Indeed.com tracks job postings nationally. Compare the March, 2010 yearly change chart above to the October, 2009 chart below, previously published here. Yearly change in the job listings for all the industries turned positive, except construction, still at zero coming of the worst decline and the healthcare, showing the net largest gain during the great recession and still posting the most job listings amongst the industries. There is even an improvement in the “Media and Newspapers”, what’s that all about? Retail shows the biggest gain. Shop till you drop, literally.
The new conventional rocket called Prompt Global Strike above. Evidently the launch of the next generation X-37B Spaceship might have been only to divert attention from the Prompt Global Strike test. And now Russians put on the market the new cruise missile weapon that hides in a shipping container, AKA “Club-K Container Missile System” complete with a promotional soviet-style (that music again…, bastards) animation on YouTube. Club-K not only hides in a container but launches up to four satellite controlled missiles that could hit the same target from all sides: ►click to continue
There have been a lot of incoming links to the “pictures” over here. Is there anything more hideous than the LiveJournal Russian blogs, I mean besides the Facebook? But you know already by that name, there will be noting “live” in the journal (as there is no “face to face” or “books” in the Facebook). There is a quote by Jaron Lanier describing a “second-order expression”:
“The distinction between first-order expression and derivative expression is lost on true believers in the hive. First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a whole that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world. Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first order-expression.”
To be alive is to be born a human and what makes a human alive is that he or she is a world onto itself, a unique and complete cosmos. Conversely a derivative, fragmented and impulsive commentary is stillborn. Naturally a web site dedicated to this type of expression will try to overcompensate with the name. The first-order expression is not easy and rare but you can tell a lot by the direction.
The graffiti artist known as Bansky, Sale Ends Today, from the LA Series.
As much as the content of our society is advertising, the content of an ancient empire was sacrifice. But could it be that we are as delusional about the usefulness of advertising as people were about the sacrifices? These things are very hard to measure, even given the spy grade tools of the Internet and this is precisely the point. As long as people believe that it works, it’s all that counts. Speaking of the propelled by the ads Internet, as long as there are budgets allocated to “the Google strategy”, “the Facebook strategy”, “Twitter strategy”, etc. – it’s “what’s people do”. And now this timely riff by Joseph Javier Perla – Facebook is a Ponzi Scheme. Joseph is right, there is the novelty curve. The Internet is pretty good for point of purchase links but terrible for the classic “let’s create the vibe and the image” branding. People will catch on eventually, they always do.
Nassim Taleb tweeted few days ago: “You can be certain that the CEO of a corp has a lot to worry about when he announces publicly that “there is nothing to worry about”. This reminds me that David Kelsey hooked me up with a Shalom Auslander quote: “I was raised on a steady diet of Holocaust films, books, newsreels, and stories. By ‘never again,’ it was clear that my teachers meant ‘again.’ They meant, ‘Bet on it.’ They meant, ‘Hide some cigarettes in your underpants, you can trade them for bread.” The orthodox culture today is the expectation and assumed behavior that must trigger another destruction. And then there finally will be a relief, thank God the world still functions as it supposed too, there is a supreme order and at the root of that order are the sacrificed Jews, they inevitably must be slaughtered for this all to makes sense. Jews never wait for a messiah they always expect another destruction and it defines every fiber of the culture.
Arianna got it right this time – Shorting The Middle Class:
“Thirty years ago, top executives at S&P 500 companies made an average of 30 times what their workers did — now they make 300 times what their workers make. And between 2000 and 2008, the poverty rate in the suburbs of the largest metro areas in the U.S. grew by 25 percent — making these suburbs home to the country’s largest and fastest-growing segment of the poor.”
Nassim Taleb advocates free style expertise:
“My idea of naturalistic/Paleo fitness: the broadest domain bandwidth, freedom from the captivity & injurious gym machines (resembling Tayloristic methods in working out). So started walking/sprinting on “rough”, fractal surfaces. I am lucky to have a place within walking distance from the best park for that; along the coastline with close to a mile of rocks. Exhilarating, except for my broken nose. Just as chess skills only help you in chess (we know that those who can play chess games from memory don’t have strong memory for other matters), classroom math only helps in classrooms, weight training in gyms almost only helps you in gyms, a specific sport almost only helps you in that specific sport, and walking on smooth Euclidian surfaces causes injuries somewhere deep inside your soul. When you run and jump on rocks, your entire brain and body are at work; you stretch your back better than with yoga; every muscle in your body is involved; no two movements will be identical (unlike running in gyms); you become yourself.”
I agree mostly, one must stay away from the torture machines in the gyms. Flat surface walking was always a man’s routine though, it’s acceptable and much preferred to the unnatural repetitive motions in a gym or the deranged weight lifting. My second best to the rock formations are the Harvard Stadium steps, I climbed them today, and of course swimming. Taleb mentions in the post Erwan Le Corre who is an advocate of the free style exercise (video) and John Durant, an advocate for the Paleo diet, the pre-agriculture era diet of hunters gatherers. This diet has no grains, sugars or milk. The core of the diet are meat, greens, nuts, berries and vegetables. I must also mention that the highest form of exercise is still a fee style dancing, it’s even unconstrained by the prey or food gathering patterns. And this precisely is the subject of the song by the Killers – Are we Human or are we Dancer?
The Daily Beast ranked 40 top-using cities. Here are top 10:
- Eureka, California – Regular Users: 11.3%
- Tallahassee, Florida – 10.8%
- Manhattan, NY – 10.1%
- Boston, MA – 9.7%
- San Francisco – 10%
- Portland, Oregon – 10.9%
- Chico, California – 11.3%
- Seattle – 8.8%
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Burlington, Vermont – 11.4%
- Detroit – 9.8%
Following the tremendous popularity of the 1948 series, perhaps this is the moment to look at the year after, the first year of the sate. This is also an opportunity to honor the photography and human inspiration of John Philips. All photos in this post are by John Phillips.
Nurses listening to the opening ceremonies of the new Medical School.
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I was half asleep about 4 am last might when I read this article by Davis Brooks – Riders on the Storm. By the way of a comment. I don’t think Brooks understands the Internet or he uses it as an extension of the old media. I don’t think he actually participates in the online forums or comments even to his own articles. His output got ported from the print to digits and he doesn’t recognizance that the nature of the participatory medium is not the same. There is a difference between a web site where people just cruise through and the site people engage with. And yes the participatory sites are what the Internet is all about and they are polarized to the Mad Max, reflecting the binary digital architecture. Brooks is not going to convince me that the invention of the automobile will lead to white people driving through the black neighborhoods and in turn to the multiculturalism.
If someone told me that you can have thousands of people cycling through a web site in just few days. 99% of them vising one viral page (even though the page is 1 of 3!). Not leaving a comment and not a single subscription to the RSS, I would have called you crazy. But this is exactly what is happening for the last few days. People treat the internet as anonymous interconnected mush, it has nothing to do with an author, just another faceless McDonald’s along the highway. I can’t describe how disheartening this is. This is a poisonous culture and it is so ingrained there is really no remedy. And it’s like that by design, in the advertising culture measured by click it’s precisely the faceless visitor that you are after. I am going to watch TV, at least there you know that one person looks different from the other. TV is more personal.
When people say “I don’t wish it on anyone” what they really mean is “I hope you all get it, so you know how I feel”. And here is one of the two major flaws of the unintelligent design. First is that people think in terms of patterns, like “Germans in WWI came around here and they were so nice and polite, why we need to run?”. But even in the small things people tend to operate, decide and advise based on a pattern, they chart the past to erroneously assume that the pattern persists. They even confuse wisdom with the memorized patterns.
And the second flaw is the inability to understand without an experience. In the past years I recognized how dramatically experience changes our perception and how imperfect is the abstract knowledge, but I don’t wish it on anyone.
