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The weather is terrible, and I feel lousy. Perhaps you do, too. Here’s a piece on a possible reason why, from ten years ago.
On a grey and dreary day, nearly everyone is running a bit low. You can see it in people’s faces – they’d rather snuggle under a blanket with the cats up close and warm. Some of us, however, are even more sensitive to the weather than that. We are the human barometers.
The basis of any capitalist or free market system is risk analysis. Every investment, whether in time or capital or short-term inventory is made based on the potential reward for success and the potential risk of failure. Because these events happen in the future, confidence or anxiety often play a large role in the process.
Generally speaking, it’s all about the availability of the critical resource being invested. People with nothing left to lose often put their time into a project because their time is all they have. Capital markets flush with cash are often looking for places that will give them a big return. Yet in all of these cases, emotions eventually become important.
Lately, nerves are raw. Investment? You gotta be kidding.
This is a post from four years ago. After a weekend of robotics I am plain exhausted!
You probably have a better idea about how to do something. But will it work? You’ll never know until you try. When you do give it a go, you may find that getting there requires a lot of compromises along the way before your dream is realized. Or, perhaps, you’ll simply give up – blaming your own inability to make it happen or blaming the world for being so darned unfair.
Both experiences are simply part of human nature meeting reality. We’re all idealists at heart, at least in a certain sense. Only a few people have the skills necessary to make those dreams a reality and much of the time they have to keep their eyes on the prize. A dream is one thing, but getting there requires wide-awake attention.
That is why an open, democratic political system can’t live by rigid ideology alone.
At the regional FIRST Robotics competition in Minneapolis, the Czech team had some problems. Far from home, they had to improvise to get their robot on the field in time to compete. Fortunately, our team had a big supply of encoders purchased directly from China, well ahead of the long lead-time for parts like this. It was nice to help.
Posting pictures and stories about the event, my facebook feed also contains people convinced that kids from the same generation couldn’t possibly organize a march on Washington. There had to be others, adults who made it happen. The kids just have to be nothing more than tools.
I’ve given up telling people like that what I’ve learned from this generation, so very much like the last one to grow up in a Depression. It seems as plain as sunrise to me. You ask these kids to storm the beaches at Normandy, I’m pretty sure they will take freakin’ Normandy. More to the point, they’re willing to put in the work it takes to create a world where you don’t have to storm the beaches.
I wrote this ten years ago. The financial collapse of 2008 was still six months away and GW Bush was President. Yet big hunks of it are more true now than they were at that time. We have indeed stagnated in the face of “everything is possible” and decided to wallow in our own refusal to make choices on how to move forward. Will this still be relevant in 2028?
When I was young, I lived in a time and place where just about anything was possible. It’s amazing just how terrifying that prospect was.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 