Aphorisms of the Day

Even a perfectly good pair of shoes will have at least two holes in them.

Knowledge tempers zeal as heat tempers steel.

Rando Thought of the Day

Any institution, be it political, religious, or economic, that does not take into account the true nature of humanity is doomed to fail, fail catastrophically, and cause much suffering in the process.

A Thought on Pragmatic Politics

The beautifully insidious thing about taking a pragmatic approach to politics is that you can justify your decisions based on postulation rather than principle.

True resolve is usually silent...

Robert Rules!

QOTD from Henry M. Robert:

Where there is no law, but every man
does what is right in his own eyes,
there is the least of real liberty.

File under "I" for "I Told You So"

More than one way to be wrong

I find it incredibly frustrating that many conservative Christians feel justified in stomping on the feelings of others in their zeal for moral justice while many liberal Christians feel justified in stomping on the feelings of others in their zeal for social justice. Isn't kindness a moral virtue? Can we ever expect human beings to treat each other justly if those who are supposedly leading the way can't even be decent to each other?

A person won't change because a self-righteous person condemned his or her behavior. They will change, however, if they are lovingly led to a knowledge of the truth - that morality matters, that justice matters, that people matter. Loving God and loving our neighbor aren't nice sentiments that we should try to hang on to as we "do the real work of building God's kingdom" (pompous tone intended). They are the only means by which we can serve God and through which we can foster a moral and just society.

Patently Obvious Thoughts for the Day

You can't guide others where you haven't been and you can't lead them where you aren't willing to go.

Two implications of this:

1. If I want to be the spiritual leader of my family, I can't just point the way. "Hey, you kids go on up out of Egypt to the promised land. Pop's gonna stay here and hang out". I have to go on ahead, away from the safety of being in the group, and face the risks of loneliness and isolation that come with breaking new ground and being misunderstood.

2. I can't be so arrogant as to think that a) I will be the "expert" in everything, since my wife will be ahead of me in some regards as will my kids as they reach an age where they begin to have experiences I never did, or b)God hasn't already been there. He is the true Leader, and my job is to follow and help my family do the same.

iPad 2010 = Newton 1993

'Nuff said.

Climate Change?

Why am I not surprised by this?

Bill Gates' Silhouette in Outlook 2010?

Dorky Observation of the Day: I think the default silhouette in the Outlook 2010 people pane is based on Bill Gates mug shot from the 70's. Where do I collect my prize for being the first one to notice this?

Stupid Career Tricks

So I had a job interview the other day. I felt like it went well, but I didn't hear anything within 5 business days, so I called to leave a message with the hiring manager. Problem is, I apparently didn't get his name right during the interview. Somehow, I managed to come away thinking he was "Bill Jones".

So I call and ask to leave a message with "Bill Jones" (who, apparently is an employee with said company) and was put through to his voice mail. I leave a nice VM thanking him for the interview and expressing interest in moving forward in the process. Then today, I get an email from the HR person who lets me know that she'll be meeting with "Bob" later this week to determine next steps. Nice way to shoot yourself in the foot, huh?

Very Interesting Interview with the Author of The Political Gene

Turn so many phrases they call me the Lathe

Dehumanization

I just read the abstract for an upcoming talk at work. One line spoke of the "vision of establishing and running a virtual business, a business in which most or all of its business functions are outsourced to online services". Wow! The complete commoditization and abstraction of human labor is at hand. Isn't that grand!

Others at my place of employment are working on everything from building nanoscale sensors that can be deployed anywhere and everywhere on the planet to the data extraction and analytics algorithms that will be necessary to process and act on - in realtime the terabyte streams of data those trillions of sensors will produce. I'm sure they'll put those to use in good, non-surveillance-type applications!

Maybe my "John Henry and the Steam Hammer" allusions are too much, and maybe "1984" had more impact on my thinking than it should have, but I can't help feel that I'm witnessing - and in my own small way, contributing to - the undoing of civilization, if not humanity.

How did I get so damn vested in such a system? How do I break free without becoming some dirt-eating hippie?

Man, Was I Feeling Emo When I Wrote This, or What?

I wrote this a little over 5 years ago:

A big aching crater
A bunker of despair

To know that it's my own
for no one else to share

A bleeding ulceration
A gash through soul and flesh

To know that it's my own
And is forever fresh

Everyone is hurting
as they twist the knife

Everyone is grasping
for a slice of life

It's my own creation
indeed of my design

To know that it's my own
this cancer of the mind

Deep and dank and lonely
The demon lurks within

To know that its my own
the consequence of sin

Everyone is hurting
as they twist the knife

Everyone is grasping
for a slice of life

Next Wave

Global labor arbitrage - finding ever cheaper sources of labor - has made a tremendous impact on the bottom lines of Fortune 500 companies, US workers, and workers in emerging markets with benefits coming to the first and last largely at the expense of the middle. (I know, Americans got cheap stuff to buy at Walmart as a result, but hey, when you factor in that they were mortgaging their homes to buy that crap, it doesn't look like such a great deal, huh?).

Anyway, the cigar chompers are running out of cheap (or rather, cheaper) labor sources, so what's the next stop in the drive to eliminate labor? (And don't kid yourself by thinking a) senior executives don't want to do just that or b) I'm 'white collar', not ~shudder!~ labor. They do and you are - unless you've got a 'nut' that wouldn't be exhausted by you or your children, even if you never worked another day in your life). The next stop is Automation. Why pay Indians or Bulgarians or Costa Ricans to run your data center when you can have the systems run themselves? Why pay analysts in the EU and the US to munge business processes and design improved systems when you can automatically capture and analyse user interactions with business apps and programatically generate design improvements? And once you know enough to improve a process and its supporting systems *automatically*, you can certainly begin to reduce the number of people it takes to actually *run* those processes while simultaneously improving output.

I'm talking about a John Henry and the Steam Hammer scenario here, but on a global scale. Only this time it will be massive declines in the demand for 'skilled' labor (though I wouldn't have told John Henry to his face that he was "unskilled"). And not just in the US, but globally. Factor in that a large percentage of the people who are displaced by either labor arbitrage or automation will no longer be "good consumers", and the pressure to improve the bottom line as the top line falls only increases.

All of this is going to have a tremendous impact on social and political stability, around the globe. Unemployed people are restless people. Are fearful people. And are often all-to-malleable in their thoughts and consequent actions.

Just sayin'.

More Learnings...

As I reflect on my last position, here are some things I would do differently:

1. Don't let a desire for perfection kill your project schedules. Most of the time 80% is good enough, at least for a first release.
2. Make sure service standards exceed expectations, but not by much. Pouring effort into providing a level of service that is unappreciated keeps you from aggressively pursuing new opportunities.
3. Remember that fear is a poor long-term business driver. Said another way, being overly afraid of layoffs or budget cuts is a sure way to incur both.
4. You can only do what you can do.

Are you kidding me?

This is an absolute nightmare. Think about it. The Chinese gov't holds something like $1T in US treasuries. Once inflation sets in and they begin dumping US $, do we really want them to be able to exchange their $ for a fast track to US citizenship? $1T would buy 2 Million EB-5 visas! Moreover, I saw nothing in this that would prevent the EB-5 visa holder from employing H1B Visa holders to meet the employment criteria. Not hard to imagine several hundred thousand new citizens being created through this process.

Madden said winning is the best deodorant, but clearly it's money. This stinks to high heaven, but will undoubtedly be defended as "good for the economy". Since when did money become the sole arbiter of all we value? Frightening.

Casting Down Idols

Things that are hindering my walk with God:

Love of comfort
Love of pleasure
Love of others' esteem
Pride