![]() The brilliant Bill Watterson nails corporatism, perfectly. A mishmash this week, but there’s some really interesting and important developments here. Taskonomy, not Taxonomy: There’s a lot of debate in Knowledge Management circles about when taxonomy (a top-down imposed organizing scheme for subject matter in a library or database) is better and worse than folksonomy (a bottom-up evolving organizing scheme, where people choose their own tags to index the content). Here’s an interesting article by Don Norman that suggests a different approach again: Instead of organizing content by subject matter at all, organize it by its expected (re-)purpose/re-use. Duh! Thanks to Innovation Weekly for the link. What Do You Do When There’s No Profit In Curing a Terrible Disease?: Black fever kills a half million people a year, but because they’re mostly poor, Big Pharma has simply abandoned developing and marketing drugs that could easily eradicate the disease. So a small charity has stepped in to bring the drug to market, and had to fight huge hurdles thrown in its way by corporatists and bureaucrats. But they’ve persevered, and in the process developed yet another promising model (like microfinance) to help us replace the shabby and dysfunctional market economy. Bravo! Chronic Under-Employment is No Better Than Unemployment…: US unemployment is shooting up again, even using the horrifically distorted data put out by the Bush Admin to obfuscate the utter failure of its economic programs. But there’s still little attention to the much larger problem of chronic under-employment — people working grueling hours at multiple jobs far beneath their capabilities for pathetic wages and few/no benefits, all in the interests of reducing corporate labour costs, increasing ‘productivity’ and maximizing obscene ROIs for corporate execs and shareholders. Finally, the NYT has caught on, and reports that the number of people who just aren’t putting up with it any more is soaring. Make more room on the Edge! …Ten Reasons Not to Have a Job…: On a related note, Steve Pavlina provides ten good reasons not to have a job, ever. A must read. Thanks to Rob Paterson for the link. … and A Personal Declaration of Independence: And if you need some encouragement to quit your meaningless job, start with Pamela Slim’s video, and then dig further into her blog. Thanks to Rob Paterson and Kathy Sierra for this link. Pay Attention! Innovation Does Start With Customers: Kathy Sierra argues that great innovation is about imagining and creating new needs, not satisfying unmet ones. It’s a compelling and recurring argument among innovation thinkers, but, as I’ve argued before, at length, it’s wrong. “Jerry Springers”: How the US Troops Describe Their Own Iraq Behaviour: If you still need convincing that the US must get out of Iraq, completely, immediately, now, read this. Thanks to Umair Haque for the link. The (False?) Promise of Ethanol: The debate over the potential of ethanol as an alternative fuel rages on, with skeptics saying it’s hopelessly inefficient and just another way to get more massive subsidies for agriculture. The issues are notthat simple, though. Use this post from Salon’s Andrew Leonard to read both sides and make up your own mind. Thought for the Week, a poem, from Orion Magazine, by Reg Saner: Night Coyotes To our dog three coyotes howled |
Navigation
Collapsniks
Albert Bates (US)
Andrew Nikiforuk (CA)
Brutus (US)
Carolyn Baker (US)*
Catherine Ingram (US)
Chris Hedges (US)
Dahr Jamail (US)
Dean Spillane-Walker (US)*
Derrick Jensen (US)
Dougald & Paul (IE/SE)*
Gail Tverberg (US)
Guy McPherson (US)
Honest Sorcerer
Janaia & Robin (US)*
Jem Bendell (UK)
Mari Werner
Michael Dowd (US)*
Nate Hagens (US)
Paul Heft (US)*
Post Carbon Inst. (US)
Resilience (US)
Richard Heinberg (US)
Robert Jensen (US)
Roy Scranton (US)
Sam Mitchell (US)
Tim Watkins (UK)
Umair Haque (UK)
William Rees (CA)
XrayMike (AU)
Radical Non-Duality
Essential Reading
Archive by Category
My Bio, Contact Info, Signature Posts
About the Author (2023)
My Circles
E-mail me
--- My Best 200 Posts, 2003-22 by category, from newest to oldest ---
Collapse Watch:
Hope — On the Balance of Probabilities
The Caste War for the Dregs
Recuperation, Accommodation, Resilience
How Do We Teach the Critical Skills
Collapse Not Apocalypse
Effective Activism
'Making Sense of the World' Reading List
Notes From the Rising Dark
What is Exponential Decay
Collapse: Slowly Then Suddenly
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Making Sense of Who We Are
What Would Net-Zero Emissions Look Like?
Post Collapse with Michael Dowd (video)
Why Economic Collapse Will Precede Climate Collapse
Being Adaptable: A Reminder List
A Culture of Fear
What Will It Take?
A Future Without Us
Dean Walker Interview (video)
The Mushroom at the End of the World
What Would It Take To Live Sustainably?
The New Political Map (Poster)
Beyond Belief
Complexity and Collapse
Requiem for a Species
Civilization Disease
What a Desolated Earth Looks Like
If We Had a Better Story...
Giving Up on Environmentalism
The Hard Part is Finding People Who Care
Going Vegan
The Dark & Gathering Sameness of the World
The End of Philosophy
A Short History of Progress
The Boiling Frog
Our Culture / Ourselves:
A CoVid-19 Recap
What It Means to be Human
A Culture Built on Wrong Models
Understanding Conservatives
Our Unique Capacity for Hatred
Not Meant to Govern Each Other
The Humanist Trap
Credulous
Amazing What People Get Used To
My Reluctant Misanthropy
The Dawn of Everything
Species Shame
Why Misinformation Doesn't Work
The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
The Right to Die
CoVid-19: Go for Zero
Pollard's Laws
On Caste
The Process of Self-Organization
The Tragic Spread of Misinformation
A Better Way to Work
The Needs of the Moment
Ask Yourself This
What to Believe Now?
Rogue Primate
Conversation & Silence
The Language of Our Eyes
True Story
May I Ask a Question?
Cultural Acedia: When We Can No Longer Care
Useless Advice
Several Short Sentences About Learning
Why I Don't Want to Hear Your Story
A Harvest of Myths
The Qualities of a Great Story
The Trouble With Stories
A Model of Identity & Community
Not Ready to Do What's Needed
A Culture of Dependence
So What's Next
Ten Things to Do When You're Feeling Hopeless
No Use to the World Broken
Living in Another World
Does Language Restrict What We Can Think?
The Value of Conversation Manifesto Nobody Knows Anything
If I Only Had 37 Days
The Only Life We Know
A Long Way Down
No Noble Savages
Figments of Reality
Too Far Ahead
Learning From Nature
The Rogue Animal
How the World Really Works:
Making Sense of Scents
An Age of Wonder
The Truth About Ukraine
Navigating Complexity
The Supply Chain Problem
The Promise of Dialogue
Too Dumb to Take Care of Ourselves
Extinction Capitalism
Homeless
Republicans Slide Into Fascism
All the Things I Was Wrong About
Several Short Sentences About Sharks
How Change Happens
What's the Best Possible Outcome?
The Perpetual Growth Machine
We Make Zero
How Long We've Been Around (graphic)
If You Wanted to Sabotage the Elections
Collective Intelligence & Complexity
Ten Things I Wish I'd Learned Earlier
The Problem With Systems
Against Hope (Video)
The Admission of Necessary Ignorance
Several Short Sentences About Jellyfish
Loren Eiseley, in Verse
A Synopsis of 'Finding the Sweet Spot'
Learning from Indigenous Cultures
The Gift Economy
The Job of the Media
The Wal-Mart Dilemma
The Illusion of the Separate Self, and Free Will:
No Free Will, No Freedom
The Other Side of 'No Me'
This Body Takes Me For a Walk
The Only One Who Really Knew Me
No Free Will — Fightin' Words
The Paradox of the Self
A Radical Non-Duality FAQ
What We Think We Know
Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark
Healing From Ourselves
The Entanglement Hypothesis
Nothing Needs to Happen
Nothing to Say About This
What I Wanted to Believe
A Continuous Reassemblage of Meaning
No Choice But to Misbehave
What's Apparently Happening
A Different Kind of Animal
Happy Now?
This Creature
Did Early Humans Have Selves?
Nothing On Offer Here
Even Simpler and More Hopeless Than That
Glimpses
How Our Bodies Sense the World
Fragments
What Happens in Vagus
We Have No Choice
Never Comfortable in the Skin of Self
Letting Go of the Story of Me
All There Is, Is This
A Theory of No Mind
Creative Works:
Mindful Wanderings (Reflections) (Archive)
A Prayer to No One
Frogs' Hollow (Short Story)
We Do What We Do (Poem)
Negative Assertions (Poem)
Reminder (Short Story)
A Canadian Sorry (Satire)
Under No Illusions (Short Story)
The Ever-Stranger (Poem)
The Fortune Teller (Short Story)
Non-Duality Dude (Play)
Your Self: An Owner's Manual (Satire)
All the Things I Thought I Knew (Short Story)
On the Shoulders of Giants (Short Story)
Improv (Poem)
Calling the Cage Freedom (Short Story)
Rune (Poem)
Only This (Poem)
The Other Extinction (Short Story)
Invisible (Poem)
Disruption (Short Story)
A Thought-Less Experiment (Poem)
Speaking Grosbeak (Short Story)
The Only Way There (Short Story)
The Wild Man (Short Story)
Flywheel (Short Story)
The Opposite of Presence (Satire)
How to Make Love Last (Poem)
The Horses' Bodies (Poem)
Enough (Lament)
Distracted (Short Story)
Worse, Still (Poem)
Conjurer (Satire)
A Conversation (Short Story)
Farewell to Albion (Poem)
My Other Sites
Steve Pavlina’s next blog article was, not surprisingly, titled “10 Myths About Self-Employment”. So, while he started by putting down the whole idea of jobs, he quickly added that being self-employed (a.k.a. entrepreneurship) is not easy either. Gotta love a guy who is able to play his own devil’s advocate. :)There was also a rebutal to Steve’s “10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job”, where someone stated that finding a great company with a visionary CEO and truely professional collegues can also be extremely enlightening because of mentoring and of mild competition stimulating people into innovating. I think that this is a very valid point, but then again, there hardly seems to be any companies out there that really are worth working for.
That’s a cool poem. Steve Pavlina links are always juicy too. :)