Is it all for not?

Sometimes I wonder, what makes us think we are more civilized than nomadic tribal peoples. Just who is more civilized? We have taken over the world, with our computers, big fancy hospitals and globe trotting jet planes.

Almost always the conquerors have thought they offered more to those "uncivilized people", from the Kings of Europe, To the Soviet Empire, to the Chinese "improving" Tibet, to the USA and Canada teaching American Indians how to be "civilized."

But just what have we accomplished? Before we came along life was simple. Everything revolved around the community and family. You could not survive a day without your tribe. Now we cant survive a day without our computers, and we could go a lifetime without actually seeing people.

I think of those times and I long for that. I long for a day when every hour "I" am surrounded by the community, raised up by all the life from the young playing and dancing to the old spinning yarns of what it was like in days of old.

As it is, I live in a cold building with few if any actual connections to the people that live around me. People of the earth, what have done? The global economy failures are a testament to our greed. The massive dump of consumerism spreads out from the sea to shinning sea. Our cities are cold, giant masses of life broken by walls. Walls that keep us bound, not to each other, but from each other.

Why? Why? What have we done? Why can't we leave it behind and go back to the days of neighbors and simple lives?

I would give it all up to live in a tribal community. I would give it all up for a simple life of lost connections.

Can we go back?

Incompatibility: Gloabal Warming Related Manufacturing Restrictions and Economic Recession (Depression)

I have been thinking a lot lately. I have come to the conclusion that the world needs to scrap Global Warming restrictions until we can get the worldwide economy out of its nose dive.

When you're driving your car and you do something stupid and it goes skidding recklessly off the road. At that time you do not get out of the car to check the air pressure of your tires. You've got more important things to do, like steering the car so you don't crash. If you do get out of your car it will crash and you will die. This is what the world is doing with fears about global warming. If we do need to put restrictions on manufacturing, now is not the time. thousands of people are losing their homes. Do we really want to cripple an economy that has already lost a leg?

Let's use some common sense and send a strong message to James Hansen at NASA. Now is not the time for drastic changes that mean lost jobs. When we are back on our feet we can decide how to power the planet without coal. Wait till the unemployment rate goes back up.

Just a bit of a thought. Maybe more later.

The Paradox of World Economasics

Isn't this paradox amazing? For the world to grow you need to spend you money. For you to grow you need to save your money.

It is truly a paradox, if everybody saves their money, as they should, and waits till they have money, then the world goes into recession and depression, and the individual has even less money as less and less people spending money causes job loss and market failure. But, if everyone goes out and spends all the time the world is growing and there are all kinds of new toys, ideas and business plans. One of the problem is that if you spend everything you make then you have nothing for retirement. And, if you spend money you don't have, sooner or later it can cause a recession and depression.

I guess it means you have to balance your spending and saving. You can't save it all for a healthy world economy. You can't spend it all for a healthy personal economy.

I'll try to develop this idea more if I remember later and have time.

Love Hate with Linux

Let me just say this Linux is awesome, and just getting better all the time. but fellas, I have one complaint. I am absolutely getting tired of the cliché descriptor "Powerful". Not every single piece of software in the Linux repository can be "Small but powerful."

So those of you making all those new cool applications for Linux that keep me from ever wanting to go back to Windows, check out the thesaurus next time. Please find a few different adjectives before I pull out the remaining hair on my head.

Thank you!

Keep up the great work.

Shocker: Change in climate linked to poverty and food shortage

"I tried to convey that climate change and the loss of the sea ice up here will affect everybody on the planet - unpredictable weather changes, rises in sea levels are all linked to food shortages and poverty." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7897392.stm

Wow! Ya don't say! I bet that is exactly what the settlers of Greenland and France were thinking that fateful year when the crops failed in 1816 and there was no more food left and they were dying because of a little thing we all know as The Little Ice Age.

"Each of the peaks in prices corresponds to a particularly poor harvest, mostly due to unfavorable climates with the most notable peak in the year 1816 - 'the year without a summer.' One of the worst famines in the seventeenth century occurred in France due to the failed harvest of 1693. Millions of people in France and surrounding countries were killed. " The Little Ice Age in Europe

Or how about the 1930's, we have more CO2 in this day and age so what caused The Great Dust Bowl . Obviously we screwed up the land but why the drought?

There is more here than meets the eye. The group out to measure the Ice depth is to be commended: we need this information to know how to better treat the earth, but... let's not make hasty decisions on global warming before the science is done. Let the scientists improve the means of measuring the damage till a point that they actually know what we are doing. You can not base all of your predictions on unproven models, which up till this point seems to be the only "proof."