Oranges for luck (Taken with Instagram at Grand Sichuan)
Pomegranate green tea residue. (Taken with Instagram at M. Shanken Communications)
“Official economic statistics have hidden the probability that the Western economies have been in a zero-growth phase for at least twenty years. Whatever growth there has been has come largely from such things as real estate bubbles, the prison industry, health care costs, insurance and financial services, educational costs, the weapons industry, and so forth. The more expensive these are, the more the economy is assumed to have grown. In areas where there has been growth, such as the internet, much of this is actually a covert form of importing growth. Internet-based revenue comes mostly from sales and advertising, not from new production. We are more efficiently greasing the wheels of the conveyor belt of goods from China to the West. In any event, developing countries cannot keep the growth machine running forever. The more it slows, the more it will be necessary to get around the zero bound.” — Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein (via Findings.com)
“Here’s another worrisome point: Facebook is a company of technologists, not marketers. If you wanted to bet on someone succeeding in the marketing business, you’d bet on technologists only if they could invent some new way to sell; you wouldn’t bet on them to sell the way marketers have always sold. But that’s what Facebook is doing, selling individual ads. From a revenue perspective, it’s an ad-sales business, not a technology company. To meet expectations—the expectations that took it public at $100 billion, the ever-more-vigilant expectations needed to sustain it at that price—it has to sell at near hyperspeed.” — The Facebook Fallacy - Technology Review
On the Hudson (Taken with Instagram at Liberty Island)
“We have lived in an Age of Separation. One by one, our bonds to community, nature, and place have dissolved, marooning us in an alien world. The loss of these bonds is more than a reduction of our wealth, it is a reduction of our very being. The impoverishment we feel, cut off from community and cut off from nature, is an impoverishment of our souls. That is because, contrary to the assumptions of economics, biology, political philosophy, psychology, and institutional religion, we are not in essence separate beings having relationships. We are relationship.” — Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein (via Findings.com)
“No wonder, after two thousand years’ immersion in the mentality of money, we have become so used to the replaceability of all things that we behave as if we could, if we wrecked the planet, simply buy a new one.” — Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein (via Findings.com)
For as long as I can remember I’ve been managing my own server and publishing platform. I’m not into it anymore. So I’m going to play with tumblr for a while and see what happens. I’ve been a registered tumblr user for a while, but never really used it full time - it was always an add on to tweets, photos posted to flickr or instagram, blog posts on my own self-hosted blog, whatever. Today I decided to simply give up the administrative overhead of running my own server (well, really that happend a while ago) and just do this as simply and quickly as possible. So here I am.
Minor reality