcollinsnh.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/the-monk-and-the-minister/](http://jlcollinsnh.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/the-monk-and-the-minister/) - -**6)** Put this money in the **Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund (VTSAX). ** [https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0585&FundIntExt=INT ](https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0585&FundIntExt=INT) You want the money you save to work hard for you. In VTSAX it will. - -i. This is an “index fund.” You can learn more about exactly what that means anytime, but for our purposes here it means very low cost so you keep more of your money. - -ii. VTSAX is an index fund that invests in stocks. Stocks, over time, provide the best returns. - -iii. Vanguard is the company that operates the fund and it is the only investment company you need (or should) deal with. Vanguard’s unique structure means that its interests and yours are the same. This is unique among investment companies. Again, if and when you care to, it is easy to learn why and how this is so. - -iv. You might find a fund in another investment company that is a bit cheaper. But you can’t trust these other companies long-term. Their interests are not your interest. If you play with snakes, to quote Dave Ramsey, you’ll eventually get bitten. Don’t bother. Stick with Vanguard. - -v. You will hear occasionally how “actively managed” funds beat index funds. It will seem obviously better to switch to one of these. It’s not. Don’t. Very rare is the manager who can consistently outperform the index. While who they are it is obvious after the fact, it is impossible to know who it will be out of the hundreds at the start. Even if you were to get lucky, now you have to pay close attention. They retire, quit, die or simply lose their touch. Plus they are more expensive. Don’t bother - -vi. We choose to invest in stocks because, over time, stocks outperform everything else. They give you the best returns with, using an index fund like VTSAX, the lowest effort and cost. Never try to pick individual stocks unless you turn pro. Even then you likely will underperform the index. Most pros do. [http://jlcollinsnh.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/why-i-can%e2%80%99t-pick-winning-stocks-and-you-can%e2%80%99t-either/](http://jlcollinsnh.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/why-i-can%e2%80%99t-pick-winning-stocks-and-you-can%e2%80%99t-either/) - -vii. Owning 100% stocks like this is considered “very aggressive.” It is, but you have decades ahead. Market ups and downs don’t matter as long as you avoid panic and stay the course. Perhaps 40+ years from now you might want to add a Bond Index Fund to smooth out the ups and downs. Worry about that 40 years from now. - -**7) Realize the market and the value of your shares will sometimes drop dramatically**. No worries. You’ll be holding this fund for 40-50+ years. During that time the stock market will very likely drop dramatically 4 or 5 times. There will be real and serious problems that cause it. Each time people will panic. Each time they will predict this is the end. Each time you’ll be hearing Sell! Sell! Sell! - -If you are smart, you will ignore this. If you are very smart you will use these times as an opportunity to buy more shares at bargain prices. - -As I write this in June 2011 the S&P is trading around 1300. Two years ago it was at 670 and people were predicting with certainty it would go to zero. Opps. It doubled. - -By the way, there will also be times then the market soars and people will begin to say this is a new age. Things are different this time. Things will never go down again. They, too, are wrong. - -Warren Buffett, the greatest investor of my age, said “When others are fearful be greedy. When others are greedy, be fearful.” Sound advice. The wheel always turns. Things always recover. If someday the end really does come, it won’t matter anyway. - -**8) When you can live off the dividends VTSAX provides you are financially free. ** Actually a bit sooner. As this is written, VTSAX is paying a dividend of 1.68%. Sometimes this will be higher, sometimes lower. Anytime you can live off it you are financially independent. But when you can live off of 3-4% per year of your net worth you are also free. - -[](http://jlcollinsnh.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/free-woman.jpg) - -There you have it. Remember, this advice is for my 19-year-old daughter. [(We do things a bit, but not much, differently.)](http://jlcollinsnh.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/what-we-own-and-why-we-own-it/)Now, if I can just get her to read it….. - -You might also be interested in the case study: [putting-the-simple-path-to-wealth-into-action](http://jlcollinsnh.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/putting-the-simple-path-to-wealth-into-action/) - -**Addendum I**: [What if you can’t buy VTSAX? Or even Vanguard?](http://jlcollinsnh.com/2013/05/02/stocks-part-xvii-what-if-you-cant-buy-vtsax-or-even-vanguard/) - -**Addendum II:** When the time comes and you want to know more about this investing stuff, here you go: [Stock Series](http://jlcollinsnh.com/stock-series/). - -[](http://www.linkwithin.com/) - -[jlcollinsnh.com __](http://jlcollinsnh.com/2011/06/08/how-i-failed-my-daughter-and-a-simple-path-to-wealth/) diff --git a/indian authors.txt b/indian authors.txt deleted file mode 100755 index ce07c96..0000000 --- a/indian authors.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,5 +0,0 @@ -Indian Authors - -Aitav Ghosh -Kavery Nambosan -Radhika Jha
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/lx post less is more post.txt b/lx post less is more post.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 0e90770..0000000 --- a/lx post less is more post.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,27 +0,0 @@ -lx-post - less is more post - -tags: #bk-redplanet -date: August 08, 2013 01:22:23 PM ---- - -My escapist tendencies evolved for a reason -- to escape the boredom of feeling trapped, but now that part is overactive compared to what I need now, so it would make sense to trim it back. - -Also, with regard to how I see myself, my life and my traveling, i like the tetherball analogy, I have to periodically kick myself out in the wild blue yonder, but I also seem to need that tether holding me back, drawing me back to some place (which changes from time to time) and then the cord winds around that pole increases it's speed until it stops and reverses the process again. - -Am I missing connections with people because of that? - - -Wanting is natural. it's part of what makes us human. It's part of what makes us want to see the world, to meet and connect with others. - -But this basic desire, to want, often catches us off guard and steers us into want things. Now I'm not so asetic as to think that there isn't something appealing about a nice home to live in, a nice desk to sit at, a nice computer to write on, a nice car to drive and so on, but none of these things comes without a cost. - -In fact, Problems result that include obesity and related diseases, massive consumer debt, shallow consumerism, overwork - - - - -“The most important thing is, what do you want in your life, right now? What you want in this very moment makes your mind, and that mind makes your life.” - -—Zen Master Seung Sahn - -The Compass of Zen diff --git a/lx post middle ground.txt b/lx post middle ground.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 6c967b9..0000000 --- a/lx post middle ground.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,35 +0,0 @@ -lx-post - middle ground - -There is a middle ground which has always left me cold. I am comfortable at the extremes -- everything or nothing. I've been comfortable with steamed towels and fully reclining seat beds in first class, driven 100,000 automobiles and eaten at some of the most expensive restaurants in New York (all of that was on someone else's dime, lest you think I am or ever have been rich, I am not, nor have I ever been). I was comfortable at that extreme, but I've also ridden in the cattle car that is Southwest Airlines and consumed $.39 Tina's burritos three times a day in the squalor of the trailer park I was living in at the time. I was also comfortable with that. More so in fact since any sustained life of luxury must eventually confront the backs on which it is made possible(*Let's not kid ourselves, me eating $.39 burritos in a trailer park in California is still very much luxury.*). The point isn't the things I have done so much as the simple fact that I am most comfortable at extremes. - -It's things in the middle that make me uncomfortable, make me want to run for the hills. Business class, Chipolte, suburbs, The Gap. The middle smacks of mediocrity. It's build in to the language -- medium gives us mediocrity (*mediocritatem*); middle, middling. Interestingly, all manner of words surrounding mediocre and middle don't acquire their modern, negative connotations until the late 16c. - -It's possible this sort of dualist thinking, this flip-flopping from one extreme to another is a personality flaw of mine. It's also possibly not even mine, but something culturally inherited as it turns out, so much of what we consider ourselves, our beliefs, turn out to be. - -Some cultures venerate the middle way. The Golden Mean. The Middle Way. Definitions of what exactly is meant by the middle way differ somewhat around China and the rest of Asia. Buddhists see it as the path by which we gain insight by transcending all the various opposing statements about existence. The middle way is the way by which we avoid the pain of life's confusing, seemingly endless duality. - -In China, where Confucianism has a long storied history, the middle way seems to mean something more like the path on which one finds balance. Sometimes it's not translated as the middle way, but as the Doctrine of the Mean. Ezra Pound liked to call it the "unswerving pivot". - -It's possible I'm twisting some possibly suspect translations of ancient texts, themselves culturally tied to the time in which they were composed to fit my own ends(*Hmm, probably I should apply for a job in academia*), but if *all* knowledge is culturally imprisoned then it seems to me that nihilism is the only answer and, while on my bleaker days I find myself feeling a bit nihilistic, by and large I refuse to give in to that line of reasoning. - -All of which is spineless qualification of why I think the middle way consist not of actually staying on a middle path, but of balancing one's center between extremes. The farm house to retreat from the city. The midnight burrito snack when the sustenance of [Alinea][1] has long disappeared. - -To be sure, that's not what Confucius wrote. Nor does it seem to be what the author of The Doctrine of the Mean(*The authorship of the The Doctrine of the Mean is somewhat debatable, though it seems most scholars ascribe it [Zisi, a grandson of Confucius][2].*) meant exactly. From my research it seems that most western scholars (the only ones I can read since I don't read Mandarin) say that the doctrine of the mean means what you would expect -- adhering to moderation, avoiding extremes. - -You don't have to step so far outside of Western culture to find this celebration of moderation. Stoicism touch on this too in a variety of contexts, suggesting that we avoid becoming accustomed to luxury lest we become incapable of appreciating anything else. - -If all you drink is $100 bottles of wine, that $2 bottle will taste like shit. But if most of the wine your drink is cheap then the occasional $100 bottle will be a revelation. - -Again, that's me, not stoicism which, so far as I know, never turns the watch out for the acclimatizing of luxury idea on its ear to consider the acclimatizing effects of poverty. In other words perhaps we ought to really splash out from time to time so we do not become too inured to self-imposed poverty. - -Of course if your poverty is not self-imposed then you have no choice, which is perhaps at least some of the reason any philosophical system concerned with transcendence of daily existence will necessarily to value austerity over luxury -- to do otherwise would be to severely limit your audience(*which isn't to say that I think it's all a conspiracy to keep poor people happy with their lot and less likely to agitate, though certianly there are elements of that in nearly every philophical system since every philosophical system is born out of cultures and civilizations with stratfied power structures and a vested iinterest in maintaining them. The Tao to Ching being one possible exception to that general rule.*). Better to stick with something that will make the greatest number of people feel better about themselves and their lives. Hence the middle way it would seem. - -But what if the center, the middle way, the point of balance is actually found by hopping back and forth between extremes? - -I don't know that it is, I only know that I feel comfortable at the extremes, but never either one for too long. - - - -[1]: https://content.alinearestaurant.com/html/index.html -[2]: http://www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Zhou/personszisi.html -[3]: http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Classics/zhongyong.html diff --git a/lx post shaving seasons.txt b/lx post shaving seasons.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 1508c10..0000000 --- a/lx post shaving seasons.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,11 +0,0 @@ -This becomes a day like any other that is somehow different in way you cannot put your finger on. The sun rises a bit later, the temperature is a bit warmer, the river lower, the trees still bare. - -Ever since they moved daylight savings time back the world has felt a bit off to me. Not that I put much stock in time. I rarely know what time it is other than in relation to something I need to do. For example I know I need to put my kids to bed in 10 minutes and therefore I know it's in the neighborhhod of seven o'clock. But otherwise... - -Still when casting about for days to mark as somehow different than the ones right around them, March 9 or so doesn't actually seem a bad one. At least in my climate. North of here is still caked in snow and ice, well below freezing. But in my world, it's sunny and nearly 75. It might not last. It's possible another snow storm is yet to come, but you have to cast your lot with some version of the future. So I shaved my beard. When I was done I felt a bit lighter, a bit brighter. So I shaved my head too. - -It's lately how I mark the passing of seasons. In Autumn and winter, more hair. In Spring and summer, less. It's a small thing. Like falling leaves or opening buds, but personally at least it is perhaps more. It is something anyway. - -There's something about spring here in athens, even if you can't pinpoint the time. Little things; people shedding practical footwear, fleeces and other winter acutrimonts. - -It's the time of year I start fermenting, creating stuff. Planting things, building things. Releasing books. travesties. diff --git a/lx-post - compound interest.txt b/lx-post - compound interest.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 6517157..0000000 --- a/lx-post - compound interest.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3 +0,0 @@ -lx-post - compound interest - -http://www.raptitude.com/2013/01/the-most-powerful-force-in-the-universe-and-how-to-use-it/
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/meditation notes.txt b/meditation notes.txt deleted file mode 100755 index d8569a8..0000000 --- a/meditation notes.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8 +0,0 @@ -http://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/viewtopic.php?t=5188&p=74622#p74622 - -I'm also kinda curious as to what the use [of meditation] is. In particular, will meditation give me superpowers or is it simply the solution to a problem I don't have. - -I used to have an internal dialogue going at all times. Then I successfully experimented with turning it off simply by stopping the train of thought and "thinking about nothing" whenever I did my long walks (commute). I've fixed my breathing and my "hockey vision" (useful for walking faster than everybody else and not bumping into cell phone zombies) in the same way. Later I tried to switch from thinking in spoken language to geometric and numerically intuitive ways with some success. I let my intuition solve most larger problems and it's simply a question of waiting for inspiration to come. That is, set up the environment [by uploading the facts] and then sit and wait for the quarry to walk by [the solution] and shoot it [formulate it actively].---Rather than trying to farm for it. - -Consequentially, I can't really relate to the "calming the mind" ... maybe it's because it's already calm? - diff --git a/missionaries-that-dont-suck.txt b/missionaries-that-dont-suck.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 87fdfd7..0000000 --- a/missionaries-that-dont-suck.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,11 +0,0 @@ -via: http://mobilecodgers.blogspot.com/2015/07/moments-with-missionary-dealing-with.html - -I favor sending: - -SCIENCE missionaries-- to debunk superstition and arouse wonder in the natives. - -ENGINEERING missionaries--- to inspire a can-do spirit in the natives. - -AGNOSTIC missionaries to acquaint the natives with the ultimate mystery of life---to demonstrate to them tolerance for ambiguity. (the joyous philosophy of i don't know ism) - -HISTORY missionaries to unfold the story of how we got to here. diff --git a/of other spaces heterotopias foucault.txt b/of other spaces heterotopias foucault.txt deleted file mode 100755 index b1db998..0000000 --- a/of other spaces heterotopias foucault.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,63 +0,0 @@ -title: Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias -date: 20141013 22:31:59 -tags: #writing - ---- - -The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. The nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermaldynamics- The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment. I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendents of time and the determined inhabitants of space. Structuralism, or at least which is grouped under this slightly too general name, is the effort to establish, between elements that could have been connected on a temporal axis, an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each other-that makes them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration. Actually, structuralism does not entail denial of time; it does involve a certain manner of dealing with what we call time and what we call history. - -Yet it is necessary to notice that the space which today appears to form the horizon of our concerns, our theory, our systems, is not an innovation; space itself has a history in Western experience, and it is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space. One could say, by way of retracing this history of space very roughly, that in the Middle Ages there was a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane plates: protected places and open, exposed places: urban places and rural places (all these concern the real life of men). In cosmological theory, there were the supercelestial places as opposed to the celestial, and the celestial place was in its turn opposed to the terrestrial place. There were places where things had been put because they had been violently displaced, and then on the contrary places where things found their natural ground and stability. It was this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this intersection of places that constituted what could very roughly be called medieval space: the space of emplacement. - -This space of emplacement was opened up by Galileo. For the real scandal of Galileo's work lay not so much in his discovery, or rediscovery, that the earth revolved around the sun, but in his constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space. In such a space the place of the Middle Ages turned out to be dissolved. as it were; a thing's place was no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo and the seventeenth century, extension was substituted for localization. - -Today the site has been substituted for extension which itself had replaced emplacement. The site is defined by relations of proximity between points or elements; formally, we can describe these relations as series, trees, or grids. Moreover, the importance of the site as a problem in contemporary technical work is well known: the storage of data or of the intermediate results of a calculation in the memory of a machine, the circulation of discrete elements with a random output (automobile traffic is a simple case, or indeed the sounds on a telephone line); the identification of marked or coded elements inside a set that may be randomly distributed, or may be arranged according to single or to multiple classifications. - -In a still more concrete manner, the problem of siting or placement arises for mankind in terms of demography. This problem of the human site or living space is not simply that of knowing whether there will be enough space for men in the world -a problem that is certainly quite important - but also that of knowing what relations of propinquity, what type of storage, circulation, marking, and classification of human elements should be adopted in a given situation in order to achieve a given end. Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites. - -In any case I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time. Time probably appears to us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space, - -Now, despite all the techniques for appropriating space, despite the whole network of knowledge that enables us to delimit or to formalize it, contemporary space is perhaps still not entirely desanctified (apparently unlike time, it would seem, which was detached from the sacred in the nineteenth century). To be sure a certain theoretical desanctification of space (the one signaled by Galileo's work) has occurred, but we may still not have reached the point of a practical desanctification of space. And perhaps our life is still governed by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down. These are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work. All these are still nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred. - -Bachelard's monumental work and the descriptions of phenomenologists have taught us that we do not live in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well. The space of our primary perception, the space of our dreams and that of our passions hold within themselves qualities that seem intrinsic: there is a light, ethereal, transparent space, or again a dark, rough, encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space from below of mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal. Yet these analyses, while fundamental for reflection in our time, primarily concern internal space. I should like to speak now of external space. - -The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives. our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another. - -Of course one might attempt to describe these different sites by looking for the set of relations by which a given site can be defined. For example, describing the set of relations that define the sites of transportation, streets, trains (a train is an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by). One could describe, via the cluster of relations that allows them to be defined, the sites of temporary relaxation -cafes, cinemas, beaches. Likewise one could describe, via its network of relations, the closed or semi-closed sites of rest - the house, the bedroom, the bed, el cetera. But among all these sites, I am interested in certain ones that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect. These spaces, as it were, which are linked with all the others, which however contradict all the other sites, are of two main types. - -HETEROTOPIAS - -First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces. - -There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. - -As for the heterotopias as such, how can they be described? What meaning do they have? We might imagine a sort of systematic description - I do not say a science because the term is too galvanized now -that would, in a given society, take as its object the study, analysis, description, and 'reading' (as some like to say nowadays) of these different spaces, of these other places. As a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live, this description could be called heterotopology. - -Its first principle is that there is probably not a single culture in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias. That is a constant of every human group. But the heterotopias obviously take quite varied forms, and perhaps no one absolutely universal form of heterotopia would be found. We can however class them in two main categories. - -In the so-called primitive societies, there is a certain form of heterotopia that I would call crisis heterotopias, i.e., there are privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women. the elderly, etc. In out society, these crisis heterotopias are persistently disappearing, though a few remnants can still be found. For example, the boarding school, in its nineteenth-century form, or military service for young men, have certainly played such a role, as the first manifestations of sexual virility were in fact supposed to take place "elsewhere" than at home. For girls, there was, until the middle of the twentieth century, a tradition called the "honeymoon trip" which was an ancestral theme. The young woman's deflowering could take place "nowhere" and, at the moment of its occurrence the train or honeymoon hotel was indeed the place of this nowhere, this heterotopia without geographical markers. - -But these heterotopias of crisis are disappearing today and are being replaced, I believe, by what we might call heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed. Cases of this are rest homes and psychiatric hospitals, and of course prisons, and one should perhaps add retirement homes that are, as it were, on the borderline between the heterotopia of crisis and the heterotopia of deviation since, after all, old age is a crisis, but is also a deviation since in our society where leisure is the rule, idleness is a sort of deviation. - -The second principle of this description of heterotopias is that a society, as its history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion; for each heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a society and the same heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, have one function or another. - -As an example I shall take the strange heterotopia of the cemetery. The cemetery is certainly a place unlike ordinary cultural spaces. It is a space that is however connected with all the sites of the city, state or society or village, etc., since each individual, each family has relatives in the cemetery. In western culture the cemetery has practically always existed. But it has undergone important changes. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the cemetery was placed at the heart of the city, next to the church. In it there was a hierarchy of possible tombs. There was the charnel house in which bodies lost the last traces of individuality, there were a few individual tombs and then there were the tombs inside the church. These latter tombs were themselves of two types, either simply tombstones with an inscription, or mausoleums with statues. This cemetery housed inside the sacred space of the church has taken on a quite different cast in modern civilizations, and curiously, it is in a time when civilization has become 'atheistic,' as one says very crudely, that western culture has established what is termed the cult of the dead. - -Basically it was quite natural that, in a time of real belief in the resurrection of bodies and the immortality of the soul, overriding importance was not accorded to the body's remains. On the contrary, from the moment when people are no longer sure that they have a soul or that the body will regain life, it is perhaps necessary to give much more attention to the dead body, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in language. In any case, it is from the beginning of the nineteenth century that everyone has a right to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay, but on the other hand, it is only from that start of the nineteenth century that cemeteries began to be located at the outside border of cities. In correlation with the individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there arises an obsession with death as an 'illness.' The dead, it is supposed, bring illnesses to the living, and it is the presence and proximity of the dead right beside the houses, next to the church, almost in the middle of the street, it is this proximity that propagates death itself. This major theme of illness spread by the contagion in the cemeteries persisted until the end of the eighteenth century, until, during the nineteenth century, the shift of cemeteries toward the suburbs was initiated. The cemeteries then came to constitute, no longer the sacred and immortal heart of the city, but the other city, where each family possesses its dark resting place. - -Third principle. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space, but perhaps the oldest example of these heterotopias that take the form of contradictory sites is the garden. We must not forget that in the Orient the garden, an astonishing creation that is now a thousand years old, had very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space still more sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the navel of the world at its center (the basin and water fountain were there); and all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come together in this space, in this sort of microcosm. As for carpets, they were originally reproductions of gardens (the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space). The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity (our modern zoological gardens spring from that source). - -Fourth principle. Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time - which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. This situation shows us that the cemetery is indeed a highly heterotopic place since, for the individual, the cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony, the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance. - -From a general standpoint, in a society like ours heterotopias and heterochronies are structured and distributed in a relatively complex fashion. First of all, there are heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time, for example museums and libraries, Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit, whereas in the seventeenth century, even at the end of the century, museums and libraries were the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century. - -Opposite these heterotopias that are linked to the accumulation of time, there are those linked, on the contrary, to time in its most flowing, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival. These heterotopias are not oriented toward the eternal, they are rather absolutely temporal [chroniques]. Such, for example, are the fairgrounds, these' marvelous empty sites on the outskirts of cities that teem once or twice a year with stands, displays, heteroclite objects, wrestlers, snakewomen, fortune-tellers, and so forth. Quite recently, a new kind of temporal heterotopia has been invented: vacation villages, such as those Polynesian villages that offer a compact three weeks of primitive and eternal nudity to the inhabitants of the cities. You see, moreover, that through the two forms of heterotopias that come together here, the heterotopia of the festival and that of the eternity of accumulating time, the huts of Djerba are in a sense relatives of libraries and museums. for the rediscovery of Polynesian life abolishes time; yet the experience is just as much the,, rediscovery of time, it is as if the entire history of humanity reaching back to its origin were accessible in a sort of immediate knowledge, - -Fifth principle. Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures. Moreover, there are even heterotopias that are entirely consecrated to these activities of purification -purification that is partly religious and partly hygienic, such as the hammin of the Moslems, or else purification that appears to be purely hygienic, as in Scandinavian saunas. - -There are others, on the contrary, that seem to be pure and simple openings, but that generally hide curious exclusions. Everyone can enter into thew heterotopic sites, but in fact that is only an illusion- we think we enter where we are, by the very fact that we enter, excluded. I am thinking for example, of the famous bedrooms that existed on the great farms of Brazil and elsewhere in South America. The entry door did not lead into the central room where the family lived, and every individual or traveler who came by had the right to ope this door, to enter into the bedroom and to sleep there for a night. Now these bedrooms were such that the individual who went into them never had access to the family's quarter the visitor was absolutely the guest in transit, was not really the invited guest. This type of heterotopia, which has practically disappeared from our civilizations, could perhaps be found in the famous American motel rooms where a man goes with his car and his mistress and where illicit sex is both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden, kept isolated without however being allowed out in the open. - -Sixth principle. The last trait of heterotopias is that they have a function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory (perhaps that is the role that was played by those famous brothels of which we are now deprived). Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. This latter type would be the heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation, and I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned somewhat in this manner. In certain cases, they have played, on the level of the general organization of terrestrial space, the role of heterotopias. I am thinking, for example, of the first wave of colonization in the seventeenth century, of the Puritan societies that the English had founded in America and that were absolutely perfect other places. I am also thinking of those extraordinary Jesuit colonies that were founded in South America: marvelous, absolutely regulated colonies in which human perfection was effectively achieved. The Jesuits of Paraguay established colonies in which existence was regulated at every turn. The village was laid out according to a rigorous plan around a rectangular place at the foot of which was the church; on one side, there was the school; on the other, the cemetery-, and then, in front of the church, an avenue set out that another crossed at fight angles; each family had its little cabin along these two axes and thus the sign of Christ was exactly reproduced. Christianity marked the space and geography of the American world with its fundamental sign. - -The daily life of individuals was regulated, not by the whistle, but by the bell. Everyone was awakened at the same time, everyone began work at the same time; meals were at noon and five o'clock-, then came bedtime, and at midnight came what was called the marital wake-up, that is, at the chime of the churchbell, each person carried out her/his duty. - -Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates. diff --git a/parmigianino.txt b/parmigianino.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 1c9e35c..0000000 --- a/parmigianino.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,7 +0,0 @@ -Parmigianino - -Bogenschnitzender Amor - -https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:Parmigianino_014.jpg - -God of love carving a bow atop dusty books as if to suggest that the world of knowledge is always trumped by the world of love.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/proust.txt b/proust.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 2877884..0000000 --- a/proust.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,5 +0,0 @@ -Proust - -"...what brings people together is not shared opinion but a latent propensity of mind" - -In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/rethinking out of africa.txt b/rethinking out of africa.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 83f37cf..0000000 --- a/rethinking out of africa.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,131 +0,0 @@ -Rethinking "Out of Africa" | Edge.org - -From <http://www.edge.org/conversation/rethinking-out-of-africa> - -# Rethinking “Out of Africa” - -[Christopher Stringer](http://www.edge.org/memberbio/christopher_stringer) [11.12.11] - - - -CHRISTOPHER STRINGER is one of the world's foremost paleoanthropologists. He is a founder and most powerful advocate of the leading theory concerning our evolution: Recent African Origin or "Out of Africa". He has worked at The Natural History Museum, London since 1973, is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and currently leads the large and successful Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project (AHOB), His most recent book is _The_ _Origin of Our Species _(titled _Lone Survivors_ in the US). - -**[Christopher Stringer's _Edge_ Bio Page](http://edge.org/memberbio/christopher_stringer)** - -**[CHRISTOPHER STRINGER:]** At the moment, I'm looking again at the whole question of a recent African origin for modern humans—the leading idea over the last 20 years. This argues that we had a recent African origin, that we came out of Africa, and that we replaced all of the other human forms that were outside of Africa. But we're having to re-evaluate that now because genetic data suggest that the modern humans who came out of Africa about 60,000 years ago probably interbred with Neanderthals, first of all, and then some of them later on interbred with another group of people called the Denisovans, over in south eastern Asia. - -If this is so, then we are not purely of recent African origin. We're mostly of recent African origin, but there was contact with these other so-called species. We're having to re-evaluate the Out-of-Africa theory, and we're having to re-evaluate the species concepts we apply, because in one view of thinking, species should be self-contained units. They don't interbreed with other species. However, for me, the whole idea of Neanderthals as a different species is really a recognition of their separate evolutionary history—the fact that we can show that they evolved through time in a particular direction, distinct from modern humans, and they separated maybe 400,000 years ago from our lineage. And morphologically we can distinguish a relatively complete Neanderthal fossil from any recent human. - - - -You could argue that they're an extreme variant of _Homo sapiens_, but a very different 'race' from anyone alive today, or, as I prefer to argue, they're a separate species, with a separate evolutionary history. But I've never actually said that that meant they were completely reproductively isolated from us. We know that many closely related species in primates, for example, can interbreed. Various species of monkey can interbreed and have fertile offspring, and so can our closest living relatives, Bonobos and common chimpanzees. - -In my view the Neanderthals were closely related and probably potentially able to interbreed with modern humans, but until recently I considered that while there could have been interbreeding forty or fifty thousand years ago, it was on such a small scale that all trace of it vanished in the intervening years. But it now seems from Neanderthal genome studies that that was not so. We do have a bit of Neanderthal in us, you and I—it's a small amount, but certainly not negligible.. - -Does that mean Neanderthals are a different species or does it mean we should include them in _Homo sapiens_? Well, they are still only a small part of our makeup now, reflecting something like a 2.5% input of their DNA. Physically, however, they went extinct about 30,000 years ago. They had distinct behavior and they evolved under different conditions from us, so I still think it's useful to keep them as a separate species, even if we remember that that doesn't necessarily preclude interbreeding. - -Then there are these enigmatic people called the Denisovans, who we only know about because of DNA work that's gone on in the site of Denisova Cave in Siberia. The site has been known for a long time. There were some very fragmentary human fossils from there, a finger bone; a couple of teeth, a foot bone, and each of them have yielded significant DNA. The surprise was that while the foot bone DNA turned out to be Neanderthal, at the eastern limit of their known range, the other fossils had DNA that was quite distinct: it wasn't clearly Neanderthal, it wasn't modern human. It was something different. - -Svante Pääbo and his colleagues have dubbed these people the Denisovans. So we have this site in Siberia with Denisovans, and it looks like it was occupied in quite a short period of time by the Denisovans, by Neanderthals, and finally by modern humans. It's a remarkable site with three different kinds of humans living there in close proximity in time and space. However, the exact dating of these different occupations is still unclear. - -Thus the Denisovans are only known from this one site, genetically. The fossils are too incomplete to tell us what these people were really like, except they've got big teeth. However, there are lots of ancient fossils from China, and one from India. We've known about the people in China for a long time, ones who didn't look Neanderthal, and didn't look modern human either. Fossils like from the ones from Dali, Jinniushan, Maba might well be Denisovans, but unfortunately we don't have DNA from them at the moment, and we have to hope that the DNA work will move on, and eventually we can unite the Denisovan DNA with more complete fossils, and say physically what these people looked like. - -A further big surprise was that not only were there distinct humans in Siberia maybe 50,000 years ago, but when whole genome scans were done against modern humans, it turned out that there was one group of living humans that seemed to be related to the Denisovans, that had Denisovan DNA in them, and these people are down in Australasia. They're in New Guinea, Australia, and some neighbouring islands, so that's also very unexpected. - -The Denisovans are only known from their DNA in Siberia. Down in New Guinea and Australia, there is Denisovan DNA in living people. The best way to explain this at the moment is that modern humans were dispersing through southern Asia towards Australia and New Guinea, and Denisovans must also have been living in that region. So they weren't just in Siberia, they were actually right across eastern Asia and down into Southeast Asia, where there was another interbreeding with people whose descendants ended up in New Guinea and Australia. So those people have got a double archaic dose, if you like: they've got a bit of Neanderthal DNA that their ancestors picked up maybe in western Asia from encounters with some Neanderthals, and then coming through southeast Asia, they picked up some Denisovan DNA, and that gets added to the mix. - -We end up with a pretty complicated story of the interweaving of these lineages, which were separate for hundreds of thousands of years, but then when they overlapped, they exchanged genes. We don't know the circumstances of the interbreeding—we don't know if these were groups that came together peacefully, or maybe some modern humans were lacking mates and decided to capture some from a neighboring group. It can't have been that common a behavior, or there would be a lot more DNA from these archaic people. And it can't even have been a common behavior with the Neanderthals, because of course, if modern humans came out of Africa and spread gradually across Europe, we would expect if there was continuing interbreeding with Neanderthals, then Europeans would actually have a lot more Neanderthal DNA than someone in China or someone in New Guinea. - -The extraordinary thing is the level of DNA is about the same in a modern European, a modern Chinese and a modern New Guinean. One possibility is that an interbreeding event happened early on in southwest Asia. As modern humans first emerged from Africa, they met some Neanderthals—maybe only 25 Neanderthals and 1,000 modern humans. That would be enough. And then that DNA gets carried with those modern humans as they spread out from that area and diversify. - -Another possibility, which Mathias Currat and Laurent Excoffier have recently argued, is that the low level of interbreeding between Neanderthals and moderns was actually due to the unsuccessful nature of most of the interbreeding events. That actually the level of interbreeding in separate events was a measure of the low viability of those interbreeding events— which is why there isn't more Neanderthal DNA in people outside of Africa. - -I'm thinking a lot about species concepts as applied to humans, about the "Out of Africa" model, and also looking back into Africa itself. I think the idea that modern humans originated in Africa is still a sound concept. Behaviorally and physically, we began our story there, but I've come around to thinking that it wasn't a simple origin. Twenty years ago, I would have argued that our species evolved in one place, maybe in East Africa or South Africa. There was a period of time in just one place where a small population of humans became modern, physically and behaviourally. Isolated and perhaps stressed by climate change, this drove a rapid and punctuational origin for our species. Now I don’t think it was that simple, either within or outside of Africa. - -We can see the focus, the center of evolution, for modern humans in Africa apparently moving around from one place to another, driven by climate changes. 110,000 years ago the Sahara was not desert, it was well-watered, with extensive lakes and rivers. And we see evidence of human occupation in the form of stone tools right across the region. At other times those populations completely vanished, and we pick up the evidence of evolving modern humans in East Africa, or down in the south instead. And we have to remember that there are large parts of Africa where we have stone tools, but no fossil record to show us who was making those tools. We've got no ancient human fossils from central Africa or West Africa, none at all. So we have to bear in mind that our picture is still limited in terms of the sites that have been excavated and the information we've got from them. - -So for me, the exact processes involved in our African origin are still unclear. We don't know exactly when it happened, we don't know exactly where it happened. We have modern human fossils from Ethiopia at 160,000 years at Herto and 195,000 years from Omo Kibish. These do look physically like a more robust version of people today, but I think we're also learning that alongside those modern-looking people were surviving forms of more archaic humans, at sites like Omo Kibish, Ngaloba, Singa and Eyasi. - -And there were further surprises from a specimen that I and collaborators published on a few months ago. It's the oldest fossil from Nigeria, from a site called Iwo Eleru. It's about 13,000 years old, and yet if you look at it, you would say from its shape that it's more than 100,000 years old. This reminds us that we have a very biased picture of African evolution, with many unknown areas, and there could be relics of human evolution hanging on not only outside of Africa in the form of the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, and over in Flores, this strange creature nicknamed the 'Hobbit'. In Africa itself, archaic humans could have lingered in parts of the continent as well. From some recent genetic analyses, there is evidence of an input of archaic DNA into some modern African populations as recently as 35,000 years ago. So even in Africa, the process was more complicated than we thought. - -In terms of modern humans, this means that in a sense some modern humans have got more archaic genes than others. That does seem to be so. So it leads us on to ask again: what is a modern human? Some of the most fascinating ongoing research topics in the next year or two will be homing in on the DNA that some of us have acquired from Neanderthals, that some people have acquired from the Denisovans, and that some African people have acquired, perhaps even from _Homo heidelbergensis. _ - -Scientists will look at that DNA and ask, is it functional? Is it actually doing something in the bodies of those people? Is it affecting brains, anatomy, physiology, and so on? That's going to be a huge focus of research for the next few years because on the one hand, looking at these genes will help to really tell us what makes a Neanderthal a Neanderthal, what makes a modern human a modern human, what makes a Denisovan a Denisovan. But it might possibly also show that, as multiregionalists have argued in the past, robust fossils in regions like Australia could be a reflection of archaic gene flow. - -We can say that the shared (specific) features of _Homo sapiens_ (e.g. globular braincase, small brows, chin) evolved first, in Africa, while most of our regional ('racial') traits were added on to that modern template through the action of natural selection, sexual selection, founder effect and drift, as modern humans spread out to the regions where they are found today. But could archaic genes be responsible for some of them, at least? - -Darwin was puzzled, of course, by the evolution of those features. If we read _The Descent of Man, _his favoured view for the evolution of many of the regional features was that they were sexually selected or, we might say, culturally selected. I think he was probably right, in some cases at least. We can see that skin colour generally has a relationship with ultraviolet light, with getting a balance between having enough UV getting into your skin to produce Vitamin D, but not too much of it that it will damage the skin or destroy folic acid. So there's a balancing act in the amount of skin pigmentation, and there's no doubt natural selection is at work on this. But even here, sexual selection in terms of mating preferences for lighter or darker skin could be playing a part. And when we look at other features such as, say, oriental eyes or the kind of hair we've got, Darwin may be have been right, and sexual selection is at work there. As populations spread out in small numbers, cultural preferences for attractiveness might have driven some of those differences. Not much DNA is involved, and some striking-looking differences between populations could have evolved quite rapidly. - -There have been some remarkable advances in the time that I've been researching human evolution, which is 40-odd years now. When I began my PhD in 1970 and went on my doctoral research trip in 1971, the technology was very primitive. Basically, I went around Europe with a suitcase full of measuring instruments: calipers, tapes, protractors. I applied these to the fossil skulls of Neanderthals and modern humans that I was studying, spending four months doing that. It took half a day to study a single skull and collect that data, all put down by hand onto a paper sheet that couldn’t be backed up. There were not even any photocopy machines around so I could have lost all of my data quite easily. There were no pocket calculators, there were no photocopy machines—it was entirely non-digital recording. - -When I got back to Bristol, I had to laboriously transcribe all of those measurements by hand onto punch cards, which were then fed into the massive mainframe computer for the whole of Bristol University. It was probably about four times the size of this room, but with less processing power than the digital watch that I'm wearing now. A day later I would come back and get the results of that particular analysis. Or if it didn't work because of some minor error in one of cards, I'd have to put them all in again, which happened often. - -Things were laboriously slow. It took me four months on that trip to gather the data. It took me another 18 months to analyze those data, to get the results for my PhD. But my conclusions were clear enough. I had cranial samples of modern humans from different regions, and they grouped with each other in cranial shape, rather than with their local predecessors. And the Neanderthals rarely fell into an intermediate position between ancient fossils and recent humans—they seemed to be heading off in their own evolutionary direction through time, rather than gradually approaching a modern cranial shape. - -Now, of course, with the advent of scanning and digital technology, a good graduate student sitting at a computer console here or in Europe or the USA could conjure up an equivalent amount of data that I gathered, in fact probably more data than I gathered, on a series of skulls in a week or two, And they could do a more thorough computational analysis of that data than I managed, in a couple of weeks more. So what effectively took me nearly four years could be accomplished by a good student now in a few weeks! - -Advances like CT technology give you access to far more, and far richer, data. I was limited to the craniometric points on skulls where I could put my measuring instruments. But with CT, you can capture the whole shape of a specimen, of course. You can look at the internal cranial morphology, the sinuses, the inner ear bones of Neanderthals, which we now know are differently shaped from our own. We only learned that through CT technology, so all of that has made a huge difference to what we can get out of our fossils. - -In one way I'm jealous of the new generation that can come in and do all of this in such a short period of time. On the other hand, by going around Europe for four months, I actually held the Neanderthal skull from Germany in my hands, and the Cro-Magnon skulls from France, and it was wonderful to have a hands-on approach to these important relics. So with only virtual access to the fossils, I think the people doing the digital stuff on their consoles are missing that special and even emotional contact with the actual fossils. - -When I began my work in 1970, it's fair to say that people who believed in evolutionary continuity between Neanderthals and modern humans dominated the field. There was Loring Brace at Michigan, who certainly influenced me in my early studies. Loring firmly believed that human evolution passed through a Neanderthal stage all over the world. Everywhere we looked in the middle Pleistocene, there were 'Neanderthaloid' people, and these were the ancestors of modern humans in each region. Thus if we had a complete fossil record, we would see a gradual transition in each region through Neanderthal-like forms to modern humans. Around 1970, that was probably the dominant view. - -Milford Wolpoff was one of Loring Brace's students and he came out of that tradition, but with collaborators he developed his own variant by going back to the views of Franz Weidenreich, the German anatomist. Weidenreich had developed a theory which is now known as Multiregional Evolution. In 1984 Milford, Alan Thorne and Wu Xinzhi published a paper that argued for multiregional evolution from fossil, archaeological and genetic data. _Homo erectus_, when it spread out around the Old World, started to evolve towards modern humans in each region. But these lines didn't diverge—they were glued together by gene flow. The populations were breeding with each other across the whole range of humans at the time, and so there was no single place where modern humans evolved. Basically modern humans evolved everywhere where ancient humans lived. Thus every fossil could potentially be placed in a lineage leading through to modern humans. And in one of the clearest distinctions from a Recent African Origin model, the establishment of regional features would often have preceded, rather than succeeded, the appearance of shared modern ones. - -However there were also people who weren't part of the framework of regional continuity. For example there was William Howells from Harvard, who I spent a lot of time with in the 1970s. Bill was someone who didn't think the Neanderthals were our ancestors, and he exerted an increasing influence on my thinking. We didn't know where modern humans had evolved, but we both felt that it wasn't from the Neanderthals. But if not the Neanderthals, where were those ancestors? Were they in the Far East? Were they in Africa? In the 1970s, we couldn't say. However I followed Bill in arguing that there was probably a single center for modern human origins, given the similarities among humans all over the world, physically and genetically. - -During the 1980s, data started to build up that the African record was significant. In terms of both morphology and archaeology, Africa wasn't the rather backward place it was often thought to be. First, modern humans and advanced tools were shown to be there as early as anywhere else in the world. Then as the data grew, it seemed that modern humans were indeed there _earlier_ than they were anywhere else. This was the beginning, in the 1980s, of what we call "Out of Africa". - -On the archeological side, Desmond Clark, was also very strong in that view. He had links with Tim White, and Desmond and Tim were people who went out in the field to find the fossils we needed to test our models. I haven't been so lucky on the excavations I've been on in places like Gibraltar, tending to find lots of archeology and fauna, but not the human fossils. But people like Desmond, Tim, Ofer Bar Yosef and Bernard Vandermeersch have invested many years in field work and were rewarded in finding those fossils. Clark Howell was another big influence on me, having written influential papers on Neanderthals during the 1950s and 1960s, and he was a pioneer of field work in many regions. He was someone who was meticulous in the anatomical details that he looked at in fossils and he taught me a lot about how to look at the morphology of fossils. And closer to home I learnt a lot from my Museum colleague Peter Andrews, who helped to sharpen my thoughts about an African origin for modern humans, co-authoring our influential 1988 paper in _Science_. - -The preceding year of 1987 was a real watershed, with the publication of the 'Mitochondrial Eve' paper in _Nature_ by Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking and Allan Wilson. A few of us had been advocating a recent African origin for modern humans before then, but it wasn't until '87 that this topic suddenly made the front pages of journals and newspapers. Suddenly modern human origins became very sexy, and more money became available for research and for field work on recent human evolution. - -Before that, the sexy areas for human evolution were in the much older African record. People working in the Rift Valley and in South Africa were the focus of attention and funding. But after 1987, people started to pick up on the evolution of modern humans as a significant topic, and we started to get more conferences, more fieldwork, and more public interest in our own evolution. Of course I was delighted to ride on that wave of increasing public interest in modern human origins. - -Until 2004, we thought that only modern humans had got across the Wallace line. The Wallace line was named after the zoologist Alfred Russel Wallace, who recognised significant changes in the fauna and flora in Southeast Asia as we move from places like Java across into the islands leading to New Guinea and Australia. The view was that ancient humans like _Homo erectus_ got as far as Java, but they didn't get any further—the assumption was that only modern humans with boats were able to get onto the islands leading to New Guinea and Australia. - -Then the find known as _Homo floresiensis_ was made in Liang Bua Cave on the island of Flores, and was quickly nicknamed "The Hobbit," because the _Lord of the Rings_ films were popular at that time. The excavators who described this material argued that they had found a new species of human, small-bodied at about a meter tall, with primitive features in the skeleton, and a brain the size of that of a chimpanzee. And this creature was living on the island of Flores, way over the Wallace Line, five-hundred kilometers beyond Java. Not only that, it was still around 17,000 years ago, long after the Neanderthals had died out. It was an extraordinary claim from a partial skeleton and some more fragmentary material dug up from just this one site on Flores. - -I was at the _Nature_ press conference where these findings were announced, and commentated on the discovery, which did impress me. I took this seriously as a distinct human-like species, which had somehow got to Flores and had evolved separately in isolation for a long period of time. The leading view in 2004 was that this creature represented a dwarf form of _Homo erectus_. _Homo erectus_ had somehow headed eastwards, arrived on Flores, and under the conditions of this relatively small island, the species had dwarfed down in size (a process called insular dwarfism, which happens to medium-to-large-sized mammals on islands with reduced resources, when evolution favors a reduced body size). The argument was that this was a dwarfed _Homo erectus_, explaining the smaller body and brain size. - -However, some researchers refused to accept that. They felt that this was such a bizarre find, under bizarre circumstances, and they actually favored the view that they were some kind of pathological modern human, perhaps suffering from cretinism, microcephaly or something called Laron Syndrome. These conditions can produce small brains and small bodies in modern humans, so some people have argued that these findings are not a distinct species at all. - -That view is a minority view, but it continues up to this day. However I'm not convinced by these counter-arguments. We've got now over 100 fossils from Liang Bua, not just that one skeleton—there are a number of other individuals. There's a second jaw bone, which to me looks every bit as primitive and archaic as the first jaw bone that's with the skeleton. And there are two sets of primitive-looking wrist bones. These finds were made in levels from about 17,000 right down to about 90,000 years in the cave, and there's archeology right through those levels, archaeology which in some respects resembles much older stone tools found elsewhere on the island. - -So for me, it remains a convincing distinct form of human, and one that may be even more primitive than was originally considered because recent research on the material, more detailed research, has found a number of features that seem to be more primitive than even the ones we find in _Homo erectus_. The suggestion is now that this might represent an even earlier stage of human evolution, one that's closer to _Homo habilis_ or even to _Australopithecus,_ creatures that lived two million years ago or more in Africa. Although we've got no evidence of it happening yet, the argument is that one of those more primitive forms got out of Africa more than two million years ago, somehow found its way over to southeast Asia, and survived in isolation on the island of Flores until 17,000 years ago, when it went extinct. That would be an even more extraordinary story than a _Homo erectus_ getting there and dwarfing, that you've actually got a relic of an earlier stage of human evolution that got all the way over there. - -Lots of questions arise from this very challenging find in explaining where it came from and what happened to it. Did it die out because of the impact of modern humans, which is an argument that's been used for the extinction of Neanderthals? Well, according to the excavators on Flores, there's no evidence of modern humans there 17,000 years ago. Supposedly the modern humans came later. But there is evidence of a massive volcanic eruption about 17,000 years ago, which produced very thick ash in the Liang Bua cave and elsewhere on the island. It may well be that this eruption was so enormous that it devastated the vegetation on the island and led to the extinction of the hobbit, which would be a very sad end after maybe two million years of evolution in a remote region, at the edge of the inhabited world at that time. - -Where did it come from? Well, that's also still a mystery. On the one hand, was it from _Homo erectus_? Mike Morwood has recently argued that it's more likely that the ancestors of the Hobbits came from the north, because the currents of water in that region actually run from Sulawesi southwards, down to places like Timor, and then westwards. That's the opposite direction from a transit from Java to Flores. So Morwood argues that the Hobbit's ancestors will be found further north. Remarkably, he and his colleagues have found stone tools on Flores that are a million years old, which might have been made by the ancestors of the Hobbit. Reportedy he's even found tools which are a million years old on the island of Sulawesi, and that island is also over the Wallace Line. So there may actually be many more populations related to the hobbit waiting to be found on the islands of the region. - -We've got a whole unknown history there for the hobbit, just as we've got an unknown history for the Denisovans in East Asia. - -Changing topics, I think one of the most remarkable recent finds is the material from the site of Malapa in South Africa. This is material that's been found in the last few years, and we've seen a series of papers published in _Science_ in the last few months. This is a species of _Australopithecus_ called _Australopithecus sediba_, and it's clearly related to the previously known and possibly ancestral species _Australopithecus africanus_. The Taung specimen and the 'Mrs Ples' fossil are two famous examples of _Australopithecus africanus_, a species that lived in South Africa more than two million years ago. - -It's true to say that for most experts, the South African australopithecines have been side-lined from the mainstream of human evolution. The mainstream view has been that East Africa was where the first humans evolved, with _Homo habilis_ coming out of a species like Lucy’s, _Australopithecus afarensis._ From there, in turn, the species _Homo erectus_ supposedly evolved about 1.8 million years ago. - -What’s new is that _sediba_ is close to two million years old and has many more human features than _Australopithecus africanus._ So we've got these strange fossil skeletons of _sediba _down in South Africa, on the one hand looking like _Australopithecus africanus_, but with more human features in the teeth, pelvis, legs and hands. This suggests for people like Lee Berger (the discoverer of _sediba_), that the transition to _Homo_ occurred in South Africa, not east Africa. You could then turn things around and sideline all of those east African fossil. - -I tend to the view that it will be more complex than that. We know there were australopithecines living in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi, down into South Africa about 2.5 million years ago. Then if in a number of areas we get parallel evolution in adapting to environmental change, these different species start to use tools to an increasing extent, they start to eat meat to an increasing extent, they start to travel longer distances on two legs to get their food, this could have driven parallel human-like changes in the body, the hands, the brain, even. That is maybe what we're seeing in both East Africa and South Africa. And an even more radical possibility is that hybridization events which we can now map from ancient and modern DNA were also occurring in Africa two million years ago and might have produced some of the mosaic morphologies that we observe there. So which area will eventually turn out to be the place of origin of the genus _Homo_ is still an open question, but _sediba_ reminds us that South Africa could be part of that story, and that perhaps _Australopithecus africanus_ didn't die out. Maybe it carried on evolving, and even started to evolve some human-like features. So this material is important in evolutionary terms, but also important because of the completeness of the several skeletons discovered so far. - -Published so far are two fairly complete skeletons of what are probably a boy, perhaps nine or ten when he died, and an adult female. Still unpublished are at least three more individuals, all from this one site. It looks like these individuals fell one after another into a death trap. They may have fallen into anoxic water, where there was very slow decay of the tissue, and they were mummified before they were fossilized, with even the possibility, according to Lee Berger, of soft tissue preservation. Between the bones and the sediments around them there could be layers of fossilized skin that might have preservation of skin, pores, hair and even pigments. Even more extraordinary if that's true. But just for their completeness, these are really important specimens. - -The impact of genetic work on our field is enormous, and growing. When you think back to 1997, a tiny bit of mitochondrial DNA was recovered from the original Neanderthal skeleton found in Germany. I was at the press conference with Svante Pääbo, and it was undoubtedly a pioneering achievement, and a breakthrough. But no one could have believed that ten years later, we'd be talking about most of a genome of a Neanderthal being reconstructed. So the technical and computational advances have been huge. - -The ability to recover the DNA, massive computing power, huge databases of comparative DNA samples have allowed us to map most of the genome of a Neanderthal, in fact several Neanderthals, and also recover the DNA of these enigmatic people called the Denisovans. I think wherever there are suitably cold conditions, and just as importantly, where it was predominantly cold in the past there should be good DNA preservation. So in northern Asia and Europe and in sites at high altitude outside of those areas, there should be more DNA to come from the fossils, and we will see increasing amounts from modern human fossils as well, which has been slow to come through because of the problems of contamination. We may find there are other people than the Denisovans and the Neanderthals to be recognized from their DNA in these regions— there may well be more surprises to come. For example there is evidence both from fossils and recent DNA that even Africa had an overlap of modern and archaic humans, with the possibility in a continent so large that there were other descendants of _heidelbergensis_ living there alongside _Homo sapiens_. These populations could have exchanged DNA too, evidence of which might be found in the genomes of living Africans. We will also get the first good look at functional DNA in the genomes of ancient individuals. For the first time, we can make a comparison, not just between the chimp genome and the modern human genome, but we can now add in the Neanderthal genome and the Denisovan genome. We can start to see what unites those three human genomes compared with the chimpanzees. What evolved along the modern human line to make us what we are? And then individually, what made the Neanderthals what they were? What made the Denisovans what they were? This will have an impact, of course, on our own nature, what makes a modern human a modern human. Already a number of bits of DNA have been identified that are distinct among humans, where the Neanderthals are like chimpanzees. Some of these are concerned with the brain, some are concerned with the skin and physiology, some are concerned with how the skeleton grows, and some are concerned with things like the motility of sperm. These things really are going to help us tell what makes a Neanderthal, what makes a Denisovan, and what makes a modern human. Equally we will see studies of the function of Neanderthal-derived and Denisovan-derived DNA in the modern populations that show this from previous interbreeding. So we will find out whether we picked up short or longer-term advantages from those interbreeding events in terms of local adaptation, resistance to new pathogens etc. - -Here's a somewhat simple representation of my current thinking now about human evolution over the last two million years: - -We've got the lineage of the hobbit, '_Homo floresiensis' _(in quotation marks because its human status in not yet clear), perhaps diverging more than two million years ago, evolving in isolation in southeast Asia, and apparently going extinct about 17,000 years ago. - -We've got _Homo erectus_, most likely originating in Africa, giving rise to lineages which continue in the Far East in China and Java, but which eventually go extinct. In Europe, it perhaps gave rise to the species _Homo_ antecessor, "Pioneer Man," known from the site of Atapuerca in Spain. Again, going extinct. - -In the western part of the Old World, we get the development of a new species, _Homo heidelbergensis_, present in Europe, Asia and Africa. We knew _heidelbergensis_ had gone two ways, to modern humans and the Neanderthals. But we now know because of the Denisovans that actually _heidelbergensis_ went three ways—in fact the Denisovans seem to represent an off-shoot of the Neanderthal lineage. - -North of the Mediterranean, _heidelbergensis _gave rise to the Neanderthals, over in the Far East, it gave rise to the Denisovans. In Africa _heidelbergensis_ evolved into modern humans, who eventually spread from Africa about 60,000 years ago, but as I mentioned, there's evidence that _heidelbergensis_ populations carried on in Africa for a period of time. But we now know that the Neanderthals and the Denisovans did not go genetically extinct. They went physically extinct, but their genes were input into modern humans, perhaps in western Asia in the case of the Neanderthals. And then a smaller group of modern humans picked up DNA from the Denisovans in south east Asia. - -We end up with quite a complex story, with even some of this ancient DNA coming back into modern humans within Africa. So our evolutionary story is mostly, but not absolutely, a Recent African Origin. - - - -[edge.org __](http://www.edge.org/conversation/rethinking-out-of-africa) diff --git a/script mutt to plain text note.txt b/script mutt to plain text note.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 7e1a99c..0000000 --- a/script mutt to plain text note.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,72 +0,0 @@ -script- mutt to plain text note - -tags: nvalt gtd -date: January 24, 2013 19:03:28 PM ---- - - -Subject: Re: Your Mutt Scripts... - -Hi Scott, - -Thanks for your nice message, and glad you found the posts useful. -Here's the script I use, which is somewhat geared towards my -idiosyncratic "2q" system: - - - #!/bin/sh - # $HOME/Scripts/m2q - BODY=$(sed -n '/^Date/,$ p' | grep -E -i '^[^X]+' | sed -En '/^Date/,/application\// p') - TITLE="2q $1" - echo "${BODY}" | sed -En '/^Date/,/text\/html/ p' > /Users/wcm1/Dropbox/notes/"$TITLE".txt - echo "${BODY}" | sed -En '/text\/html/,$ p' | pandoc --strict -f html -t markdown >> $HOME/Dropbox/notes/"$TITLE".txt - - -It's actually a very imperfect filter. The sed command in the BODY -variable is clumsy and designed mainly to clear out gobbledy-gook from -attachments. I use the other echo commands to print both the -plain-text version of the message and the HTML version (if there is -one) parsed by pandoc to my note. -Within put, I use the | key to call the pipe message command, and then -I enter: - m2q "Title of my note" -and hit enter (the Script is called m2q and resides in my $PATH). -You should be able to see how to make an even simpler script, though. -If all you wanted to do was be able to give your note a title within -Mutt, your script could look like this: -``` -MESSAGE=$(cat) -TITLE="$1" -echo "${MESSAGE}" > path/to/notes/"$1".txt -``` -Hope this helps, -Caleb -W. Caleb McDaniel -Assistant Professor of History -Rice University -http://wcm1.web.rice.edu -On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 04:54:49PM -0500, Scott Gilbertson wrote: -> Caleb- -> -> I stumbled across your site trying to perfect my GTD-in-plain-text -> system. I like what you wrote about regarding notational velocity, it's -> very similar to what I do. -> -> What I was writing about though is your mutt post. This bit about saving -> messages as plain text files caught my eye: "I wrote up a simple script -> that takes the message, cleans it up, and puts it in a plain text file -> whose title I specify within Mutt." -> -> I was wondering if you'd be willing to share that script? -> -> What I'm doing right now is just putting <pipe-message> in my muttrc and -> passing it to cat to saving the file in my notes folder. But I like the -> idea of giving it a title and everything right in mutt. I just can't -> seem to get that to work for me. -> -> Anyway, thanks for your time. -> -> cheers -> Scott Gilbertson -> sng@luxagraf.net -> diff --git a/seth brown's writer workflow.txt b/seth brown's writer workflow.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 52612f0..0000000 --- a/seth brown's writer workflow.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,84 +0,0 @@ -Seth Brown's Writer Workflow - -From <http://www.macdrifter.com/2012/05/seth-browns-writer-workflow.html> -# Seth Brown’s Writer Workflow - -May 08, 2012 by Gabe - -**Editor's Note:** Seth Brown writes about extremely technical topics over at DrBunsen.org. His interests span from awesome [vim overviews](http://www.drbunsen.org/text-triumvirate.html) to [personal productivity](http://www.drbunsen.org/towards-effective-information-processing.html) with some [stop overs in whisky town](http://www.drbunsen.org/malt-analysis.html). Virtually everything he posts I put straight into Instapaper. That is if I can wait to read it. Most of the time I stop everything to read each post entirely. Each post is a little technical course on a single fascinating topic.. - -### _If you like, please provide a brief bio_ - -My name is Seth Brown. I live in the United States with my wife Katrina and our dog Stewie. By day, I'm a [bioinformatician](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics). I use statistics and computers to analyze [big data](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data) and understand human disease. By night I use the same tools to build stuff, answer questions that interest me, and act deliciously geeky. [Mark Twain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain) said that work and play are two words that describe the same thing under different conditions—I feel extremely lucky to be able to agree with him. - -### _Why did you start writing at DrBunsen.org_ - -I started [DrBunsen.org](http://www.drbunsen.org/) from a confluence of things that were happening in my life. I had just finished an enjoyable post as a visiting professor and I felt a need to continue educating after I left my position. Web development was something that I had no prior experience with and something that I always had an itch to learn. I wanted a public venue where I could continue to improve my writing, coding, and analytical skills as well as interact with other people who shared similar interests. Creating a website satisfied all of these criteria, so here we are. - -### _How do you capture your ideas and research an article on your blog?_ - -Capture is frequently precipitated by my own interests in learning something new. One of the best way to learn something is to write about it. This is one way I try to [trick myself into being awesome](http://japhr.blogspot.com/2012/04/366-or-how-i-tricked-myself-into-being.html). I get ideas by trying to answer questions that I think are interesting, pursuing difficult problems I've encountered, and writing about inspiring subjects. - -I capture most of my ideas with pen and paper or on my office whiteboard. Lately, I've been using the [Retro 51 Tornado](http://www.retro51.com/fwi_tor_classiclacquers.html) for most of my paper capture. I digitize everything, so the irony here is not lost on me. I've yet to find another medium that rivals the speed, information density, or expressiveness of drawing for capture and idea generation. From these physical inputs, I use an automated system that I wrote to archive daily digital snapshots of my whiteboard and other drawings and images that I take with my iPhone camera. Apps like [Prizmo](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/prizmo/id366791896?mt=8) make the iPhone a powerful capture tool in my workflow. - -A nascent blog post begins when I create a new [OmniFocus](http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnifocus/) project and import an image of a drawing that I've captured into the project. I like to further develop my posts from within OmniFocus in the form of shallow outlines; simple bullet points mostly. I also add links, images, and sometimes audio data to the project. My best ideas occur at random times so I like to confine the development process to OmniFocus where I can quickly capture supporting ideas at my computer or remotely on iOS. When I feel that I've accumulated sufficient material, I use my OmniFocus outline as a guide for writing my posts. Most of my blog post ideas die at this stage when I come to the realization that either my ideas are poor or someone has already written something better than I could ever hope to produce. Once I've accumulated sufficient material within the OmniFocus project, I start the writing process. - -### _How does this differ from your process for writing professionally?_ - -The initial idea capturing process is similar between my blog and professional work. My work projects are larger and more complex, so I supplement my capture process by using a wiki system generated with [Gollum](https://github.com/github/gollum) and written in Markdown. I find that wikis are a great medium to organize, consolidate, and interconnect my drawings, with URLs, PDF files, visualizations, and other resources relevant to a given project. I frequently have impromptu whiteboard brain-storming sessions with coworkers that I capture with my iPhone and later add to my wiki. Drawing and image capture are very useful in these contexts. - -### _You write a lot of code. How do you research and create code for your professional and personal projects?_ - -I create personal and professional code similar to how I create prose. Coding and writing are essentially the same thing. I start coding projects by drawing diagrams of how my programs will work, how the individual pieces will fit together, and what data structures and algorithms I plan to use. If I'm creating a tool that other people will use, I think about the user interface first and work backward to write the implementation. Experience has taught me that diving into a project without thoroughly thinking it through leads to downstream problems. - -I don't research code _per say_, but I do like to read code to make myself a better programmer. I read great writers to understand how to become a better writer, so this seems like what I should be doing with code as well—the [XMonad source code](http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Guided_tour_of_the_xmonad_source) and Peter Norvig's [Sudoku puzzle solver](http://norvig.com/sudoku.html) are beautiful examples. - -Whenever I encounter a useful piece of code, I add it to my snippet library if the snippet is short or refactor it into one of own my personal modules. I've always struggle with how best to keep small code snippets, but I've settled on using [CodeBox](http://www.shpakovski.com/codebox/). I have very large snippet libraries for several languages, so searching my own resources is usually the fastest way to find what I need. [Symbol Hound](http://www.symbolhound.com/) and [Hoogle](http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/) are also handy tools for metacharacter queries and other special searches. - -### _Can you provide an overview of your writing process?_ - -It's essential for me to build an outline in OmniFocus prior to starting the writing process. The outline is a way for me to evaluate whether I can write a cohesive body of text around an idea. The cornerstone of good writing is good ideas. I like outlines because they allow me to see how my writing will look and flow. Once I have the substance captured in outline form, I can concentrate on the flow and syntax of my words during the writing process. - -Before I start writing, I like to read short passages from great writers. I write mostly technical material, so I try to read and emulate the styles of the best technical writers I know—[Harold Varmus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_E._Varmus), [Brian Kernighan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan), and [Oliver Sacks](http://www.oliversacks.com/) to name a few. I try to absorb their styles and integrate them into my own. In the words of Paul Graham, [copy what you like](http://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html) and in the words of Ausin Kleon, [steal like an artist](http://www.austinkleon.com/2011/03/30/how-to-steal-like-an-artist-and-9-other-things-nobody-told-me/). - -I write the final version of a document start to finish, paragraph by paragraph, until the final version is finished. I write in Markdown for my blog and initially Markdown for my professional work, which later gets converted to [TeX](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX) and rendered with the [XeTeX](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XeTeX) engine. I've never been able to write drafts and then iterate through revisions until a final version is produced. I rarely finish a post in one sitting. I like to write in short spurts over the course of several days. As I write, I like to read my words aloud. This technique greatly improves my writing. - -If I get stuck while writing, I use a few techniques to help me. Sometimes I start working on another project for a few days then go back to writing. Switching working environments and input devices can help. I move from working on the computer at my standing desk to an iPad on a chase. If I get stuck more than once or twice while working on a piece, it's usually a sign that my original ideas are flawed. - -### _How long have you been doing it this way?_ - -Since college. - -### _What enhancements have you made to make writing and research easier?_ - -Practice is the biggest enhancement I've made to my writing. The more I write, the better and faster I get. I use several tools I've written to help me automate steps in the writing process. I write a lot of Markdown and one of my favorite enhancements is a simple Markdown formatting tool that I've written called [formd](http://drbunsen.github.com/formd/). I also make heavy use of [TextExpander](http://smilesoftware.com/TextExpander/) to simplify a lot of writing drudgery. TextExpander is especially useful for Unicode characters. I have an entire snippet group dedicated to Unicode, which greatly speeds up my professional writing where I use a lot of obscure math symbols and greek letters. - -I've experimented with many different research enhancements over the years. [Towards Effective Information Processing](http://www.drbunsen.org/towards-effective-information-processing.html) is kind of my manifesto on this subject. Learning to automate much of the initial research process has been the biggest enhancement that I've made. - -### _Do you have a specific work environment or setup for researching and composing an article?_ - -My home office is my preferred working environment because it's where I get the most done. The lack of a commute and the distraction free environment make me much more productive than in a typical office. My work environment consists of a [standing drafting table](http://www.drbunsen.org/standing-office-setup.html) with a [three monitor configuration](http://www.drbunsen.org/tri-display-desk.html) and [bias lighting](http://www.drbunsen.org/bias-lighting.html). I spent my youth working on drafting tables and it remains my preferred work surface. My left display always has a full screen [iTerm2](http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home) window running in it. I spend close to 90% of my time between [iTerm2](http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home) and Google Chrome. I use terminal Vim inside iTerm for all [my writing](http://www.drbunsen.org/writing-in-vim.html) and coding. - -### _Do you write from a mobile device? If so, how does this process differ from your desk computer?_ - -I write with my iPad. My writing process really doesn't change very much on the iPad, it just slows down. I don't find that the iPad can even remotely substitute for my work station, but I do feel it plays an important role in my writing workflow. The iPad allows me to sit outside or in a remote location, which can sometimes help me write. - -I use OmniFocus for the iPad since I use OmniFocus so heavily on my Mac. Dropbox is the glue that holds all my writing together on my computer and remote devices. I completely burnt-out on iOS Dropbox text editors sometime in 2009. There are just too many excellent iOS apps to keep track of. I just use whatever [Federico Viticci recommends](http://www.macstories.net/stories/my-dropbox-writing-workflow/); lately that's [Writing Kit](http://getwritingkit.com/) on the iPad. Thanks to [your recommendations](http://www.macdrifter.com/2012/03/doing-research-with-an-ipad-part-2-reference-material.html), I also use [Terminology](http://agiletortoise.com/terminology) frequently while I write. - -### _Does your workflow change based on the type of post?_ - -No. - -### _What parts of your workflow are you looking to change or improve?_ - -Contextual awareness. - -Location-specific functionality is an untapped area of my workflow. There is tremendous potential to leverage proximity sensors and WiFi location to carry out specific actions though a computer or mobile device. Every six months, I try to integrate contextual functionality into my workflow with little success. In an ideal world, my iPhone would open my garage door, turn the lights on in my office, and open a terminal window because it is aware that I am in the car, close to home, and at 11am there is a high probability that I will be working on the command line. - -### _What parts of your workflow are you least willing to change?_ - -Maybe I'm dodging the question, but I'm willing to drop any piece of my workflow if it makes me a faster or better writer. I have no allegiances. With that being said, it will take something special to get me to get me to move away from Vim as my text editor. - -### _Anything else you would like to share about your workflow?_ - -I write best in flannel surrounded by the [The Goldberg Variations](http://www.amazon.com/Bach-Goldberg-Variations-Glenn-Gould/dp/B0000025PM). diff --git a/space pen gel ink refills.txt b/space pen gel ink refills.txt deleted file mode 100755 index fe51b02..0000000 --- a/space pen gel ink refills.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1 +0,0 @@ -Zebra G301 gel
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/street-photographers.txt b/street-photographers.txt deleted file mode 100644 index cf1075e..0000000 --- a/street-photographers.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,5 +0,0 @@ -Martine Franck -Fred Herzog -Vivian Maier -Helen Levitt - diff --git a/the abolition of work.txt b/the abolition of work.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 68a4f9e..0000000 --- a/the abolition of work.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,104 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: THE ABOLITION OF WORK -date: 2015-03-29T00:35:56Z -source: http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm -tags: philosophy, anarchism, culture - ---- - -![ARBEIT MACHT FREI - WORK MAKES ONE FREE - entrance to Nazi concentration camp at Theresienstadt, Germany][1] **No one should ever work.** - -Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost all the evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. **In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. ** - -That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a _ludic_ revolution. By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us [will] want [to] act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of same debased coin. - -**The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for "reality," the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival.** Curiouslymaybe notall the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else. - -Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. **I say we should end employment**. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue **I support the right to be lazy**. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealistsexcept that I'm not kidding**I favor full unemployment**. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. **I agitate for permanent revelry**. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate workand not only because they plan to make other people do theirsthey are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. **Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.** - -You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking _and_ serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn't have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn't triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I'd like life to be a game \- but a game with high stakes. I want to play _for keeps._ - -**The alternative to work isn't just idleness.** To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, it's never more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I promoting the managed time-disciplined safety-valve called "leisure"; far from it. Leisure is non-work for the sake of work. Leisure is the time spent recovering from work, and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work many people return from vacations so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation. - -I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimun definition of work is _forced labor_, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. **Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick**. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it's done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. **To define it is to despise it**. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or "communist," work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness. - -Usuallyand this is even more true in "communist" than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee**work is employment, _i.e._, wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan**. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or some_thing_) else. In the USSR or Cuba or Yugoslavia or Nicaragua or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastionsMexico, India, Brazil, Turkeytemporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millennia, the payment of taxes (ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. _**All**_** industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility**. - -But modern work has worse implications. People don't just work, they have "jobs." One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don't) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A "job" that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates whoby any rational-technical criteria - should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control. - -The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as "discipline." Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplacesurveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and -out, etc. **Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital**. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic tators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn't have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity. - -Such is "work." Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. **What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced. This is axiomatic**. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the "suspension of consequences." This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; that's why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga (_Homo Ludens_) define it as game-playing or following rules. I respect Huizinga's erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-govemed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travelthese practices aren't rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be _played with_ at least as readily as anything else. - -**Work makes a mockery of freedom**. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to the higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing. - -And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. **There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace.** You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. **A worker is a part-time slave**. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors; he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work? - -The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. **For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism orbetter stillindustrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. **Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid. _You are what you do_. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. **Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education**. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to hierarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it. - -**We are so close to the world of work that we can't see what it does to us.** We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the "work ethic" would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labelled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed, the Calvinist cranks notwithstanding, until overthrown by industrialismbut not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets. - -**Let's pretend for a moment that work doesn't turn people into stultified submissives.** Let's pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And let's pretend that work isn't as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would _still_ make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. **Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right.** Because of work, no matter what we do we keep looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. **Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair.** Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. But workers do. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "_Work is for saps!_" - -Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and as a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, **Cicero said that "whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves."** His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Westem anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed "to regain the lost power and health." Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to "St. Monday"thus establishing a _de facto_ five-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecrationwas the despair of the earliest Factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the _ancien regime_ wrested substantial time back from their landlord's work. According to Lafargue; a fourth of the French peasants' calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov's figures from villages in Czarist Russiahardly a progressive societylikewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants' days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited _muzhiks_ would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we. - -**To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gatherers. **Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war raged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of govemment authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes' compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of lifein North America, particularlybut already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. **Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than West Germans climb the Berlin Wall from the west.**) The "survival of the fittest" versionthe Thomas Huxley versionof Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book _Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution_. (Kropotkin was a scientistgeographerwho'd had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about. Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography. - -The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled "The Original Affluent Society." They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that "**hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intemmittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.**" They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were "working" at all. Their "labor," as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schiller's definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full "play" to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. As he put it: "**The animal _works_ when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it _plays_ when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity.**" (A modern versiondubiously developmental \- is Abraham Maslow's counterposition of "deficiency" and "growth" motivation.) Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that "the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required." He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, **the abolition of work** \- it's rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work \- but we can. - -**The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial Europe**, among them M. Dorothy George's _England in Transition_ and Peter Burke's _Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe_. Also pertinent is Daniel Bell's essay "Work and Its Discontents," the first text, I believe, to refer to the "revolt against work" in so many words and, had it been understood, an important correction to the complacency ordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, _The End of Ideology_. Neither critics nor celebrants have noticed that Bell's end-of-ideology thesis signalled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology. It was Seymour Lipset (in _Political Man_), not Bell, who announced at the same time that "the fundamental problems of the Industrial Revolution have been solved," only a few years before the post- or metaindustrial discontents of college students drove Lipset from UC Berkeley to the relative (and temporary) tranquillity of Harvard. - -As Bell notes, Adam Smith in _The Wealth of Nations_, for all his enthusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smith's modem epigones. As Smith observed: "**The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations . . . has no occasion to exert his understanding . . . He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.**" Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized, unorganizable malaise of the 1970's and since, the one no political tendency is able to hamess, the one identified in HEW's report _Work in America_, the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. **That problem is the revolt against work.** It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economistMilton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posnerbecause, in their terms, as they used to say on _Star Trek_, "[it does not compute][2]." - -If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist tum, there are others which they cannot disregard. **Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words. **Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are killed annually in this country on the job. Over two million are disabled. Twenty to twenty-five million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus they don't count the half million cases of occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occuptional diseases which was 1,200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die every year, a much higher fatality rate than for AIDS, for instance, which gets so much media attention. This reflects the unvoiced assumption that AIDS afflicts perverts who could control their depravity whereas coalmining is a sacrosanct activity beyond question. **What the statistics don't show is that tens of millions of people have their lifespans shortened by workwhich is all that homicide means, after all.** Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their 50's. Consider all the other workaholics. - -**Even if you aren't killed or crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work.** The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of auto-industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly or indirectly, to work. - -**Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life.** People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. **We kill people in the sixfigure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors.** Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing \- or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for. - -Bad news for liberals: regulatory tinkering is useless in this life-and-death context. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration was designed to police the core part of the problem, workplace safety. - -Even before [Reagan][3] and the Supreme Court stifled it, OSHA was a farce. At previous and (by current standards) generous Carter-era funding levels, a workplace could expect a random visit from an OSHA inspector once every 46 years. - -State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything, more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here. Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow subway. **Stories reverberate about covered-up Soviet nuclear disasters which makes Times Beach and Three Mile Island look like elementary-school air-raid drills.** On the other hand, deregulation, currently fashionable, won't help and will probably hurt. From a health and safety standpoint, among others, work was its worst in the days when the economy most closely approximated laissez-faire. Historians like Eugene Genovese have argued persuasively thatas antebellum slavery apologists insistedfactory wage-workers in the Northern American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats and businessmen seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious enforcement of even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill. The enforcers apparently appreciate this, since they don't even try to crack down on most malefactors. - -What I've said so far ought not to be controversial. **Many workers are fed up with work.** There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work. And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also widespread among workers themselves is that work itself is inevitable and necessary. - -I disagree. **It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of activities.** To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand \- and I think this the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departurewe have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that shouldn't make them _less_ enticing to do. **Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.** - -I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. **Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages.** Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five per cent of the work then being donepresumably the figure, if accurate, is lower nowwould satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, **most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control**. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrockers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkeys and underlings also. Thus the economy _implodes_. - -Forty per cent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the "tertiary sector," the service sector, is growing while the "secondary sector" (industry stagnates and the "primary sector" (agriculture) nearly disappears. **Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order.** Anything is better than nothing. That's why you can't go home just because you finish early. They want your _time_, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn't the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the last fifty years? - -Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorantand above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model T might be all right, but the autoeroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend is out of the question. Already, without even trying, we've virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems. - -Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks around. I refer to _housewives_ doing housework and childrearing. **By abolishing wage-labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor.** The nuclear family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of labor imposed by modern wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been for the last century or two it is economically rational for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork to provide him with a haven in a heartless world, **and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration campscalled "schools," primarily to keep them out of Mom's hair but still under control, but incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers**. If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of the nuclear family whose unpaid "shadow work," as Ivan Illich says, makes possible the work-system that makes _it_ necessary. Bound up with this no-nukes strategy is the abolition of childhood and the closing of the schools. There are more full-time students than full-time workers in this country. **We need children as teachers, not students.** They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because they're better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge the generation gap. - -I haven't as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence should have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly they'll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps they'll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies. Perhaps. I myself am no gadget freak. I wouldn't care to live in a pushbutton paradise. I don't want robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I think, a place for laborsaving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. **When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished.** The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labor-saving inventions ever devised haven't saved a moments labor. Karl Marx wrote that "**it would be possible to write a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class.**" The enthusiastic technophilesSaint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B.F. Skinnerhave always been unabashed authoritarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more than skeptical about the promises of the computer mystics. _They_ work like dogs; chances are, if they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any particularized contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, let's give them a hearing. - -**What I really want to see is work turned into play.** A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their airconditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? **Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.** - -The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I don't want coerced students and I don't care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure. - -Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy baby-sitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile profoundly appreciate the time to themselves that you free up for them, although they'd get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when they're just fueling up human bodies for work. - -Third,other things being equal,some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are enjoyable, at least for awhile, if these circumstances are changed. This is probably true, to some extent, of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can. Activities that appeal to some people don't always appeal to all others, but everyone at least potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety. As the saying goes, "anything once." Fourier was the master at speculating how aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to use in post-civilized society, what he called Harmony. **He thought the Emperor Nero would have turned out all right if as a child he could have indulged his taste for bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse.** Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organized in "Little Hordes" to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding. I am not arguing for these precise examples but for the underlying principle, which I think makes perfect sense as one dimension of an overall revolutionary transformation. Bear in mind that we don't have to take today's work just as we find it and match it up with the proper people, some of whom would have to be perverse indeed. If technology has a role in all this it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation. To some extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morris considered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution. Art would be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as a specialized department catering to an elite audience, and its qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from which they were stolen by work. **It's a sobering thought that the Grecian urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store olive oil. I doubt our everyday artifacts will fare as well in the future, if there is one.** The point is that there's no such thing as progress in the world of work; if anything it's just the opposite. We shouldn't hesitate to pilfer the past for what it has to offer, the ancients lose nothing yet we are enriched. - -**The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps.** There is, it is true, more suggestive speculation than most people suspect. Besides Fourier and Morrisand even a hint, here and there, in Marxthere are the writings of Kropotkin, the syndicalists Pataud and Pouget, anarcho-communists old (Berkman) and new (Bookchin). The Goodman brothers' _Communitas_ is exemplary for illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to be gleaned from the often hazy heralds of alternative/appropriate/intermediate/convivial technology, like Schumacher and especially Illich, once you disconnect their fog machines. The situationistsas represented by Vaneigem's _Revolution of Everyday Life_ and in the _Situationist International Anthology_are so ruthlessly lucid as to be exhilarating, even if they never did quite square the endorsement of the rule of the workers' councils with the abolition of work. Better their incongruity, though, than any extant version of leftism, whose devotees look to be the last champions of work, for if there were no work there would be no workers, and without workers, who would the left have to organize? - -So the abolitionists would be largely on their own. **No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen.** The tiresome debater's problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values is co-extensive with the consumption of delightful play activity. Life will become a game, or rather many games, but notas it is nowa zero/sum game. **An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play.** The participants potentiate each other's pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. **The more you give, the more you get.** In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. - -If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps. - -No one should ever work. - -Workers of the world. . . _relax!_ - -[Thought Crime][4] -[The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension][5] - -[1]: http://deoxy.org/gif/workfree.gif -[2]: audio/compute.au -[3]: pc.htm#raygun -[4]: tcrime.htm -[5]: http://deoxy.org diff --git a/the gospel of consumption.txt b/the gospel of consumption.txt deleted file mode 100755 index af29053..0000000 --- a/the gospel of consumption.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,101 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Gospel of Consumption - Orion Magazine -date: 2014-12-18T20:09:15Z -source: https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-gospel-of-consumption/ -tags: #wub, life, economics - ---- - -PRIVATE CARS WERE RELATIVELY SCARCE in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. And within the home, electricity remained largely a luxury item for the wealthy. - -Just ten years later things looked very different. Cars dominated the streets and most urban homes had electric lights, electric flat irons, and vacuum cleaners. In upper-middle-class houses, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, curling irons, percolators, heating pads, and popcorn poppers were becoming commonplace. And although the first commercial radio station didn't begin broadcasting until 1920, the American public, with an adult population of about 122 million people, bought 4,438,000 radios in the year 1929 alone. - -But despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people's sense that they needed them. - -It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called "Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied." He wasn't suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry — from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones. - -In a 1927 interview with the magazine _Nation's Business_, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the _New York Times_ called "need saturation." Davis noted that "the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months' operation each year" and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year's supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, "It may be that the world's needs ultimately will be produced by three days' work a week." - -Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new "labor-saving" machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: "I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work — more work and better work." "Nothing," he claimed, "breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure." - -By the late 1920s, America's business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called "the gospel of consumption" — the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn't enough. President Herbert Hoover's 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: "By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up." They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: "Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied." - -Today "work and more work" is the accepted way of doing things. If anything, improvements to the labor-saving machinery since the 1920s have intensified the trend. Machines _can_ save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but "higher productivity" — and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce. - -FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS of the Age of Consumerism there were critics. One of the most influential was Arthur Dahlberg, whose 1932 book _Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism_ was well known to policymakers and elected officials in Washington. Dahlberg declared that "failure to shorten the length of the working day . . . is the primary cause of our rationing of opportunity, our excess industrial plant, our enormous wastes of competition, our high pressure advertising, [and] our economic imperialism." Since much of what industry produced was no longer aimed at satisfying human physical needs, a four-hour workday, he claimed, was necessary to prevent society from becoming disastrously materialistic. "By not shortening the working day when all the wood is in," he suggested, the profit motive becomes "both the creator and satisfier of spiritual needs." For when the profit motive can turn nowhere else, "it wraps our soap in pretty boxes and tries to convince us that that is solace to our souls." - -There was, for a time, a visionary alternative. In 1930 Kellogg Company, the world's leading producer of ready-to-eat cereal, announced that all of its nearly fifteen hundred workers would move from an eight-hour to a six-hour workday. Company president Lewis Brown and owner W. K. Kellogg noted that if the company ran "four six-hour shifts . . . instead of three eight-hour shifts, this will give work and paychecks to the heads of three hundred more families in Battle Creek." - -This was welcome news to workers at a time when the country was rapidly descending into the Great Depression. But as Benjamin Hunnicutt explains in his book _Kellogg's Six-Hour Day_, Brown and Kellogg wanted to do more than save jobs. They hoped to show that the "free exchange of goods, services, and labor in the free market would not have to mean mindless consumerism or eternal exploitation of people and natural resources." Instead "workers would be liberated by increasingly higher wages and shorter hours for the final freedom promised by the Declaration of Independence — the pursuit of happiness." - -To be sure, Kellogg did not intend to stop making a profit. But the company leaders argued that men and women would work more efficiently on shorter shifts, and with more people employed, the overall purchasing power of the community would increase, thus allowing for more purchases of goods, including cereals. - -A shorter workday did entail a cut in overall pay for workers. But Kellogg raised the hourly rate to partially offset the loss and provided for production bonuses to encourage people to work hard. The company eliminated time off for lunch, assuming that workers would rather work their shorter shift and leave as soon as possible. In a "personal letter" to employees, Brown pointed to the "mental income" of "the enjoyment of the surroundings of your home, the place you work, your neighbors, the other pleasures you have [that are] harder to translate into dollars and cents." Greater leisure, he hoped, would lead to "higher standards in school and civic . . . life" that would benefit the company by allowing it to "draw its workers from a community where good homes predominate." - -It was an attractive vision, and it worked. Not only did Kellogg prosper, but journalists from magazines such as _Forbes_ and _BusinessWeek_ reported that the great majority of company employees embraced the shorter workday. One reporter described "a lot of gardening and community beautification, athletics and hobbies . . . libraries well patronized and the mental background of these fortunate workers . . . becoming richer." - -A U.S. Department of Labor survey taken at the time, as well as interviews Hunnicutt conducted with former workers, confirm this picture. The government interviewers noted that "little dissatisfaction with lower earnings resulting from the decrease in hours was expressed, although in the majority of cases very real decreases had resulted." One man spoke of "more time at home with the family." Another remembered: "I could go home and have time to work in my garden." A woman noted that the six-hour shift allowed her husband to "be with 4 boys at ages it was important." - -Those extra hours away from work also enabled some people to accomplish things that they might never have been able to do otherwise. Hunnicutt describes how at the end of her interview an eighty-year-old woman began talking about ping-pong. "We'd get together. We had a ping-pong table and all my relatives would come for dinner and things and we'd all play ping-pong by the hour." Eventually she went on to win the state championship. - -Many women used the extra time for housework. But even then, they often chose work that drew in the entire family, such as canning. One recalled how canning food at home became "a family project" that "we all enjoyed," including her sons, who "opened up to talk freely." As Hunnicutt puts it, canning became the "medium for something more important than preserving food. Stories, jokes, teasing, quarreling, practical instruction, songs, griefs, and problems were shared. The modern discipline of alienated work was left behind for an older . . . more convivial kind of working together." - -This was the stuff of a human ecology in which thousands of small, almost invisible, interactions between family members, friends, and neighbors create an intricate structure that supports social life in much the same way as topsoil supports our biological existence. When we allow either one to become impoverished, whether out of greed or intemperance, we put our long-term survival at risk. - -Our modern predicament is a case in point. By 2005 per capita household spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) was twelve times what it had been in 1929, while per capita spending for durable goods — the big stuff such as cars and appliances — was thirty-two times higher. Meanwhile, by 2000 the average married couple with children was working almost five hundred hours a year more than in 1979. And according to reports by the Federal Reserve Bank in 2004 and 2005, over 40 percent of American families spend more than they earn. The average household carries $18,654 in debt, not including home-mortgage debt, and the ratio of household debt to income is at record levels, having roughly doubled over the last two decades. We are quite literally working ourselves into a frenzy just so we can consume all that our machines can produce. - -Yet we could work and spend a lot less and still live quite comfortably. By 1991 the amount of goods and services produced for each hour of labor was double what it had been in 1948. By 2006 that figure had risen another 30 percent. In other words, if as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day — or 2.7 hours if we were willing to return to the 1948 level. We were already the richest country on the planet in 1948 and most of the world has not yet caught up to where we were then. - -Rather than realizing the enriched social life that Kellogg's vision offered us, we have impoverished our human communities with a form of materialism that leaves us in relative isolation from family, friends, and neighbors. We simply don't have time for them. Unlike our great-grandparents who passed the time, we spend it. An outside observer might conclude that we are in the grip of some strange curse, like a modern-day King Midas whose touch turns everything into a product built around a microchip. - -Of course not everybody has been able to take part in the buying spree on equal terms. Millions of Americans work long hours at poverty wages while many others can find no work at all. However, as advertisers well know, poverty does not render one immune to the gospel of consumption. - -Meanwhile, the influence of the gospel has spread far beyond the land of its origin. Most of the clothes, video players, furniture, toys, and other goods Americans buy today are made in distant countries, often by underpaid people working in sweatshop conditions. The raw material for many of those products comes from clearcutting or strip mining or other disastrous means of extraction. Here at home, business activity is centered on designing those products, financing their manufacture, marketing them — and counting the profits. - -KELLOGG'S VISION, DESPITE ITS POPULARITY with his employees, had little support among his fellow business leaders. But Dahlberg's book had a major influence on Senator (and future Supreme Court justice) Hugo Black who, in 1933, introduced legislation requiring a thirty-hour workweek. Although Roosevelt at first appeared to support Black's bill, he soon sided with the majority of businessmen who opposed it. Instead, Roosevelt went on to launch a series of policy initiatives that led to the forty-hour standard that we more or less observe today. - -By the time the Black bill came before Congress, the prophets of the gospel of consumption had been developing their tactics and techniques for at least a decade. However, as the Great Depression deepened, the public mood was uncertain, at best, about the proper role of the large corporation. Labor unions were gaining in both public support and legal legitimacy, and the Roosevelt administration, under its New Deal program, was implementing government regulation of industry on an unprecedented scale. Many corporate leaders saw the New Deal as a serious threat. James A. Emery, general counsel for the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), issued a "call to arms" against the "shackles of irrational regulation" and the "back-breaking burdens of taxation," characterizing the New Deal doctrines as "alien invaders of our national thought." - -In response, the industrial elite represented by NAM, including General Motors, the big steel companies, General Foods, DuPont, and others, decided to create their own propaganda. An internal NAM memo called for "re-selling all of the individual Joe Doakes on the advantages and benefits he enjoys under a competitive economy." NAM launched a massive public relations campaign it called the "American Way." As the minutes of a NAM meeting described it, the purpose of the campaign was to link "free enterprise in the public consciousness with free speech, free press and free religion as integral parts of democracy." - -Consumption was not only the linchpin of the campaign; it was also recast in political terms. A campaign booklet put out by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency told readers that under "private capitalism, the _Consumer_, the _Citizen_ is boss," and "he doesn't have to wait for election day to vote or for the Court to convene before handing down his verdict. The consumer 'votes' each time he buys one article and rejects another." - -According to Edward Bernays, one of the founders of the field of public relations and a principal architect of the American Way, the choices available in the polling booth are akin to those at the department store; both should consist of a limited set of offerings that are carefully determined by what Bernays called an "invisible government" of public-relations experts and advertisers working on behalf of business leaders. Bernays claimed that in a "democratic society" we are and should be "governed, our minds . . . molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of." - -NAM formed a national network of groups to ensure that the booklet from J. Walter Thompson and similar material appeared in libraries and school curricula across the country. The campaign also placed favorable articles in newspapers (often citing "independent" scholars who were paid secretly) and created popular magazines and film shorts directed to children and adults with such titles as "Building Better Americans," "The Business of America's People Is Selling," and "America Marching On." - -Perhaps the biggest public relations success for the American Way campaign was the 1939 New York World's Fair. The fair's director of public relations called it "the greatest public relations program in industrial history," one that would battle what he called the "New Deal propaganda." The fair's motto was "Building the World of Tomorrow," and it was indeed a forum in which American corporations literally modeled the future they were determined to create. The most famous of the exhibits was General Motors' 35,000-square-foot Futurama, where visitors toured Democracity, a metropolis of multilane highways that took its citizens from their countryside homes to their jobs in the skyscraper-packed central city. - -For all of its intensity and spectacle, the campaign for the American Way did not create immediate, widespread, enthusiastic support for American corporations or the corporate vision of the future. But it did lay the ideological groundwork for changes that came after the Second World War, changes that established what is still commonly called our post-war society. - -The war had put people back to work in numbers that the New Deal had never approached, and there was considerable fear that unemployment would return when the war ended. Kellogg workers had been working forty-eight-hour weeks during the war and the majority of them were ready to return to a six-hour day and thirty-hour week. Most of them were able to do so, for a while. But W. K. Kellogg and Lewis Brown had turned the company over to new managers in 1937. - -The new managers saw only costs and no benefits to the six-hour day, and almost immediately after the end of the war they began a campaign to undermine shorter hours. Management offered workers a tempting set of financial incentives if they would accept an eight-hour day. Yet in a vote taken in 1946, 77 percent of the men and 87 percent of the women wanted to return to a thirty-hour week rather than a forty-hour one. In making that choice, they also chose a fairly dramatic drop in earnings from artificially high wartime levels. - -The company responded with a strategy of attrition, offering special deals on a department-by-department basis where eight hours had pockets of support, typically among highly skilled male workers. In the culture of a post-war, post-Depression U.S., that strategy was largely successful. But not everyone went along. Within Kellogg there was a substantial, albeit slowly dwindling group of people Hunnicutt calls the "mavericks," who resisted longer work hours. They clustered in a few departments that had managed to preserve the six-hour day until the company eliminated it once and for all in 1985. - -The mavericks rejected the claims made by the company, the union, and many of their co-workers that the extra money they could earn on an eight-hour shift was worth it. Despite the enormous difference in societal wealth between the 1930s and the 1980s, the language the mavericks used to explain their preference for a six-hour workday was almost identical to that used by Kellogg workers fifty years earlier. One woman, worried about the long hours worked by her son, said, "He has no time to live, to visit and spend time with his family, and to do the other things he really loves to do." - -Several people commented on the link between longer work hours and consumerism. One man said, "I was getting along real good, so there was no use in me working any more time than I had to." He added, "Everybody thought they were going to get rich when they got that eight-hour deal and it really didn't make a big difference. . . . Some went out and bought automobiles right quick and they didn't gain much on that because the car took the extra money they had." - -The mavericks, well aware that longer work hours meant fewer jobs, called those who wanted eight-hour shifts plus overtime "work hogs." "Kellogg's was laying off people," one woman commented, "while some of the men were working really fantastic amounts of overtime — that's just not fair." Another quoted the historian Arnold Toynbee, who said, "We will either share the work, or take care of people who don't have work." - -PEOPLE IN THE DEPRESSION-WRACKED 1930s, with what seems to us today to be a very low level of material goods, readily chose fewer work hours for the same reasons as some of their children and grandchildren did in the 1980s: to have more time for themselves and their families. We could, as a society, make a similar choice today. - -But we cannot do it as individuals. The mavericks at Kellogg held out against company and social pressure for years, but in the end the marketplace didn't offer them a choice to work less and consume less. The reason is simple: that choice is at odds with the foundations of the marketplace itself — at least as it is currently constructed. The men and women who masterminded the creation of the consumerist society understood that theirs was a political undertaking, and it will take a powerful political movement to change course today. - -Bernays's version of a "democratic society," in which political decisions are marketed to consumers, has many modern proponents. Consider a comment by Andrew Card, George W. Bush's former chief of staff. When asked why the administration waited several months before making its case for war against Iraq, Card replied, "You don't roll out a new product in August." And in 2004, one of the leading legal theorists in the United States, federal judge Richard Posner, declared that "representative democracy . . . involves a division between rulers and ruled," with the former being "a governing class," and the rest of us exercising a form of "consumer sovereignty" in the political sphere with "the power not to buy a particular product, a power to choose though not to create." - -Sometimes an even more blatant antidemocratic stance appears in the working papers of elite think tanks. One such example is the prominent Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington's 1975 contribution to a Trilateral Commission report on "The Crisis of Democracy." Huntington warns against an "excess of democracy," declaring that "a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups." Huntington notes that "marginal social groups, as in the case of the blacks, are now becoming full participants in the political system" and thus present the "danger of overloading the political system" and undermining its authority. - -According to this elite view, the people are too unstable and ignorant for self-rule. "Commoners," who are viewed as factors of production at work and as consumers at home, must adhere to their proper roles in order to maintain social stability. Posner, for example, disparaged a proposal for a national day of deliberation as "a small but not trivial reduction in the amount of productive work." Thus he appears to be an ideological descendant of the business leader who warned that relaxing the imperative for "more work and better work" breeds "radicalism." - -As far back as 1835, Boston workingmen striking for shorter hours declared that they needed time away from work to be good citizens: "We have rights, and we have duties to perform as American citizens and members of society." As those workers well understood, any meaningful democracy requires citizens who are empowered to create and re-create their government, rather than a mass of marginalized voters who merely choose from what is offered by an "invisible" government. Citizenship requires a commitment of time and attention, a commitment people cannot make if they are lost to themselves in an ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption. - -We can break that cycle by turning off our machines when they have created enough of what we need. Doing so will give us an opportunity to re-create the kind of healthy communities that were beginning to emerge with Kellogg's six-hour day, communities in which human welfare is the overriding concern rather than subservience to machines and those who own them. We can create a society where people have time to play together as well as work together, time to act politically in their common interests, and time even to argue over what those common interests might be. That fertile mix of human relationships is necessary for healthy human societies, which in turn are necessary for sustaining a healthy planet. - -If we want to save the Earth, we must also save ourselves from ourselves. We can start by sharing the work _and_ the wealth. We may just find that there is plenty of both to go around. - -_This article, along with other landmark _Orion_ essays about transformative action, are collected in a new anthology, _Change Everything Now_. Order your copy [here][1]._ - -[1]: http://www.orionmagazine.org/books diff --git a/the hidden wonders of the united states you need to visit.txt b/the hidden wonders of the united states you need to visit.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 3a3b3ba..0000000 --- a/the hidden wonders of the united states you need to visit.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,151 +0,0 @@ ---- -title: The Hidden Wonders Of The United States You Need To Visit -date: 2015-04-12T02:25:08Z -source: http://all-that-is-interesting.com/hidden-wonders#23 -tags: luxagraf, travel - ---- - -The Black Hills - -![Black Hills American Wonders][1] - -Native Americans have inhabited the Black Hills of South Dakota since at least 7000 BC. The hills were the site of gold mining and as you might guess, numerous battles between the government and Native Americans. Today, they are an annual gathering place for over 550,000 bikers. Source: [Matador Network][2] - -The Black Hills - -The Black Hills landscape is incredibly complex as well, featuring craggy rocks, grasslands and wet valleys. The environment is home to a wide array of animals, including buffalo, mountain lions and Bighorn Sheep. Source: [Matador Network][2] - -Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge - -Migratory birds have a friend in Delaware at the Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge. Established in 1937, the 15,978-acre tidal marsh is one of the largest and most pristine expanses in the Mid-Atlantic region. Source: [Stephen L Tabone Nature Photography][3] - -Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge - -As high-quality habitats along the Atlantic Flyaway disappear, Bombay Hook has become increasingly important as a stop for migratory birds that travel north to their breeding grounds. Source: [Stephen L Tabone Nature Photography][3] - -Carlsbad Caverns - -Tucked in the Guadalupe Mountains of New Mexico is Carlsbad Caverns National Park, where caverns are king. The park contains 119 limestone caves that were carved out by sulfuric acid. Source: [Matador Network][2] - -Carlsbad Caverns - -The caverns were once a part of a primordial sea that existed 250 million years ago. Bones from ice age animals like giant sloths, lions and camels have been found around the entrances to the caves. Source: [Weird World Facts][4] - -Death Valley - -Though Death Valley is the driest and hottest area in North America, it actually sits over one of the world's largest aquifers. The valley's oldest rocks are over 1.7 billion years old. Source: [Matador Network][2] - -Death Valley - -Death Valley is also known for Racetrack Playa, where rocks seem to move without any intervention from humans or animals. Scientists recently discovered that the rocks don't use magic to move, but rather slide across thin sheets of ice that are pushed by wind whipping through the valley. Source: [Matador Network][2] - -Dinosaur Valley State Park - -Just outside of Fort Worth, Texas is a place where you can actually walk in the footsteps of dinosaurs. Dinosaur Valley State Park actually has fossilized dino prints along the Paluxy River that runs through the park. Source: [Dinosaur Valley State Park][5] - -Dinosaur Valley State Park - -Hiking trails take you back through time on rugged and steep pathways, but at least you're not running from a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Source: [Dinosaur Valley State Park][6] - -Hocking Hills State Park - -Picturesque waterfalls and rocky outcroppings aren't normally associated with Ohio, but they're definitely there. Hocking Hills State Park houses unique geographical features. Source: [Business Insider][7] - -Hocking Hills State Park - -Formed by glacial torrents, the park's rock formations also include deep gorges, a rock shelter and a "devil's bathtub," which is a cool way to describe a creepy hole with water in it. Source: [Bourbon Ridge Retreat][8] - -The Horicon Marsh - -The largest freshwater cattail marsh isn't in Florida or Louisiana, it's actually in Wisconsin. The Horicon Marsh is an important habitat for redheaded ducks, Canadian geese and great blue herons. Over 268 different species of birds have been sighted in the area. Source: [Adkotin][9] - -The Horicon Marsh - -The marshland remained unchanged until the arrival of European settlers, who modified it through draining and hunting. However, after it was deemed a wildlife refuge in 1927, water levels returned and it's once again wild. Source: [Birding is Fun][10] - -Craighead Caverns - -The United States' largest non-subglacial underground lake is located outside of the small town of Sweetwater, Tennessee. The lake is part of an extensive cave system called Craighead Caverns. Source: [Travel Mindset][11] - -Craighead Caverns - -Explorers have mapped 13 acres of water and discovered more cavernous rooms beneath the lake. The Lost Sea is marked by "cave flowers," a rare phenomena that worked to have lake named as a National Landmark. Source: [Lake Scientist][12] - -The Monument Rocks - -These beautiful rock formations aren't in the desert of Arizona, but rather in Kansas, in the middle of grassland. Oh, and they're made out of chalk. Source: [Tourist Destinations][13] - -The Monument Rocks - -The Monument Rocks also have the accolades of being named the first national natural landmark by the Department of the Interior. They rise up 70 feet and are estimated to have been formed 80 million years ago. The formations are important shelters for birds, particularly the American kestrel who hunts across the prairie. Source: [Nature's Arches and Bridges][14] - -Mount Desert Island - -Mount Desert Island looms over the water like a mountain, which is how it got its name. The island only has 10,000 year round residents, but visitors come to see Acadia National Park, which is located on the island. Source: [Matador Network][2] - -Acadia National Park - -The island dates back 550 million years ago when it was just a sea-floor mud deposit, created by volcanic ash. Eventually, the island rose and glaciers eroded its landscape, as visible in the extremely rocky landscape. Source: [Matador Network][2] - -Northern Lights, Alaska - -Alaska is one of the best spots on the planet to see the Northern Lights or the Aurora Borealis. Caused by solar winds, the aurora looks like a rainbow doing yoga as it moves across the sky. Source: [National Geographic][15] - -Northern Lights, Alaska - -The Northern Lights are best observed in the winter when it's darkest in Alaska. The displays take place 60 to 70 miles above the Earth, higher than a plane flies. Source: [National Geographic][16] - -The Okefenokee Swamp - -The Okefenokee Swamp covers 700 square miles in southeastern Georgia and northern Florida. The name comes from the Hitchiti Creek language meaning "Waters Shaking." Source: [Luxagraf][17] - -The Okefenokee Swamp - -The shaking waters could come from the sound of the male alligator as it bellows throughout the swamp. Be prepared for awesome paddling treks through 120 miles of swamp trail, just don't fall in. Source: [Luxagraf][17] - -Painted Hills, Oregon - -One of Oregon's 7 natural wonders are the painted hills near the town of Mitchell. Millions of years of history are exposed in the layered hills of the area like geological water painting. Source: [Love These Pics][18] - -Painted Hills, Oregon - -Many ancient fossils have been discovered in the area, including early horses, camels and rhinos. The red coloring of the formations is due to laterite that was created by floodplain deposits. Source: [Love These Pics][18] - -Palouse Falls - -Washington's Palouse Falls consists of upper falls at a drop of about 20 feet, which lead to the main drop and lower falls around 180 feet high. Rock benches, plunge pools and potholes have imprinted the surrounding landscape. Source: [Matador Network][2] - -Palouse Falls - -Kayaker Tyler Bradt ran the falls setting an unofficial world record for highest waterfall run. Lacking that kind of bravery, most of us just enjoy the pristine beauty of the locale. Source: [Reddit][19] - -Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore - -Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore runs nearly 40 rocky and sandy miles along the Lake Superior shoreline in Michigan. The colorful cliffs have been naturally sculpted into caves, peaks and arches. Source: [Random Space][20] - -Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore - -The colors of the painted rocks come from the large amount of minerals in them. The area contains most of Michigan's waterfalls and makes for great recreational activity or even video production. In 2010, Kid Rock filmed the video for his song Born Free at the lakeshore. If he knows about it, you should too! Source: [Random Space][21] - -[1]: http://all-that-is-interesting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/hidden_wonders_black_hills.jpg -[2]: http://matadornetwork.com/ -[3]: http://stevetaboneblog.com/page/13/ -[4]: http://www.weirdworldfacts.com/ -[5]: http://tpwd.texas.gov/ -[6]: http://tpwd.texas.gov/state-parks/dinosaur-valley -[7]: http://www.businessinsider.com/ -[8]: http://bourbonridgeretreat.com/ -[9]: https://adkotin.wordpress.com/ -[10]: http://www.birdingisfun.com/ -[11]: http://www.travelmindset.com -[12]: http://www.lakescientist.com/ -[13]: http://www.tourist-destinations.com/ -[14]: http://arches.marbleart.us/ -[15]: http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/ -[16]: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/photo-contest/2011/entries/80665/view/ -[17]: https://luxagraf.net/ -[18]: http://www.lovethesepics.com/ -[19]: http://www.reddit.com/ -[20]: http://www-personal.umich.edu -[21]: http://www-personal.umich.edu/ diff --git a/the secrets of the world's happiest cities.txt b/the secrets of the world's happiest cities.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 4a8b3f6..0000000 --- a/the secrets of the world's happiest cities.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,101 +0,0 @@ -The secrets of the world's happiest cities | Society | The Guardian - -tags: refx, life -date: November 18, 2013 10:15:13 AM ---- - -From <http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/nov/01/secrets-worlds-happiest-cities-commute-property-prices> - -# The secrets of the world's happiest cities - -November 2, 2013 - - - -'City life is as much about moving through landscapes as it is about being in them.' Illustration: Francesco Bongiorni for the Guardian - -Two bodyguards trotted behind [Enrique Peñalosa](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrique_Pe%C3%B1alosa), their pistols jostling in holsters. There was nothing remarkable about that, given his profession – and his locale. Peñalosa was a politician on yet another campaign, and this was Bogotá, a city with a reputation for kidnapping and assassination. What was unusual was this: Peñalosa didn't climb into the armoured SUV. Instead, he hopped on a mountain bike. His bodyguards and I pedalled madly behind, like a throng of teenagers in the wake of a rock star. - - - -A few years earlier, this ride would have been a radical and – in the opinion of many Bogotáns – suicidal act. If you wanted to be assaulted, asphyxiated by exhaust fumes or run over, the city's streets were the place to be. But Peñalosa insisted that things had changed. "We're living an experiment," he yelled back at me. "We might not be able to fix the economy. But we can design the city to give people dignity, to make them feel rich. The city can make them happier." - -I first saw the Mayor of Happiness work his rhetorical magic back in the spring of 2006. The United Nations had just announced that some day in the following months, one more child would be born in an urban hospital or a migrant would stumble into a metropolitan shantytown, and from that moment on, more than half the world's people would be living in cities. By 2030, almost 5 billion of us will be urban. - -Peñalosa insisted that, like most cities, Bogotá had been left deeply wounded by the 20th century's dual urban legacy: first, the city had been gradually reoriented around cars. Second, public spaces and resources had largely been privatised. This reorganisation was both unfair – only one in five families even owned a car – and cruel: urban residents had been denied the opportunity to enjoy the city's simplest daily pleasures: walking on convivial streets, sitting around in public. And playing: children had largely disappeared from Bogotá's streets, not because of the fear of gunfire or abduction, but because the streets had been rendered dangerous by sheer speed. Peñalosa's first and most defining act as mayor was to declare war: not on crime or drugs or poverty, but on cars. - -He threw out the ambitious highway expansion plan and instead poured his budget into hundreds of miles of cycle paths; a vast new chain of parks and pedestrian plazas; and the city's first rapid transit system ([the TransMilenio](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransMilenio)), using buses instead of trains. He banned drivers from commuting by car more than three times a week. This programme redesigned the experience of city living for millions of people, and it was an utter rejection of the philosophies that have guided city planners around the world for more than half a century. - -In the third year of his term, Peñalosa challenged Bogotáns to participate in an experiment. As of dawn on 24 February 2000, cars were banned from streets for the day. It was the first day in four years that nobody was killed in traffic. Hospital admissions fell by almost a third. The toxic haze over the city thinned. People told pollsters that they were more optimistic about city life than they had been in years. - - - -Colombian students ride their bicycles during 'No car day' in Bogota. The day-long ban on all private car traffic on the city's streets forces residents to use public transportation or bicycles to get to and from work. Photograph: Jose Miguel Gomez/Reuters - -One memory from early in the journey has stuck with me, perhaps because it carries both the sweetness and the subjective slipperiness of the happiness we sometimes find in cities. Peñalosa, who was running for re-election, needed to be seen out on his bicycle that day. He hollered _"Cómo le va?"_ ("How's it going?") at anyone who appeared to recognise him. But this did not explain his haste or his quickening pace as we traversed the north end of the city towards the Andean foothills. It was all I could do to keep up with him, block after block, until we arrived at a compound ringed by a high iron fence. - -Boys in crisp white shirts and matching uniforms poured through a gate. One of them, a bright-eyed 10-year-old, pushed a miniature version of Peñalosa's bicycle through the crowd. Suddenly I understood his haste. He had been rushing to pick up his son from school, like other parents were doing that very moment up and down the time zone. Here, in the heart of one of the meanest, poorest cities in the hemisphere, father and son would roll away from the school gate for a carefree ride across the metropolis. This was an unthinkable act in most modern cities. As the sun fell and the Andes caught fire, we arced our way along the wide-open avenues, then west along a highway built for bicycles. The kid raced ahead. At that point, I wasn't sure about Peñalosa's ideology. Who was to say that one way of moving was better than another? How could anyone know enough about the needs of the human soul to prescribe the ideal city for happiness? - -But for a moment I forgot my questions. I let go of my handlebars and raised my arms in the air of the cooling breeze, and I remembered my own childhood of country roads, after-school wanderings, lazy rides and pure freedom. I felt fine. The city was mine. The journey began. - -Is urban design really powerful enough to make or break happiness? The question deserves consideration, because the happy city message is taking root around the world. "The most dynamic economies of the 20th century produced the most miserable cities of all," Peñalosa told me over the roar of traffic. "I'm talking about the US Atlanta, Phoenix, Miami, cities totally dominated by cars." - - - -Red Transmilenio buses pull into the Museum of Gold station in front of the 16th century Iglesia de San Francisco, Bogota's oldest restored church. Photograph: John Coletti/Getty Images - -If one was to judge by sheer wealth, the last half-century should have been an ecstatically happy time for people in the US and other rich nations such as Canada, Japan and Great Britain. And yet the boom decades of the late 20th century were not accompanied by a boom in wellbeing. The British got richer by more than 40% between 1993 and 2012, but the rate of psychiatric disorders and neuroses grew. - -Just before the crash of 2008, a team of Italian economists, led by Stefano Bartolini, tried to account for that seemingly inexplicable gap between rising income and flatlining happiness in the US. The Italians tried removing various components of economic and social data from their models, and found that the only factor powerful enough to hold down people's self-reported happiness in the face of all that wealth was the country's declining social capital: the social networks and interactions that keep us connected with others. It was even more corrosive than the income gap between rich and poor. - -As much as we complain about other people, there is nothing worse for mental health than a social desert. The more connected we are to family and community, the less likely we are to experience heart attacks, strokes, cancer and depression. Connected people sleep better at night. They live longer. They consistently report being happier. - -There is a clear connection between social deficit and the shape of cities. A [Swedish study](http://www.samfak.umu.se/english/about-the-faculty/news/newsdetailpage/long-distance-commuters-get-divorced-more-often.cid160978) found that people who endure more than a 45-minute commute were 40% more likely to divorce. People who live in monofunctional, car‑dependent neighbourhoods outside urban centres are much less trusting of other people than people who live in walkable neighbourhoods where housing is mixed with shops, services and places to work. - -A couple of University of Zurich economists, Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, compared German commuters' estimation of the time it took them to get to work with their answers to the standard wellbeing question, "How satisfied are you with your life, all things considered?" - -Their finding was seemingly straightforward: the longer the drive, the less happy people were. Before you dismiss this as numbingly obvious, keep in mind that they were testing not for drive satisfaction, but for life satisfaction. People were choosing commutes that made their entire lives worse. [Stutzer and Frey](http://ideas.repec.org/p/zur/iewwpx/151.html) found that a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40% more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. On the other hand, for a single person, exchanging a long commute for a short walk to work has the same effect on happiness as finding a new love. - -[Daniel Gilbert](http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dtg/gilbert.htm), Harvard psychologist and author of [Stumbling On Happiness](http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780007183135), explained the commuting paradox this way: "Most good and bad things become less good and bad over time as we adapt to them. However, it is much easier to adapt to things that stay constant than to things that change. So we adapt quickly to the joy of a larger house, because the house is exactly the same size every time. But we find it difficult to adapt to commuting by car, because every day is a slightly new form of misery." - -The sad part is that the more we flock to high‑status cities for the good life – money, opportunity, novelty – the more crowded, expensive, polluted and congested those places become. The result? Surveys show that [Londoners are among the least happy people in the UK](http://www.govtoday.co.uk/health/44-public-health/11410-london-least-happy-in-the-uk), despite the city being the richest region in the UK. - - - -For a single person, exchanging a long commute for a short walk to work has the same effect on happiness as finding a new love. Illustration: Francesco Bongiorni for the Guardian - -When we talk about cities, we usually end up talking about how various places look, and perhaps how it feels to be there. But to stop there misses half the story, because the way we experience most parts of cities is at velocity: we glide past on the way to somewhere else. City life is as much about moving through landscapes as it is about being in them. Robert Judge, a 48-year-old husband and father, once wrote to a Canadian radio show explaining how much he enjoyed going grocery shopping on his bicycle. Judge's confession would have been unremarkable if he did not happen to live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where the average temperature in January hovers around -17C. The city stays frozen and snowy for almost half the year. Judge's pleasure in an experience that seems slower, more difficult and considerably more uncomfortable than the alternative might seem bizarre. He explained it by way of a story: sometimes, he said, he would pick up his three-year-old son from nursery and put him on the back seat of his tandem bike and they would pedal home along the South Saskatchewan river. The snow would muffle the noise of the city. Dusk would paint the sky in colours so exquisite that Judge could not begin to find names for them. The snow would reflect those hues. It would glow like the sky, and Judge would breathe in the cold air and hear his son breathing behind him, and he would feel as though together they had become part of winter itself. - -Drivers experience plenty of emotional dividends. They report feeling much more in charge of their lives than public transport users. An upmarket vehicle is loaded with symbolic value that offers a powerful, if temporary, boost in status. Yet despite these romantic feelings, half of commuters living in big cities and suburbs claim to dislike the heroic journey they must make every day. The urban system neutralises their power. - -Driving in traffic is harrowing for both brain and body. The blood of people who drive in cities is a stew of stress hormones. The worse the traffic, the more your system is flooded with adrenaline and cortisol, the fight-or-flight juices that, in the short-term, get your heart pumping faster, dilate your air passages and help sharpen your alertness, but in the long-term can make you ill. Researchers for Hewlett-Packard [convinced volunteers in England to wear electrode caps during their commutes](http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/nov/30/research.transport) and found that whether they were driving or taking the train, peak-hour travellers suffered worse stress than fighter pilots or riot police facing mobs of angry protesters. - -But one group of commuters report enjoying themselves. These are people who travel under their own steam, like Robert Judge. They walk. They run. They ride bicycles. - -Why would travelling more slowly and using more effort offer more satisfaction than driving? Part of the answer exists in basic human physiology. We were born to move. Immobility is to the human body what rust is to the classic car. Stop moving long enough, and your muscles will atrophy. Bones will weaken. Blood will clot. You will find it harder to concentrate and solve problems. Immobility is not merely a state closer to death: it hastens it. - -[Robert Thayer, a professor of psychology at California State University, fitted dozens of students with pedometers](http://www.csulb.edu/misc/inside/archives/vol_58_no_4/1.htm), then sent them back to their regular lives. Over the course of 20 days, the volunteers answered survey questions about their moods, attitudes, diet and happiness. Within that volunteer group, people who walked more were happier. - -The same is true of cycling, although a bicycle has the added benefit of giving even a lazy rider the ability to travel three or four times faster than someone walking, while using less than a quarter of the energy. They may not all attain Judge's level of transcendence, but cyclists report feeling connected to the world around them in a way that is simply not possible in the sealed environment of a car, bus or train. Their journeys are both sensual and kinesthetic. - -In 1969, a consortium of European industrial interests charged a young American economist, [Eric Britton](http://worldstreets.wordpress.com/author/worldstreets/), with figuring out how people would move through cities in the future. Cities should strive to embrace complexity, not only in transportation systems but in human experience, says Britton, who is still working in that field and lives in Paris. He advises cities and corporations to abandon old mobility, a system rigidly organised entirely around one way of moving, and embrace new mobility, a future in which we would all be free to move in the greatest variety of ways. - -"We all know old mobility," Britton said. "It's you sitting in your car, stuck in traffic. It's you driving around for hours, searching for a parking spot. Old mobility is also the 55-year-old woman with a bad leg, waiting in the rain for a bus that she can't be certain will come. New mobility, on the other hand, is freedom distilled." - -A row of Velib rental bicycles are parked at the rue de La Harpe in Paris. Dozens of cities have now dabbled in shared bike programmes, including London, Montreal, Melbourne and New York Photograph: Horacio Villalobos/EPA - -To demonstrate how radically urban systems can build freedom in motion, Britton led me down from his office, out on to Rue Joseph Bara. We paused by a row of sturdy-looking bicycles. Britton swept his wallet above a metallic post and pulled one free from its berth. "_Et voilà!_ Freedom!" he said, grinning. Since the Paris bike scheme, [Vélib'](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/aug/16/ethicalliving.france), was introduced, it has utterly changed the face of mobility. Each bicycle in the Vélib' fleet gets used between three and nine times every day. That's as many as 200,000 trips a day. Dozens of cities have now dabbled in shared bike programmes, including Lyon, Montreal, Melbourne, New York. In 2010, London introduced a system, dubbed Boris Bikes for the city's bike-mad mayor, Boris Johnson. In Paris, and around the world, new systems of sharing are setting drivers free. As more people took to bicycles in Vélib's first year, the number of bike accidents rose, but the number of accidents per capita fell. This phenomenon seems to repeat wherever cities see a spike in cycling: the more people bike, the safer the streets become for cyclists, partly because drivers adopt more cautious habits when they expect cyclists on the road. There is safety in numbers. - -So if we really care about freedom for everyone, we need to design for everyone, not only the brave. Anyone who is really serious about building freedom in their cities eventually makes the pilgrimage to Copenhagen. I joined Copenhagen rush hour on a September morning with Lasse Lindholm, an employee of the city's traffic department. The sun was burning through the autumn haze as we made our way across Queen Louise's Bridge. Vapour rose from the lake, swans drifted and preened, and the bridge seethed with a rush-hour scene like none I have ever witnessed. With each light change, cyclists rolled toward us in their hundreds. They did not look the way cyclists are supposed to look. They did not wear helmets or reflective gear. Some of the men wore pinstriped suits. No one was breaking a sweat. - -Lindholm rolled off a list of statistics: more people that morning would travel by bicycle than by any other mode of transport (37%). If you didn't count the suburbs, the percentage of cyclists in Copenhagen would hit 55%. They aren't choosing to cycle because of any deep-seated altruism or commitment to the environment; they are motivated by self-interest. "They just want to get themselves from A to B," Lindholm said, "and it happens to be easier and quicker to do it on a bike." - -The Bogotá experiment may not have made up for all the city's grinding inequities, but it was a spectacular beginning and, to the surprise of many, it made life better for almost everyone. - -The TransMilenio moved so many people so efficiently that car drivers crossed the city faster as well: commuting times fell by a fifth. The streets were calmer. By the end of Peñalosa's term, people were crashing their cars less often and killing each other less frequently, too: the accident rate fell by nearly half, and so did the murder rate, even as the country as a whole got more violent. There was a massive improvement in air quality, too. Bogotáns got healthier. The city experienced a spike in feelings of optimism. People believed that life was good and getting better, a feeling they had not shared in decades. - -Bogotá's fortunes have since declined. The TransMilenio system is plagued by desperate crowding as its private operators fail to add more capacity – yet more proof that robust public transport needs sustained public investment. Optimism has withered. But Bogotá's transformative years still offer an enduring lesson for rich cities. By spending resources and designing cities in a way that values everyone's experience, we can make cities that help us all get stronger, more resilient, more connected, more active and more free. We just have to decide who our cities are for. And we have to believe that they can change. - -• This is an edited extract from Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, by Charles Montgomery, published by Penguin at £16.99. - -• This article was edited on 4 November 2013, to make clear that it is an edited extract. diff --git a/un image fan.txt b/un image fan.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 5b0646d..0000000 --- a/un image fan.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3 +0,0 @@ -un-image fan - -Someone staring at a ceiling fan the spinning motion looks like the wheel of an old reel to reel film machine rewinding.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/un quote america.txt b/un quote america.txt deleted file mode 100755 index c2416e7..0000000 --- a/un quote america.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3 +0,0 @@ -un-quote-America - -No one defends America when it collapses because there was nothing left to defend, the place itself, the public spaces -- which reflect who we are -- were no longer worth defending.
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/what to get everyone for christmas.txt b/what to get everyone for christmas.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 90fb3a9..0000000 --- a/what to get everyone for christmas.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,83 +0,0 @@ -What to get everyone for Christmas - -From <http://www.raptitude.com/2013/12/what-to-get-everyone-for-christmas/> - -# What to get everyone for Christmas - -by David Cain - - - -Every Christmas, after the initial flurry of present-opening, we’d toss all the paper into the biggest box we could find. Sometimes the cat would make a bed of it, and she seemed pretty comfortable. So when I’d walk down my back lane to learn what toys other kids got, I’d imagine gathering every family’s paper in one giant pile and jumping into it like raked-up leaves. - -If the homes on our little street would have made a pile the size of a minivan, then the entire city’s paper would surely make a pile the size of a small office building. You could jump from a plane into it and be fine. Each city in Canada would contribute another building-sized pile, every year, until you had an entire city of crumpled gift wrap. The paper from the US would make it ten or twelve times larger. A decade’s worth would be unimaginable. - -It occurs to me only now that the gifts that came in that paper would make an astronomically larger heap — an entire Death Star of toys and kitch, having come at a cost of about 5 trillion dollars. - -Gradually I began to realize that while having new toys is a wonderful feeling, nothing was quite as wonderful as unwrapping them. The high topped out in the morning hours and wore off faster each year. By January, our family’s joy level was always about back to normal, maybe a little lower, and the decorations and ads that were still around by that time only made me sad it was over. The new stuff was still around, but it was no longer so new, and Christmas didn’t leave me with the net gain it seemed to promise. What we were really buying was the swell of awesome feelings that crested at about 9am on the 25th and then gently drained back to sea level. - -The items we end up giving or getting at Christmas are usually entirely ephemeral. A typical American or Canadian has received thousands of dollars in Christmas gifts throughout his or her lifetime, and would be hard pressed to remember getting the vast majority of them, let alone tell you what those gifts are doing for them now. Ultimately they’re bought to stir up the magic and promise of Christmas, and they do, but often that’s all they do. - -The bulk of consumers’ Christmas trillions is spent trying to buy an intangible thing we can call The Magic of Christmas. Some of this Magic certainly comes from outside the shopping aspect — the closeness of family, the warmth of sweaters and boozy board game sessions — but that’s the free part. The vast majority of the spending arises from chasing the ecstatic feeling of Christmas morning one felt as a child, even if you’re grown up now and only want it for your children. - -The rest of the year we would call this feeling abundance. It’s not a feeling particular to Christmas, but for a lot of kids Christmas morning represents the abundance feeling at its peak concentration. The first days of Summer break gives a similar high, but it’s spread over a much longer period and so it’s never quite as dazzling. There is also a minor spike in the fall, the evening of Halloween. In each case the abundance feeling is glorious, but fades quickly. - -I don’t want to dismiss the lasting meaning of this Magic, or these gift-opening experiences. Some of my best memories are of those glowing days surrounding my childhood Christmases. But the gift-receiving part was absolutely central to making those days glow for me, and I think this is true for almost every child. Experiences of abundance are intoxicating and unforgettable, and we seek them everywhere in life, but for many of us we never find them so dependably as we do at Christmas. - -There are ways to create abundance that are far less costly than through traditional Christmas shopping though, and which keep it going much better. Only later in life would I start learning to get that abundant feeling from simple luxuries like walls, socks, food and visits with loved ones, and would it appear more evenly throughout the year. - -### Gifts that give - -Christmas gives most generously to those who are doing the selling. The vast majority of everyday people are on the losing side of the enormous exchange of value that takes place during the holidays. As nervous as the word “inflation” makes people, cash itself does a much greater job at retaining its value than most of the stuff we spend it on, and this is doubly true at Christmas. - -The holiday mall-goer typically trades money for things whose value fades much more quickly, and never had as much to begin with. Imagine buying an investment that’s almost guaranteed to lose half its value in 24 hours. That is the range of investment quality we’re talking about for most of the shopping that goes on in December. That’s because we don’t think of Christmas purchases as any kind of investment, and even if we did we don’t know another way to go about it. - -The pivotal understanding in moving from unhealthy finances to healthy finances is learning this: feelings are what you’re actually trying to buy with every purchase. Every _thing_ we want [amounts to a feeling we want](http://www.raptitude.com/2012/07/what-you-want-is-never-a-thing/), and so everything we buy amounts to an attempt to buy a source of emotional experience, even if we don’t realize it. - -This is true throughout the year, but at Christmas in particular we open our wallets out of conditioning and momentum, rather than a clear-minded reflection on the real value gained (for either ourselves or the recipient.) When you feel like you’re buying abundance, it seems like you can never buy too much. - -In terms of the joyful feelings and quality of life we’re actually seeking with our purchases, there’s a vast range in return on investment. Some people make terrible investments their whole lives by making purchases that are enormously expensive, give only a few moments of pleasure, and come with a bag of potential health and social issues — hard drugs and prostitutes, as an extreme example. - -Every year a gazillion consumer dollars go towards buying similarly short-lived feelings, often junk that may make someone smile for ten seconds when they open it but never does anyone any other good. The joy-per-dollar rate for most Christmas gifts is probably pretty low in most families. When you think that people often go into high-interest debt to fund this losing exchange, it goes from silly to sad. - -At the opposite end of the spectrum are purchases that generate returns for a long time. That is how the rich get rich: they are careful to buy only things that pay them in some way, like businesses, properties, educations and business leads. And they certainly are careful not to buy things that leak money or value. - -But financial abundance is only one kind of abundance. Some purchases also pay its owner interest and dividends, in the form of personal growth, insight, skills or confidence. The principle of [compound interest](http://www.raptitude.com/2013/01/the-most-powerful-force-in-the-universe-and-how-to-use-it/) applies in virtually every area of personal gain, and the rates of return are far greater than even the best financial investments. Ten percent is nothing. - -The best purchase I ever made for myself was an online blogging course, back in January of 2009. It was a few hundred dollars, and directly because of it I found my passion in life, I’ve become a much more happy and capable person, I’ve made thousands of dollars and I escaped the rat race, and the best of its returns are certainly yet to come. That gift kept on giving and will keep on giving probably past the end of my life — over the years as this blog grows and my writing skills improve, I’m helping increasingly more people, and I’m increasingly more free to make my best contributions to the world. - -I didn’t quite know the astounding value of that purchase at the time, but I certainly would have been more likely to make that purchase if I had been in the habit of only spending on things I expected to create some form of lasting returns. Spending on education was out-of-character for me, and it was a major purchase. I feel very lucky that I had a good feeling about it, because it was an absolute steal — orders of magnitude better than successfully nabbing a $39 television or any other Black Friday loss leader. - -### Give growth for Christmas - -All purchases are exchanges of value. Many, or maybe most Christmas gift exchanges disperse the value something like this: the giver comes away with some debt and the mildly relieving feeling of having fulfilling one of his social obligations; the recipient gets a bit high opening it and possibly enjoys using it, but will soon forget it; the retailer adds a bit of money to his money pile. Retailers want this kind of exchange to happen as often as possible. - -Sometimes it works out better though, and the giver feels wonderful and the recipient gains something lasting, _and_ the seller adds to his stack. But I think this is the exception — most of the consumer Death Star is built from waste and debt. But we can make that happen more often by thinking consciously about the real-life value of what we buy. - -Imagine if after Christmas, millions of people were left with the means to become better and more capable people, rather than billions in debt. - -Last year I announced to my family that I’m no longer going to participate in the normal exchange of gifts. I just don’t feel good about it. I’ve come to feel a tinge of guilt at buying any [new, manufactured good](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/04/11/getting-started-2-the-higher-cause/), and I think this is a feeling usually worth trusting. - -Yesterday my mother suggested a wonderful alternative for gift-giving between the adults of the family: we each find books that we think everyone will like, and give a random wrapped book to each other person, which we will pass along to each other throughout the year as we read them. In our case everyone would get a new book to read each month of the year. This I feel good about because the value of each purchase goes to multiple people, and that [good books](http://www.raptitude.com/50-books-in-52-weeks/) deliver lasting value, even lifelong value. - -Everyone has a different emotional relationship to the gift-giving aspect of Christmas. Some can’t stand it and some love it. I acknowledge that opting-out of the tradition isn’t desirable (or possible) for all of you, so I suggest getting gifts that pay interest — skills, insight, recurring joy. This creates abundance of the lasting kind. - -And if your gifts return compounding value, give this abundance to yourself too. It’s easier to know what gift will pay you the greatest dividends than it is to know the long-term value of a gift to someone else, so take advantage of how well you know your recipient. Make an annual tradition of giving yourself a gift that leaves you with a new skill or a recurring source of joy or income. - -My post-Christmas gift to myself in 2009 paid for itself in the monetary sense a long time ago, but it also pays me every day in a dozen ways, particularly in the moment I wake up and remember that I don’t have a boss any more. _(The course isn’t available anymore, because [the man who taught me to blog](http://bit.ly/1fWHvpS) is now focusing on teaching people to build membership sites.)_ - -If you feel guilt about buying a present for yourself, then make it one you expect to pay off in dollars, because it’s easier to see that there’s no loss in value. A new skill — or better, starting a tiny business — could pay for all your holiday gifts by this time next year. If you want to start a one-person business, you live in an era where it’s as easy as it’s probably ever going to be. Chris Guillebeau runs a [lifestyle business course](http://unconventionalguides.com/cmd.php?Clk=5145840) that could make a chimpanzee back his money several times over in a year. - -I’ll probably get something else too, but one thing I know I’m getting for myself this year is a book about making bread from scratch, along with the necessary kitchenware. I’m going to learn to make my own bread, which will make its money back quickly, be a lot of fun, and give me one of those gritty medieval skills that I’ll have forever. I wish I had done this for each of the last dozen Christmases. - -Whatever you do, think of all your gift purchases in terms of what they are likely to deliver _beyond_ the initial rush of receiving them. Imagine what the world would be like if that was a cultural norm. Imagine what just a decade of that mentality would for the population, even if the tradition were started only today. - -I’ll give you your first idea for free. Plant a seed by sharing this post on Facebook. - -*** - -If you liked this article, get email updates for free. - -[(Or click here to get it via RSS.)](http://www.raptitude.com/feed) - -[raptitude.com __](http://www.raptitude.com/2013/12/what-to-get-everyone-for-christmas/) * by David Cain diff --git a/when did goods get so bad.txt b/when did goods get so bad.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 1da7b42..0000000 --- a/when did goods get so bad.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,59 +0,0 @@ -When did goods get so bad? - -tags: refx, stuff -date: November 18, 2013 10:14:47 AM ---- - -From <http://www.raptitude.com/2013/09/when-did-goods-get-so-bad/> - -# When did goods get so bad? - -by David Cain - - - -The city was behaving very strangely while I was out walking Saturday morning. Cars went by too slowly, as if they were stalking me, or someone. Every pedestrian but me seemed to be have a backpack or a large shopping bag, and I knew most of them didn’t live in my neighborhood. - -A young woman walked by pushing an empty stroller and the paranoia really started to creep into my muscles. I suddenly became convinced that I was being filmed. A passing Cavalier came to a stop in the middle of the street and sat there for a moment. Whatever was going to happen was about to happen now. Two Middle Eastern men got out, leaving the doors open and the engine running. They trotted into a back alley, and emerged carrying a coffee table. - -I had forgotten that it’s Winnipeg’s giveaway weekend, where citizens are encouraged to leave their unwanted home furnishings on the boulevard in front of their houses, for others to pick up if they like. Thrift-minded Winnipeggers hit the streets early Saturday, usually in pairs, to skulk through other people’s neighborhoods at creepy-slow speeds, hoping to find anything that may possibly be useful: worn-out golf bags, folding chairs, tarpaulins, drawerless dressers, dresserless drawers, sander belts, axe handles, maybe even a pair of Shake-Weights or a Jolly Jumper. - -I’d intended to put out my items before the foragers left home: a tiny computer desk, a box of low-quality paintball gear, and a particle-board bookshelf. I forgot but knew it would be no problem finding a taker later on. The most important thing not to forget on giveaway weekend is to keep everything you do wish to keep as far as possible from the front boulevard. It’s even dangerous to leave something anywhere in the front yard. Every year careless people lose bikes, lawnmowers and garden gnomes, because anybody could haul it off and, if stopped in the act, make a case that they thought it was free. - -Quirks aside, I love that we have giveaway weekends. There’s something beautiful about how it allows an object to regain its lost worthiness, by gaining a new owner. When I did put my items out later in the morning, they were gone before I could return to my desk with my coffee — I had hoped to see their new owners through the window. - -The value of everyday household stuff has dwindled noticeably in my lifetime. I remember accompanying my dad, one Summer weekday when I was ten, to a little shop to get the family VCR repaired. Repaired! Can you imagine that? There were people running a profitable business fixing small appliances — toasters, coffee makers and Video Cassette Recorders — because even a few decades ago there was an expectation of lasting value in these things. Today we typically [bury](http://www.raptitude.com/2011/01/a-day-in-the-future/) malfunctioning electronic devices in the ground and buy new ones. It’s possible that there will be a time when children are surprised to hear their parents used to have their cars fixed too. - -Certain aspects of the human world are marching pretty steadily in a particular direction, the growing disposableness of our goods being only one of them. But they aren’t all moving in a bad direction. Over my lifetime I’ve seen a steady increase, for example, in the recognition of gays as regular people, the ease of self-publishing your own creative work, and freedom of expression generally. I like the way things are moving on those fronts. So don’t think I’m saying that the world is going uniformly to Hell. But the quality of the objects with which we populate our homes is certainly not a category in which we’re moving towards humanity’s potential. - -In New Zealand I met a young, pseudo-Buddhist Englishman — he high-fived me when he learned I had been meditating on the hostel’s back porch — who carefully washed and reused plastic bags other travelers had left. He explained that they are as permanent as everything else, and so he wanted to get some value out of the refuse of others if he could. “The only thing that makes them disposable is that we’re told to dispose of them,” he said. “If the ancient Egyptians made these, we’d still be finding them.” - -I respect the way he valued value. He recommended getting rid of everything I own at least once, then go backpacking with a change of clothes and a book to see how infrequently I had to actually buy something in order to get by. It sounded more extreme to me at the time than it does now. - -A stand-up lamp I bought a year ago is now showing signs of senility. The brightest setting is no longer where the knob is all the way to the right, it’s at a random position somewhere along its rotation each time I turn it on. The off position, similarly, is not quite at the other end any more, it’s migrated a few millimeters to the right. When I bought it I remember consciously avoiding the low-end ones and getting the heavier, more expensive one because I wanted a trustworthy light source. - -It’s become pretty normal for “goods” to be pretty bad. So after seeing the delight with which a different person carries away the same bookshelf I can’t bloody stand to look at any more, I want to celebrate and maximize the value of the things I let into my life. There’s no strict timeframe for this, so I’m not making a formal [experiment](http://www.raptitude.com/experiments/) out of it, but I am going to set a definite compass heading here. From here on in I want to move against the cultural current by gradually transitioning my estate to include only lasting, fixable possessions, even if the world around me continues to lower its standards. - -Broken down, that means: - -**Only buy new things that I expect to last a long time.** It’s true that there are some types of products that are simply not available in the long-lasting variety. If I want to participate in the smart-phone world, for example, (and at this point I do) I will not expect to find one that will last ten years. But I will go with the makes that seem to be the most durable. My Samsung Android has survived quite a bit, including being submerged in running ditchwater for a good half-minute. - -**Acquire fewer things.** Even if I’m not actively minimizing possessions, acquiring fewer things is a necessary side-effect because the initial purchase price of a high-quality item is going to be higher, even though cheaper items tend to cost more in the long run because they need replacing sooner. As I get more and more [frugal](http://www.raptitude.com/2013/04/how-much-of-your-life-are-you-selling-off/), the purchase of a new item (or even a quality used one) is becoming rarer. This is good all around I think. As [Mr. Money Mustache](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/04/11/getting-started-2-the-higher-cause/) has said, “Buying yourself a new manufactured product should hurt a little bit.” - -**Find owners for things I don’t want.** When something has become valueless for me, there is almost certainly someone out there in this city who would value it. Sometimes it’s a little more work to find an owner than to drag it to the bin, but often it’s not. Putting it on Kijiji or Craigslist often means you only have to drag it as far as your front door. - -**Fix broken things, if possible.** For every item that has ever been successfully fixed by a DIY enthusiast, there is a Youtube video showing you how you can do it too. Fixing something is an incredible feeling. - -**Own nothing that makes me feel bad.** This includes not only the low-quality but also the unnecessary. If I don’t have actual intentions for it, it ought to be somebody else’s. I’d rather own fifty good things than a thousand crummy things. - -Some part of me yearns for a [Walden](http://amzn.to/1aX4VsY)-like life of sturdy hand tools and homemade everything, in a self-built shack outside the edge of town. I would like to trust and respect every item I use in my daily life, which means the fewer items there are, and the simpler they are, the better. The motive here isn’t exactly minimizing the volume of possessions, but maximizing their quality. - -I know I’m too dependent on 21st century miracles like the internet to go quite as far as, say, Thoreau. Still, I would like to begin pruning the dead overgrowth away from where I am, and see what kind of material life I end up with before it truly pains me to cut one more thing loose. - -*** - -If you liked this article, get email updates for free. - -[(Or click here to get it via RSS.)](http://www.raptitude.com/feed) - -[raptitude.com __](http://www.raptitude.com/2013/09/when-did-goods-get-so-bad/) * by David Cain diff --git a/workout advanced body weight circuit.txt b/workout advanced body weight circuit.txt deleted file mode 100755 index 7e26583..0000000 --- a/workout advanced body weight circuit.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,95 +0,0 @@ -[Source](http://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/2009/12/17/advanced-body-weight-workout-warning-this-will-kick-your-ass/ "Permalink to Advanced Body Weight Workout - This Will Kick Your Ass") - -# Advanced Body Weight Workout - This Will Kick Your Ass - -Join the Rebellion, get free eBooks. - -If this little dude can get in shape without a gym, what's your excuse? - - -Most gyms these days are loaded with chumps, meatheads, pushy salesmen, and people who suck at working out. (If you DO go to a gym, [make sure you DON'T suck at it][1]). Luckily, you can burn fat, build muscle, and get a great workout using just your body weight. Most of you saw the [Beginner Bodyweight Workout][2] I posted last week. If you didn't, I'd recommend starting there before moving onto this routine, because this is uber-advanced and designed for nerds looking for a brutally difficult challenge. - -Are you ready for this? - -## NF Advanced Body Weight Workout - -Warning: this workout that will have you sweating like a pig and leave you sore all over the next day. If you're just moving beyond the [beginner body weight workout][3] for the first time, this workout might seem ridiculously difficult. That's because it IS ridiculously difficult – the first time I did this routine, taught to me by fitness guru and mentor [Mike Rickett][4], I wanted to throw up afterwards and couldn't walk straight for two days. You've been warned! - -Obviously, if this routine is too tough, there are quite a few variations you can make to lessen the difficulty and then build your way up to the real deal. Remember, it's important to push yourself outside of your comfort zone, but safely. Don't try to do too much or you'll just end up hurting yourself. - -NOTE: I do use a pull up bar in this routine. If you don't have one at your home, you can head to a park and use their pull up bar, or substitute inverted body weight rows until you are strong enough to do pull ups and chin ups. I include a video of how to do these inverted rows in your home at the end of this post. - -Before you start, WARM UP \- Never ever ever ever forget to warm up. If you're strapped for time, cut short your workout, not your warm up. You can run in place, jump rope, do a few push ups, pedal on a stationary bike, jog up and down your stairs, etc. - -Here's the NF Advanced Body Weight Workout: - - -[Nerd Fitness TV – Advanced Body Weight Workout][5] - -If you want to write down everything, here it is: - -* 10 one legged squats – each side [warning super-difficult, only attempt if you in good enough shape] -* 20 body weight squats -* 20 walking lunges (10 each leg) -* 20 jump step-ups (10 each leg) - -* 10 pull ups [or inverted body weight rows using your kitchen table] -* 10 dips – bar stools -* 10 chin ups [or inverted body weight rows with underhand grip] -* 10 push ups -* 30 second plank - -That's one complete rotation. If you're up for it, try to do 3 complete circuits. Stop when you need to, get water when necessary, but try to finish it as quickly as possible while still practicing PERFECT FORM. The first time I went through this routine it took me right around 18 minutes. What is it with me and [18 minutes of hell][6]? - -You can cut short the number of repetitions, but never half-ass a rep. If you can only do five or six pull ups, bring a chair over to the bar, hop up above the bar and lower yourself down. If you can't do a plank for 30 sec, hold it for 15, and work your way up to 30. If 20 body weight lunges is too many, only do 10 and work your way up to 20. Challenge yourself safely and within reason. - -## Can't Do Pull Ups? Do These Instead - -I'm going to guess that the most difficult exercise for most people in this routine will be the pull ups and the chin ups. If you don't have a pull up bar, or if you're not strong enough to do pull ups yet, here is a video on how to do Inverted Body Weight Rows using just your kitchen table. Most importantly, make sure your table is strong enough or you're going to snap it in half. It isn't optimal, but it's better than nothing, and a good step up from the dumbbell rows in the Beginner Body Weight Circuit. Inverted body weight rows are certainly tough, but not as tough as pull ups and chin ups. Attempt these at your own risk! - - -[Nerd Fitness TV – Inverted Body Weight Rows][7] - -## How to Scale Your Routine - -As I said earlier, this whole routine is scalable based on your ability. For example, here is a sample routine for somebody who has conquered the beginner workout but can't do the full routine above: - -* 10 Body Weight Squats -* 10 Walking Lunges -* 15 Jump Ups -* 3 Pull Ups (or 6 inverted body weight rows – overhand grip on table) -* 8 dips (or 10 decline push ups if these are too tough) -* 3 Chin ups (or 6 inverted body weight rows – underhand grip on table) -* 10 push ups -* 30 second plank -* 30 jumping jacks - -Whatever your fitness level, find a way to push yourself a litter harder, get better, be faster, and grow stronger ([thanks Daft Punk!][8]) Keep track of your exact routine, how long it took you, which exercises wore you out, exactly how many reps you did, etc. - -Then, the next time you do this routine (make sure you wait at least 48 hours before attempting it again), try to do the whole routine with one or two more repetitions or with less down time between exercises. - -## Your thoughts? - -There you have it guys. I would love to hear what you think! I got a lot of great comments on the Beginner Body Weight video, and hopefully those of you who are looking for more of a challenge are getting it here. - -Do you want to see more routine-based videos? More videos like the Inverted Body Weight Row videos showing you how to do specific exercises? Let me know what you want to see, and I'll make it happen. - --Steve - -PS – For any of you who plan on doing this routine during the next few days, I apologize in advance for how your whole body will feel the next morning! - -### - - - -photo: [eyeliam][9] - -[1]: http://www.nerdfitness.com/2009/10/26/how-to-not-suck-at-working-out/ -[2]: http://www.nerdfitness.com/2009/12/09/beginner-body-weight-workout-burn-fat-build-muscle/ "Beginner body weight workout" -[3]: http://www.nerdfitness.com/2009/12/09/beginner-body-weight-workout-burn-fat-build-muscle/ "Beginner Body Weight Workout" -[4]: http://mikerickett.wordpress.com/ "Mike Rickett" -[5]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZKysm4oAvU "Nerd Fitness Advanced Body Weight Workout" -[6]: http://www.nerdfitness.com/2009/10/14/crossfit-18-minutes-and-48-seconds-of-hell/ "Nerd Fitness Crossfit" -[7]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYUxXMGVuuU "Nerd Fitness TV" -[8]: http://www.nerdfitness.com/2009/12/14/daft-punks-kick-ass-guide-to-fitness/ "Daft Punk" -[9]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eyeliam/2539194260/ "eyeliam"
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