Thursday, September 8, 2011
Last week we looked at the upside of Consumerism, the ways in which it functions well as an employment-creation system. This week we’ll look at the darker side of our trusty economic engine. Seventh in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work The question of course, is this: If [...]
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Sixth in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work Let’s take a good hard look at our old friend Consumerism, the dominant Employment-Creation System (ECS) in the modern world. In many ways it works quite well, and it fits all the criteria we outlined last week. It creates jobs: [...]
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Fifth in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work Don’t jump off any tall buildings yet. Despite the abundant Direness, things are less bleak than they appear. The problem may present as though we’ve run out of a scarce resource –namely jobs, particularly meaningful ones –but viewed from the [...]
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Fourth in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work (Adapted from an essay originally presented on 4/4/05) Most Americans are familiar with the phenomena of “busywork” –time-consuming tasks of dubious meaning and value, which much be completed according to precise but arbitrary parameters. Such tasks –generally consisting of pieces [...]
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Third in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work Dire Trend #2 – The Global Pyramid Scheme: This second trend is a little easier to miss than the first one. Did you ever get a letter –or an email –promising you $625 in the mail? All you had to [...]
Second in an ongoing series about the deeper reasons behind the difficulty of finding work Dire Trend #1 – Runaway Debt: I think everyone has pretty much noticed this one, and if not, it’s because we’re collectively putting our fingers in our ears and shouting “Na na na na!” at the top of our lungs. [...]
Dear Jobless, In the smaller picture, you may be doing something wrong –looking for the wrong kinds of opportunities, not projecting a professional image, showing up for your job interview with spinach in your teeth –something that can be fixed. It’s quite probable there are specific practical steps you can take that would lead you [...]
From this point moving forward, the goal of this blog is to provide cogent, practical answers to some of the biggest problems facing humanity, and to provide those in easily digested, bite-sized pieces. Starting next week will be a new series of blog entries around the subject of how to fix the global economic crisis. [...]
Thursday, November 18, 2010
It depends on how strictly you want to define the word “tautology”. A) FORMAL: If you wanted to evaluate it this statement as a formal tautology you would have to rewrite it as a formal statement first. In the form “IF NOT a THEN NOT b” (a=opportunities, b=crimes) it is not a tautology, but in [...]
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
You are probably thinking of Socrates. To be exact, he said that the wiser man is the one who knows he knows nothing rather than the person who thinks he knows something (but does not). However, the underlying idea is the same. Socrates is also famous for developing a method of practicing philosophy that consists [...]
Essence in this case refers to the ancient philosophical idea (most closely associated with Plato) that all things have a predefined, ideal set of characteristics. For instance, the Essence of a chair is that it has four legs, a back, and people sit on it. However, not everything matches its Essence. You might have a [...]
Monday, September 20, 2010
I can’t give any definitive answer to this question, but I can offer you a portrait of a situation that might be analogous. Picture yourself as a character in a book. Time only has meaning for you, the character, during the narrative of the story, which represents your life on earth. However, outside of the [...]
I’m not usually one to rave about a video game, but this simple, easy to play , quick to complete game changed my entire evaluation of the potential of video games as an art form. A dark, existential humanist parable about an office drone, the game uses a severely limited set of options and locations as a strength rather than a weakness
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Both wrestle with the concept that everything we ordinarily view as “reality” could be in fact a highly convincing illusion.
It’s both. It has the form and function of a question, so it is a question, but it is about the questioning process, so it is also a metaquestion. Formal languages such as first or second order logic have paradox-avoiding restrictions that force an either/or choice between using regular langauge or meta langauge, but not [...]