Questions About The Economy

Would Wall Street have any money if no one trusted faceless inhuman monsters (e.g. "banks") to invest their money? If Wall Street didn't have any money, would the rest of us have more of it? If we invested in ourselves (e.g. by acquiring and developing resources for production, by using extra income to buy time to develop our skills and learn to create value), would we be freer, more independent, more capable, more productive, and therefore wealthier? If we invested in endeavors we believed in, would the world look more like our dreams?

Bring on the Student Loans!

I knew the Department of Education had to be good for something.

time to blog

I've been wishing for time to do a blog for the last two weeks. Tonight I am "attending" an on-line webinar, which means I have half a brain free to do other things that don't require much concentration, like...blogging! So I'm checking in here to tell you, well, to tell you that I am attending an on-line webinar.

Why would I do this? Because they are paying me to do it. As of this week I am a part time tutor for a big tutoring company, and the training process requires me to be logged in to an on-line orientation.

He admits he was wrong

Well, it seems that I maligned the fates when I proposed that I might be prevented in every attempt to get my Texas driver's license. As it happened I was thwarted only one more time, by a representative at the DMV who claimed that I could get a ticket for driving my parents' Ohio-registered car with a Texas license. I sat down with the forms and called the police station, whose number I cleverly entered into my cell phone last year, and asked whether this information was correct. The woman I spoke with on the phone thought it sounded wrong and called an officer to confirm, but when she came back with the answer my phone ran out of batteries.

Not to be discouraged by a mere four fruitless trips to the DMV (It took me seven trips to get my license in the first place. Ask me about it sometime), I dared to venture a fifth, all applicable divine prohibitions notwithstanding. As a result, I am now the proud owner of a small piece of paper which declares that I will have a Texas license within six weeks.

Huh, that doesn't seem quite as triumphant as it did at the time.

Deja DMVu

This morning, for the second time this year, I packed up all the necessary documents to get a driver's license into my briefcase, loaded Buggle into the car, and headed for the DMV. Actually, depending on how you count, this was both the second and third time; the first time, I had to go twice, because when I got there I found I had forgotten the briefcase. When I got back again with the briefcase, I discovered that my social security card was missing.

Today, I very deliberately packed my brand new replacement social security card in with the other documents, and was feeling pretty competent all the way to the DMV, where I bought the same cup of crappy coffee from 6th Street Donuts as last time, having forgotten that food and drink are not permitted in the DMV. Well, Daniel and I would sit outside while I finished the coffee, just like last time...wait, no, last time I was drinking the coffee on the way home to get the briefcase, which of course this time is in the back seat of the...wait, where, under that blanket? Behind the car seat? Hmmm.

Maybe I will never get a Texas Driver's License. When the Iowa license expires I will just start biking everywhere. It sounds easier than getting a few pieces of paper from point A to point B, of which I am evidently incapable.

Are we displacing behaviour yet?

I just want the world to know that when I read the following passage, I had reached such a degree of vexation with J. L. Austin's article that I was in fact standing on my head:

Observation of animal behaviour shows that regularly, when an animal is embarked on some recognizable pattern of behaviour but meets in the course of it with an insuperable obstacle, it will betake itself to energetic, but quite unrelated, activity of some wild kind, such as standing on its head. This phenomenon is called "displacement behaviour" and is well identifiable. If now, in the light of this, we look back at ordinary human life, we see that displacement behaviour bulks quite large in it: yet we have apparently no word, or at least no clear and simple word, for it.

Moving!

Ideally I would like to live in a big building with four wings surrounding an enclosure, with a garden and a nice fountain. Shaped like this:

My family and I would live in one wing, and in the other wings would live all our best friends.

We are not moving into that building. But we are moving into a condo in a group of buildings that looks like this:



As you can see, this group of condos is very similar to the building I would like to live in. As you can also see, there is a swimming pool, which is kind of like a very big fountain that happens not to be running. What you cannot see from this picture is that we will live here:



and that a group of some of our best friends lives here:



So that's a whole corner of my dream right there. Maybe if I dream harder it will spread until I have the whole thing.