There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
Pentagon Cyber Unit Prompts Questions
Topic: Military Technology
1:05 pm EDT, Jun 14, 2009
Ellen Nakashima:
The Pentagon's development of a "cyber-command" is fueling debate over the proper rules to govern a new kind of warfare in which unannounced adversaries using bits of computer code can launch transnational attacks.
DIRNSA:
We support. Technical support. I see that as our role. And I think that's where you need us.
Kevin Chilton, USSTRATCOM:
You always ... want to bring those two elements together so that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.
James L. Jones, national security adviser:
There is no right-hand, left-hand anymore.
General "Buck" Turgidson:
Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice ...
Louis Menand:
The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving.
Robert Frost:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
Much of the debate over how to address the economic crisis has focused on a single word: regulation. But the truth is quite a bit more complicated.
The upshot is that regulation cannot be the linchpin of attempts to reform our economy. What is needed instead is something far more sweeping: for people to internalize a different sense of how one ought to behave, and act on it because they believe it is right.
In short, the normative values of a culture matter. Regulation is needed when culture fails, but it cannot alone serve as the mainstay of good conduct.
So what kind of transformation in our normative culture is called for? What needs to be eradicated, or at least greatly tempered, is consumerism: the obsession with acquisition that has become the organizing principle of American life. This is not the same thing as capitalism, nor is it the same thing as consumption.
But consumerism will not just magically disappear from its central place in our culture. It needs to be supplanted by something.
What should replace the worship of consumer goods?
The main challenge is not to pass some laws, but, rather, to ask people to reconsider what a good life entails.
Alan Kay:
If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?
Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.
Louis CK:
When I read things like, "The foundations of capitalism are shattering," I'm like, "Maybe we need that." Maybe we need some time ... because everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy ...
Ginia Bellafante:
There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.
Decius:
Paul Graham asks what living in your city tells you. Living in the north Perimeter area for 6 odd years now has told me that everybody makes way, way more money than I do. It's not inspiring so much as it makes you sympathize with class warfare.
From the archive, Amitai Etzioni:
I presume that many a psychiatrist and New Age minister would point out that by keeping busy we avoid “healthy” grieving. To hell with that; the void left by our loss is just too deep. For now, focusing on what we do for one another is the only consolation we can find.
US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive
Topic: Home and Garden
1:05 pm EDT, Jun 14, 2009
Tom Leonard:
Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic "shrink to survive" proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline.
The US government is looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.
Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.
"The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we're all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way," said Mr Kildee. "Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity."
Flint wants to specialise in health and education services, both areas which cannot easily be relocated abroad.
"Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow," he said.
Christopher Leinberger:
Fundamental changes in American life may turn today’s McMansions into tomorrow’s tenements.
From the archive:
Rewilding: the process of creating a lifestyle that is independent of the domestication of civilization.
Donald Rumsfeld:
Building a new nation is never a straight, steady climb upward. Today can sometimes look worse than yesterday -- or even two months ago. What matters is the overall trajectory: Where do things stand today when compared to what they were five years ago?
Have you seen "Revolutionary Road"?
Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.
A Bernstein survey says 35% of Web video watchers might dump their cable TV provider in favor of online video within 5 years. That's not too alarming by itself, says Bernstein's Jeff Lindsay -- that's in line with the amount of people who typically say they'd cut the cord because of price.
More interesting: Web video watchers don't want to dump cable because it's too expensive. Instead, mostly because of content.
Paul Kedrosky:
There have been a number of articles lately about people cutting costs by cancelling/cutting cable TV service.
Christopher Lawton:
The cable-cutting trend isn't just being driven by pinched personal budgets.
Flynn23:
All of this 'chaos' in the economy is really the result of a transition to an information-based economy.
John Gapper, for FT, in 2007:
Microsoft is trying to differentiate itself from Google by portraying itself as more sympathetic to copyright holders than Google.
Decius, from 2007:
Ultimately, content is not king, and filters are not king. Bandwidth, and the money that funds it, is king. There will be as many social frameworks as there are societies. There will be many content producers, a small number of which will make money. But the market will only sustain a few free video hosting systems. It's not about production cost or end user value. It's about marginal cost. You can copy a floppy but you can't copy a server.
In the latest milestone on the music industry death march, the private equity fund that owns digital music distributor eMusic has decided to trade in its old, loss-making "indie" fans for a fresh crop of youthful, energetic casual listeners. The editors at eMusic eagerly look forward to introducing these new arrivals to Miles Davis.
Regarding the grandfathering plans, it definitely sucks to see your downloads cut. But this isn’t out of a lack of loyalty: this is because those plans, which we have grandfathered for a few years, would now be priced at a loss. We changed what some of you spend per-track so that it was equal to what everyone else spends. Whether Sony happened or not, this was an eventuality. An eventuality that stinks, yes, but one all the same.
Paul Bonanos, for GigaOm:
It seems inevitable that consumers everywhere will eventually demand ubiquitous on-demand mobile streams, making ownership of music less popular and iTunes therefore less important.
Fortune Magazine:
Rhapsody, not iTunes, in my opinion, is the future of music.
From May:
Right before Apple finally implemented variable pricing in iTunes it wasn't hard for many to predict that it would backfire badly on the major record labels as they tried to jack up prices. So, it should come as little surprise to find out those predictions appear to be entirely accurate.
Unlike the electrician who knows his work is good when you flip a switch and the lights go on, the average knowledge worker is caught in a morass of evaluations, budget projections and planning meetings.
Matthew Crawford argues that the ideologists of the knowledge economy have posited a false dichotomy between knowing and doing.
Few things I’ve created have given me nearly as much pleasure as those tangible objects that were hard to fabricate and useful to other people. I put my power tools away a few years ago, and find now that I can’t even give them away, because people are too preoccupied with updating their iPhones.
We have betrayed several generations of children in many ways — by giving the teaching of skills priority over that of knowledge, by making exams easier out of a false egalitarianism, by letting them choose their own morality from a soup of political correctness, by over-emphasising the importance of the computer as if it were anything more than a useful tool, and of the internet as if it were more content-rich than books. But we have also betrayed them by confiscating their silence and failing to reveal the richness that may be found within the context of "a great quiet".
So difficult has it become to find such oases of silence, that many children never experience it. In adapting to constant noise, we seem to have become afraid of silence. Why? Are we afraid of what we will discover when we come face to face with ourselves there? Perhaps there will be nothing but a great void, nothing within us, and nothing outside of us either. Terrifying. Let's drown our fears out with some noise, quickly.
People would go into the pi room, and their brains would become quiet, and they would emerge relaxed.
William Deresiewicz:
There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude.
At a recent screening of "Up!", during a beautiful, wordless-but-not-silent extended montage sequence in which the almost-entire life of the protagonist and his wife unfolds on the screen, children in the audience can be heard squirming antsily, intermittently compelled to quietly express their discomfort at the verbal vacuum of the soundtrack. Even as these kids disrupt the proceedings with their untimely comments, one feels a certain sadness for them, not unlike the feelings evoked by major events in the protagonist's life story. These kids are so unfamiliar with the pleasures of silence that even a few minutes of wordlessness feels like punishment.
It seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.
I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.
I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.
If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies.
Winifred Gallagher:
Even as a kid, I enjoyed focusing. I took a lot of pleasure in concentrating on things. You can’t be happy all the time, but you can pretty much focus all the time. That’s about as good as it gets.
It isn’t that love and work are invariably incapable of delivering fulfillment—only that they almost never do for too long.
Stefan Klein:
We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.
Ashby Jones:
Happiness exists just around the corner, it’s just a matter of figuring out how to get there.
Samantha Power:
There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
Benjamin Kunkel:
I would rather raise a few eyebrows, curse the occasional payphone, and miss out on some parties than to spoil my necessary concentration and even boredom with phone calls I know I couldn't resist fielding or placing.
Carolyn Johnson:
As cures for boredom have proliferated, people do not seem to feel less bored; they simply flee it with more energy.
I feel truly geeky because I can think of something that should have gotten me geek points that wasn't on the list -- owning the "Real Genius" DVD and reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach."
Jello:
I own the Real Genius DVD. I love it. I just bought Godel, Escher, Bach and... I can't fucking understand it and I feel stupid. It's not that it's totally above me and I could never approach it. It's just that ... for the same reason I've never finished Gravity's Rainbow: it's full time work understanding it.
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
John Lanchester:
A common criticism of video games made by non-gamers is that they are pointless and escapist, but a more valid observation might be that the bulk of games are nowhere near escapist enough.
I did not much connect with the film [Antonioni's "L'Avventura"] when I saw it first -- how could I, at 18? These people were bored by a lifestyle beyond my wildest dreams. When I taught the film in a class 15 years later, it seemed affected and contrived, a feature-length idea but not a movie. Only recently, seeing it again, did I realize how much clarity and passion Antonioni brought to the film's silent cry of despair.
Louis CK: Those were simpler times, I think -- we may be going back to that, by the way -- but, in a way, Good!, because when I read things like, "The foundations of capitalism are shattering," I'm like, "Maybe we need that." Maybe we need some time ...
Conan: You think that would just bring us back to reality?
Louis CK: Yeah, because, everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy ...
A wise man once sang:
When you're chewing on life's gristle Don't grumble, give a whistle. And this'll help things turn out for the best.
Ashby Jones:
Happiness exists just around the corner, it’s just a matter of figuring out how to get there.
Positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.
Elizabeth Farrelly:
For my own future, as well as my children's, I must change. And yet--this is what's weird--I, like you, can't. Cannot abandon comfort, convenience and pleasure for the sake of abstract knowledge. Can't stop doing it. This is interesting.
Rebecca Brock:
People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.
Ginia Bellafante:
There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.
Margaret Atwood:
What we owe and how we pay is a feature of all human societies, and profoundly shapes our shared values and our cultures.
