I tried to put the first video clip from Europe on YouTube at an internet cafe yesterday. It was a 33-megabyte clip, and after my hour had expired, only 20 megs got uploaded.
I did some disappointing math: at the rate of about 20 megs an hour, my 20 GIGS of footage will take around a thousand hours to upload. At the rate of about a dollar an hour that I pay for internet access, and using the internet for a maximum of an hour a day, I would eventually get all the footage uploaded in around three years, at the cost of a thousand dollars. Um, no thanks.
Then Luana reminded me that Sean also has the raw footage, plus unlimited high-speed internet access. Problem solved.
Also, if anyone is interested in calling, Luana´s cell phone number is 11-8646-3203. The country code for Brazil is 55. Cheap phone cards can be bought online at www.nobelcom.com.
We´re going to Prado beach over the weekend, where I´ll be finishing the Pinker books (The Blank Slate and The Language Instinct) and preparing the big forthcoming review, in addition to finally eating Moqueca.
Thursday, 30 August 2007
Wednesday, 29 August 2007
mailing address and pictures delivered as promised!
No big news. Luana and I are going to Prado, a beautiful beach that´s met by a freshwater river (though, are there any salty rivers?) over the weekend. We spent the majority of my five-hour lunch break yesterday watching footage from the Europe trip. I´m starting today to upload the videos to YouTube, but with the lousy internet speed, I´ll be lucky to be able to upload two minutes of video in an hour. And there are like 20 hours of video. So this will be a very slow-revealing series, which I guess will keep fans (by which I mean Mom, Dad, Sean, and Molly) tuned in for a long time. Search on YouTube for muldoon2007 (my username) to get to my channel and all the videos.
ALso, I uploaded some pictures on previous posts and now have my mailing address. It´s
Student Center
Avenida Salvador 1017
Centro Itabatan, Mucuri
Mucuri, BA CEP: 45830000
ALso, I uploaded some pictures on previous posts and now have my mailing address. It´s
Student Center
Avenida Salvador 1017
Centro Itabatan, Mucuri
Mucuri, BA CEP: 45830000
Tuesday, 28 August 2007
August 27 slightly delayed blog
Luana and I spent the weekend at a massive campout for Seventh-Day Adventists. I can't tell whether the experience was more or less weird than it sounds. In any event, there was no doubting that the double mattress in our room was like heaven last night compared to the camping setup. I slept about twelve hours last night and would have missed my first tutee in the morning, had she not arrived forty minutes late. I was nonetheless energized, having eaten my first of undoubtedly many fried egg sandwiches this morning. Each one -- two eggs on fresh French bread -- costs the equivalent of 10 American cents.
Okay, so on my way home from work on Thursday, I ran into Mara, one of my intermediate English students, who was headed to a friend's house nearby. Having left work early due to yet another cancellation, I tagged along and met her group of friends, all of whom are around my age and fun to talk to. After the cursory cultural exchange moment -- Brazilians always ask whether we Americans understand the complexity of the country beyond Ipanema, Carnaval, and the jungle -- they invited me (and Luana as well) to the campout that was going to take place this weekend. They said that it was really more about meeting people than about religion, and since we didn't have any plans for the weekend, it seemed like a good option. Luana wasn't feeling great and thought that Adventists were especially strict, so she didn't really want to go. I'm completely ignorant about Protestant denominations -- are Adventists even Protestant? -- but Mara and her friends were definitely not hard-core conservative types. So I eventually subdued the dissent and convinced Luana that in any case, it would be worth it to get out of Itabatan for a few days.
The bus left from the Adventist church in Itabatan on Friday and made it to Moroba, in the neighboring state of Espirito Santo, in about four hours. Luana and I sat across the aisle from the local pastor, Robismario, who was probably the most immature adult I've ever seen, seriously. When one of the adults was walking through the aisles to give out candy to pious or well-behaved kids, Robismario earnestly waved his hands in the air indicating his interest in the candy and snatched it at the first opportunity. When someone threw candy in an up-for-grabs lottery, Robismario naturally towered over his neighbors and won the candy. He had to be pleaded by the adolescents nearby to share some of it. Oh, and on the way home (I'm getting ahead of myself), Robismario broke tradition and refused to allow the bus to stop for lunch. This led to a near-mutiny, which the more responsible adults quelled by holding a vote. The pro-food coalition naturally won and the adults convinced Robismario to allow the bus to stop. Once at the restaurant, those had voted against stopping -- because they either weren't hungry or wanted to support Robism‡rio -- stayed in the bus. Robismario, of course, was among the first off the bus and in line for food. Ha!
I don't want to make a generalization about Adventists, though. Mara and her friends were a lot of fun and were the leaders of the pro-food coalition. Like they had said, the religious stuff was a very minor part of the whole experience. For them and the hordes of young people at the campout, it was a chance to meet new people outside the bounds of small-town life, and especially to find like-Godded romantic partners. Which brings me to the part about the whole thing that struck me the most about the whole weekend, which was how incredibly good people looked, despite the fact that we were all sleeping in tents on a dirt out in the middle of nowhere. People dressed to impress. I mean, there were showers, but they were in outdoor shacks and without any hot water, yet everyone (except Luana and me, who haven't been weaned off hot water) took showers every morning. Then they went back to their tents, slipped into their Sunday dresses and suits, whipped out the pocket mirrors, hooked up their electric hair straighteners to stray outlets, and went to church. It was really amusing and impressive to see people in high heels hiking across the campground. Being my lazy self, I brought my camera but only took a few lousy pictures.
The religious activities at the event primarily involved half-singing along to the two theme songs, which I presume are exclusively Adventist songs. But seriously, there were many small events and services, and these two songs were very well-represented. On Sunday morning, Luana and I went to find a place to sit after packing up our tent, and we ended up in church. At one point, a youth trio -- they were called the Trio Life -- went up to the stage to sing. There was a problem with their backing track, so another lady took the stage to entertain the crowd while they fixed the technical difficulties. She ended up singing what she called a crowd favorite, which was of course one of the two theme songs: "Jesus Amem." By the time she was done, the Trio Life went up, the backing track played, and sure enough, it was an alternative arrangement of "Jesus Amem." Nobody in the audience seemed to find this as funny as I did.
There was a truly passionate and profound sermon, which was given by a pastor from Rio Grande do Sul, a state in the extreme south of Brazil. It was about optimism, about enjoying the good things in life and not complaining about the bad things. It related the story of a parishioner who was always complaining to a group of followers of Moses from the Old Testament. The followers were crossing the desert in search of Canaan, and the only ones who survived were the ones who avoided complaining ... or something like that. I can't quite tell since my Portuguese isn't that great and my knowledge of the Old Testament is much worse. Anyway, I can't agree more. Complaining is completely futile and completely counterproductive. Similarly, being optimistic isn't just a convenient personality trait, but a vital component of success and personal growth. One of these days I'll finally get around to writing the complete Logic of Optimism essay, though I imagine the same message is to be found in most motivational speeches, self-help books and great success stories.
Speaking of writing, I've been itching to write my review of Steven Pinker's book, The Blank Slate. I'm only about a hundred pages into the book, but I think it's really fascinating and at the same time completely unsurprising. It's incredible how many popular psychology books rehash the same famous studies and findings. What's generally annoying to me about the book is that it is so one-sided: Pinker makes it clear that it is a Nature-Nurture book and that he's on the side of Nature. Of course, he acknowledges that nothing in human behavior is completely determined or completely unrelated to biology, but wherever there is room for debate, he chooses to err firmly on the side of determinism and mechanism instead of creativity or flexibility. He also does a bad job of dismissing connectionism, which is really what the Luana model is about and which is much simpler and more elegant than Pinker's metaphor of the mind as a giant toolbox with all these tools that sometimes work together and sometimes don't.
Okay. More later. I have to go to class now.
Okay, so on my way home from work on Thursday, I ran into Mara, one of my intermediate English students, who was headed to a friend's house nearby. Having left work early due to yet another cancellation, I tagged along and met her group of friends, all of whom are around my age and fun to talk to. After the cursory cultural exchange moment -- Brazilians always ask whether we Americans understand the complexity of the country beyond Ipanema, Carnaval, and the jungle -- they invited me (and Luana as well) to the campout that was going to take place this weekend. They said that it was really more about meeting people than about religion, and since we didn't have any plans for the weekend, it seemed like a good option. Luana wasn't feeling great and thought that Adventists were especially strict, so she didn't really want to go. I'm completely ignorant about Protestant denominations -- are Adventists even Protestant? -- but Mara and her friends were definitely not hard-core conservative types. So I eventually subdued the dissent and convinced Luana that in any case, it would be worth it to get out of Itabatan for a few days.
The bus left from the Adventist church in Itabatan on Friday and made it to Moroba, in the neighboring state of Espirito Santo, in about four hours. Luana and I sat across the aisle from the local pastor, Robismario, who was probably the most immature adult I've ever seen, seriously. When one of the adults was walking through the aisles to give out candy to pious or well-behaved kids, Robismario earnestly waved his hands in the air indicating his interest in the candy and snatched it at the first opportunity. When someone threw candy in an up-for-grabs lottery, Robismario naturally towered over his neighbors and won the candy. He had to be pleaded by the adolescents nearby to share some of it. Oh, and on the way home (I'm getting ahead of myself), Robismario broke tradition and refused to allow the bus to stop for lunch. This led to a near-mutiny, which the more responsible adults quelled by holding a vote. The pro-food coalition naturally won and the adults convinced Robismario to allow the bus to stop. Once at the restaurant, those had voted against stopping -- because they either weren't hungry or wanted to support Robism‡rio -- stayed in the bus. Robismario, of course, was among the first off the bus and in line for food. Ha!
I don't want to make a generalization about Adventists, though. Mara and her friends were a lot of fun and were the leaders of the pro-food coalition. Like they had said, the religious stuff was a very minor part of the whole experience. For them and the hordes of young people at the campout, it was a chance to meet new people outside the bounds of small-town life, and especially to find like-Godded romantic partners. Which brings me to the part about the whole thing that struck me the most about the whole weekend, which was how incredibly good people looked, despite the fact that we were all sleeping in tents on a dirt out in the middle of nowhere. People dressed to impress. I mean, there were showers, but they were in outdoor shacks and without any hot water, yet everyone (except Luana and me, who haven't been weaned off hot water) took showers every morning. Then they went back to their tents, slipped into their Sunday dresses and suits, whipped out the pocket mirrors, hooked up their electric hair straighteners to stray outlets, and went to church. It was really amusing and impressive to see people in high heels hiking across the campground. Being my lazy self, I brought my camera but only took a few lousy pictures.
The religious activities at the event primarily involved half-singing along to the two theme songs, which I presume are exclusively Adventist songs. But seriously, there were many small events and services, and these two songs were very well-represented. On Sunday morning, Luana and I went to find a place to sit after packing up our tent, and we ended up in church. At one point, a youth trio -- they were called the Trio Life -- went up to the stage to sing. There was a problem with their backing track, so another lady took the stage to entertain the crowd while they fixed the technical difficulties. She ended up singing what she called a crowd favorite, which was of course one of the two theme songs: "Jesus Amem." By the time she was done, the Trio Life went up, the backing track played, and sure enough, it was an alternative arrangement of "Jesus Amem." Nobody in the audience seemed to find this as funny as I did.
There was a truly passionate and profound sermon, which was given by a pastor from Rio Grande do Sul, a state in the extreme south of Brazil. It was about optimism, about enjoying the good things in life and not complaining about the bad things. It related the story of a parishioner who was always complaining to a group of followers of Moses from the Old Testament. The followers were crossing the desert in search of Canaan, and the only ones who survived were the ones who avoided complaining ... or something like that. I can't quite tell since my Portuguese isn't that great and my knowledge of the Old Testament is much worse. Anyway, I can't agree more. Complaining is completely futile and completely counterproductive. Similarly, being optimistic isn't just a convenient personality trait, but a vital component of success and personal growth. One of these days I'll finally get around to writing the complete Logic of Optimism essay, though I imagine the same message is to be found in most motivational speeches, self-help books and great success stories.
Speaking of writing, I've been itching to write my review of Steven Pinker's book, The Blank Slate. I'm only about a hundred pages into the book, but I think it's really fascinating and at the same time completely unsurprising. It's incredible how many popular psychology books rehash the same famous studies and findings. What's generally annoying to me about the book is that it is so one-sided: Pinker makes it clear that it is a Nature-Nurture book and that he's on the side of Nature. Of course, he acknowledges that nothing in human behavior is completely determined or completely unrelated to biology, but wherever there is room for debate, he chooses to err firmly on the side of determinism and mechanism instead of creativity or flexibility. He also does a bad job of dismissing connectionism, which is really what the Luana model is about and which is much simpler and more elegant than Pinker's metaphor of the mind as a giant toolbox with all these tools that sometimes work together and sometimes don't.
Okay. More later. I have to go to class now.
August 23 delayed blog
I'm at my computer in my room in Brazil. I tried to plug it in to charge, but the electricity is unreliable at best, so I'll have to charge it somewhere else. This also means I'll have to stop writing in an hour or so when the battery dies.
My room is a room. Actually, two rooms: a room room and a bathroom. My employer is paying somewhere around $75 a month for the room, which I think also includes water and electricity. The details of my job compensation are under permanent negotiation, but that's a good thing. I get surprise perks like a borrowed gas stove and TV and flexible hours and frequent cancellations which allow me to stay in my room. Like this morning, when I was supposed to give private lessons at 8:30am and 2:30pm, but both students cancelled and freed up my entire day until 5:30 or 5:45. Back to the room: I've got a double-size matress on the floor where Luana and I sleep, which faces our borrowed TV now hooked up to our new and overpriced PlayStation 2. What's the name of the piece of furniture that hold clothes in drawers?! I always forget. Closet? No. Bookshelf? No. Cabinet? I'm going to check my Microsoft Word thesaurus. It's not a trunk or a chest -- it's just some drawers. Whatever. My books are stacked next to the TV. I'm hoping to read most of them while I'm here, since I have three-day weekends every week. Maybe I should say three-day vacations and four-day vacat-ends. Back to the room ... we have a few things taped to walls, then we have our guitars and violin and mandolin on the floor, Luana's extra clothes in her suitcase, and then a small bathroom. It's got an electric showerhead for hot water, but we're starting to appreciate the wisdom of cold showers. When the electrician came to install the showerhead, he told us that his youthful appearance at age forty was due primarily to his habit of only taking freezing cold showers. He also said that eight minutes should be long enough to wash an elephant, which I thought was funny in light of the fact that I'm used to taking 20-minute showers.
Fuck, I might as well just take pictures and save my thousand words. Enough describing the room.
My room is a room. Actually, two rooms: a room room and a bathroom. My employer is paying somewhere around $75 a month for the room, which I think also includes water and electricity. The details of my job compensation are under permanent negotiation, but that's a good thing. I get surprise perks like a borrowed gas stove and TV and flexible hours and frequent cancellations which allow me to stay in my room. Like this morning, when I was supposed to give private lessons at 8:30am and 2:30pm, but both students cancelled and freed up my entire day until 5:30 or 5:45. Back to the room: I've got a double-size matress on the floor where Luana and I sleep, which faces our borrowed TV now hooked up to our new and overpriced PlayStation 2. What's the name of the piece of furniture that hold clothes in drawers?! I always forget. Closet? No. Bookshelf? No. Cabinet? I'm going to check my Microsoft Word thesaurus. It's not a trunk or a chest -- it's just some drawers. Whatever. My books are stacked next to the TV. I'm hoping to read most of them while I'm here, since I have three-day weekends every week. Maybe I should say three-day vacations and four-day vacat-ends. Back to the room ... we have a few things taped to walls, then we have our guitars and violin and mandolin on the floor, Luana's extra clothes in her suitcase, and then a small bathroom. It's got an electric showerhead for hot water, but we're starting to appreciate the wisdom of cold showers. When the electrician came to install the showerhead, he told us that his youthful appearance at age forty was due primarily to his habit of only taking freezing cold showers. He also said that eight minutes should be long enough to wash an elephant, which I thought was funny in light of the fact that I'm used to taking 20-minute showers.
Fuck, I might as well just take pictures and save my thousand words. Enough describing the room.
The important thing is my job, which is teaching English. Now, to be a college-educated native English speaker teaching in a Brazilian language school is like being Leonardo Da Vinci teaching kindergarten. It's a breeze. All the books and materials are of good quality and I just guide students through them. The same few kinds of activities -- games, translations, invidivual readings, whatever -- happen over and over again, which means that I do not have to prepare at all for class. I just walk in, pick up the materials, and go. Of course, I try to do some new and different things that require some extra work, but I don't have to, and nobody would notice or care if I didn't.
I'll probably have more stories to tell about the English classes. It's only been three days (four if you count today, when I walked in only to find my classes cancelled), but I already kind of know the students pretty well. I'm all about conversation, since pretty much everyone learns a language for the sake of communication, unless they're really intellectual and learning Latin, which can be good, too. I have some private students and I already know them quite well: in the course of the first two hours, it's usually possible to cover family, occupation, brief life history, religious views, and a person's conception of her situation in society. Last night, I talked for a solid hour about the details of the eucalyptus industry with a guy who works in the big eucalyptus company here in town. By next week, our conversations are inevitably going to move more directly towards intimate life details, since it's the next easiest thing to talk about. If I were a local, we could talk like locals and gossip, but since I'm not, all we can really talk about is our lives. Then I'll get to play psychologist, which is something I've always wanted to do but never until now felt like I could ever do. My whole new Luana model at least gives me a basis for talking about emotions and minds.
Luana's making lunch now. Our first meal at home! I'm hungry.
I think it'll be good to do a real blog, to actually recount events and my thoughts about them as they happen.
Online in Itabatan, Bahia, BRAZIL
I´ve finally got my system down for writing and communicating in Brazil. As of now, there´s no internet at the school where I work, which means I have to pay for internet time at cafes. So I think the best solution is to (1) write blog entries offline on my laptop and then post them when I get online and (2) arrange regular times when I´ll be online so I can do Skype. The weekend would probably be best for me, because I don´t have any classes on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. If anybody could leave comments on this post with times they´d be available, then I´ll get back with a set time that´s most mutually convenient. Okay?
Now I´ll post two blogs that I wrote offline. Coming soon: pictures and my mailing address.
Love,
Mickey
Now I´ll post two blogs that I wrote offline. Coming soon: pictures and my mailing address.
Love,
Mickey
Tuesday, 14 August 2007
Give Dennis a Chance
Most people I know never even take the time to read Kucinich's campaign platform.
Anyway, I'm not saying that he's my guy for sure, or that he's completely perfect. Come on, he's tiny and maybe slightly Napoleonic. But the "electability" escape is an insult to our faculties of reason. You know what, people could make Kucinich electable: he's got perfectly sensible stances on the issues, he's experienced, he's tough, and he's been a fighter his whole life. But if nobody makes any noise, the media coverage defaults to people like Bush and Hillary and Obama because they're they've got the most celebrity status. Plain and simple.
For people who don't think Kucinich is genuine, check out his record. He was a strong opponent of the Iraq war from the start, unlike Hillary. He and Gravel are the only full supporters of gay marriage, which is the only genuinely liberal position on the matter. His efforts as mayor of Cleveland standing up to the Cleveland Trust Company sent him into "political Siberia," only to be applauded years later when it became clear that he was right.
Now to the issues:
I'm not sure what the Wikipedians meant by "free love," but I'm sure Kucinich could find a more politically correct way to express his policy. If he's for removing antiquated legal barriers to unrestricted sexual behavior, then I'd guess that the majority of young people -- not just in the north, but across the country -- would find his policy appealing. Can any liberal American honestly say that certain types of (non-coerced) should be banned? Also, it was our parents' generation -- the now-powerful baby boomers -- who invented free love! And besides, we're talking about winning the Democratic nomination, not charming every single voter in every corner of every state.
I'm not sure what to say about reparations -- maybe Pfoho people who have thought about the issue more could chime in -- but I definitely think they are worth considering. Even if they aren't the best idea, I am very much in support of creative thinking for combating the lasting racial inequities, beyond affirmative action and British-style rigid schooling and testing (by that I mean No Child Left Behind and the KIPP etc. schools that are its champions. They are frighteningly strict and anti-progressive me.)
About Iraq, I think that an international peacekeeping force is the only way to go, and it has to be strong and fierce, but much less American and partisan. Clearly, abandoning the country would leave it in utter chaos, and this isn't what Kucinich is advocating. But keeping American forces there will perpetuate the notion that Americans are occupiers and not peacekeepers. My best hope is that an international force could more effectively do something like what Charles de Gaulle did in Senegal when it was considering independence -- organize a national referendum, giving citizens the option to choose either a particular system of government and power structure imposed by the UN, or to have all the forces pull out and leave the country in perpertual chaos. I still harbor hope that the ravaged citizens could choose order. Either way, the US could never pull such a move off on its own.
Visas and immigration are complicated and require quite a bit more investigation. I asked my mom, who happens to be an immigration lawyer, about the L-1 visa, and she said that it really is being exploited a lot by foreign companies, even though it also serves a perfectly permissible purpose. What it's supposed to do is allow experts about specific business or technology to cross borders to train branches of multinational corporation. What some Indian companies do is they create nominal but useless branches in the US, then send their employees to work here on L-1 visas, which means they can get paid a ton more than they would in India. To eliminate the visas altogether might be extreme, but to brush off the issue entirely is worse.
Finally, Kucinich supports impeaching Cheney, which I think is an honorable thing to do. Cheney is a crook and he deserves to be punished to the full extent of the law. To get Cheney on an orderly show trial would help us heal the wounds that he and Bush created, and help us pass more of the blame for the Iraq mess on their shoulders, since they are the ones who masterminded the malicious deception about WMDs in the first place.
We have to resist celebrity worship and other regressive heuristics if we want our most important decisions -- voting included -- to mean anything.
Anyway, I'm not saying that he's my guy for sure, or that he's completely perfect. Come on, he's tiny and maybe slightly Napoleonic. But the "electability" escape is an insult to our faculties of reason. You know what, people could make Kucinich electable: he's got perfectly sensible stances on the issues, he's experienced, he's tough, and he's been a fighter his whole life. But if nobody makes any noise, the media coverage defaults to people like Bush and Hillary and Obama because they're they've got the most celebrity status. Plain and simple.
For people who don't think Kucinich is genuine, check out his record. He was a strong opponent of the Iraq war from the start, unlike Hillary. He and Gravel are the only full supporters of gay marriage, which is the only genuinely liberal position on the matter. His efforts as mayor of Cleveland standing up to the Cleveland Trust Company sent him into "political Siberia," only to be applauded years later when it became clear that he was right.
Now to the issues:
I'm not sure what the Wikipedians meant by "free love," but I'm sure Kucinich could find a more politically correct way to express his policy. If he's for removing antiquated legal barriers to unrestricted sexual behavior, then I'd guess that the majority of young people -- not just in the north, but across the country -- would find his policy appealing. Can any liberal American honestly say that certain types of (non-coerced) should be banned? Also, it was our parents' generation -- the now-powerful baby boomers -- who invented free love! And besides, we're talking about winning the Democratic nomination, not charming every single voter in every corner of every state.
I'm not sure what to say about reparations -- maybe Pfoho people who have thought about the issue more could chime in -- but I definitely think they are worth considering. Even if they aren't the best idea, I am very much in support of creative thinking for combating the lasting racial inequities, beyond affirmative action and British-style rigid schooling and testing (by that I mean No Child Left Behind and the KIPP etc. schools that are its champions. They are frighteningly strict and anti-progressive me.)
About Iraq, I think that an international peacekeeping force is the only way to go, and it has to be strong and fierce, but much less American and partisan. Clearly, abandoning the country would leave it in utter chaos, and this isn't what Kucinich is advocating. But keeping American forces there will perpetuate the notion that Americans are occupiers and not peacekeepers. My best hope is that an international force could more effectively do something like what Charles de Gaulle did in Senegal when it was considering independence -- organize a national referendum, giving citizens the option to choose either a particular system of government and power structure imposed by the UN, or to have all the forces pull out and leave the country in perpertual chaos. I still harbor hope that the ravaged citizens could choose order. Either way, the US could never pull such a move off on its own.
Visas and immigration are complicated and require quite a bit more investigation. I asked my mom, who happens to be an immigration lawyer, about the L-1 visa, and she said that it really is being exploited a lot by foreign companies, even though it also serves a perfectly permissible purpose. What it's supposed to do is allow experts about specific business or technology to cross borders to train branches of multinational corporation. What some Indian companies do is they create nominal but useless branches in the US, then send their employees to work here on L-1 visas, which means they can get paid a ton more than they would in India. To eliminate the visas altogether might be extreme, but to brush off the issue entirely is worse.
Finally, Kucinich supports impeaching Cheney, which I think is an honorable thing to do. Cheney is a crook and he deserves to be punished to the full extent of the law. To get Cheney on an orderly show trial would help us heal the wounds that he and Bush created, and help us pass more of the blame for the Iraq mess on their shoulders, since they are the ones who masterminded the malicious deception about WMDs in the first place.
We have to resist celebrity worship and other regressive heuristics if we want our most important decisions -- voting included -- to mean anything.
The State of Politics at Harvard
Why are the most educated students in the world sometimes incapable of working together and supporting each other, even though they know it pays off in the long term?
Why do students continue to issue vacuous threats to the Pfoho community when the it's the very house community that provides our only sustained moral education at Harvard?
Why aren't more students supporting Dennis Kucinich?
Why are politically-minded students obsessing with national politics and policies when the most creative and difficult decisions are made at the state level?
Why are we students craving power at the national level when we can barely handle our immediate relationships?
Why do students continue to issue vacuous threats to the Pfoho community when the it's the very house community that provides our only sustained moral education at Harvard?
Why aren't more students supporting Dennis Kucinich?
Why are politically-minded students obsessing with national politics and policies when the most creative and difficult decisions are made at the state level?
Why are we students craving power at the national level when we can barely handle our immediate relationships?
Saturday, 11 August 2007
Email exchange about business
1) trade deficits are not bad for the us or for any other country. we are still gaining from comparative advantage (other countries make things better/cheaper/etc. and we gain from that as we give them what we are relatively better at (like human capital, which isn't included in trade balances)). remember the corn for beer example? even if china can make everything more cheaply than we can, if the cost of corn relative to beer for us is less than taht in china, it makes sense for us to make the corn (relative vs. absolute advantage). there is a LOT to be said about why trade deficits are NOT bad, although you don't actually want them to be ginormous b/c of the way we pay for them and thus end up investing more in other countries (which is ironic, b/c when other countries invest a lot in us we tend to cry about it, too, although why would that be bad? it's nice if someone else wants to give us capital).
I'm sure you know a whole lot more about trade deficits that I do, but I'm just going on what I read in the papers, which is that people are worried about trade deficits with countries like China. Isn't it at least a little troubling, just the idea that they make much more stuff that we want, and not vice versa? I buy the idea that we have intangibles and human capital that don't go on the ledgers, but there's a limit to that, and there's a limit to which the US has these magical human factors that makes it competitive. I mean, other countries have better educational systems that are improving, and we have an incredible elite tier of universities (which are the sources of so much American innovation and creativity) and many underperforming universities. And can an entire export economy really survive on human capital alone? I don't know, it sounds unsustainable. Richer countries are going to find a way to import our innovators and our best educators and then leave all the uneducated people out to dry.
If we take the cases of Germany or Japan after the Industrial Revolution, both countries hired out the English innovators in technology and eventually adopted their techniques, getting better and better while the English basked in their glory until their industries got bloated and bad. Japan, example, had to erect tariff walls to protect the new industries (this wasn't to their comparative advantage in the short term), but it developed a very strong sense of dedication and teamwork and soon enough the industries were good enough to lower the tariff walls (This is all taken straight from David Landes' "Wealth and Poverty of Nations"). I'm afraid the US is finding itself in England's former place, thinking that the free market and intangible human factors will carry the country to eternal prosperity, even as other countries start doing things better than we can. On the other hand, if we take Germany's approach to industrialization and recognize that we need help from businesses that are beating us, we'll have a chance of being competitive. Again, to avoid competition by saying that we have special comparative advantage in these magical intangibles makes me skeptical. I mean, do we think that this human capital will ever disappear or show up in other countries? I wrote about Hollywood in my blog.
2) self-interest should NOT lead to poor quality - rather it should improve quality as in the case of software, as Mickey notes. That's why the Japanese and European companies do so well, right? they fight to protect their reputation as suppliers of high quality goods (self-interest) by producing high quality goods and using advertising, and so their market share is increasing while american market share is decreasing. this is competition driven by self-interest and it is good that american market share is decreasing b/c our car companies for example are shitty. so if they want to get more market share, they need to up their quality - this is all driven by the invisible hand, driven by self-interest & competition blah blha.
Also, the governemtn of coruse has its role and should prevent some of these mega-mergers to prevent the loss of some of the comeptition within the us.
i think maybe mickey thinks self-interest leads to poor quality b/c this is of cousre what can happen if one company has significant market power, but that is why self-interest shoudl defeat this, right? consumer self-interest and the self-interest of other companies trying to make it should be able to defeat this, excep tin teh case of extremely high barriers to entry or natural monopolies (and in these cases the govt should step in).
Let's clarify what I mean by self-interest. I'm talking about the idea that for businesses, profit/growth is good, and more profit/growth is better. Maybe self-interest wasn't the right term for that. But I think we're mostly on agreement about this point -- that mega-size businesses are bad, especially mega-size business that only care about the bottom line. Not only do they stifle competition, but they force us consumers to accept bad products and lower standards. When the product gets so bad that foreign countries don't want to buy it (like cars and food), then I think it might be an economic problem, plus it's degrading to the consumer. My opinion is that our insurance, pharma, agro, car (GM), media (ClearChannel) and retail (WalMart) companies are already too big and not restricted enough by the government.
I'm not sure if saving the car industry is just a simple matter of "upping the quality" -- it's about changing work ethic, educating better engineers, negotiating better labor relations, etc. -- and I think the car makers are going to have a very hard time doing that, because it's about changing business culture. It's about creating high standards and trust to enable cooperation, and once businesses have been soiled by excessive focus on the bottom line, I'm not sure how easy it'll be to turn around (We agree that new American companies with new cultures -- especially in software -- are doing this best. But they have it easy, because they only have to employ highly-educated workers and robots).
3) that leads me to how the farming system is propped up by subsidies. this is NOT what economists want. it's stupid and fucks over developing countries who could sell us much cheaper produce. this is a restriction on free trade nad of course fucks over american consumers. it only helps farmers but they have a stron globby and therefore congress will not let go of these terrible subsidies. yes, this is driven by self-interest, and i agree that if consumers would have the "spirit of cooperation" as mickey indicates, they could probably defeat these lobbies. that said, this will probably not happen soon b/c each consumer is hurt by like a penny in comparison to the million dollar loss this would entail to the lobbies (ie each individual consumer does not feel a compelling urge to fight this whereas farmers' livelihoods are propped up by the subsidies so they do). this just sucks and makes me sad.
Agreed, our farm subsidies are ridiculous. But who's doling them out? Ignorant people in Congress supported by ignorant people in the states. How do we stop reactionary lobbying? By freeing politicians from dependency on campaign contributions. Our campaign finance situation is a true disgrace.
4) Europe and germany in particular have their own issues. ridiculous unemployment rates etc. etc. also, the US doesn't produce terrible goods - we jsut don't have the advantage in manufacturing and agriculture anymore, as our advantage tends to lie in intangible goods like human capital. look at even the entertainment industry - sure bollywood and european cinema export a lot fo films, but i would say the US is relatively dominant in the movie industry.
Germany definitely isn't perfect, and I saw that the unemployment rate has been hovering around 8 and 9 percent, with the US between 4 and 5 percent. But compared with the advantages of the generous welfare system, health coverage, vacation days, unemployment doesn't hurt nearly as much as in the US. Once more, I'm skeptical about whether we really have any long-term advantage in the intangibles.
5) money doesnt' buy happiness but a shitload of social science data does show that people are happier the richer they are in comparison to those around them. ask shanshan for her thesis.
Happiness is so hard -- SO HARD!! -- to measure. I took a psych class about measuring happiness. I take the perspective that I can only assess my own well-being, and I assume that others act like me, and I have a very hard time filling out happiness surveys. From my own experience, I've seen so many people who are relatively wealthy and insecure, and many people who are relatively less wealthy but more satisfied with life. I know happy super-rich people, miserable super-rich people, and everything inbetween. I think that the only healthy generalization is that money buys happiness, up to a point.
6) in the repeated prisoner's dilemma, cooperation can arise from self-interest naturally as in a repeated game it is in your interest to play the "good" strategy as there is possible punishment tactics.
Agreed, which is why I think the deserters -- exploitative or excessively selfish businesses -- have to fail or change eventually. I just worry that they'll bring ordinary people and good business down with them.
I'm sure you know a whole lot more about trade deficits that I do, but I'm just going on what I read in the papers, which is that people are worried about trade deficits with countries like China. Isn't it at least a little troubling, just the idea that they make much more stuff that we want, and not vice versa? I buy the idea that we have intangibles and human capital that don't go on the ledgers, but there's a limit to that, and there's a limit to which the US has these magical human factors that makes it competitive. I mean, other countries have better educational systems that are improving, and we have an incredible elite tier of universities (which are the sources of so much American innovation and creativity) and many underperforming universities. And can an entire export economy really survive on human capital alone? I don't know, it sounds unsustainable. Richer countries are going to find a way to import our innovators and our best educators and then leave all the uneducated people out to dry.
If we take the cases of Germany or Japan after the Industrial Revolution, both countries hired out the English innovators in technology and eventually adopted their techniques, getting better and better while the English basked in their glory until their industries got bloated and bad. Japan, example, had to erect tariff walls to protect the new industries (this wasn't to their comparative advantage in the short term), but it developed a very strong sense of dedication and teamwork and soon enough the industries were good enough to lower the tariff walls (This is all taken straight from David Landes' "Wealth and Poverty of Nations"). I'm afraid the US is finding itself in England's former place, thinking that the free market and intangible human factors will carry the country to eternal prosperity, even as other countries start doing things better than we can. On the other hand, if we take Germany's approach to industrialization and recognize that we need help from businesses that are beating us, we'll have a chance of being competitive. Again, to avoid competition by saying that we have special comparative advantage in these magical intangibles makes me skeptical. I mean, do we think that this human capital will ever disappear or show up in other countries? I wrote about Hollywood in my blog.
2) self-interest should NOT lead to poor quality - rather it should improve quality as in the case of software, as Mickey notes. That's why the Japanese and European companies do so well, right? they fight to protect their reputation as suppliers of high quality goods (self-interest) by producing high quality goods and using advertising, and so their market share is increasing while american market share is decreasing. this is competition driven by self-interest and it is good that american market share is decreasing b/c our car companies for example are shitty. so if they want to get more market share, they need to up their quality - this is all driven by the invisible hand, driven by self-interest & competition blah blha.
Also, the governemtn of coruse has its role and should prevent some of these mega-mergers to prevent the loss of some of the comeptition within the us.
i think maybe mickey thinks self-interest leads to poor quality b/c this is of cousre what can happen if one company has significant market power, but that is why self-interest shoudl defeat this, right? consumer self-interest and the self-interest of other companies trying to make it should be able to defeat this, excep tin teh case of extremely high barriers to entry or natural monopolies (and in these cases the govt should step in).
Let's clarify what I mean by self-interest. I'm talking about the idea that for businesses, profit/growth is good, and more profit/growth is better. Maybe self-interest wasn't the right term for that. But I think we're mostly on agreement about this point -- that mega-size businesses are bad, especially mega-size business that only care about the bottom line. Not only do they stifle competition, but they force us consumers to accept bad products and lower standards. When the product gets so bad that foreign countries don't want to buy it (like cars and food), then I think it might be an economic problem, plus it's degrading to the consumer. My opinion is that our insurance, pharma, agro, car (GM), media (ClearChannel) and retail (WalMart) companies are already too big and not restricted enough by the government.
I'm not sure if saving the car industry is just a simple matter of "upping the quality" -- it's about changing work ethic, educating better engineers, negotiating better labor relations, etc. -- and I think the car makers are going to have a very hard time doing that, because it's about changing business culture. It's about creating high standards and trust to enable cooperation, and once businesses have been soiled by excessive focus on the bottom line, I'm not sure how easy it'll be to turn around (We agree that new American companies with new cultures -- especially in software -- are doing this best. But they have it easy, because they only have to employ highly-educated workers and robots).
3) that leads me to how the farming system is propped up by subsidies. this is NOT what economists want. it's stupid and fucks over developing countries who could sell us much cheaper produce. this is a restriction on free trade nad of course fucks over american consumers. it only helps farmers but they have a stron globby and therefore congress will not let go of these terrible subsidies. yes, this is driven by self-interest, and i agree that if consumers would have the "spirit of cooperation" as mickey indicates, they could probably defeat these lobbies. that said, this will probably not happen soon b/c each consumer is hurt by like a penny in comparison to the million dollar loss this would entail to the lobbies (ie each individual consumer does not feel a compelling urge to fight this whereas farmers' livelihoods are propped up by the subsidies so they do). this just sucks and makes me sad.
Agreed, our farm subsidies are ridiculous. But who's doling them out? Ignorant people in Congress supported by ignorant people in the states. How do we stop reactionary lobbying? By freeing politicians from dependency on campaign contributions. Our campaign finance situation is a true disgrace.
4) Europe and germany in particular have their own issues. ridiculous unemployment rates etc. etc. also, the US doesn't produce terrible goods - we jsut don't have the advantage in manufacturing and agriculture anymore, as our advantage tends to lie in intangible goods like human capital. look at even the entertainment industry - sure bollywood and european cinema export a lot fo films, but i would say the US is relatively dominant in the movie industry.
Germany definitely isn't perfect, and I saw that the unemployment rate has been hovering around 8 and 9 percent, with the US between 4 and 5 percent. But compared with the advantages of the generous welfare system, health coverage, vacation days, unemployment doesn't hurt nearly as much as in the US. Once more, I'm skeptical about whether we really have any long-term advantage in the intangibles.
5) money doesnt' buy happiness but a shitload of social science data does show that people are happier the richer they are in comparison to those around them. ask shanshan for her thesis.
Happiness is so hard -- SO HARD!! -- to measure. I took a psych class about measuring happiness. I take the perspective that I can only assess my own well-being, and I assume that others act like me, and I have a very hard time filling out happiness surveys. From my own experience, I've seen so many people who are relatively wealthy and insecure, and many people who are relatively less wealthy but more satisfied with life. I know happy super-rich people, miserable super-rich people, and everything inbetween. I think that the only healthy generalization is that money buys happiness, up to a point.
6) in the repeated prisoner's dilemma, cooperation can arise from self-interest naturally as in a repeated game it is in your interest to play the "good" strategy as there is possible punishment tactics.
Does the US have a comparative advantage in culture?
There's an argument that the decline of US manufacturing and agriculture industries is economically undisturbing because the US no longer has a comparative advantage in those industries, in the context of the global economy. What does the US have comparative advantage in, we must ask? I guess, in culture: Hollywood, video games, music, and advertising. Also, the computer industry, which really means Apple and Microsoft.
I think that the US really does have a comparative advantage in software development, since it requires a set of skills that American students are uniquely prepared to deliver: equal parts analytical ability, math, creativity, teamwork, dedication, and design sensibility. Our counterparts in other countries do well with the analytical stuff and might make more efficient code monkeys, but Americans make the best innovators, by my estimation. It's not for no reason that Google, Miscroft, Apple, Blizzard (World of Warcraft), Electronic Arts, DigiDesign (ProTools), and many of the open-source projects are firmly based in the US.
But software development is a small industry (in terms of employment) in the US, since collaboration and production is so cheap and efficient. I mean, all the great accomplishments of the entire industry -- the best games, the best operating systems, the best programs -- can be stored on a single hard drive. Software development is an industry that works best when concentrated in a few huge companies -- or often, when done mostly by open-source volunteers who really care about quality over profitability. In any event, it's hard to imagine software development carrying an entire economy or employing a lot of people.
What about Hollywood? Sure, Hollywood makes the biggest worldwide blockbusters, but is that really because of an identifiable comparative advantage? I think not. Our blockbusters make it big because they have massive budgets -- for advertising, star power, special effects, and distribution. But what if the huge budgets thin out over time? What if Americans stop shelling out $10 for movie tickets? What if American movies no longer set the pace around the world? Let's imagine that Bollywood movies start to get more sophisticated and earn more money banking on the growing Indian middle class. The studios have no problem importing American or Japanese special-effects teams, and all of a sudden the next worldwide blockbuster is produced in India.
American production teams don't go out of business, but they have to thin out their own budgets, cutting on effects and advertising. Without that muscle, they can't push American movies around the globe. Maybe quality goes up (blockbusters are no longer feasible) or quality goes down (power concentrated exclusively at Disney or Universal), but either way, movies cease to be such major exports. The "comparative advantage" evaporates, like the French "comparative advantage" in films disappeared when the US got rich after the World Wars.
Tastes in cultural products depend very much on advertising and distribution bullying. We can't take the American cultural supremacy for granted.
I think that the US really does have a comparative advantage in software development, since it requires a set of skills that American students are uniquely prepared to deliver: equal parts analytical ability, math, creativity, teamwork, dedication, and design sensibility. Our counterparts in other countries do well with the analytical stuff and might make more efficient code monkeys, but Americans make the best innovators, by my estimation. It's not for no reason that Google, Miscroft, Apple, Blizzard (World of Warcraft), Electronic Arts, DigiDesign (ProTools), and many of the open-source projects are firmly based in the US.
But software development is a small industry (in terms of employment) in the US, since collaboration and production is so cheap and efficient. I mean, all the great accomplishments of the entire industry -- the best games, the best operating systems, the best programs -- can be stored on a single hard drive. Software development is an industry that works best when concentrated in a few huge companies -- or often, when done mostly by open-source volunteers who really care about quality over profitability. In any event, it's hard to imagine software development carrying an entire economy or employing a lot of people.
What about Hollywood? Sure, Hollywood makes the biggest worldwide blockbusters, but is that really because of an identifiable comparative advantage? I think not. Our blockbusters make it big because they have massive budgets -- for advertising, star power, special effects, and distribution. But what if the huge budgets thin out over time? What if Americans stop shelling out $10 for movie tickets? What if American movies no longer set the pace around the world? Let's imagine that Bollywood movies start to get more sophisticated and earn more money banking on the growing Indian middle class. The studios have no problem importing American or Japanese special-effects teams, and all of a sudden the next worldwide blockbuster is produced in India.
American production teams don't go out of business, but they have to thin out their own budgets, cutting on effects and advertising. Without that muscle, they can't push American movies around the globe. Maybe quality goes up (blockbusters are no longer feasible) or quality goes down (power concentrated exclusively at Disney or Universal), but either way, movies cease to be such major exports. The "comparative advantage" evaporates, like the French "comparative advantage" in films disappeared when the US got rich after the World Wars.
Tastes in cultural products depend very much on advertising and distribution bullying. We can't take the American cultural supremacy for granted.
two short principles
1. We're all connected, physically (since we're all matter and there's no way to find an exact physical barrier between me and you), socially (part of civilization), and psychologically (we're all humans so we all feel the same basic emotions, and our good and bad sentiments are both contagious). Thus, the Golden Rule must be rational:
a1. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." — Jesus (c. 5 B.C. - A.D. 32 ) in the Gospels, Matthew 7:12, Matthew 22:39, Luke 6:31, Luke 10:27
a2. "What you do not wish upon yourself, extend not to others." — Confucius (ca. 551 - 479 B.C.)
b. others = you, yourself
c. Substituting (b) into (a):
Do unto yourself as would have [others] do unto you.
What you do not wish upon yourself, extend not to yourself.
It's hard to argue with those statements.
2. Hard questions in society often boil down to Prisoner's Dilemmas. In iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas (when we play more than once and we can punish people who defect), cooperation is ALWAYS the best solution. It's always better to establish good faith and to be screwed, than to establish bad faith and expect the worst. Again, we can always punish people who really don't know how to reciprocate good faith: the only people who really fit that that description are sociopaths. Good faith and trust are what make great relationships, families, schools, institutions, and societies. Bad faith is what characterizes social systems and relationships that are doomed to failure. Both good faith and bad faith are contagious: people who want their relationships and instutitions to succeed have to choose good faith.
Is that it??
a1. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." — Jesus (c. 5 B.C. - A.D. 32 ) in the Gospels, Matthew 7:12, Matthew 22:39, Luke 6:31, Luke 10:27
a2. "What you do not wish upon yourself, extend not to others." — Confucius (ca. 551 - 479 B.C.)
b. others = you, yourself
c. Substituting (b) into (a):
Do unto yourself as would have [others] do unto you.
What you do not wish upon yourself, extend not to yourself.
It's hard to argue with those statements.
2. Hard questions in society often boil down to Prisoner's Dilemmas. In iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas (when we play more than once and we can punish people who defect), cooperation is ALWAYS the best solution. It's always better to establish good faith and to be screwed, than to establish bad faith and expect the worst. Again, we can always punish people who really don't know how to reciprocate good faith: the only people who really fit that that description are sociopaths. Good faith and trust are what make great relationships, families, schools, institutions, and societies. Bad faith is what characterizes social systems and relationships that are doomed to failure. Both good faith and bad faith are contagious: people who want their relationships and instutitions to succeed have to choose good faith.
Is that it??
Thursday, 9 August 2007
Email to friends about the Luana Model
Pam and I took a philosophy class called "Personal Identity and Self-Knowledge." It was all about different philosophical constructions of the self and for me, it was one of the most important classes in my intellectual development at Harvard. My favorite author was this guy Derek Parfit, who had the view that the self is an illusion: there's no criterion by which you can establish that one discrete "soul" stays with a particular body over the course of time, or that ultimately distinguishes "me" from "you" apart from our bodies, which are completely recycled every so many years. This is also the Buddhist perspective, which I tried to convice Shawn about, and which Scott is probably already familiar with. It's part of what I meant what I wrote that nothing is certain, but unity.
Okay, so Parfit said that the whole idea of self vs. other is an illusion, which meant that the whole classical Self-Interest Theory in economics must also be an illusion. That was in the 70s. Thomas Nagel (who we read in the Pinker/Dershowitz class) made similar arguments in moral philosophy, arguing that altruism is not only good, but rational. Anyway, I think those ideas are proving themselves to be true in economics, as people realize more that (1) after a certain point, money doesn't buy happiness, (2) decision-making often comes to down to Prisoners' Dilemmas where cooperation beats pure selfishness, and (3) the pursuit of profit for its own sake leads to low quality and low expectations and is eventually unsustainable, even though it pays off in the short term.
The spirit of cooperation was the genius of the Marshall Plan and of the economic strength of the EU and it's really what's missing in American business and economics today. I don't need to tell you guys how weak the dollar is in comparison to the Euro. But also, the US isn't producing high-quality goods for the international market, and that's what's really frightening. We've got a terrible trade deficit, we rely on subsidies and protection for agriculture, and good fresh food is harder for the average American to get. My take on all this is that American companies are obsessed with Self-Interest and classical economics, which means that they're willing to lower standards of quality and raise prices as long as there's still demand, until we have these giant agro or pharma or media conglomerates producing shitty or overpriced products that only Americans are willing to buy because they don't know any better. Germany makes better cars, food, hotels, chemicals, transport systems, radio stations, beer, etc., all decently priced. And I think it's because they really understand the spirit of cooperation and shared goals, as opposed to selfish goals. My guess is that it'll take a brand new economic model or a distaster (unemployment, social security or health care system crises) in the US for us to learn this the hard way. The Self-Interest Theory -- profit for its own sake -- leads us down a one-way path to lower quality standards, worker-management hostility, and unchecked imperialism and exploitation in underdeveloped countries. I was talking to Adam the other night about how our mega multinational corporations are in many ways similar to the old charter companies from imperial Britain, since they operate solely to create profit and growth with little concern for their human impact. Sure, we've got corporate responsibility, but it's always an afterthought. It took violent uprisings in Jamaica and India for the British Empire to take responsibility for its companies, and I think it would be the right thing for our government to take responsibility for the impact our international businesses are having on the world. The disaster of the Middle East and the lost opportunities to create prosperity there are perfect examples.
I know this is kind of rambly, but it's fresh in my mind because Silpa and I were talking about it today. She's studying intro economics at LSE and it's clear that the whole notion that greed and growth and profit are desireable as ends in themselves are still part of our thinking about business and society. My point to her was that (1) self-interest theory is incomplete and leads to low standards and (2) we should appaled when businesses lower standards. Don't we all want our products and services -- food, cars, schools, healthcare, clothes -- to be better, not cheaper? There's an argument that competitors can always create better goods and charge more, such that those who want better goods can pay more for them. And of course that's the way things work. Europeans are willing to pay a little more for their cars and clothes, and it's so nice to be able to enjoy those things as part of the normal lifestyle, without feeling like I'm getting ripped off for imported designer fancy gourmet shit. But the whole climate in the US of mergers and acquisitions and growth and megacorporations obviously makes competition very hard and makes it much more convenient for people to make consumer decisions based solely on price and not on quality. The big companies in Europe and Japan -- Ikea, Nokia, Daimler, Toyota, Sony -- got big because they developed reputations for quality at a good price, not just because they delivered the cheapest shit possible, like Walmart. The computer industry in the US (Apple, Microsoft) is an exception, because quality is so self-evident and so important. The car industry is similar, and like I said earlier, that fact that American car makers are losing market shares is pretty troubling.
Okay, that's it. For you guys doing battle out there in the business world, please tell me how wrong I am. I know I didn't get to explaining much of the Luana Model, since most of it is about psychology, but I hope you guys trust that there's some intellectual meat lurking behind the stage. For you guys who did neuroscience or psychology, my whole point was that Hebbian conditioning and Skinnerian behaviorism explain basically all of human growth and learning, including language and memory. The "cognitive revolution" in psychology that supposedly defeated behaviorism was nothing more than a detour that Chomsky steered us toward, as we understood what language was all about. But I think that problem evaporates if we understand that language is learned by conditioning, grammar learned by pattern detection, and memory nothing more than connections between sensory perceptions. Time really is an illusion -- Einstein proved it.
Okay, so Parfit said that the whole idea of self vs. other is an illusion, which meant that the whole classical Self-Interest Theory in economics must also be an illusion. That was in the 70s. Thomas Nagel (who we read in the Pinker/Dershowitz class) made similar arguments in moral philosophy, arguing that altruism is not only good, but rational. Anyway, I think those ideas are proving themselves to be true in economics, as people realize more that (1) after a certain point, money doesn't buy happiness, (2) decision-making often comes to down to Prisoners' Dilemmas where cooperation beats pure selfishness, and (3) the pursuit of profit for its own sake leads to low quality and low expectations and is eventually unsustainable, even though it pays off in the short term.
The spirit of cooperation was the genius of the Marshall Plan and of the economic strength of the EU and it's really what's missing in American business and economics today. I don't need to tell you guys how weak the dollar is in comparison to the Euro. But also, the US isn't producing high-quality goods for the international market, and that's what's really frightening. We've got a terrible trade deficit, we rely on subsidies and protection for agriculture, and good fresh food is harder for the average American to get. My take on all this is that American companies are obsessed with Self-Interest and classical economics, which means that they're willing to lower standards of quality and raise prices as long as there's still demand, until we have these giant agro or pharma or media conglomerates producing shitty or overpriced products that only Americans are willing to buy because they don't know any better. Germany makes better cars, food, hotels, chemicals, transport systems, radio stations, beer, etc., all decently priced. And I think it's because they really understand the spirit of cooperation and shared goals, as opposed to selfish goals. My guess is that it'll take a brand new economic model or a distaster (unemployment, social security or health care system crises) in the US for us to learn this the hard way. The Self-Interest Theory -- profit for its own sake -- leads us down a one-way path to lower quality standards, worker-management hostility, and unchecked imperialism and exploitation in underdeveloped countries. I was talking to Adam the other night about how our mega multinational corporations are in many ways similar to the old charter companies from imperial Britain, since they operate solely to create profit and growth with little concern for their human impact. Sure, we've got corporate responsibility, but it's always an afterthought. It took violent uprisings in Jamaica and India for the British Empire to take responsibility for its companies, and I think it would be the right thing for our government to take responsibility for the impact our international businesses are having on the world. The disaster of the Middle East and the lost opportunities to create prosperity there are perfect examples.
I know this is kind of rambly, but it's fresh in my mind because Silpa and I were talking about it today. She's studying intro economics at LSE and it's clear that the whole notion that greed and growth and profit are desireable as ends in themselves are still part of our thinking about business and society. My point to her was that (1) self-interest theory is incomplete and leads to low standards and (2) we should appaled when businesses lower standards. Don't we all want our products and services -- food, cars, schools, healthcare, clothes -- to be better, not cheaper? There's an argument that competitors can always create better goods and charge more, such that those who want better goods can pay more for them. And of course that's the way things work. Europeans are willing to pay a little more for their cars and clothes, and it's so nice to be able to enjoy those things as part of the normal lifestyle, without feeling like I'm getting ripped off for imported designer fancy gourmet shit. But the whole climate in the US of mergers and acquisitions and growth and megacorporations obviously makes competition very hard and makes it much more convenient for people to make consumer decisions based solely on price and not on quality. The big companies in Europe and Japan -- Ikea, Nokia, Daimler, Toyota, Sony -- got big because they developed reputations for quality at a good price, not just because they delivered the cheapest shit possible, like Walmart. The computer industry in the US (Apple, Microsoft) is an exception, because quality is so self-evident and so important. The car industry is similar, and like I said earlier, that fact that American car makers are losing market shares is pretty troubling.
Okay, that's it. For you guys doing battle out there in the business world, please tell me how wrong I am. I know I didn't get to explaining much of the Luana Model, since most of it is about psychology, but I hope you guys trust that there's some intellectual meat lurking behind the stage. For you guys who did neuroscience or psychology, my whole point was that Hebbian conditioning and Skinnerian behaviorism explain basically all of human growth and learning, including language and memory. The "cognitive revolution" in psychology that supposedly defeated behaviorism was nothing more than a detour that Chomsky steered us toward, as we understood what language was all about. But I think that problem evaporates if we understand that language is learned by conditioning, grammar learned by pattern detection, and memory nothing more than connections between sensory perceptions. Time really is an illusion -- Einstein proved it.
Email to my dad about the Golden Rule
...We drove past a five thousand year old stone circle today and I thought about you. This is a very very old culture and I´m finally starting to understand its acquired wisdom: they actually live by the Golden Rule. I think that the Golden Rule is the Big Answer in spirituality and life: treat the rest of the world exactly like you´d want to be treated, because there really is nothing different between me and you. We all have certain desires and feelings, and your love and desire to be loved, to be challenged, to have good food, and to be healthy are exactly the same as my desires and feelings.
The mechanism of evolution works on civilizations exactly as it works on organisms: things that work stay, and things that don´t eventually die off. Luckily, living by the Golden Rule works for all groups: it certainly works for families -- and what is the rest of the world but an extended family? It just takes time and luck for a group to evolve to that realization, and even more luck for the group not to be destroyed by force. Which, I think, is the only way to kill the Golden Rule. There´s absolutely nothing we can do to speed up the whole evolution process. We just have to live by the Golden Rule ourselves. That´s my one thought about morality...
The mechanism of evolution works on civilizations exactly as it works on organisms: things that work stay, and things that don´t eventually die off. Luckily, living by the Golden Rule works for all groups: it certainly works for families -- and what is the rest of the world but an extended family? It just takes time and luck for a group to evolve to that realization, and even more luck for the group not to be destroyed by force. Which, I think, is the only way to kill the Golden Rule. There´s absolutely nothing we can do to speed up the whole evolution process. We just have to live by the Golden Rule ourselves. That´s my one thought about morality...
Description of Luana Model in failed submission to Plastic.com
I wrote out a thing this morning that, as silly as it sounds, is trying to be a unified theory. I would like to present it to Plastic, which is the only place I've ever been able to turn for honest analysis of current issues.
I don't have any credentials, so I'm sorry if that's a deterrent for some of you. I graduated a few weeks ago from Harvard with a degree in Psychology and a 3.5 GPA; I wasn't an outstanding student at all. I just took introductory courses in pretty much every subject I could: psychology, computer science, philosophy of identity and self, Confucianism, behavioral neuroscience, mechanics and relativity, music theory, linear algebra, ethics, and history. I also worked briefly in the memory laboratory of Daniel Schacter, doing fMRI of emotional and non-emotional memory processing. While my grades weren't great, I had the great opportunity to take classes or participate in conversations with some of the most respected scholars in the world: Steven Pinker, Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Gilbert, Paul Davies, Louis Menand, Tu Weiming, Howard Gardner, Daniel Schacter, Hans Tutschku, David Hubel, Christof Koch, Ned Block, and other people who I've forgotten about. I hope that this didn't sound pretentious, but my only real credential is that I've heard all these people speak in person.
There are lots of troubles at the top of academia today. In science, there's the problem of the unified theory of everything in physics and the problem of consciousness in psychology. In all the humanities, there are tons of conflicts arising from analysis and theories. The Harvard Literature and English departments have deep rifts, the former emphasizing Literary Theory and the latter emphasizing close reading. The only person really making progress is Louis Menand, who puts it all together in his teaching and his writing, which integrates history, literature, and cultural studies. Taking a class with him allowed me to understand the importance of integration.
Now to my model. I'm traveling in Europe with my brother and sister right now, so I've had lots of time to observe and think, and very little time to write. Now as always, I'm paying for my internet connection. So it's all hastily done but, I think, on the right track.
The big problems in psychology are consciousness, memory, and language. They are supposed to be things that distinguish us from monkeys. I propose that (1) since there is no universal acceptable definition for consciousness, it must be a nonsense word, (2) language is the natural product of a big brain and highly refined speech control in our mouths, and (3) that all of the connections we make ARE memory. This is why it's impossible to "find" memories in the brain. I think that we learn everything, including language, simply by the process of Hebbian conditioning, and thus, that the Behaviorist psychologists were right all along. Learning a language is just making connections between sounds and things, and keeping those connections by repeating words. Learning a grammar is learning a way of reasoning or parsing the world, and we pick up grammar with pattern detection, which is what humans are really good at. My thought is that all languages (or at least the ones that spread) really do have a universal grammar, and that's Boolean logic, plus concepts for spacetime. We know that spacetime is one thing, but the fact that we use time and space words and treat them as coordinate systems makes us really believe in the past and the future and in a here/there distinction. All the great thinkers (I think) were able to really overcome the illusions of time, space, free will, and the self vs. other problem. If there is a unified theory in physics, my guess is that it's simple: it's impossible to distinguish any one thing from another, since the only thing that does the distinguishing is language. We give names to help parse the world, but everything is connected and interdependent. The great Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, and to a lesser extent, the English philosopher Derek Parfit, understood this. Parfit anticipated huge repercussions for the whole self-interest theory of economics as a result, and that's exactly what's happening as economics merges with behavioral psychology and game theory. Wittgenstein also understood this, and he took the interesting position of advocating the use of "it" instead of "I" to avoid the self-other distinction.
I don't have any credentials, so I'm sorry if that's a deterrent for some of you. I graduated a few weeks ago from Harvard with a degree in Psychology and a 3.5 GPA; I wasn't an outstanding student at all. I just took introductory courses in pretty much every subject I could: psychology, computer science, philosophy of identity and self, Confucianism, behavioral neuroscience, mechanics and relativity, music theory, linear algebra, ethics, and history. I also worked briefly in the memory laboratory of Daniel Schacter, doing fMRI of emotional and non-emotional memory processing. While my grades weren't great, I had the great opportunity to take classes or participate in conversations with some of the most respected scholars in the world: Steven Pinker, Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Gilbert, Paul Davies, Louis Menand, Tu Weiming, Howard Gardner, Daniel Schacter, Hans Tutschku, David Hubel, Christof Koch, Ned Block, and other people who I've forgotten about. I hope that this didn't sound pretentious, but my only real credential is that I've heard all these people speak in person.
There are lots of troubles at the top of academia today. In science, there's the problem of the unified theory of everything in physics and the problem of consciousness in psychology. In all the humanities, there are tons of conflicts arising from analysis and theories. The Harvard Literature and English departments have deep rifts, the former emphasizing Literary Theory and the latter emphasizing close reading. The only person really making progress is Louis Menand, who puts it all together in his teaching and his writing, which integrates history, literature, and cultural studies. Taking a class with him allowed me to understand the importance of integration.
Now to my model. I'm traveling in Europe with my brother and sister right now, so I've had lots of time to observe and think, and very little time to write. Now as always, I'm paying for my internet connection. So it's all hastily done but, I think, on the right track.
The big problems in psychology are consciousness, memory, and language. They are supposed to be things that distinguish us from monkeys. I propose that (1) since there is no universal acceptable definition for consciousness, it must be a nonsense word, (2) language is the natural product of a big brain and highly refined speech control in our mouths, and (3) that all of the connections we make ARE memory. This is why it's impossible to "find" memories in the brain. I think that we learn everything, including language, simply by the process of Hebbian conditioning, and thus, that the Behaviorist psychologists were right all along. Learning a language is just making connections between sounds and things, and keeping those connections by repeating words. Learning a grammar is learning a way of reasoning or parsing the world, and we pick up grammar with pattern detection, which is what humans are really good at. My thought is that all languages (or at least the ones that spread) really do have a universal grammar, and that's Boolean logic, plus concepts for spacetime. We know that spacetime is one thing, but the fact that we use time and space words and treat them as coordinate systems makes us really believe in the past and the future and in a here/there distinction. All the great thinkers (I think) were able to really overcome the illusions of time, space, free will, and the self vs. other problem. If there is a unified theory in physics, my guess is that it's simple: it's impossible to distinguish any one thing from another, since the only thing that does the distinguishing is language. We give names to help parse the world, but everything is connected and interdependent. The great Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, and to a lesser extent, the English philosopher Derek Parfit, understood this. Parfit anticipated huge repercussions for the whole self-interest theory of economics as a result, and that's exactly what's happening as economics merges with behavioral psychology and game theory. Wittgenstein also understood this, and he took the interesting position of advocating the use of "it" instead of "I" to avoid the self-other distinction.
The Original Luana Model
The Luana Model
1. Shoulders of giants
-Einstein
-Heisenberg
-Darwin
-All the shoulders they and anyone ever stood on. Duh!!!
2. Humans are animals that evolved through the process of natural selection from earlier species. Thus, there should be no unexplainable gap in evolution beteween humans and other animals.
3. Neurons make connections, that's it.
4. Conditioning (behaviorist/Hebbian) is the basis for all learning and development in all animals including humans.
5. As in conditioning, we only learn things that we didn't already know, and that are associated with reward or punishment. Rewards are things that feel good, like sex and approval and good food and good music, and good family and good friends, and our first time using a new drug. We can tell when something feels very good because we can laugh and cry when it's done. We laugh because it doesn't make sense and we cry because we know it's real. Punishments, as we know from behaviorism and history (especially forced reparations from Germany after WWI, are always detrimental to development). Punishments include bodily harm, and social rejection or disapproval. Thus, the happiest people are the ones who are punished the least and the meanest people are the ones who are punished the most. Punishment is also known as fear conditioning, and it's very easy to do to animals and humans for evolutionary reasons. Luckily, fears can always be overcome! The one greatest success in clinical psychology is helping people overcome their fears. Our favorite people are the ones who are afraid the least. Since everyone can overcome their fears, everyone can be our favorite person!
6. We can judge other people's emotions by their body language, since body language is universal. Same goes for judging dogs' emotions, since they show good body language. This is the ingenius contribution of the psychologist Paul Ekman.
7. Paying attention is just dedicating energy to the brain, so it can make more connections. We learn so easily when we're young because we have so much energy to devote to our brain.
8. Positive reinforcement via rewards is a virtuous cycle. The more we learn, the more we pay attention; the more we pay attention, the more we learn. Getting in this virtuous cycle is called being in a state of flow. All great thinkers and learners and leaders, and all children, experience the state of flow. This is the ingeniuous contribution of the psychologist and philosopher Mihaly Czikmenthalyi (not sure about spelling!). I thank Howard Gardner for teaching about flow and my dad for giving me Mihaly's book on flow and creativity.
9. Negative reinforcement is a vicious cycle. The more we're punished, the more fear we feel. The more fear we feel, the more we want to punish others. I thank the Confucian scholar Tu Weiming for the idea of virtuous and vicious cycles as the Confucian notion of the Good and the Bad.
10. Positive reinforcement is associated with the sympathetic nervous system ("rest and digest") and negative reinforcement is associated with the parasympathetic nervous system ("fight or fright"), or vice versa, I forget which is which. I thank John Dowling for the convenient rhyme to remember the difference between the two types!
11. Nothing is certain, but everything is connected. No absolute, but unity. I thank my dad for buying me Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I loved, and which mentioned Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I checked out the Critique from the library in high school but I never read a page. I thank Kant for the title which helped me trust in the idea that nothing is certain.
12. It is very hard to understand the great thinkers who write in a language that is not our own. This is because all the great thinkers stumble upon item (11) but can only express it in their own language. The problem is that reason itself is bound to grammar. In order to understand that even reason/certainty is fallible, you have to disprove it in your own grammar/reasoning. Some of the great thinkers also realize this grammar problem, so they choose not to write anything. My dad told me that he thought that Yeshua (later called Jesus) only ever wrote one thing, the Venn diagram, in the sand before he died. This is one symbol that represents unity or the idea of dialectics and synthesis. The Venn diagram simultaneously resembles 0 and I, like the infinite sign and the Mobius band. For some reason, people only kept a fragment of the original symbol, which is what we know as the fish. People who really understood phrase (11) include Socrates, Yeshua, Buddha, Nagarjuna, Mohammed, Kant, Einstein, Hegel, Godel, Escher, Bach, the Dalai Lama, and enlightened people everywhere. The one truly great thinker who never understood this was Darwin, and it was because he could never get over the grief of having lost his beloved daughter. But phrase (11) is the one and only natural conclusion of the theory of evolution. I thank the class Reason and Faith for picking up the personal story of Darwin.
13. I am in Germany now and I think it's the most enlightened place I've ever been! My guess is that German is the youngest of the language families, and not having been contaminated that much by other languages (though Germans now are afraid of it being contaminated by English), it has the simplest and most efficient grammar. From (12), this leads to a simple and efficient style of reasoning. I also guess that ancient Tibetan had very efficient grammar, and this is why people like the Dalai Lama who study ancient Tibetan are also so enlightened. To be enlightened is to understand that reason and faith are not at all incongruous. The terrible moral crime of Nazism taught Germans that order and unity must go together. Nazism was complete faith in reason and rejection of the unity of mankind.
14. The Scientific Revolution happened when people realized that by experimentation, they could rapidly contribute to the evolution of ideas. The scientific method is, at its very core, a way to speed up evolution by creating more variation and keeping what works. I thank Ms. Brackett in 6th grade for teaching me the scientific method and being the best science teacher in the world. All weather is created by variable distribution of heat on the earth caused by the sun; see, I remember! One addition: heat = energy = mass/gravity/spacetime = life = neurons = connection = love
15. The internet is one big fucking brain, making connections just like brains do. We connect with the internet just like we connect with humans: by asking it questions and hoping for satisfying answers. When we connect with someone or something, we call it love.
16. There are only certain questions we can ask if we want a satisfying answer. Computer programmers and mathematicians (all logicians) ask questions in Boolean grammar (and, not, or, equal) and there only two satisfying answers (yes and no). People, in addition to asking logic questions, ask questions about spacetime (where, when), names (who, what), and reason (how, why). But there are only a few satisfying answers:
who/what/when/where? here/now
how/why? because
Be and cause at the very same time!! It's so easy!!
17. Humans love asking questions and getting satisfying answers, but we also love surprise. The emotion of hope is our desire for surprise. This simple emotion explains everything irrational about what we do: beliefs we know we shouldn't hold (that's Dad), pulling for sports teams even when they're no good (that's Sean, the ultimate Cubs fan), playing the lottery (that's Grandpa), and loving unconditionally (that's Mom and Luana).
LIFE IS A SURPRISE PARTY! AMERICA NEEDS A SURPRISE PARTY IN 2008!
1. Shoulders of giants
-Einstein
-Heisenberg
-Darwin
-All the shoulders they and anyone ever stood on. Duh!!!
2. Humans are animals that evolved through the process of natural selection from earlier species. Thus, there should be no unexplainable gap in evolution beteween humans and other animals.
3. Neurons make connections, that's it.
4. Conditioning (behaviorist/Hebbian) is the basis for all learning and development in all animals including humans.
5. As in conditioning, we only learn things that we didn't already know, and that are associated with reward or punishment. Rewards are things that feel good, like sex and approval and good food and good music, and good family and good friends, and our first time using a new drug. We can tell when something feels very good because we can laugh and cry when it's done. We laugh because it doesn't make sense and we cry because we know it's real. Punishments, as we know from behaviorism and history (especially forced reparations from Germany after WWI, are always detrimental to development). Punishments include bodily harm, and social rejection or disapproval. Thus, the happiest people are the ones who are punished the least and the meanest people are the ones who are punished the most. Punishment is also known as fear conditioning, and it's very easy to do to animals and humans for evolutionary reasons. Luckily, fears can always be overcome! The one greatest success in clinical psychology is helping people overcome their fears. Our favorite people are the ones who are afraid the least. Since everyone can overcome their fears, everyone can be our favorite person!
6. We can judge other people's emotions by their body language, since body language is universal. Same goes for judging dogs' emotions, since they show good body language. This is the ingenius contribution of the psychologist Paul Ekman.
7. Paying attention is just dedicating energy to the brain, so it can make more connections. We learn so easily when we're young because we have so much energy to devote to our brain.
8. Positive reinforcement via rewards is a virtuous cycle. The more we learn, the more we pay attention; the more we pay attention, the more we learn. Getting in this virtuous cycle is called being in a state of flow. All great thinkers and learners and leaders, and all children, experience the state of flow. This is the ingeniuous contribution of the psychologist and philosopher Mihaly Czikmenthalyi (not sure about spelling!). I thank Howard Gardner for teaching about flow and my dad for giving me Mihaly's book on flow and creativity.
9. Negative reinforcement is a vicious cycle. The more we're punished, the more fear we feel. The more fear we feel, the more we want to punish others. I thank the Confucian scholar Tu Weiming for the idea of virtuous and vicious cycles as the Confucian notion of the Good and the Bad.
10. Positive reinforcement is associated with the sympathetic nervous system ("rest and digest") and negative reinforcement is associated with the parasympathetic nervous system ("fight or fright"), or vice versa, I forget which is which. I thank John Dowling for the convenient rhyme to remember the difference between the two types!
11. Nothing is certain, but everything is connected. No absolute, but unity. I thank my dad for buying me Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I loved, and which mentioned Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I checked out the Critique from the library in high school but I never read a page. I thank Kant for the title which helped me trust in the idea that nothing is certain.
12. It is very hard to understand the great thinkers who write in a language that is not our own. This is because all the great thinkers stumble upon item (11) but can only express it in their own language. The problem is that reason itself is bound to grammar. In order to understand that even reason/certainty is fallible, you have to disprove it in your own grammar/reasoning. Some of the great thinkers also realize this grammar problem, so they choose not to write anything. My dad told me that he thought that Yeshua (later called Jesus) only ever wrote one thing, the Venn diagram, in the sand before he died. This is one symbol that represents unity or the idea of dialectics and synthesis. The Venn diagram simultaneously resembles 0 and I, like the infinite sign and the Mobius band. For some reason, people only kept a fragment of the original symbol, which is what we know as the fish. People who really understood phrase (11) include Socrates, Yeshua, Buddha, Nagarjuna, Mohammed, Kant, Einstein, Hegel, Godel, Escher, Bach, the Dalai Lama, and enlightened people everywhere. The one truly great thinker who never understood this was Darwin, and it was because he could never get over the grief of having lost his beloved daughter. But phrase (11) is the one and only natural conclusion of the theory of evolution. I thank the class Reason and Faith for picking up the personal story of Darwin.
13. I am in Germany now and I think it's the most enlightened place I've ever been! My guess is that German is the youngest of the language families, and not having been contaminated that much by other languages (though Germans now are afraid of it being contaminated by English), it has the simplest and most efficient grammar. From (12), this leads to a simple and efficient style of reasoning. I also guess that ancient Tibetan had very efficient grammar, and this is why people like the Dalai Lama who study ancient Tibetan are also so enlightened. To be enlightened is to understand that reason and faith are not at all incongruous. The terrible moral crime of Nazism taught Germans that order and unity must go together. Nazism was complete faith in reason and rejection of the unity of mankind.
14. The Scientific Revolution happened when people realized that by experimentation, they could rapidly contribute to the evolution of ideas. The scientific method is, at its very core, a way to speed up evolution by creating more variation and keeping what works. I thank Ms. Brackett in 6th grade for teaching me the scientific method and being the best science teacher in the world. All weather is created by variable distribution of heat on the earth caused by the sun; see, I remember! One addition: heat = energy = mass/gravity/spacetime = life = neurons = connection = love
15. The internet is one big fucking brain, making connections just like brains do. We connect with the internet just like we connect with humans: by asking it questions and hoping for satisfying answers. When we connect with someone or something, we call it love.
16. There are only certain questions we can ask if we want a satisfying answer. Computer programmers and mathematicians (all logicians) ask questions in Boolean grammar (and, not, or, equal) and there only two satisfying answers (yes and no). People, in addition to asking logic questions, ask questions about spacetime (where, when), names (who, what), and reason (how, why). But there are only a few satisfying answers:
who/what/when/where? here/now
how/why? because
Be and cause at the very same time!! It's so easy!!
17. Humans love asking questions and getting satisfying answers, but we also love surprise. The emotion of hope is our desire for surprise. This simple emotion explains everything irrational about what we do: beliefs we know we shouldn't hold (that's Dad), pulling for sports teams even when they're no good (that's Sean, the ultimate Cubs fan), playing the lottery (that's Grandpa), and loving unconditionally (that's Mom and Luana).
LIFE IS A SURPRISE PARTY! AMERICA NEEDS A SURPRISE PARTY IN 2008!
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