Later today, I shall be denuded of my work-issue laptop, so this is to be the last blog post written on shuttle wireless.
I've been wandering around these past few weeks trying to absorb what I can of what the past three years have been. I do think I've learned a lot. More about Silicon Valley, technology and big business that I had ever intended to know, but a fair bit about me too. I've appreciated building reading or relaxing time into my morning. I think I'd like to keep that.
I see people, like my favorite shuttle drivers, and want to tell them this is it, good bye, but then I don't because I like the idea that the future in their heads still has me in it.
I am a little nervous knowing that the check I get today will be the last for a long time, but all in all, I feel good about things. This feels like the right time to go. My work here is done.
Alright, I'm off for my last breakfast, the transitioning of the last few things, my last lunch, my last goodbyes, my exit interview, and then The Future.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
Back to basics
Had a nice chat with a coworker over lunch today about cultural knowledge, and how with all this technology we can operate (and survive, for now) at a high level without knowing how things work.
Take food, for example. I think in so many cases, the connection between food and plants and animals is lost. Barbara Kingsolver talks about kids who didn't want to eat vegetables that had fallen on the ground outside, as if all their potatoes and carrots hadn't been in the ground in the first place, and hadn't been covered in dirt themselves before they were washed off. It's as if food is generated spontaneously and just appears clean in a grocery store or in a restaurant.
I heard somewhere that if you talked to an Inuit (or maybe it was another Native American tribe), anyone in the tribe could tell you how to build an igloo, how to skin a seal, what the designs on their parkas signify, and so on, whereas I couldn't begin to know all of the things we've learned collectively as a society. I don't know how to build electronics or a lightbulb. I can use a computer, but don't totally know how they work at a base level.
That's not a bad thing in itself, but I'm disturbed by a couple of things:
1. That if we had to start over, I'm not sure we could build what we have again. I feel like civilization is building this massive structure, and people's knowledge is moving up and up and after a point, we won't know how to get back to the bottom. We imagine one thing to stand for another and another and another until we can't remember what it signified in the first place.
2. We (or at least I) no longer really have the means to fully assess the implications of a lot of our actions or decisions. I have shares in a mutual fund, but don't really know what sort of business practices I'm supporting. Or, I buy a laptop - granted mine is supposedly a 'green' one - but I don't really know what it means to have equipment built from one sort of metal or another. You hear about diamond mines in Africa, but we could be strip mining all manner of beautiful places to make me something I might not have wanted if I knew.
In any case, everyone doesn't have to know everything. That's the benefit of society, of civilization.
My coworker said she'd be tempted to teach her kids useless things like the classics, that we should bring back cooking and wood shop into the schools, but that's my point - that it isn't useless. I want to know how everything works. I've gotten to a point where I want to start exploring backwards. I think it's healthy to know how to build a table, grow your own food and bake bread from scratch. That's why I'm going back to school: to do real things in the real world. Or, maybe it's simple things in a basic world. I want to understand the connection between the things I do, to act responsibly to the best of my knowledge.
Take food, for example. I think in so many cases, the connection between food and plants and animals is lost. Barbara Kingsolver talks about kids who didn't want to eat vegetables that had fallen on the ground outside, as if all their potatoes and carrots hadn't been in the ground in the first place, and hadn't been covered in dirt themselves before they were washed off. It's as if food is generated spontaneously and just appears clean in a grocery store or in a restaurant.
I heard somewhere that if you talked to an Inuit (or maybe it was another Native American tribe), anyone in the tribe could tell you how to build an igloo, how to skin a seal, what the designs on their parkas signify, and so on, whereas I couldn't begin to know all of the things we've learned collectively as a society. I don't know how to build electronics or a lightbulb. I can use a computer, but don't totally know how they work at a base level.
That's not a bad thing in itself, but I'm disturbed by a couple of things:
1. That if we had to start over, I'm not sure we could build what we have again. I feel like civilization is building this massive structure, and people's knowledge is moving up and up and after a point, we won't know how to get back to the bottom. We imagine one thing to stand for another and another and another until we can't remember what it signified in the first place.
2. We (or at least I) no longer really have the means to fully assess the implications of a lot of our actions or decisions. I have shares in a mutual fund, but don't really know what sort of business practices I'm supporting. Or, I buy a laptop - granted mine is supposedly a 'green' one - but I don't really know what it means to have equipment built from one sort of metal or another. You hear about diamond mines in Africa, but we could be strip mining all manner of beautiful places to make me something I might not have wanted if I knew.
In any case, everyone doesn't have to know everything. That's the benefit of society, of civilization.
My coworker said she'd be tempted to teach her kids useless things like the classics, that we should bring back cooking and wood shop into the schools, but that's my point - that it isn't useless. I want to know how everything works. I've gotten to a point where I want to start exploring backwards. I think it's healthy to know how to build a table, grow your own food and bake bread from scratch. That's why I'm going back to school: to do real things in the real world. Or, maybe it's simple things in a basic world. I want to understand the connection between the things I do, to act responsibly to the best of my knowledge.
Waxing economic
I was listening to Professor Robert Frank of the Johnson School at Cornell University talk about economics, the economy and what we can do about it the other day on the Commonwealth Club. He claims that in another 100 years, Charles Darwin will have replaced Adam Smith as the father of modern economics, the key difference between their philosophies being that Smith's theory assumes that individuals acting in their own best interest will result in everyone getting what's best, whereas Darwin's theory leaves more room for improvement.
He gave the example of elephant seals: as a male elephant seal, it behooves you to be as massive as possible so that you can fight your competitors for a harem and send your genes into the next generation, which over time results in enormous elephant seals. Male elephant seals today can weigh up to 6,000 pounds. 6,000 pounds! All in all, Frank says, elephant seals as a population would likely prefer to be a third that size. They could escape predators faster and wouldn't have to find as much to eat, but such is evolution.
And this is where Frank says we as humans can step outside this cycle. We don't have to be victims of a vicious cycle. We can change the rules. In considering the current economic crisis, he emphasized the Keynesian government spending, saying that now is not the time to balance the federal budget by cutting spending, imbalanced as it may be. Even without fully knowing the implications of that sort of policy, it's heartening to hear an economist recommend that the government put more people to work, and not just digging holes and filling them back up à la FDR, but getting some real work done, like hiring people to inspect all those bridges and dikes and then actually fixing them to help prevent disasters.
The idea that really intrigued me though - and I'm not one to be intrigued by economics in general - was called something like the graduated consumption tax. It goes something like this - rather than taxing you on your gross income, the government would tax you based on how much you spent in a given year, and tax rates themselves could be (on the surface at least) much higher. For example, Frank proposed 100% tax for upper spending brackets, which I suppose in the end may be similar to the current tax structure in terms of how much money we bring in, except that it would encourage saving, a good behavior. Milton Friedman won a Nobel Prize in 1976 for this kind of thinking. All in all, it sounds to me like a pretty neat idea.
Fortunately, someone in the audience asked the question I was thinking of, which was - do we really want everyone stuffing all their money into savings right now? Don't we need that economic stimulus? And his answer was that, yes, consumption tax wouldn't be a good idea right now, but it would be a good idea to put it on the table for later. If we said we'd be converting to a consumption tax structure in some number of years, people would be incentivized to spend now, which would give us that extra kick we need, and then spend more moderately in the future.
For example, say you're a millionaire and you're just itching to build an addition onto your mansion (so as not to be outdone by your neighbors) and you're aiming to spend $2M on your project. If you know a consumption tax is on the horizon, you have two options: build a $2M addition now, or build a $1M addition later and pay another $1M (assuming you're in the 100% tax bracket) in taxes. Having the consumption tax on the horizon encourages you to build now, and anyone looking to build later will be incentivized to scale back, which, if everything goes according to plan, will help address the tendency for excess.
Future moderate spending is ok, he says, because money stored in banks and mutual funds isn't actually tied up. It's moving around as capital on the market.
Then, as I'm finishing dinner, feeling optimistic, the World Affairs Council wraps up and BBC World News starts up, main story: California lawmakers finally balance budget by cutting spending on education and social services. Sigh.
He gave the example of elephant seals: as a male elephant seal, it behooves you to be as massive as possible so that you can fight your competitors for a harem and send your genes into the next generation, which over time results in enormous elephant seals. Male elephant seals today can weigh up to 6,000 pounds. 6,000 pounds! All in all, Frank says, elephant seals as a population would likely prefer to be a third that size. They could escape predators faster and wouldn't have to find as much to eat, but such is evolution.
And this is where Frank says we as humans can step outside this cycle. We don't have to be victims of a vicious cycle. We can change the rules. In considering the current economic crisis, he emphasized the Keynesian government spending, saying that now is not the time to balance the federal budget by cutting spending, imbalanced as it may be. Even without fully knowing the implications of that sort of policy, it's heartening to hear an economist recommend that the government put more people to work, and not just digging holes and filling them back up à la FDR, but getting some real work done, like hiring people to inspect all those bridges and dikes and then actually fixing them to help prevent disasters.
The idea that really intrigued me though - and I'm not one to be intrigued by economics in general - was called something like the graduated consumption tax. It goes something like this - rather than taxing you on your gross income, the government would tax you based on how much you spent in a given year, and tax rates themselves could be (on the surface at least) much higher. For example, Frank proposed 100% tax for upper spending brackets, which I suppose in the end may be similar to the current tax structure in terms of how much money we bring in, except that it would encourage saving, a good behavior. Milton Friedman won a Nobel Prize in 1976 for this kind of thinking. All in all, it sounds to me like a pretty neat idea.
Fortunately, someone in the audience asked the question I was thinking of, which was - do we really want everyone stuffing all their money into savings right now? Don't we need that economic stimulus? And his answer was that, yes, consumption tax wouldn't be a good idea right now, but it would be a good idea to put it on the table for later. If we said we'd be converting to a consumption tax structure in some number of years, people would be incentivized to spend now, which would give us that extra kick we need, and then spend more moderately in the future.
For example, say you're a millionaire and you're just itching to build an addition onto your mansion (so as not to be outdone by your neighbors) and you're aiming to spend $2M on your project. If you know a consumption tax is on the horizon, you have two options: build a $2M addition now, or build a $1M addition later and pay another $1M (assuming you're in the 100% tax bracket) in taxes. Having the consumption tax on the horizon encourages you to build now, and anyone looking to build later will be incentivized to scale back, which, if everything goes according to plan, will help address the tendency for excess.
Future moderate spending is ok, he says, because money stored in banks and mutual funds isn't actually tied up. It's moving around as capital on the market.
Then, as I'm finishing dinner, feeling optimistic, the World Affairs Council wraps up and BBC World News starts up, main story: California lawmakers finally balance budget by cutting spending on education and social services. Sigh.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Down to the wire
Alright, today is the big day! Today has thus far included a spot of John time, a chocolatine, some strawberries and cherries, so I'm off to a good start and feeling jolly.
Then, a bit of chat with the manager later this afternoon. After all this time, I can't believe it's Today. Wish me luck!
Then, a bit of chat with the manager later this afternoon. After all this time, I can't believe it's Today. Wish me luck!
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Ask and thou shalt receive
I, right at this moment, am on the verge of eating my second macaron of the day. A vanilla macaron, mind you, as opposed to a coconut macaroon. Someone in the pastry department of a nearby cafe made them, perhaps in celebration of Bastille Day, which is today. I am taking it as a sign, a good omen of what is to come.
And speaking of omens, I am all of a sudden having a hankering for another go at Ciana's tarot cards. I am Pretty Sure I would not get the soul sucker card this time. I hope to prove me right.
Ces macarons sont incroyable, by the way. Just incredible. You definitely want one.
And speaking of omens, I am all of a sudden having a hankering for another go at Ciana's tarot cards. I am Pretty Sure I would not get the soul sucker card this time. I hope to prove me right.
Ces macarons sont incroyable, by the way. Just incredible. You definitely want one.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Positive thinking
The future can't be all bad if it involves a trip to Ladurée for a macaroon or two.
Peut être une boîte if I'm good.
T minus 2 days
Wednesday is to be the big announcement. I've been taking it easy to prepare.
Everything feels quiet. I'm feeling more like an end than a beginning. My prospects feel shadowy. I can't see in my head how it will turn out, and I like to have pictures. Nothing outside of my own self, really, is certain. I won't have money, I don't know where I'll be living or how I'll get around. It's enough to make me nervous, but this is my life, and it's too short to be safe all the time. I'm going to get closer to what I love. I can do this.
Everything feels quiet. I'm feeling more like an end than a beginning. My prospects feel shadowy. I can't see in my head how it will turn out, and I like to have pictures. Nothing outside of my own self, really, is certain. I won't have money, I don't know where I'll be living or how I'll get around. It's enough to make me nervous, but this is my life, and it's too short to be safe all the time. I'm going to get closer to what I love. I can do this.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Thursday, July 9, 2009
In the ether
Feeling uneasy about this whole life change thing. It still seems like the right thing to do, but I'm feeling v. cut off about it. Cut off from everything, as if I'm not really here. I'm not really at work, I'm not really not at work, I'm not really in school. I'm just kind of out in the ether. I am reminded of Emile Durkheim and anomie.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Out of the woods
It is eight pm on Sunday. I haven't been to work in almost a week, having been laid low by the worst flu I've ever been caught by. There was a moment on Tuesday when I thought that might be it. It was only mid afternoon, but everything started to turn dark and I made my way back to bed, unsure whether to call home or 911, but my temperature came down two degrees a day until I could promise John that I'd be able to make it out to collect him from the airport. If I'd gotten sick twelve hours later, I'm not sure if I could have done it, but I run a tight ship.
And then John came. <3. I love that boy and I don't care if everybody knows it. It felt so good to see him sitting in my different chairs. Or to hear him brushing his teeth just out of sight. To walk down my same steps to the BART station with him next to me. It felt normal, but the best kind of normal. Cozy. He was only here two days really, but it felt like it could have been forever. It's so hard to tell with him around. Time is something else entirely.
And then this will be my last normal week at work. The last week before my secret comes out. And then my manager is back and the secret comes out. Then a good week of work. Then a few days before days before John appears again and we're off to Paris, the one in France, which is what made this morning a little easier, knowing I'd see him again so soon, for so long. There is so much to do between now and then, though.
Truth be told, I'm a little scared. The quitting of one's job to do Something Entirely Different feels big, but at the same time, it feels like time.
And then John came. <3. I love that boy and I don't care if everybody knows it. It felt so good to see him sitting in my different chairs. Or to hear him brushing his teeth just out of sight. To walk down my same steps to the BART station with him next to me. It felt normal, but the best kind of normal. Cozy. He was only here two days really, but it felt like it could have been forever. It's so hard to tell with him around. Time is something else entirely.
And then this will be my last normal week at work. The last week before my secret comes out. And then my manager is back and the secret comes out. Then a good week of work. Then a few days before days before John appears again and we're off to Paris, the one in France, which is what made this morning a little easier, knowing I'd see him again so soon, for so long. There is so much to do between now and then, though.
Truth be told, I'm a little scared. The quitting of one's job to do Something Entirely Different feels big, but at the same time, it feels like time.
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