In the two years I’ve been writing Barataria, I’ve taken one sick day and one vacation day off from a MWF schedule. I’m proud of that record, but with my parents in town and a potential new business opportunity starting to fill my thoughts there wasn’t much room left for a piece today. So I’ve decided to do a clip show – a few highlights of pieces from Barataria past that seem to be popular. I hope you enjoy them!
A Matter of Priority
If you’re trying to keep track of the money spent by our Federal Government for “stimulus”, you must know that it’s not easy. CNN has a guide that I’ve found handy that tells me the Government has committed to $1.9 Trillion (With a capital T) and the Federal Reserve about $6.4 Trillion. It adds up to about $75,000 for every family in the USofA, a number so large that it still defies description. I was wondering if somewhere in all that was, in fact, a bit for our families – or at least the kids who will have to pay for this.
Systemic Connections: Conclusion
We live in a time that seems to rarely be bounded by what we know. All around us are what appears to be an unlimited number of new scientific facts and imaginative ideas. Yet with all of the great products of our minds, we live in uncertain times. Great theories about economic systems have collapsed in disaster. Terrific advances in medicine are not available to everyone because we can’t figure out how to pay for them. Our political system lurches from one gridlocked intersection to another like a New York cabbie punching the accelerator and the brakes in rapid succession.
For all the smarts we have, our world doesn’t look all that smart.
Systemic Connections: Politics
Governments of various kinds and levels are the way people organize and define themselves, and their operating systems are politics. Connections have always been at the heart of politics for obvious reasons. In our modern democracies, journalists have tried valiantly to define elections based on issues and ideas, but it never works – the connections of politics are tribal and personal. People rarely change their affiliations because they’d lose the connections that define them in part, too. Issues come and go, but connections remain. That doesn’t mean that connections in politics never change, but change stalls until the tribes and their purported issues lose all connection with relevance.
Such a time might be now.
Systemic Connections: Economy
The art and skill needed to put knowledge to practical use is more than just what technology is really about – it’s generally seen an increasing share of our economy. The term “Knowledge Economy” comes from Peter Drucker in his 1966 book, “The Age of Discontinuity”. It includes this:
“In a knowledge economy where skill is based on knowledge, and where technology and economy are likely to change fast . . . the only meaningful job security is the capacity to learn fast.”
True enough, since a lot of knowledge applied as an art went to revolutionizing economics itself since that time. But as many of us have learned, the ability to think fast means nothing without the right connections.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 