NFL playoffs

The playoffs have mirrored the regular season. 8-8 teams getting in; 10-6 teams going home. Only one team upheld its seed: Steelers. Cardinals were not supposed to win. Eagles were not supposed to win…what’s with all the birds? Anyway, I think it will come to mistakes in the NFC, and heroics in the AFC. The Cardinals and the Eagles both have the experience, the talent and the QB to beat the other team…who will make the least mistakes? That’s your winner. AFC? The Steelers are (yes, arguably) the flat out, look it up, better team. That means that either it will be the most boring game or the most exciting. Either the Steelers will systematically put away the Ravens, just as they did the Chargers; or, the Ravens will (and, honestly, no disrespect to a top-level team) pull something off and upset.

dogs love cheese

Dogs really love cheese, and it’s a little creepy. Descended from wolves, pack hunters, carnivores! Is that a slice of Kraft American? Hot damn! Aged dairy? Really? Hell, I like it, too.

Stroke

The Stroke
Films are…important. They are. They tell us who we are, they point out who we should be and they tantalize us with what we might become. They also stroke us to be damned. That last one hurts, but it is true. In fact, not only is it true, it is arguably the most essential talent of cinema…the stroke. It’s a cannibalistic pursuit to be certain; but aren’t those the most fun?

Salad days and a little discipline…
Our current financial crisis has several obvious themes. We were undisciplined. We were overly optimistic. We were greedy. Sometimes, we were criminals. These are all universal human qualities that we are not likely to overcome anytime soon. Consequently, it is uninformative to point out these traits as the cause of the current crisis. We did not magically start buying houses we couldn’t afford. We did not magically start lending credit when it was not prudent to do so. We did not magically become too optimistic to be at least somewhat realistic.
Economists have a complicated subject matter to say the least; just try reading their books. The economy is really just an abstraction of standard Machiavellian (Hobbesian, if you prefer) human interaction. So how did it get so out of whack? We didn’t change, I assure you. The “globalization” of everything is also uninformative, I’d argue. For one thing, everyone with a Masters degree and a camera-ready mug has been yakking about “the global economy” for over 15 years…we would have seen that from around the corner. Somebody wake up and figure it out. Please?

it's 4:30 in the morning and I can't sleep

I recently watched a film about the late Jeffery Dahmer. Wow. I know that the economy is scary right now, but at least he’s dead. The actor who played him was someone I’d seen in many other projects, but when the credits rolled, I jumped up and ran out of the house and down the street so I did not catch his name. When I returned to the house, some Will Smith movie was on…there were vampires in it, but thankfully none were wearing freaky 70’s amber tinted aviator sunglasses.
I’m pretty sure that not one person who claims to be my friend actually likes me. And people have to try really hard to become my friend because I am the antithesis of outgoing. You have to practically present me with an Academy Award before I will believe that you want to hang out with me. I have exactly 9 friends, 14 friendly acquaintances, 97 relatives and the rest of you…well, I am still waiting for my Academy Award (you should see me at the annual elementary school Christmas party…arguably my best work.) And there are persons in my freezer.
How did I get to a place in life where I am made to agonize over the patterns on someone else’s 19 pairs of black socks, and the person I am supposed to be sharing my life with can’t be bothered to wipe his ass? And nobody likes cold water. The only reason that people take the cold water bottles out of the fridge is that they are leaving the warm ones in the garage for everyone else. And why is it that most households are full of folks who can never find anything? I have a rule in my house: if you claim that I have to find it for you and it takes me less than ten seconds, you’re busted. Unless it’s the kitchen…then there is the odd case of knowing exactly where it is when you need it, but having no clue where it goes when you’re done with it.
I’m off to stock the fridge.

something I wrote

wrote this a few years ago, lost it to a crashed laptop and now have salvaged it from the internet...

The Knowledge Economy and Diversity:
New Opportunity for Black Americans
Angela Larson
Introduction
Many black Americans believe that Capitalism is evil. This belief underscores a mindset of such longevity and ironclad reputation that its core tenets have become near apriorisms in our collective consciousness. The central maxim of this worldview is that capitalism’s promise of unchecked wealth accumulation for individuals inspires such incurable avarice as to make racial and class oppression, dehumanization of the American worker and a host of other social ills, positively inevitable. Corollaries to this claim are the equally pervasive notions that American corporations intentionally prioritize the racial and cultural status quo alongside profits and that the American economic system is designed and maliciously directed to do the same.
Black political leaders, liberals and even academics have so often condemned competitive free enterprise historically as a primary source of class oppression that it is now seen, in principle, as such. Little wonder, then, that any positive linkage between corporate America and progress within the black community easily goes unnoticed. But a careful survey of our nation’s past and current economic landscape soundly refutes this view and reveals the emergence of unprecedented financial opportunity for minorities. Capitalism is not a dirty word, and the American Corporation is not the enemy.
With our national economy continuing to struggle, CEO’s being led away in handcuffs, and war on the horizon, it may seem like odd timing for talk of new economic opportunity for black Americans in the corporate setting, but let’s set aside the headlines for a moment and consider what the future of the "new economy" will mean for people of color.
The Industrial Age has ended and a new Information Age has emerged to take its place. In the last century, the advent of mass production gave rise to a full realization of the enormous potential of economies of scale and made the U.S. the richest nation on earth. Today we are at the vanguard of a new economic age, driven not by steel and cars, but by technology and innovation; and knowledge—more than labor, location, or raw materials—is now the crucial economic resource.
One cannot escape the host of new nomenclatures highlighting this economic shift: IT, ICT, E-conomy, E-commerce, Information Economy, Knowledge Economy, such terms are increasingly tossed around as academics, executives, members of the media and office workers everywhere join in the growing commentary and discussion regarding the new global economy and what its future has in store.
At least two new economic principles have emerged in this new knowledge society. First, innovation is king. It now powers the economy of all developed nations. Second, human capital (or if you prefer, intellectual capital) has replaced all other forms—financial or material—as the most important corporate asset. In response, corporations have pushed the aggressive pursuit and maximization of human capital to the strategic forefront, paving the way for an explosion of "knowledge workers" in all spheres of business. There are now over 38 million such workers in the U.S., and their increasing economic dominance translates into radical departures from the traditional corporate picture. To understand these changes and how they are impacting the fortunes of black Americans, we must understand who these workers are.
The Creative Class
We’re all familiar by now with at least one survivor of the dot.com boom and bust of the late 90’s, "the office IT guy." Unshaven, no socks, a colorful tattoo (or three) peeking out from his no-collar shirts and bedraggled chinos, he likes mountain biking, coffee houses, live music and showing up to work at 10 in the morning. No longer an oddity of the tech-underground, 20something bohemian professionals of similar ilk are populating small firms and big corporations alike; yesterday’s corporate outsider is today’s cutting-edge insider.
In a 2002 book titled, The Rise of the Creative Class1, Richard Florida, a professor of regional economic development at the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University, has transformed the "knowledge worker" from a mere employment demographic into a full-fledged socio-economic phenomenon, heralding the emergence of what he calls the Creative Class. At its center is a "super creative core" comprised of people "whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content." In addition to the obvious candidates such as artists and writers, Florida includes engineers, software developers, scientists and people working in architecture and design. Around the core we find a much broader group of "creative professionals," employed in business and finance, law or health care and related fields. These people "engage in complex problem solving that involves a great deal of independent judgment and requires high levels of education and human capital."
Our economy’s deepening dependence upon the Creative Class is made obvious by noting its dramatic expansion as a percent of the total workforce. All told, the Creative Class has consistently increased its ranks in the past century, rising from 3 million in 1900 to 38.3 million in 1999. In the 1990’s alone, the Creative Class climbed in numbers from about 20 percent to its current 30 percent of all employed people. Conversely, the same period has seen a steady decline in the Working Class population (which employs the majority of the black workforce), which currently accounts for 33 percent of all working people. And while the service class (consisting of lower-end health care, office and clerical workers, as well as food service and preparation, etc.) is still the largest, with about 55 million workers and 43 percent of the total workforce, it is the Creative Class that is driving our economy.
The impetus to take advantage of the Creative Class is reflected in a number of economic trends in recent decades. Florida sites, for example, an over 800 percent increase in research and development spending, which he characterizes as "systematic investment in creativity," since 1950. Additionally, there is the development of the modern venture capital system, which, according to Florida, generated new avenues for innovation and creativity by "unleash[ing] the talents and energies of creative people who previously might have chafed within the confines of big firms or research labs." Venture capital expenditures increased from less than $1 billion in 1990 to over $100 billion by 2000 (before decreasing to less than $40 billion in the wake of the 2001 stock market crash). And while the economy has yet to witness a substantial recovery, there can remain little doubt that our nation’s fortunes are tied to the Creative Class economy.
Creativity in the Workplace
As Florida puts it, "Creativity2 has come to be valued—and systems have evolved to encourage and harness it—because new technologies, new industries, new wealth and all other good economic things flow from it." He notes the emergence of a new "creative ethos" in which "creativity, individuality, difference and merit" have replaced the "organizational ethos" of the postwar economy, where social and professional conformity reigned supreme. Florida avers of his Creative Class mentality: "Individuality, self-expression and openness to difference are favored over the homogeneity, conformity and ‘fitting in’ that defined the organizational age." Consequently, the old "top down" corporate paradigm wherein behemoth bureaucracies, and a multitude of managers, policies and directives from above kept executives and company men well in line has been usurped by a decidedly less structured "bottom-up" gestalt, designed to allow creative people the intellectual and managerial freedom their creativity requires.
Recruitment strategies have also changed. Companies now compete for talented personnel with increasing disregard for race, age, ethnicity or gender. What black Americans must understand is that this is not the result of sweeping social change, nor legally imposed quotas or otherwise artificially generated policies devised to increase "diversity" in the workplace. It is happening because economic success now demands it.
Capitalism, in its purest form, is a meritocratic economic system, meaning that it ignores ideological, social and political considerations. Survival is overwhelmingly a matter of finding ways to maximize profits and minimize costs over one’s competitors. This is a simple, self-interested principle that operates without passion or prejudice. In the "Brave New World" of post-industrial America, this principle manifested itself primarily through the implementation of methodologies intended to increase and streamline production. The rise of the assembly line and large factory systems required tight control and monitoring of all aspects of production to ensure maximum efficiency, resulting in near universal adoption of the "command and control," military-style model, which demanded that every employee accept and maintain strict adherence to the
corporate hierarchy, and carry out perfect "push-button" execution of everyday responsibilities.
Under such a system, is it any wonder that corporate America churned out homogenous, "cookie-cutter" executives, from whom conformity, both in and out of the office, was expected and even demanded? That ethnic and cultural minorities were unable to build significant inroads within the corporate structure of the "organizational age" is as much a consequence of the existing economic milieu as it was the result of any longstanding prejudicial hiring policies or otherwise "institutionalized" occurrences of corporate racism.
This claim may seem controversial, but the fact remains: the sorts of radically individualistic and idiosyncratic personalities, work habits and interests, not to mention the increasingly diverse backgrounds, of today’s Creative Class working environment would have been utterly antithetical to success in the working world of 1950; today, that environment is crucial. Talent and creativity cannot be prioritized without the introduction of diversity, just as conformity cannot be maximized less its exclusion. Ironically, that the capitalist system is blind to such distinctions is exactly what has lead to its perennial denigration by liberal and black political leaders.
Not only has diversity increased because of a shift in priority from conformity to creativity, with recruiters seeking out talent over a propensity to fit in, diversity itself is highly conducive to the creative process, thus generating its own inherent value. This means that firms now have an intrinsic motivation for being color blind with regard to personnel, and talent acquisition becomes even more merit based. An organization that continues to filter potential employees according to race will be penalized in the long run, even if it highlights creativity and talent thereafter; a diverse organization, so long as it recruits its employees for their skills, will inevitably thrive over one that stubbornly supports the status quo.
Hence the increase in diversity among companies at the vanguard of technical innovation and economic growth. But, as Florida points out, "it is a diversity of educational elites, limited to highly educated, creative people." Corporate offices now look more like university research labs and think tanks, where diverse peoples have always gravitated and interacted. But, as is the case at many such institutions, African Americans are woefully underrepresented in occupations associated with the Creative Class, especially in high tech fields.
Black Americans in the Knowledge Economy
The percentages of black men and women employed in managerial and professional occupations are far below those for whites; and with only 119,000 engineers, 45,000 doctors and 48,000 lawyers in the year 2000, blacks account for precious few of the 38.3 million members of the Creative Class.3 Not surprisingly, median incomes of black families relative to white families have changed little in over 30 years, with black
household earnings remaining less than 60 percent of that of white households.4 Even more unsettling, the median net worth (assets less liabilities) of white households was about 10 times that of black households in 1990, with the past decade bringing negligible improvement. In 1999, for example, the median net worth of households headed by older black people was $13,000, compared to $181,000 for households helmed by older whites.5 And, while incomes for blacks have risen in recent years, at $30,439 for an average black household in 2000, most blacks make considerably less than a single member of Florida’s Creative Class, for whom just under $50,000 is the average yearly income.6
These numbers, while disturbing, are not new. Nor can they be expected to improve simply because American firms now cater to the Creative Class. However, there are crucial lessons for the black community. The rise of the Creative Class effectively debunks the accepted wisdom that says Capitalism is always a bad thing for minorities and outsiders. The knowledge economy proves that capitalism is blind to race, creed or color: witness the dramatic explosion of diversity across all categories within the high tech sector. When diversity translates into dollars, diversity there will be. This can hardly be a surprise to even the most casual student of economics, as the capitalist system is based upon purely self-interested interaction between individuals for mutual benefit, in a free market system, unfettered by ideological or political constraints. Under capitalism, rationality dictates that individuals and financial entities will inevitably sacrifice political ideals for economic gain. Capitalism is, therefore, not inherently a source of oppression, but rather a potent force for social change.
Unless black leaders relinquish the political tunnel vision that has dominated the past half century, and refocus energies upon increasing opportunity among blacks for entry into archetypically Creative Class occupations through an emphasis on job training and education, black Americans face being left behind in the next half century. The time for heavy-handed racial politics has passed. The liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed: economic gains have been minimal, and education levels among blacks of all age groups continue to lag. The rise of the Creative Class is not the result of social engineering, policy experiments, or any other artificially contrived means; but it is an example of how the outsider has become the insider, of how the minority mentality can become mainstream. In short, the rise of the Creative Class reveals an opportunity that black Americans should not fail to grasp.
1Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life (Basic Books, 2002).
2Note that it is human creativity—the ability to produce novel "forms," be they ideas, technologies or strategies—that more appropriately denotes the central commodity in today’s economy, and the term "creative capital" replaces "intellectual capital" as a more apt characterization of the driving force behind our nation’s economy. One of Florida’s main contributions, then, is to shift the emphasis on human capital from the intellectual to the creative, claiming that the former (specialized knowledge and technological information) presents merely the "tools and materials of creativity" and that "innovation…is its product."
3Census 2000, the Survey of Minority-Owned Business Enterprises, the Current Population Survey and the Statistical Abstract of the United States. http://www.census.gov/statab/www/
4 Council of Economic Advisors for the President’s Initiative on Race, "Changing America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being by Race and Hispanic Origin." September 1998. http://www.access.gpo.gov/eop/ca/pdfs/ca.pdf/
5Census 2000, the Survey of Minority-Owned Business Enterprises, the Current Population Survey and the Statistical Abstract of the United States. http://www.nih.gov
6Census 2000, the Survey of Minority-Owned Business Enterprises, the Current Population Survey and the Statistical Abstract of the United States. http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/2001/cb01-158.htmlhttp

autonomous robotics on the battlefield

I just read an article in the Science Times by Cornelia Dean about current research into “intelligent robots,” that could potentially “behave more ethically in the battlefield than humans currently can.” I’ve quoted a researcher named Ronald C. Arkin, from Georgia Tech. Arkin’s basic hypothesis is that the stressors of wartime, including but not limited to, fear, anger, anxiety, the loss of colleagues, the handling of corpses, etc. are likely to cause human soldiers to abuse noncombatants, as well as the Geneva Conventions/rules of engagement. Okay, war is hell and we all know that it often brings out the worst in us. But are autonomous, armed robots, entrusted with the power to make real time battlefield decisions really a viable answer? (I’d like to point out that the article I read and all of its scientific contributors were very even handed about the potential moral and ethical issues here; however the research is funded and underway.)
Why pursue autonomous robots when we have solid “drone” technology already in place? The point is not to relieve ourselves of the potentially damning moral and ethical dilemmas of wartime, is it?! I don’t think so. The point is to reduce the number of dead, disfigured and otherwise mentally destroyed human beings that wars churn out by the thousands. What we want to do is live up to the standards we’ve tried to put in place. Replacing actual human beings with “autonomous robots” isn’t likely to do this. What I think it would do, is deaden us to the very grim realities that we are trying to avoid. And just in terms of logic, doesn’t drone technology eliminate, in at least as much theory as that supporting Arkin’s research, the very stressors that he claims cause us humans to behave immorally and unethically in times of war in the first place?! The point of drones is to replace the precious lives of actual human beings with metal. But the decisions are still in our hands. Replacing those decisions with more metal, is, in my opinion, antithetical to the principals we’re trying to uphold.