In 1861, the American Civil War pitted the vastly more populous, vastly richer and more industrialized North against the Confederacy, which was sitting on a possibly-rebellious slave population that outnumbered their masters 10:1, and that had no navy and thus could never receive reinforcements or supplies. The outcome of this conflict was obvious from the get-go. The Union soldiers would literally be home by Christmas.
A man named George B. McClellan was given charge of the Union army to make short work of it all, after a brief battle that took the existing regional commander out of the picture. All he needed to do was take the Juggernaut union army on a three day's long march from Fort Monroe to Richmond, and all this nonsense would be over. Done and done.
McClellan, unfortunately, wound up being an awful general. He was cautious when he needed to be risky, risky when he needed to be cautious, and put his own reputation on the line less frequently than the blood of his soldiers. But personal reasons to hate him aside. He was a bad general. He drew his first major battle at Williamsburg, followed by a loss at Seven Pines, just a few miles from Richmond. His easy advance turned into a humiliating, fighting retreat that ended in the disaster of the 2nd battle of Bull Run. After this, the Confederacy was on the attack. The end result of his bungling was the battle of Antietam which managed to get more Americans killed on any singly day than any battle before or since. It did not, however, end in anything more than an indecisive draw.
With great disgust of both the people and the government at his actions, McClellan was replaced by General Burnside. Burnside set out to do what McClellan could not, beat up the numerically inferior Confederate army and actually end the war proper. The result was the battle of Fredericksburg: one of the most humiliating defeats for the Union cause of the war. Like his predecessor, all Burnside had managed to do was get a lot of Union soldiers killed for no real purpose. He also oversaw a general crumbling of the army as desertion rates soared.
Burnside was replaced by General Hooker (after whom we get the slang word for prostitute), whose own moral behavior aside, only really managed to enforce crony-ism in the army, and lead the Union to a crushing defeat at Chancelorsville, called "Lee's perfect battle". Though decisive, unlike his predecessors, he was sleazier, and a bad general, but he wasn't even all there as far as common Union ideology was concerned, once saying that "Nothing would go right until we had a dictator, and the sooner the better."
We are facing a similar type of problem today in our economic crisis. We have had a lot of CEO's, the proverbial generals of capitalism, who have had a massive amount of resources and large, powerful institutions, and one easy task: make us all some money. Economic growth should have been easy with the best people involved on the job. Like the Union generals, however, they were of dubious scruples, unclear in purpose, and most importantly, really, really bad at their jobs.
The end result, then as now, is disaster. Politicians and the populace alike are demanding the heads of industry giants, especially the ones at AIG, who have taken huge bonuses as a reward for leading our modern day Union into the dirt. It is clear with our Wall Street exec's as it was with the army's exec's back in the day that the old leadership was bad, and that new leadership is required. The question, then, is who do we get to do the job right?
When McClellan screwed it all up, they went for another general. When they got a worse one, they put another general in charge. They didn't put the army under the control of some random government bureaucrat or some other random person. They put the army in control of similar people with the same training, and the same experience, and the same expertise, and they did WORSE than the people they put in before them.
This is exactly the problem that we're having with AIG. Businesses have gone bust, the economy is tanking, and CEO's legitimately bear a big chunk of the blame. The government plan over the last year or so is to fire the CEO's and appoint a government bureaucrat because the other CEO's out there that are trained the same way and are doing the same things are still out there making it WORSE.
The problem, though, is that some random, everyday government bureaucrat is NOT going to be able to lead an army as well as a general, and they're NOT going to be able to handle a massive corporation as well as a CEO. In the end, even if they're making the problem worse, you need the same type of people who have the pertinent training and experience to be able to actually fix the problems. If specific generals and CEO's are causing problems, than those specific ones should be brushed away, but having a systemic change to hand over power to a class of people who we know are less qualified is an unjustified way of handling our anger.
In the end, Lincoln kept on picking more generals to command his army, even though it was the generals that were losing the war and destroying America. Hooker would be replaced by Meade, who beat Lee at Gettysburg but shamefully let them get away. Meade was made a subservient of General Grant, who had a vision of warfare that eventually brought about the ultimate victory of the Union army in the Civil War.
If Lincoln had decided to get rid of the commander of his army and replace him with a government appointee from the war department (or somewhere else in the bureaucracy), it is unclear what would have happened in the war. It is certain however, that it took a man who had spent his whole life in the army and had fought in the trenches and had fought his way up the rungs to the top, who was the person who had the experience and leadership qualities to be able to lead the army to victory, no matter HOW bad his predecessors had been.
Why should we expect it to be any different with our CEO's?
For further reading, click here.
Showing posts with label connections. Show all posts
Showing posts with label connections. Show all posts
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
The Economic Crisis, Deflation and the Louisiana Purchase
In order to make this connection, I'm going to need to spell out a few terms, so bear with me a moment.
The first term I need to define is "value". While value usually refers to a state that is a function of worth divided by price ("that's a great value on that can of beans" is a statement about cost/benefit). Because I need a transitive verb, I'll be referring to value as the worth that someone applies to some thing ("I value your trust" for example).
That said, value is something that is very relative. You may value a high-performance sports car while I might value a well-crafted wine or a meticulously painted Repan or Degas. Furthermore, you may think very lowly of my grape juice and old paintings, while I may assign little value to your brightly polished chunk of metal. The important thing is that no one thing has the exact same value to more than person.
The other term here is money. Money is a fictional construct that allows people to quantize the value that they put on something. It helps us see the relativity of value (and to a lesser extent, wealth), and allows us to trade things of equal value, (not objectively, but subjectively based on the person and item). In the end, if we feel that we've given away something that means more to us than what the other person had to part with, we feel treated unfairly. Money both reveals and alleviates this to a great extent. In any case, the important thing to remember about money is that it isn't real. It doesn't represent the actual value of anything. This is why we're allowed to do really goofy stuff with it, as it's pretty much all math, and hypothetical, fiat-based situations.
Anyways, let's get to the heart of the matter. So we've got this economic crisis going on (click here for a really good, simple explanation). What's of particular note of interest here is how money and wealth relate to each other.
People value houses. This idea of value, over a period of time, caused the amount of money required to get that to go up. In theory, this was just matching the price with the value (trying to make things even), but in reality, the price vastly outstripped the value. Eventually, people started to figure this out in a very brutal way.
So, through a complex series of financial services multiplied by time and events, it all came crashing down. This lost a lot of investors their money. They did not, however, lose their wealth. Remember, money isn't wealth. All the things that the investors valued, like their house and their children and their Degas in the living room were left untouched. Some people did lose these things, like the deadbeats who couldn't pay their mortgages who lost their homes and the investment bankers who lost their shirts, but most people lost things like pensions, college savings, and other things where nothing was physically taken away from them.
Of course, these people (ie. everyone) did lose something. They lost their ability to be able to afford things they value, like food, once they retire. They lost their ability to give their children a valuable education. These things are worrying, but far from immediate. These things, rather, are relegated to the world of "wall street", a fake world where people trade around worthless scraps of paper and electronic bits. If this were the only result of the economic collapse, there wouldn't be much of a problem. This crisis, however, has bled into "main street".
For example, few people are going to have enough things that other people value enough to buy a home by trading it in. Instead, people usually borrow the money to do this. Said money has mostly dried up at the moment. Likewise, there are a lot of businesses out there that create things that everyone values, like cars, who, due to stupid stuff that they've done with labor unions and risky investment, taxes, etc. are forced to take the money they get and basically throw it away, rather than exchange it for things that are valuable (such as parts to make new cars). When this happens, businesses go bust, and people lose their jobs.
So what? All a job gets you is money, and money is fake anyways, right? Of course, a vast majority of people are completely ignorant about how to get the things that they value without just handing over money to someone else to get it. This means that a person who becomes unemployed is left with two choices: learn how to grow food real quick, or get a new source of money so that you can just buy things again.
In the end, it's a breakdown of value. When we're faced with a situation where we can only purchase so much value, we tend to rank things, and just as quickly bump up the value of the top things and bump down the value of other things. We start ranking things into needs and wants, and statements like "we don't need new rotors on our car yet" start showing up. It's not that people intrinsically want working breaks less, but its value is decreased relative to other things when the money is tight.
Of course, what this brings is deflation. As we value things less, the prices go down to match the value. As prices go down, so do the balance sheets of companies. In a perfect world, this would be fine, as employers would simply match the cost of living decrease to a pay decrease and everything hits equilibrium again.
Of course, to some people, particularly people who big into big labor, are horrified at even the idea of wages (money) going down, even if it allows them to buy the same, or more goods and services (value). Likewise, modern economics are big into inflation, in part because of what their ideologies tell them about deflation. In the perfect world of most modern economists, people who have a lot of money will loan it out as interest, which creates more money (I borrow $10 and give back $11, there is now an extra dollar of money in the system). Of course, more money spread around the same amount of wealth (value) causes the price to go up. They have more money to deal with it, the rest of us who aren't lending out money at interest don't. See THIS map of US inflation and how it's changed since modern monetary policy started being implemented in the 30's and 40's).
So, when prices are not allowed to deflate, yet the value of things is going down (due to a system which has created a crisis), eventually things collapse, and the money price of things goes up while the value of things continues to go down. In the end, you have "stagflation". When this happens, anyone is in a tight jam, especially if you're literally fighting for your survival.
France had just such a problem. Back in the early 1800's every single European country was sending it's armies into France in order to remove a particular political leader and return France to it's old, pre-revolutionary, autocratic, bureaucratic self. No one was buying French goods, as their value was decreased for political reasons (and because they might be just about to be blown up by English cannons). As exports tanked, jobs started bleeding like neck wound (like today). Suddenly, people made things which were valuable to themselves, but less valuable to others. As jobs went away, nobody had any money, and scarcity suddenly kicked in to drive up prices. It was Jimmy Carter meets the industrial revolution.
So, what could France do? Napoleon, in his genius, decided to take the millions and millions of angry, unemployed French people and press them into the army. Now people had jobs, AND France was less likely to immanently collapse due to foreign invasion. Two birds with one stone. The problem, of course, was how to fund it all. In the end, the French needed to take something that they had that had little value to them, and find someone for whom it had a lot of value. The money gained from the sale could quickly be turned over into something that France actually valued, like muskets.
The answer was land. Just like state governments and movie stars today, France started selling off the assets it didn't need to afford the ones it did. In France's case, it literally decided to sell its global empire (which hadn't been doing much for it). The prime slab was in the Americas: Louisiana.
Back, long ago, North America was divided up like a jawbreaker. There was the hard center between Boston and Charleston on the Atlantic coast that belonged to Britain. Outside of that was a concentric ring that went through the Caribbean through New Orleans and St. Louis up through Quebec. Outside of that was lands claimed by the Spanish, or were considered to worthless to take from the native populations. Of course, after the American Revolution, the need to contain the British was drastically weakened, as their only holdings were Fort Detroit and Ottowa. Combine that with a string of successful slave rebellions in the Caribbean, and all the sudden France's desire for empire waned. Simply put, there wasn't nearly as much value in North America as there had been when they took the trouble to carve out the territory in the first place.
But if there was someone who was willing to buy the land from France, especially for an amount of money greater than France valued it, then it would be in their best interest to sell it and turn the money into something it did value. The United States was only too willing to oblige. They needed space, they needed stable trading ports, and, most importantly, they needed the lowest number of threatening European powers bordering their fragile near-confederacy as possible.
Thomas Jefferson was willing to shell out $10 million (in 1803 dollars!) just for the port of New Orleans and the immediate surrounds. The French, on the other hand, needed more money, so they were willing to throw in the entire rest of the Louisiana Territory (all 1 million square miles) in with it for a mere $5 million more. The Americans were stunned. The deal was just too good to give up.
In the end, America bought the territory and doubled in size. France was able to get the funding it needed to raise 3 million soldiers and win the battle of Austerlitz a few years later. Win-win.
Perhaps, assuming we don't change policy to actually fix the problems we're in right now, we could consider something likewise for our current economic woes.
The first term I need to define is "value". While value usually refers to a state that is a function of worth divided by price ("that's a great value on that can of beans" is a statement about cost/benefit). Because I need a transitive verb, I'll be referring to value as the worth that someone applies to some thing ("I value your trust" for example).
That said, value is something that is very relative. You may value a high-performance sports car while I might value a well-crafted wine or a meticulously painted Repan or Degas. Furthermore, you may think very lowly of my grape juice and old paintings, while I may assign little value to your brightly polished chunk of metal. The important thing is that no one thing has the exact same value to more than person.
The other term here is money. Money is a fictional construct that allows people to quantize the value that they put on something. It helps us see the relativity of value (and to a lesser extent, wealth), and allows us to trade things of equal value, (not objectively, but subjectively based on the person and item). In the end, if we feel that we've given away something that means more to us than what the other person had to part with, we feel treated unfairly. Money both reveals and alleviates this to a great extent. In any case, the important thing to remember about money is that it isn't real. It doesn't represent the actual value of anything. This is why we're allowed to do really goofy stuff with it, as it's pretty much all math, and hypothetical, fiat-based situations.
Anyways, let's get to the heart of the matter. So we've got this economic crisis going on (click here for a really good, simple explanation). What's of particular note of interest here is how money and wealth relate to each other.
People value houses. This idea of value, over a period of time, caused the amount of money required to get that to go up. In theory, this was just matching the price with the value (trying to make things even), but in reality, the price vastly outstripped the value. Eventually, people started to figure this out in a very brutal way.
So, through a complex series of financial services multiplied by time and events, it all came crashing down. This lost a lot of investors their money. They did not, however, lose their wealth. Remember, money isn't wealth. All the things that the investors valued, like their house and their children and their Degas in the living room were left untouched. Some people did lose these things, like the deadbeats who couldn't pay their mortgages who lost their homes and the investment bankers who lost their shirts, but most people lost things like pensions, college savings, and other things where nothing was physically taken away from them.
Of course, these people (ie. everyone) did lose something. They lost their ability to be able to afford things they value, like food, once they retire. They lost their ability to give their children a valuable education. These things are worrying, but far from immediate. These things, rather, are relegated to the world of "wall street", a fake world where people trade around worthless scraps of paper and electronic bits. If this were the only result of the economic collapse, there wouldn't be much of a problem. This crisis, however, has bled into "main street".
For example, few people are going to have enough things that other people value enough to buy a home by trading it in. Instead, people usually borrow the money to do this. Said money has mostly dried up at the moment. Likewise, there are a lot of businesses out there that create things that everyone values, like cars, who, due to stupid stuff that they've done with labor unions and risky investment, taxes, etc. are forced to take the money they get and basically throw it away, rather than exchange it for things that are valuable (such as parts to make new cars). When this happens, businesses go bust, and people lose their jobs.
So what? All a job gets you is money, and money is fake anyways, right? Of course, a vast majority of people are completely ignorant about how to get the things that they value without just handing over money to someone else to get it. This means that a person who becomes unemployed is left with two choices: learn how to grow food real quick, or get a new source of money so that you can just buy things again.
In the end, it's a breakdown of value. When we're faced with a situation where we can only purchase so much value, we tend to rank things, and just as quickly bump up the value of the top things and bump down the value of other things. We start ranking things into needs and wants, and statements like "we don't need new rotors on our car yet" start showing up. It's not that people intrinsically want working breaks less, but its value is decreased relative to other things when the money is tight.
Of course, what this brings is deflation. As we value things less, the prices go down to match the value. As prices go down, so do the balance sheets of companies. In a perfect world, this would be fine, as employers would simply match the cost of living decrease to a pay decrease and everything hits equilibrium again.
Of course, to some people, particularly people who big into big labor, are horrified at even the idea of wages (money) going down, even if it allows them to buy the same, or more goods and services (value). Likewise, modern economics are big into inflation, in part because of what their ideologies tell them about deflation. In the perfect world of most modern economists, people who have a lot of money will loan it out as interest, which creates more money (I borrow $10 and give back $11, there is now an extra dollar of money in the system). Of course, more money spread around the same amount of wealth (value) causes the price to go up. They have more money to deal with it, the rest of us who aren't lending out money at interest don't. See THIS map of US inflation and how it's changed since modern monetary policy started being implemented in the 30's and 40's).
So, when prices are not allowed to deflate, yet the value of things is going down (due to a system which has created a crisis), eventually things collapse, and the money price of things goes up while the value of things continues to go down. In the end, you have "stagflation". When this happens, anyone is in a tight jam, especially if you're literally fighting for your survival.
France had just such a problem. Back in the early 1800's every single European country was sending it's armies into France in order to remove a particular political leader and return France to it's old, pre-revolutionary, autocratic, bureaucratic self. No one was buying French goods, as their value was decreased for political reasons (and because they might be just about to be blown up by English cannons). As exports tanked, jobs started bleeding like neck wound (like today). Suddenly, people made things which were valuable to themselves, but less valuable to others. As jobs went away, nobody had any money, and scarcity suddenly kicked in to drive up prices. It was Jimmy Carter meets the industrial revolution.
So, what could France do? Napoleon, in his genius, decided to take the millions and millions of angry, unemployed French people and press them into the army. Now people had jobs, AND France was less likely to immanently collapse due to foreign invasion. Two birds with one stone. The problem, of course, was how to fund it all. In the end, the French needed to take something that they had that had little value to them, and find someone for whom it had a lot of value. The money gained from the sale could quickly be turned over into something that France actually valued, like muskets.
The answer was land. Just like state governments and movie stars today, France started selling off the assets it didn't need to afford the ones it did. In France's case, it literally decided to sell its global empire (which hadn't been doing much for it). The prime slab was in the Americas: Louisiana.
Back, long ago, North America was divided up like a jawbreaker. There was the hard center between Boston and Charleston on the Atlantic coast that belonged to Britain. Outside of that was a concentric ring that went through the Caribbean through New Orleans and St. Louis up through Quebec. Outside of that was lands claimed by the Spanish, or were considered to worthless to take from the native populations. Of course, after the American Revolution, the need to contain the British was drastically weakened, as their only holdings were Fort Detroit and Ottowa. Combine that with a string of successful slave rebellions in the Caribbean, and all the sudden France's desire for empire waned. Simply put, there wasn't nearly as much value in North America as there had been when they took the trouble to carve out the territory in the first place.
But if there was someone who was willing to buy the land from France, especially for an amount of money greater than France valued it, then it would be in their best interest to sell it and turn the money into something it did value. The United States was only too willing to oblige. They needed space, they needed stable trading ports, and, most importantly, they needed the lowest number of threatening European powers bordering their fragile near-confederacy as possible.
Thomas Jefferson was willing to shell out $10 million (in 1803 dollars!) just for the port of New Orleans and the immediate surrounds. The French, on the other hand, needed more money, so they were willing to throw in the entire rest of the Louisiana Territory (all 1 million square miles) in with it for a mere $5 million more. The Americans were stunned. The deal was just too good to give up.
In the end, America bought the territory and doubled in size. France was able to get the funding it needed to raise 3 million soldiers and win the battle of Austerlitz a few years later. Win-win.
Perhaps, assuming we don't change policy to actually fix the problems we're in right now, we could consider something likewise for our current economic woes.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Fascism and GeoCaching
Life is boring.
I have two cats, and, like all animals who don't need to worry about where their next meal is coming from, just sort of sit around all day. Humans, on the other hand, are an odd species out. Rather than simply accepting that there isn't, latently, anything more to it all than just sort of lying around, we demand that life has some sort of ACTUAL meaning to it. We assign meaning to things: we come up with grand ideas, we choose careers, we join causes, etc. in part because without meaning, life to human beings is boring.
But just because humans tend to become depressed when they realize that life has no default meaning or universal overarching point, doesn't mean that it does. As such, in the end, it winds up falling upon us to MAKE that meaning (which we then tend to turn around and believe was there all along). In the end, religion has done an excellent job in giving people meaning along with other ideologies and organizations. We get meaning and purpose, but also identity and understanding, even if we have to make it up ourselves. Life is boring otherwise.
This brings us to fascism. At it's heart, fascism is little more than a rejection of modernity (itself built on a series of systems). The old, medieval systems of giving life meaning and purpose were out, and now, two to three hundred years later, we still haven't figured out how capitalism, industrialization, secularism, liberalism, urbanization etc. is supposed to fill the void. Fascism's answer is to reject modern ideas and return to a life where understanding is governed by an abstract idea of faith, a die-hard sense of community, and purpose in one's occupation. The end result is a quasi-mystical, iron-clad state that is based on a corporatist model.
If I get my sense of identity and propose from my volk, I don't need to frantically scramble for it in a world that is undirected where everybody's way of finding meaning is equal, and thus relative (and thus fundamentally unsatisfying to most people). Of course, this idea of nationalism can quickly lead to an exclusion of non-volkish people. Combined with the power of a state, fascism showed us very well in the 1930's how genocide can be quickly orchestrated based on a warped search for personal meaning.
So herein lies the problem. On the one hand, we have a very old mindset, in one form or another, that assigns people deep personal meaning and understanding, while at the same time causing inquisitions and genocides. On the other, we have a mutual respect for everyone's story, along with the tacit understanding that there is no ONE story, which leads people to vainly attempt to ascertain meaning on their own in an unsupportive, relative, constructivist, post-positivist world. No wonder fascism is making a comeback.
But this brings us to geo-caching. For those who don't know, the basic idea is that someone hid a nalgene bottle really well somewhere and all you get is the GPS coordinates. With some sort of a hand-held GPS reciever, you go tromping through woods and parks and wherever trying to find these sometimes very well hidden, sometimes very difficult to reach containers. When you finally find it, the reward is getting to put your name on a little notebook in the Nalgene along with a note. I got to do this for the first time today, and let me tell you, it was quite an experience.
The thing is, the world is still the same, with the same park benches, and the same bridges, and the same boring everything. Now, with geo caching, there is a quest, a purpose to it all. Now you have something that you need to explore, and something that you need to achieve (and the sense of achievement when you finally find the things is quite satisfying). The plain old boring, has been transformed into the creative and meaningful, while exploring and learning about your community, rather than ritually murdering a particular group out of it.
In the end, fascism and geo-caching have a core problem that they both address. As such, it seems to me like there should be other systems out there like geo caching that can allow us to have meaning in the otherwise mundane, while at the same time actually supporting the search and results thereof, while causing happiness without needless bloodshed.
I have two cats, and, like all animals who don't need to worry about where their next meal is coming from, just sort of sit around all day. Humans, on the other hand, are an odd species out. Rather than simply accepting that there isn't, latently, anything more to it all than just sort of lying around, we demand that life has some sort of ACTUAL meaning to it. We assign meaning to things: we come up with grand ideas, we choose careers, we join causes, etc. in part because without meaning, life to human beings is boring.
But just because humans tend to become depressed when they realize that life has no default meaning or universal overarching point, doesn't mean that it does. As such, in the end, it winds up falling upon us to MAKE that meaning (which we then tend to turn around and believe was there all along). In the end, religion has done an excellent job in giving people meaning along with other ideologies and organizations. We get meaning and purpose, but also identity and understanding, even if we have to make it up ourselves. Life is boring otherwise.
This brings us to fascism. At it's heart, fascism is little more than a rejection of modernity (itself built on a series of systems). The old, medieval systems of giving life meaning and purpose were out, and now, two to three hundred years later, we still haven't figured out how capitalism, industrialization, secularism, liberalism, urbanization etc. is supposed to fill the void. Fascism's answer is to reject modern ideas and return to a life where understanding is governed by an abstract idea of faith, a die-hard sense of community, and purpose in one's occupation. The end result is a quasi-mystical, iron-clad state that is based on a corporatist model.
If I get my sense of identity and propose from my volk, I don't need to frantically scramble for it in a world that is undirected where everybody's way of finding meaning is equal, and thus relative (and thus fundamentally unsatisfying to most people). Of course, this idea of nationalism can quickly lead to an exclusion of non-volkish people. Combined with the power of a state, fascism showed us very well in the 1930's how genocide can be quickly orchestrated based on a warped search for personal meaning.
So herein lies the problem. On the one hand, we have a very old mindset, in one form or another, that assigns people deep personal meaning and understanding, while at the same time causing inquisitions and genocides. On the other, we have a mutual respect for everyone's story, along with the tacit understanding that there is no ONE story, which leads people to vainly attempt to ascertain meaning on their own in an unsupportive, relative, constructivist, post-positivist world. No wonder fascism is making a comeback.
But this brings us to geo-caching. For those who don't know, the basic idea is that someone hid a nalgene bottle really well somewhere and all you get is the GPS coordinates. With some sort of a hand-held GPS reciever, you go tromping through woods and parks and wherever trying to find these sometimes very well hidden, sometimes very difficult to reach containers. When you finally find it, the reward is getting to put your name on a little notebook in the Nalgene along with a note. I got to do this for the first time today, and let me tell you, it was quite an experience.
The thing is, the world is still the same, with the same park benches, and the same bridges, and the same boring everything. Now, with geo caching, there is a quest, a purpose to it all. Now you have something that you need to explore, and something that you need to achieve (and the sense of achievement when you finally find the things is quite satisfying). The plain old boring, has been transformed into the creative and meaningful, while exploring and learning about your community, rather than ritually murdering a particular group out of it.
In the end, fascism and geo-caching have a core problem that they both address. As such, it seems to me like there should be other systems out there like geo caching that can allow us to have meaning in the otherwise mundane, while at the same time actually supporting the search and results thereof, while causing happiness without needless bloodshed.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)