woke up to watch sunrise both mornings, he was grateful my camera's in the shop.
detoured for greenwood chicken.
finished up a new song with curtis, to accompany an old film de miguel.
unearthed my favorite karl marx quote, "the idiocy of rural life." a winner both standalone and in-context.
am disappointed criminals' facebook interests and status updates are now making front page news on the financial times. if you don't have anything important to say, don't say it.
read why nothing works, © 1980 the original freakonomics. the table of contents says it all. not his strongest book, but a few neat ideas about american oligopoly..
four or fewer companies dominate 99 percent of the domestic production of cars, 92 percent of flat glass, 90 percent of cereal breakfast foods, 90 percent of turbines and turbine engines, 90 percent of electric lamps, 85 percent of household refrigerators and freezers, 84 percent of cigarettes, 83 percent of television picture tubes, 79 percent of aluminum production and 73 percent of tires and inner tubes.
when economists measure productivity, they make absolutely no provision for the quality of what is produced. if five million new toasters, vacuum cleaners, and sewing machines break down each year, the cost of repairing them is not subtracted from the dollar value of the manufacturing sector; rather it gets added to the output of the service sector.
..the roots of change..
what..caused the baby boom? ... fourteen million ex-members of the armed forces-mostly young unmarried men-became eligible for substantial severance bonuses, cheap life insurance, guaranteed low-cost mortgages, and tuition and monthly stipends for education with dependency allotments..these programs temporarily shifted a considerable portion of the actual and anticipated costs of getting married and of rearing children from the nuclear family to the federal budget.
the unions were once one of the great bastions of antifeminism: the men who ran the unions wanted women to stay home for the same reason they wanted blacks to stay on the farms and immigrants to stay across the ocean-to force up the price of labor. for unionized men a worker's wage had at least to be "sufficient to keep his wife and children out of competition with himself."
..and the inseverability of eternity and necessity.
the human quest for ultimate meaning is a formidable force in history, but it rarely if ever exists apart from, above, beyond, or in opposition to the quest for solutions to practical problems...hindu believers were far more interested in praying for the rains to come, for their sick child to get well, and for their cow to have calves than in achieving transcendental bliss through meditation.
wrote an r script to loop through an ftp site and download its entire contents.
9/22/11