Dateline Fort Collins, Colorado: The Colorado State University campus there. An editorial ran recently:
"Taser this ... F*** Bush."
The expletive was spelled out.
An article covering it reads: ""I think they went over the line a little bit, but it's free speech and they're allowed to write what they want," one student told 7NEWS."
Yes, because everyone has a right to free speech. I have nothing wrong with free speech or anyone practicing any other rights. But where do those rights end?
Two places:
1. When the practice of that right becomes something that inhibits someone else from living their life or pursuing liberty or happiness.
2. When they abuse that right.
I will stand up any day for any person to practice their rights, but when they violate one of the above I take a step back and take a look at the real character of the person practicing their right.
Moral of the story: Rights are only such because they don't infringe on everyone else or when it is an abuse.
Tonight we’ll be taking a look at some wisdom from elsewhere:How forming a walking path through snow is much like self-engineering a set of favorable habits.
“The process of forming habits [is] as walking home through fresh snow. The first person to go through the snow has to forge a path through the snow, and it’s difficult … but others will follow in that path and it gets easier and easier.
Forming a habit is a matter of forging that initial path until it’s harder not to take the path. Who wants to forge a new path through the snow?
But let’s take that concept a little further: what if you engineered it so that even the initial person forging through the snow would rather take that path than another, because it would be harder not to take the path.
Engineer your habit change so that it’s harder not to form the habit.”
Many people in recent decades have been incessantly taught that college is the right way to go:Get a good job, retire, so on and so forth.While in this conventional wisdom lie some very valid points—education is completely worthwhile, there are diminishing returns in some scenarios.The classic picture of an Ivy League education being responsible for making one’s way up the corporate ladder and into the corner office isn’t necessarily the one that is based in reality.
“Most CEOs of the biggest corporations didn't attend Ivy League or other highly selective colleges. They went to state universities, big and small, or to less-known private colleges.”
In fact, I know for a fact (as the article reports), went to Pittsburg State University in the small community of Pittsburg, KS:A place where I resided for a small time.An accounting major there, H. Lee Scott ascended to the top spot in the world’s top corporation:Certainly no small feat.
In fact, the “Oracle of Omaha,” the third-richest man in the world Warren Buffett, is quoted as saying “I don't care where someone went to school, and that never caused me to hire anyone or buy a business.”
Following the line of logic that this allows, let’s take a look at Gabriel Hammod, a Johns Hopkins student who had his mind set on law school.During the course of his undergraduate years there, however, he traded stocks, placing $1000 on Caterpillar.Finding he had a knack for it, Gabriel decided to join Goldman Sachs as a stock analyst.Instead of going to business school for an MBA, like many of his colleagues, he chose to raise $5 million and start his own hedge fund, Alerian Capital Management.Three years into it, his company now manages $300 million from New York and Dallas.Gabriel, on the other hand, at the age of 28, enjoys a seven-figure salary.
What was his logic?
“Like other young people on the fast track, Mr. Hammond has run the numbers and figures that an M.B.A. is a waste of money and time — time that could be spent making money. “There’s no way that I would consider it,” he says.”
The finance world is rife with these sorts of stories.
“At funds that manage $1 billion to $3 billion, people with just a few years of finance experience will make $337,000 this year, Mr. Zoia says, and those with five to nine years of experience will average $830,000, up 6 percent from last year. These estimates include analysts and researchers but not portfolio traders, who can make much more because they sometimes share in profits.”
The moral of this story is clear:While extrinsic qualifications such as college degrees and other pieces of paper are good, intrinsic qualifications such as leadership skill, are the make-or-break critical factor in success.
“This wild tea was considered so delicious that other people began to train monkeys to collect this rare wild tea. Nowadays the practice of monkeys picking tea has all but died out, except in one small remote village where they still continue this remarkable tradition. No monkeys are harmed or mistreated in order for us to bring this rare brew to you! In fact the monkeys and their ancestors before them have been doing this job for generations”
Today: Let's start with a way to start your day as positively as possible with an outside blog article:
“The way that you start the day nearly always sets the tone for the rest of it. If you begin in a rush, feeling frazzled and harassed, it’s very likely that the rest of the day will go the same way—or worse. It’s well worth a little planning and care to start each day well. It may still go downhill, but at least you won’t have begun in a foul mood.”
I'm going to try something different for the remainder of September, at least. Instead of a daily blog post, I'll be trying a blog post every other day, likely with more "on the spot" content such as quotes and current events with and without commentary.
Let me know what you think with an email or a comment!
The introduction of the Euro is an example of progression in the classic economy toward an all-digital economy.On the first of January 2002, the Euro became the standard currency of the member countries of the European Union.The Euro was introduced because the barriers to trade created inefficiency and waste and current systems created less value in each of their monies. This affected European countries when conducting business with the remainder of the global marketplace.Standardization of the Euro as the single currency in 12 countries of the European Union reduced the cultural barriers to trading with one another and unified at least 12 separate markets.The unified European marketplace is making it easier for other major markets in the world to do business with them, as well.Despite earlier doubts, the Euro has gained market value to be nearly of the same value as the U.S. Dollar, the most compared-to currency in the world.
This introduction of the Euro has been indicative as a case study of what evolving several markets into a unified marketplace can do to an economic system.Unifying markets can be defined as unifying resources, however, there are the structural changes that need to take place including infrastructure, demand, and a single currency.The infrastructure, as noted earlier, exists in the current capacity of the Internet.Further redundancies, such as more “backbone servers” that operate the core of the Internet, are necessary; as is the need for more bandwidth increases and the standardization of the languages and protocols that transport data.The demand exists because of increased efficiency involved with international transactions, thus relieving some of any trade deficit or increasing any trade surplus:This effect alone would sell the governments of the world to the idea, keeping in mind that the U.S. Government accounts for roughly one third of all monetary transactions in our $10 trillion economy.The single currency in this new, all-digital system would be simple:The “credit.”If all national markets were to utilize this “credit,” it would decrease the amount of waste in the world today.A major problem that critics are likely to point out is the problem plaguing individual currencies today is inflation.The best way to arrange this is to mimic the way that the European Union dealt with introducing the Euro to member nations: Rules were enacted to impose a strict level of fluctuations on the Euro.These rules were strict, since countries who wished to participate in the euro and be a part of "Euroland" had to pass some economic tests referred to as convergence criteria:
“The country's annual government budget deficit (the amount of money it owes) cannot exceed 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP, the total output of the economy).
The total outstanding government debt (the cumulative total of each year's budget deficit) cannot exceed 60 percent of GDP.
In order to push down inflation rates and encourage more stable prices, the country's rate of inflation must be within 1.5 percent of the three best performing EU countries.
The average nominal long-term interest rate must be within 2 percent of the average rate in the three countries with the lowest inflation rates. (Interest rates are measured on the basis of long-term government bonds and/or comparable securities.)
The country's exchange rates must stay within "normal" fluctuation margins of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) for at least two years. “ (Howstuffworks.com)
With such controls in place, it is likely that a universal “earth credit” would be an attainable standard.
Now that the theoretical groundwork has been laid, how is this somewhat evolutionary, somewhat revolutionary system going to change the way individuals and businesses buy and sell goods and services?Every time that a consumer purchases a good or service a small stream of credits will flow from one place (the consumer’s bank account) to another (the business’s merchant account) through cyberspace; every time that a business takes their margin of the profits gained from that sale to the consumer, and spends that on providing more, better items for the consumer, their account will see a decrease of funds while the business that they purchased the goods from sees an increase in their account.Imagining the endless flow of goods from their manufacturers to the consumers, and the endless flow of credits from them to the companies that serve them, a seamless flow develops between the consumer and the business.This shortens the metaphorical distance between the two, and makes the relationship that the business has with the consumer stronger.This will allow a better product for the consumer and better customer relationship management by the business.It will also allow for the business to better understand the consumers that it serves, and produce better products based on the changing needs of the consumer.By changing the system by which everyone makes their transactions with one another, everything is streamlined and people grow closer and understand one another better.
The forthcoming e-economy will change the way that the world does business in every respect.It will make money worth more, easier to purchase any item in any country, and make relations between businesses and consumers better, streamlined, and more beneficial to both parties.The true question of the e-economy, as I have implied earlier, is rather a question of when as to how:Already the amount of money that passes through “automated clearing houses,” or ACH transactions, each day numbers in the billions of dollars.Even though the governments of the world distribute most of this money, the government has always acted as a catalyst for change in a society.
Bob is a normal, average, everyday person that everyone seems to know and like.Deciding that he needs to stop by the grocery store on his way home after a rough day at the office only to pick up a few items, Bob grabs a few more items than he expected, as he always seems to do.While making his way to the cashier, Bob does a mental scan for to see if there is more cash in his pockets.Remembering that his efforts are futile, Bob stops his search:Cash money has ceased to exist. The world of the future calls for a more efficient economy:One that works on your schedule, by your rules.You are glad when you are paying for your items, because all you do is electronically transfer the necessary credits from your account to the grocery store.This transfer of credits ensures that a person does not need to hunt for cash.In the near future this will be a very plausible scenario, as economic systems move into existing in a purely electronic form.The effect of converting the current classic economy into an all-digital economy will increase the amount of funds in the system.Based on a general understanding of the mechanics of economics, this will have significant impacts on the efficiency of monetary transactions, unification of different economies, and ultimately streamline the spending habits of businesses and consumers worldwide.
Economics, in simplest form, is the “study of how people use their scarce resources to satisfy their unlimited wants,” (McEachern, 2).Resources are those things that go into producing or buying something.These include labor (the work put into it), land (someplace to do it), or time (arguably the most scarce resource of all).The ability of combining these resources and get an end product to the consumer has been what has kept modern-day society buoyant since the Industrial Revolution.This transformation in the way that countries produce goods and sell them to the consumer was felt worldwide between the years of 1760 and 1860, with the more intuitive societies feeling the full impact of the revolution (among them England and the United States).Even today, the rest of the world classifies countries on a first, second, or third –world basis.Although the global economy progressed in quantum leaps throughout the last 250 years, it was not until just before the turn of the millennium that the economy was once greatly altered.
The Internet Revolution started to transform the economy in the latter half of the Twentieth Century with the concept of the electronic data interchange entwined into the backbones of most businesses.This eventually warranted the introduction of the World Wide Web to the masses around 1990 when a group of physicists developed a graphic user interface that would have a profound impact on the masses.The group of physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world's largest particle physics center, had the foresight that would bring the Internet to the masses and change people’s quality of life and the way everyone purchases goods and services.The Industrial Revolution changed the way we did business by streamlining many of the classic economic principles around the world—paper money, demand and supply, centralized economies; this new Internet Revolution would further streamline these principles of economics by preparing for the e-Economy.
One principle behind paying bills is the act of not paying them until shortly before they are due, otherwise known as the present value of a dollar concept.This model states that a dollar today is worth more than that same dollar tomorrow, dictated by inflation—“a persistent increase in the level of consumer prices or a persistent decline in the purchasing power of money, caused by an increase in available currency and credit beyond the proportion of available goods and services” (Dictionary.com).The problem with tangible money is finding the balance between “available currency” (aggregate money supply) and “available goods and services” (aggregate product supply), and therefore, increasing the effects that inflation will have on the economy.Inflation is the real purchasing power of an individual or a business to purchase a good or a service:A dollar today is worth more today than it will be tomorrow.
An inefficiency of coinage lies in the time it takes for the markets to catch up with centralized economic policy.One of the major factors in how well a nation’s economy does is the rules and regulations put onto it by the governing body at the time.In a centralized economy the government closely monitors and regulates monetary flow. If the economy is decentralized, local or regionalized markets impact monetary flow more than any governing entity.In the United States, for example, the Department of the Treasury was granted a $14.705 billion for the 2002 (U.S. Treasury 2002 Budget Summary) budget.The reason why it is attractive for governments to impose fiscal regulations is because of taxation and ultimately a good economy benefits from the amount of money that the government is going to see out of the citizens that it presides over.Of their nearly fifteen billion dollar budget, roughly 63 percent of that is earmarked for the administration of taxation activities.There are billions of dollars of waste when taxing the population under the current economic system in the U.S.According to the “Waste-O-Meter” of Freedom Works, the IRS has wasted $18.1 billion to date on such things from U.S. Postal Service waste ($1.1 billion) to Housing and Urban Development (HUD) waste ($968 million) and approximately $550 million dollars in a failed education audit.Reduction of all monetary activities would help to eliminate this waste by streamlining the centralized bureaucracy surrounding fiscal policy.Better controls would also result as the system goes completely digital.Through the utilization of an information technology infrastructure evolved from today’s infrastructure the effects of the present value of a dollar model will be made up for by the amount of waste saved. In the end all monetary transactions will be far more efficient.By ensuring that the effects of present value are negated by the effects of increased efficiency, attaining buy-in from die-hard economists will be easier. Efficiency must start, though, within the bounds of a single economic system.The European Union’s example of the Euro is an excellent concept of increasing efficiency within the boundaries of a culture.
This month the largest exercise to plan for pandemics in the United States will take place.Financial services firms—to the tune of 1,800—will be participating in this simulation for three weeks.The U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association will learn, on paper, such pressing questions such as how many employees to expect calling in sick, telecommunications issues, service disruptions and, yes, even long lines at ATMs.
“Jim Binder, a spokesman for The Operations Clearing Corp., said the Chicago-based provider of derivatives clearing and settlement services will have 30 to 40 workers involved in the planning exercise. The full details of how the simulation will unfold are being kept secret until it starts Sept. 24, Binder said.”
The simulation reminds me, actually of when we used to play war games back in the Army.One thing that would happen is soldiers would be issued “casualty cards” which depicted what sort of injury one would have if they were shot and not killed.Medics, the solder’s units, and the soldier themselves, could react appropriately.In much the same fashion, firms participating in this simulation won’t be able to choose how many employees they will be losing for the duration:Depicting what events as they would be in a pandemic.
How will this affect the consumer, at least on the surface, though?
“[The U.K.-based Financial Services Authority] said [an equivalent exercise there] showed that some banks would be forced to close branches and reduce banking services, including ATMs. According to the FSA, the test also raised questions about whether the U.K.'s telecommunications infrastructure would be able to support large-scale teleworking for a prolonged period as staff shortages eroded the maintenance capabilities of service providers.”
In a world where catastrophe seems to be something occurring more frequently than in many other times in modern history, something like this seems prudent.And while some minor inconveniences could be experienced for consumers of these various financial service organizations, the long-term benefits will be if something happens catastrophic enough to warrant full implementation of the lessons learned for such an exercise.
Or, at the very least, the lessons learned from such an ordeal can go to help increase effectiveness and efficiency of the organization in peacetime.“Fight as we train, train as we fight.”
Only a monkey, it would seem, can check its ilk. Putting a Common Langur (Presbytis entellus) in charge seems to have become the most cost-effective way of checking groups of the more common Rhesus Macaques (Macaca mul atta) from indulging in vandalism.
[Note from Matthew: Due to the Labor Day holiday in the U.S., today's will be a shorter post.]
Relative to many out there, I’m a young fellow:Born in Montana in 1979, spending my formative years in the upper Midwest, I was exposed to a great mix of the culture of those from decades previous to me and I was able to see the cultures developing in those in decades younger than me.I don’t know if my upbringing was necessarily anything special, but it offered me a perspective that other people might not have.Every so often it seems that a quarrel between the generations arises:Which is better, which is worse, and where the starker of the contrasts lie.People like to compare; with that being said…
The five stages of grief are often put forth when discussing grieving.While we typically couple grief with loss, the dictionary will expand it to mean “The process of feeling distress or sorrow.”High school health classes taught me that there are two kinds of stress…eustress and distress.The first is supposedly the good kind of stress:The type of anxiety that prepares you to do better in a given task:It’s what separates apathy from achievement.Distress, however, is the more famous brother.
Stress is so often something that permeates our lives:From the anxieties that arise in the morning hours through our lying awake in bed at the end of the day worrying about tomorrow.In this endless cycle of waking and sleeping stressors, we often find ourselves with a dose of escapism:Watching the latest celebrities in Hollywood or elsewhere live their lives of misery and take great opportunities and waste them away on the frills, passions, and benefits of the moment.We find ourselves reveling in this misery, most individuals not going past the latest celebutante’s turmoil du jour and failing to get the latest news on how local, national, or world events are shaping the world in which we live.
So often these lives of ours are in the vacuum of a padded bubble in which we have access to so much information, but I’ve seen so many people only go so far as is necessary to make themselves comfortable in their castle, hiding behind a moat, and isolating themselves from any reality that means listening to someone other than a celebrity or comedic news program in order to take in the information that is relevant in some way, shape, or form to their immediate world.
All this arrives to us from a world that has been crafted to be the glamorous one.As a song from a recent movie dictates:“Watch the whores parade for the price of fame,” most everyone in this society clings to some semblance or personal meaning of having glamorous aspects in their lives:From the status symbols of cars, houses, and boats to the bohemian styling of a person that supposedly goes their own way.Living in the bubble, entrenching oneself in the comfort zone, and striving to someone’s definition of glamour and fifteen minutes of fame might be the fun and easy way out, but in the end does it offer the fulfillment that we each want and need in our lives, or does it simply leave us feeling cold and empty as are a majority of the other people that follow this path?
As the week of “doom and gloom” comes to a close, I’d like to take this opportunity to point out a few of the various odds and ends of which I find society becoming more entropic by the day.Among these are cultural divides, moral opportunism, and apathy.
Have you ever walked into a situation and felt entirely out of place, as if you were from a different world compared to the other people there?How about driving along the road, seeing the automobile that’s been modified in ways that you can’t quite understand:Non-stock body parts of different colors, rims worth more money than is probably prudent, and a spoiler that looks like it could be paid for with a $20 out of my pocket and which definitely “spoils” any other augmentations of beauty that the vehicle might have.I was walking out of the local mall the other day, having recently finished servicing a customer there.Ahead of me I saw a young man, a teenager of some vintage, who had an oversized shirt and excessively baggy pants.I tried to review the situation further by determining if he was trying to hold them up or not.I kept thinking to myself “why on earth would I want to see your underwear?”Maybe the whole baggy pants thing is the latest fad, but I don’t see the utility in it.Utility that is strictly and solely for status or otherwise to fit in is lost on me, perhaps, but I can’t help but thinking about all the other places that I can look and see things of a similar nature.Take the girls, for instance, that have the provocative tattoos on their lower backs, something which has been given the term “tramp stamp” coined to describe it due to the commonly-held generalities of the types of girls getting this sort of body art.While what a person does to their own bodies is of their own concern, and it isn’t my place to judge them based on it, they do tend to play into what seems to be a cultural norm.
Think about it:When you speak to one of those kids with the earrings, baggy pants, or similar styles about him or her…what is your expectation?Our expectations will be colored by our biases and our prejudices, but there are certain standards which the culture should be held to:Without resorting to corrupting it.Recently, while I was at work, a college-age student dressed much the same fashion—minus the baggy pants, I believe, came in looking for a job.I recall something being mentioned to the effect after the fact that “I don’t care what people wear when they’re not at work, but if I’m going to offer a job to someone, I don’t think they should be dressed like that.”The rest of the team offered the same sentiments.
Save a deeper analysis of the subject and any agenda I have for a later blog post of my “professional manager” bent, so let’s continue to the next:Moral opportunism.
I am the type of person that means what he says and says what he means.I typically don’t like game playing in my interpersonal relationships and I adhere to a strict code of moral standards:Ones that do not change based on the situation which I find myself to be in.For some years now, I’ve been playing an online roleplaying and strategy game called Battlemaster.I’ve found some staggering truths about life from it, as I firmly believe it to be a macrocosm of the rest of the world.I’ve found that people who have military experience are the best to lead armies, for example.I’ve found that there are certain types of people whom you can rely upon and others that are shaky at best.There are many people that I play Battlemaster with whom I would go onto the battlefield alongside and fight in a foxhole with—this being the highest litmus test that I can offer a fellow human being—and just as many people as I wouldn’t trust to be in that situation with and not have to worry about them looking out for themselves.In this world there are people that you can count on and people that you can count on to practice situational ethics:A moral code which adapts to the situation found in front of the practitioner.My experiences on Battlemaster, just as in other parts of life, have proven to me that there are profiles of the types of people that are this way, and likewise there are profiles for the types of people that you can rely on to be there for you in your time of need.
Why doesn’t anyone do anything about any of this?By and far, I’d have to say that many people in this society, and others, are just apathetic.To the tone of the Bystander Effect, people expect that someone else will always be there to fix things, or that it might just go away on its own.Apathy is the general malaise which fuels entropy, causing things that are already in the trash only to get worse.
Is this really the world that you want to live in, or would you rather live in one that was better?Let your amount of apathy be the judge of that.
"Conventional wisdom is often nothing more than convenient. This blog uncovers the uncommon wisdom that is hidden in our world--either in what lies beneath or in plain sight."
