The harvest of Polymeme
by Vinay Gupta • August 22, 2008 • Trivia and Media • 1 Comment
Polymeme isn’t too high traffic, and claims to cherry-pick items of general interest from the blogs of experts and specialists, more or less, using Magic Algorithms. However it works, it does what Metafilter used to do, before it got so inbred.
Here’s what I got from the last week or so’s accumulation in my RSS reader.
Splendid portraits of some dozens of African kings.
A brutal article on Washington vs. NYC lawyers, which concludes
Finance guys [in New York] openly mock and ridicule lawyers as peons who make peanuts,” said one Washington lawyer who used to work in New York. This lawyer told the story of a friend, a corporate lawyer at a prominent firm, who realized when he was a six-figure-earning bottom-dweller.
“He went out to a gentlemen’s club. One of the ladies asked him what he did for a living. His initial reaction was to lie and say, ‘I’m a banker.’ And he realized that if he couldn’t tell the truth about his job to an Eastern European stripper, he had to leave his job. He now works in finance.”
Alabama’s interior design guild monopoly enforcement.
Irrigating fields using raw sewage. (new scientist)
A tragic choice of words on transitioning to a stable society: An American Cultural Revolution, through which we change fundamentally both our distorted worldview and our dysfunctional resource utilization behavior, is our only sane choice…
Ahem. Cultural Revolution.
Chinese separatist groups really begin to get moving.
Free plans for green homes (not hexayurts.)
So… not bad for a week’s harvest – it suggested about 70 links, of which about 10% were worth listing here as “wow, this is some good stuff.”
Recommended.
In response to the stable society link…
Has there ever been, in history or at present, a sustainable society? Is the problem really the METHOD of lifestyle as this article argues? Can a case be made that the problem is rooted the MOTIVE of lifestyle? If our behavior is unsustainable and even self-destructive, but change is anathema, doesn’t that point to dysfunctional behavioral drives? Thus the importance of asking the question, has there ever been a sustainable behavior model?
Is it possible that beliefs are like DNA? Just as DNA provides the pattern by which energy is expressed into the biological world we know, don’t beliefs represent the pattern through which human energy/drives are expressed into lifestyles and societies? I respectfully submit that unsustainable behaviors, be it at the lifestyle level or all the way up to the societal level, are the effects of the cause of our individual and societal beliefs, and when weighed in the balance those beliefs are even more condemnable than the unsustainable behaviors we all are railing against. Thus the importance of asking the question, has there ever been a sustainable behavior model?
Some have made the case that the west is addicted to oil. Others have made just as strong a case that the majority of the world is addicted to unsustainable lifestyles. Since, I fall squarely into both groups, I find myself deeply unsettled by the recovering addicts proverb “the same thinking that got me into this mess cannot get me out.” Thus the importance of asking the question, has there ever been a sustainable behavior model?