Index 
Commerce Desire Thought Process
Commerce: While watching a construction project across the street, replacing a driveway, I mused that machine costs was about $200 an hour, while labor costs were about $50. So much, almost ALL human labor in industrial countries is operating (using), maintaining, designing, or building, done mostly by using other machines. Why? Well, one reason is that for $200 you get $2000 worth of human labor, probably much more. Increasingly machines that aid mental activities are accounting for our time. Security: What is the most important tool of security? “Intelligence” (in the spy v syp jargon). So a growth industry in “intelligence” emerges, made possible by mental machines, seeing machines, hearing machines, smelling machines (dogs still do much better), memory machines (database software), and killing machines. Ah yes, security for all, protection of our “freedom”. To paraphrase many's thoughts on security, especially government bureaucrats: Know everything about everyone and no one is out of control, at least for long. Perhaps we can prevent crime before is happens, SAVE someone’s life, limb, or property. (e.g. the movie "Minority Report" starring Tom Cruise). Then and only then will you be “Free”: free from crime, free from fear, (one of FDR’s four freedoms, according to Jesse Jackson in today’s Sun Times) free from deprivation, free from hunger, free from zealots, free from insults, all this and much more freedom if you just precisely, unwaveringly, submissively, obediently follow the rules – THEN you will be FREE!" Huh? At least the freedom part is nice, basically freedom “from” physical needs (food and winter shelter) and physical coercion by others. ISTMRN we go far beyond that both in desire and law. But security of food and shelter allows me a serenity those without such security would find more difficult to accept, maybe. I can’t say. I can say such needs are cheap in today’s machine dominated world, but also that the whole “engine” thrives on dissatisfaction; the “need” to change things for the better, physically, materially, and perhaps as a superset, morally (or is it the other way around? Or are they separate sphere, incomparable? With rules never to cross between them?) | My paragons of “success” include Tom Hunter from our first meeting in my motel room in Rockville, MD in about 1980 or so. We were writers assigned from Sandia to write the “Confidence Rulemaking” document for DOE. Later he promoted me to management with Dick Lynch’s (his bosses) urging. Dick is the guy who hired me. Another paragon is Pete Maravich, the most deceptively simple basketball player ever. I spent a summer of wild college fun with Pete, first at a basketball camp, then bleaching our hair in streaks with the top down in my converible ’64 Buick Skylark riding down to Ocala, Florida to see my girlfriend, Sharon Skaggs in Florida where her dad managed Silver Springs resort. Oh dear! A dissatisfaction. The parenthesis at the end of the last line is unpaired. A rule broken. A dilemma of whether to “fix” it or leave it. Such vanity, such vanity. You see, I fix things. Contrarianism: Just after I wrote the first of this paragraph, I thought of my “contrarian” perspective, which, through various twists and turns, led to “and it’s been so for a long time.” Even my list of references (bibliography) in my thesis is contrarian because I, as a fresh PhD, up on the latest, greatest research in my field, cited few recent (< 10 years old) citations other than my own work. I told a few others about it. The people I told probably forgot about it within hours of my telling them. I realized I never knew the number, I didn’t ever count it when I wrote my thesis or even afterwards. So I wondered, “Have I been telling a lie?” I do remember conscious awareness of a paucity of recent citations, in fact a conscious, preplanned objective from some dim past during my thesis work, but I never counted. So today I pulled out my old copy and counted. Yep, it shows only 6 of 90 were less than 10 years old. Many theses have hundreds of citations with all but a few, perhaps all, less than 10 years old, some with none less than 2 or 3 years old. So my bibliography is odd, but nobody noticed and I have never told anyone who might understand the joke. Anyway, I fix things: the last pages were decaying and frayed with bent corners, so I glued a card stock to the back of the pages as a protector. For whom I have no idea. But I fix things, sometimes. Vanity, such vanity. |