Category: ramblings

ramblings

No more PPT for CENTCOM

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“We have met the enemy and he is a bloated Microsoft Office Suite product!” ~ paraphrase of Gen. McChrystal
Some choice quotes from this NYT article all about how “Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession” are as follows:

  • “PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander.
  • “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster
  • “I would be free tonight, but unfortunately, I work kind of late (sadly enough, making PPT slides).” – Lieutenant Nuxol
  • “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable,” General McMaster

You have got to love the pun in the last one in the list. The image below is a PowerPoint diagram meant to portray the complexity of American strategy in Afghanistan which certainly succeeded in that aim.

The article makes me think of my Tufte related post from back in Jan, 2005 about how PowerPoint was incredibly bad for information dissemination and five years later, the game is still the same. Now though, lives are on the line so, let’s say it all together now: PowerPoint is bad, mmmkay?

politics

The Only Way to Combat the Inevitable is to Make it Irrelevant

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I was out to dinner with two political friends of mine this past Saturday night and I wound up codifying a belief that I’ve had since the Supreme Court ruled in favor of corporate money flowing relatively unchecked into political campaigns: money will always be a part of politics. So, the only way to combat it is to make money itself irrelevant.
The way this can be accomplished is by creating the conditions where it does not matter if one spends one to possibly five billion dollars during a campaign, note that this figure is before the special interests get involved. Through either scheduling, or media restrictions, or other means unknown or unstated at this time, the conditions need to be set so that any ungodly sum of money is taken off the table when it comes to any election.
I manage digital projects for a living and there quickly gets to be a point where throwing more bodies at a problem does not generate positive results. Twelve coders working in parallel cannot complete a relatively short term goal most often. To complete the task, you want two coders to sync and be left alone for a week or so to bang it out. The same must be true for campaigns and their cash – they need to have negative results for throwing more money at the problem. If this happens, then maybe we’ll start to see our political discourse and system reformed in a way that sticks for a good bit of time.

politics

The True Nature of Our Economy

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The art imitating life imitating art quality of the Onion sometimes just leaves me breathless with the way they nail the absurdity of our lives head on. Their recent post U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion shines a bright spotlight on the man behind the curtain of our ATM. There is nothing backing up our money except our shared belief / delusion that its worth value. Period.

“It’s just an illusion,” a wide-eyed Bernanke added as he removed bills from his wallet and slowly spread them out before him. “Just look at it: Meaningless pieces of paper with numbers printed on them. Worthless.”

By the time you get to the end of the article, you’ll be laughing too hard to want to get a gun and gold and run off into the woods.

health

Thoughts on Aging

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“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I want to be dead.”
“You want to be what?”
“I believe you heard me correctly, which is why you asked me to repeat myself. I’ll say the same thing the second time.”
“I’ll bite. What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I want to be dead.”
“Why would you ever say that?”
“A grown up is an adult, right?”
“Right.”
“Adults cannot see the magic in the world anymore – they are the walking dead.”
“Okay Peter Pan.”
“I’d rather be dead dead than a zombie. I’m just saying.”

ramblings

An Industrial Age From Stratch, Again?

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Today, among pondering fine questions such as “Is it legal for me to park in this space at this time?” (not an easy question in the five boroughs), I found time to ponder the question “could we start industrial society from scratch today?” and of course the answer simply is “no.”
To provide a more detailed answer, Author Kurt Cobb explains that the main reason it would be so difficult is because

most of the natural resources associated with advanced societies have been drawn down to a point where it would be difficult to extract what’s left without an up-and-running industrial system.

In the past, all of the vital base resources any society needed were near the surface and more than plentiful. Now, these same resources are infinitesimally more scarce. The search to procure these vital resources needed by a perceptually advancing technological society now goes farther and deeper than ever before, again without replenishment. This far-reaching endeavor requires an enormous amount of technological prowess which can only be provided by an increasingly complex industrial society. Thus, we hit the starting point of this circle – the snake is swallowing its tail. What are we to do?
Read the rest of the article. It’s interesting and of course this doomsayer loves its undercurrent of pessimism. Can we change our economic and technological patterns? Unless you believe in determinalism, we do have the power to affect change and to revert to at a minimum a neutral position. Will we? That is a question I would rather not ponder (this evening at least).
Via Neu

art

Thoughts on Pop Culture

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In the NY Times magazine this weekend, Deborah Solomon (DS) interviewed Douglas Coupland (DC), a writer best known for coining the term “Generation X.” He had an interesting point of view regarding popular culture that I felt was apt to share:

DS: How would you define the current cultural moment?
DC: I’m starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the worlds they want to read and the music they listen to. You don’t have the broader trends like you used to.
DS: Sure you do. What about Harry Potter and Taylor Swift and “Avatar,” to name a few random phenomena?
DC: They’re not great cultural megatrends, like disco, which involved absolutely everyone in t he culture. Now, everyone basically is their own microculture, their own nanoculture, their own generation.

Coupland’s thoughts really resonate with me. Back in the middle of last year when Michael Jackson passed away, one of the reasons that the outpouring of grief was so large was because it just might have been the last time that so many people could be unified towards a cultural event and everyone sort of felt this in their bones. His death was in a way the death rattle of the Super Culture that we’ve been used to for so long. I’m curious to see if this line of reasoning – that a Super Culture is dead – holds up over the next few years or if I look back on this entry and think, “Oh, how quaint.” I guess only time will tell…

ramblings

Feliz Década Nuevo

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Goodbye Aughts, hello Teens!
The first decade of the 21st Century and the new Millennium has finally ended. From a macro sense it was not a very good one but from a micro sense it was a very good one. I should note here that I feel a sense of deja vu in writing this post. I feel like I’ve put down these thoughts before but maybe I’ve just been telling them to so many people that I just think that I posted this info. Anyhow, here is what I mean exactly by my macro / micro breakdown terminology:
Macro: from a high level, the decade was book ended by the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the Global Financial Meltdown (paging Iceland – you are now bankrupt and hello mortgage holders in Florida, 45% of your houses are “under water,” a.k.a. you owe more than they are worth). If you throw in a Presidential election that was basically decided by elderly Jews down Florida who couldn’t vote straight (and its resulting Imperial Bush Presidency) and add on two wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) and lots of man-made and Act of God disasters (the Columbia shuttle explosion was “man made” while the Asian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina were Acts of God), it’ s a good thing that the decade has come to a close.
Micro: the decade was book ended by me moving into and planning to move out of NYC (I moved in on 3/00 and I will be out by 7/10). I started my Internet career which has luckily thrived despite the dotcom bust and aforementioned recent global financial meltdown. I continued my relationship with my college sweetheart who eventually became my roommate, then my fiance and then my wife. We first added a dog and then a daughter to our family and God willing will have another child join us later this year. I watched most of friends fall in love, get married and start to have children of their own. I donated bone marrow to an anonymous donee (the docs said it was a one in a million match) and saved his life. I bought an apartment and pulled off the ultra rare NYC miracle of selling one’s apartment to one’s neighbors (hello no broker fee!). Sure, I was almost killed twice, once by someone I knew which resulted in me missing almost a full year of work and once by a stray bullet in a Chinatown shootout. I also lost my job as well as a boat load of money when the dotcom bubble burst but there is something quite humbling and clarifying about being laid off, losing your shirt financially and being on long-term disability all before the age of 25. It made me focus on what truly matters in my life. To that end, while my parents split up after some 30 odd years of marriage (which definitely would not be classified as a a good event) this trauma allowed me – and also forced me – to focus on my own marriage and I think it has been and will be better because of the landmines my parents hit.
At the close of the previous decade, I posted to my bedroom door the words of the poet Robert Hunter who wrote,

“Every silver lining has a touch of grey.
I will get by. I will get by. I will get by. I will survive.”

As I look back at all of what the Aughts wrought, I think that those words have never been truer. There was abundance of bad but an ever greater amount, at least for me personally, of good. While I’m both extremely scared and exhilarated to see what the next decade will bring, I hope you Dear Reader will be there sitting shotgun as I travel through it. To paraphrase an Irish blessing that I tend to write on special occasions,

May the sun always shine upon your face and may the wind be forever at your back.

Happy New Year and New Decade.

ramblings

Happiness

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Happiness – what it means to be and the pursuit of this blissful state – has fixated me from the beginning of my time here on Planet Earth. I love how in the Declaration of Independence only “the pursuit of happiness” is promised, not happiness itself. It’s not something inherited, but it can be given, or earned, or never achieved. It is a magical state. It is a kaleidoscope, a cornucopia, it embraces and mocks, and the list goes on and on.
I’ve especially been thinking about happiness lately because its the holiday season which always makes me take stock of my “happiness.” It’s a trip to be bombarded by “happy” imagery for a month straight while potentially “unhappy” events, say like your company laying off another 10% of its staff (which happened last week) swirl about the air.
Earlier this week, I read an article in the 11/16/09 edition of the New Yorker (in an article titled “Slow Fade”) about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s time as a screenwriter in Hollywood and I didn’t know that “happiness” would be a central theme of the article but it was – Fitzgerald started out a huge literary success and then that success dwindled and was never duplicated again leaving him despondent, vain and embittered. In the article, Fitzgerald is quoted as saying,

“life is essentially a cheat…and that the redeeming things are not ‘happiness and pleasure’ but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.”

That to me that type of sentiment comes from the “it’s not the destination but the journey” school of thought. Is it true? Sometimes yes actually for nothing gives you greater pleasure than knowing you accomplished what you thought was an insurmountable goal but always? That is an answer about which I am not so sure. I do not deal well with absolutes.
My “journey” right now is geolocated in NYC and the Gray Lady yesterday had an article today about how Science Magazine has rated New York the most unhappy state in the union. Super!
One part towards the end of the article sums up the study and the city best:

Seriously, isn’t restlessness, even outright discontent, often a catalyst for creativity? We’re from the Harry Lime school. If you’ve seen the film classic “The Third Man,” you will remember that character’s admonition: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.

W. B. Yeats’ output would not have been possible without his desire for unrequited love. I get it. Difficult circumstances can act as a fulcrum and allow greatness to be squeezed into existence. NYC’s tides ebb and flow over and over again and every generation has (no disrepect to da Vinci for I’m about to focus on one micro-microcosm of what goes around and while it is great to throw a great party, I know it’s not timeless like a statue) their Copacabana, or Max’s Kansas City, or Studio 54, or Marquee, or Beatrice Inn, or Bungalow 8, or TenJune, or Pink Elephant, or Santos Party House. Reach for the moon with those unhappy hands for while you very well might miss, you’ll still end up in the stars.
Note: I take no small comfort in knowing that NJ and CT were better than NY because they ranked 49 and 50 in the study. Yes, NYC did not even rank 50, it ranked 51. In the District of Columbia, which was counted in the study and ended up at 37, people are happier than in the Big Apple. Go figure.

ramblings

Not That Bad of a Place

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Today I became a landowner in our nation’s third state which is what my friend Adam refers to as “The Great State of New Jersey.” At some point in 2010, my family and I will head west across the Hudson and this lifelong New York resident (first Long Island for my formative years, then Binghamton for college and then NYC for the last decade) will be forced to gets a Jersey license. This exodus is not happening immediately though so I’ll save my thoughts about what this move means, first from a leaving Manhattan for the Burbs point of view and then from a leaving New York for New Jersey point of view, for a future post. Let’s just say I’ll probably be writing that one late at night, full of scotch, listening to Ryan Adam’s “New York, New York” along with Sinatra’s “New York, New York” on repeat. It’s not going to be pretty.
This post’s title came from a title – agent that is – at today’s closing. Once I had signed the final piece of paperwork, the seller said to me with a twinkle in his eye, “Welcome to the highest taxed and most corrupt state in the Union.”
< Insert your salt-in-the-wounds metaphor here >
After I made a few jokes about how I’m from Long Island and therefore (as the Daily Show put it a few months back) a conjoined twin of the aforementioned corrupt land, the representative from the title company said, “Its actually not that bad of a place. And the town you are moving to is one of my favorites.”
Not that bad of a place. That should be the new state motto for New Jersey. Seriously, if Borough President Marty Markowitz can make all sorts of fun slogans up for Brooklyn (see below), then why can’t Corzine as one of his last acts in office put up signs up and down the Turnpike saying “Welcome to NJ: Not that bad of a place!”
Sign 1:

Sign 2:

Sign 3:

This could be my first contribution to my eventual new home. It’s the least I could do.

ramblings

On Being Thankful

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It’s Thanksgiving, our national holiday of overeating mixed with family agita, and the Gray Lady has a good op-ed about it. It says in part:

It’s worth raising a glass (or suspending a forkful for those of you who’ve gotten ahead of the toast) to be thankful for the unexpected, for all the ways that life interrupts and renews itself without warning. What would our lives look like if they held only what we’d planned? Where would our wisdom or patience — or our hope — come from?

From the last Turkey Day to this one, a lot has changed in both my personal and professional lives. It’s true: the one constrant in life is change. While this change may often bring sadness and unhappiness, it can also brings delight and joy. The op-ed closes with:

Most of what life contains comes to us unexpectedly after all. It is our job to welcome it and give it meaning. So let us toast what we cannot know and could not have guessed, and to the unexpected ways our lives will merge in Thanksgivings to come.

Gobble gobble.