Midcan5's Blog

Cities can grow past control and businesses can stagnant and die. The following is a fascinating look at scale and what it means when applied to more than just living things. It is long but interesting. "The question is, as a scientist, can we take these ideas and do what we did in biology, at least based on networks and other ideas, and put this into a quantitative, mathematizable, predictive theory, so that we can understand the birth and death of companies, how that stimulates the economy?" A Conversation With Geoffrey West "The great thing about cities, the thing that is amazing about cities is as they grow, so to speak, their dimensionality increases. That is, the space of opportunity, the space of functions, the space of jobs just continually increases. And the data shows that. If you look at job categories, it continually increases. I'll use the word "dimensionality." It opens up. And in fact, one of the great things about cities is that it s...

"One of the ironies of Archie Bunker's worldview is that the 1930s, 40s, and 50s weren't nearly as conservative as he remembered them. The same faulty nostalgia drives the so-called conservatives of today's Republican Party and the Tea Party movement, who imagine those decades as a time when hard-working Americans pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. It's true that Americans worked hard during these years. But the bootstraps stuff is nonsense. The 30s through 50s were the time of the New Deal, low-cost loans from the Federal Housing Administration, the GI Bill, huge subsidies for defense contractors during the Cold War and other industries that employed millions of people, massive transfer of funding from cities to the burgeoning suburbs, federal projects like interstate highway construction and the space program, generous investment in public schools, record union membership, high tax rates for corporations and the wealthy, good job benefits, and Social...

Long ago reading Derek Parfit's 'Reasons And Persons' I became fascinated with all the reasons we give for our actions. Parfit was interested in the various ways we rationalize our behavior and our justifications in a secular world. One item that fascinated me was the debate on self interest and actual behavior. I had had a long debate arguing 'self interest' is not the only motivating factor in our decision making. My wife told me just recently that I am never self centered. I liked that thought. Finding this piece adds to the complexity of reasons and persons. "Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it,[b]"The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to ratio...

Let's give credit where credit is due, Obama, and this adminstration's focus on capturing OBL, did what Bush Cheney could not, he/they did not ignore the intelligence reports. Had Bush paid attention to the intel prior to 911, we may not even be having this discussion. But in a curious way thanks are due to Jimmy Carter as well, it was the failed attempt in Iran that lead to the backup helicopters and a successful operation this time. I had to add that comment as I hear so much negativity about Carter. "WASHINGTON — For years, the agonizing search for Osama bin Laden kept coming up empty. Then last July, Pakistanis working for the Central Intelligence Agency drove up behind a white Suzuki navigating the bustling streets near Peshawar, Pakistan, and wrote down the car’s license plate." (...) "Prisoners in American custody told stories of a trusted courier. When the Americans ran the man’s pseudonym past two top-level detainees — the chief planner of the Se...

I thought this so funny it belongs in humor, the odd, paradoxical humor of contemporary political insanity. You couldn't make this stuff up! 'Ku Klux Klan Says It Doesn't Condone Tea Party or Koran Burning' "There are without doubt Islamic sects that teach extreme views of Islam but, going down to their level of hatred by burning their books is a dangerous and ignorant way to confront their teachings. The flames made by such unholy fires never die out! The Ku Klux Klan, LLC. opposes this most un-American thinking and activity." Read article here.

America needs to get back to building here, buying made here, if we are to continue be a leading industrial nation. The movement of business overseas for profit will eventually destroy us - Enemies couldn't do it but greed will. Check this out, interesting and see cspan for video if you want to learn and not just whine about our budget and unemployment. See video here. C-SPAN Video Library. “Manufacturing still accounts for nearly one in 10 U.S. nonfarm jobs as measured by the government, and those jobs tend to pay much better than burger-flipping or barista gigs. . . Between 1997 and 2009, we lost six million U.S. manufacturing jobs, or around a third of the total. How much should we care? Plenty, says Andrew Liveris, chairman and chief executive of Dow Chemical. In Make It in America, he calls for a national strategy to revive manufacturing. We need manufacturing jobs, he says, if we are to keep a growing population busy and start paying off our debts to the rest of the w...

Whenever I hear talk of American exceptionalism (AE) I wonder what does that mean? How different are we from a banana republic when one attack on native soil creates an atmosphere of fear so strong constitutional law goes out the window? How exceptional are we, when military courts hidden on foreign islands, is the best we can do? How exceptional are we when religion freedom means you can't build here because we hate you? This is just another example of how far America has traveled from its core values. But maybe AE like all things is just a myth used when necessary, forgotten much of the time. "Such tendencies in American Life as isolationism and the extreme nationalism that usually goes with it, hatred of Europe and Europeans, racial, religious, and nativist phobias, resentment of big business, trade-unionism, intellectuals, the eastern seaboard and its culture - all these have been found not only in opposition to reform but also at times oddly combined with it. One of t...