Tomorrow is to be about walking along semi-urban wilderness trails and perhaps visiting a cultural center devoted to local tribal lore. I'm on my north circuit, visiting friends and relatives, with a goal of retrieving Sydney, a four legged companion I’ve grown fond of.
My thanks to Sam Lanahan for the gift of new tires. My Sunday drive in the pouring rain marked my first time distance driving since visiting McKenzie Farm.
My cousin Mary (my grandmother Esther's sister Elsie’s granddaughter) is well versed in the nature trails in this area and today we sampled one in Arlington, close to the new Amazon fulfillment center. I enjoyed riding in her luxurious electric Ford Mustang. She misses her Ford Bolts, but those got recalled.
On math4wisdom I’ve been writing about two notions of a nation-state: the ethno-state and the unum-state.
The unumstate gets its name from E Pluribus Unum and is about achieving dynamic symbiosis among diverse ethnicities.
The ethnostate idea is older and is more about establishing a self-preserving, self-determining monoculture.
I see a lot to think about in terms of how an unumstate might have its foreign policy captured and/or dominated by an internal ethnostate. US history is characterized by ethnic factions with specific axes to grind who go to Washington, DC with high hopes of mobilizing the vast resources of the US (its military especially) to tromp some historic foe.In the meantime, so many American people remain rather clueless about all these ethnicities vying for control. The dynamism of diversity always seems to border on chaos.
One of those ethnicities was the subculture of the free and open source geeks. Their objective, world domination, was proffered jokingly, satirizing those who take themselves more seriously as conquerors.
I see global geekdom as leading a design science revolution, with an emphasis on supplying and improving artifacts (e.g. tractors) over promoting any specific political ideology (e.g. communism or capitalism).
Speaking of artifacts, I was able to load my cousin’s walking machine with a circuitous route in the Parioli neighborhood, in Rome, Italy, a former stomping grounds. I walked at 2 mph from Piazza Euclide across to Viale Parioli and past our old digs to Piazza Ungeria, spending under 200 calories. Sam has similar equipment.
Mary works 10 hour days with no breaks, seeing one urgent care patient after another. To say the economy undervalues personnel is an understatement, and derives from thinking purely in terms of money. A similar mentality has destroyed a great many economies. Thinking purely in terms of money is a symptom of mental incapacity.
Simply throwing money at a problem is woefully insufficient as a surplus of funds does not compensate for a deficit of skills and imagination. Conversely, skills and imagination may well be able to compensate for a lack of funds.
