Morning (job chassis social)

I am starting a new job next year.

I'll be making as much money as a Kentucky coal miner fresh out of high school. However, if I reflect upon this, it makes sense. I consider the cost of living in the US. I consider the occupational risk of mining: health (black lung), accidents, etc. All these things result in roughly the same salary.

I've had a liberal education and a carefree life pursuing research into life's meaning at a molecular level. I should be paid a premium for that advance knowledge. However, that premium is about the same as the premium given to coal miners for their occupational risk (or should miners be paid more?!). Let's take a look at what we mean by premium and what exactly we are paying for.

On average, a coal miner, me and a CEO of some startup cloud company, are biological the same machine. This means a sophisticated organic locomotion chassis on which an advanced neural network is mounted. It has been argued that the advanced neural network mounted on the average CEO chassis is better at making complex decision regarding an ever changing community network than me or the coal miner.

I disagree. CEOs on average don't make better decisions than a Kentucky coal miner. If a CEO or a coal miner were given ownership of a company, on average, over time with multiple trials over many companies, we would see that both perform about the same in regard to the success of the company. Of course we can't run this experiment, and in the real world with all that money the CEO's voice is louder and people are evolutionarily conditioned to believe the louder speaker. He is shouting because of some imminent danger coming to eat us! But in reality he is shouting to hide the fact that his decision making isn't better than you or me.

This doesn't mean you or I can go out today to become a CEO, or that we would be successful at it if given only one shot. But if given the opportunity and observed over multiple companies you would see that our success rate would be about the same as any current CEO.

If my hypothesis is correct, then we have to ask why we pay CEO such a high premium. This premium is specifically for their decision making ability. Isn't it? Or are we paying for the social network that they have developed over time? The premium on the social network should be high, but if that is where the real value is, then we should acknowledge this fact!

And when we talk about increasing the opportunities of all Americans, what we should be talking about is increasing access of Americans to these social networks. The old social networks were difficult to open up. They tend to be closed and clique-ish. The new networks are much more open. Let's keep it that way.

Just my 2.3 cents.

-J

Afternoon (cycle picture dream)

It's Sunday. I've had some breakfast and posted my picture. The thoughts, images, and dreams flicker through me and I can barely comprehend them. On some level I understand, on some level I feel too much, and yet at some other "holistic" level I don't understand. I will never understand. I am only offered glimpses, shadows on a cave wall some would say.

Here are the things I am selling today:

Vittorio's table, the self-assemble shelf, and gifted chairs.

The table is apart already because they need to fit it into their car. I can't with the shelf. The pieces are screwed together.
We took it apart anyways and they took everything away. A nice french couple. They were looking at the same apartment as Gonca (who took the Ikea dresser).


Before I took the table apart, I took the "almost finished breakfast on the table" picture. What did I have for dinner last night on the table? Here.

Blogger isn't really up to fancy picture display yet. No more angled table images but for sure more dinner pictures. Later.

And more wine pictures, just on a different table.

 You get the gist.

(it's chicken)

A Dornfelder from last night..

If I could only stack the pictures and compress the time like it feels. Still. The images are fragmented, spaced like I see my memories.
I put up pictures here.
We put up pictures on our walls.
For me it is a cycle of putting up and taking down physical pictures. I go through different but same emotions everytime.

There is Lil's black and white picture framing a boat. It is dated 1998, when I left LA and went to Boulder for Graduate School.

There are the Kanji from Ikeda sensei and the odd deconstruction of women pictures preserved in polyurethane shoe fix gloo. Boulder days of practicing Aikido, and then fixing paper in rubber while living in Julie's place. Maybe the artist spirit moved me then!

And what else? The calendar from 2009 giving classic art images. 2009 was a busy and good year. A stitched together photograph of a Thailand jungle was from then. Pictures of gramma and me and mom and ta re and the cardboard pieces from a care package sent to me by my nieces. Life in Vietnam circa 1970-71, LA circa 1998, Boulder 2002-6 and Tuebingen 2006-2009, all on my wall. My timeline.

It is like Aikido. You can't learn it by talking about it. You have to go through the motion. The movement is putting up and taking down physical artifacts with hyper-linked connection to various neural networks. I go through the movements that others have done with love. What does it feel like? I can't describe it. I just go through the movements. You have to go through the movements. Social muscle memory networks linked to group cognition.

I keep telling myself that when all this is more settled the pictures will come back up. And they will. They are all slices of time's passage that I've cut away and taken with me, artifacts with memory traces linking places and people and times and wine and fun and laughter.

These artifacts I will keep and go through the motions again.

But I will put some here too, as you do. An electronic artifact who's persistence might be longer than any real object.

These objects are organically in you, in your brain and now on extended network you create to store memories for random access. How will these extended networks alter the movements we do?

Regardless, if they last longer than expected, I will be happy.