http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TAqSBMZDY8
Collared or Untied: Reflections on Work in American Culture 1.Fred Armisen opened the first season of the TV show Portlandia singing “The Dream of the 90s is Alive in Portland,” a dream of pierced, tattooed folks hanging out, hot girls wearing glasses and putting images of birds on everything, and grown-ups making a living making coffee. He asks Carrie Brownstein if she remembers the ’90s, when people were unambitious and “they had no occupations whatsoever.” “I thought that died out a long time ago,” she says, wonderingly, before she leaves L.A. to join Armisen’s ragged troupe of relaxed and minimally-employed folks dedicated to the art of skateboarding. The context missing from this hilarious send-up is that Portland experienced a decade-long recession in the early years of the 2000s, and didn’t bounce back from it until the last couple of years. The ’90s, like the ’80s before them, were a decade of company mergers and the birth of bigger, leaner, and meaner mega-corporations. 2.
THE FINANCIAL PHILOSOPHER: Foundations vs 'Castles in the Air' "I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." ~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Why Everybody Who Doesn’t Hate Bitcoin Loves It: Full Transcript This is a transcript of the Freakonomics Radio podcast “Why Everybody Who Doesn’t Hate Bitcoin Loves It.” [MUSIC: Greg Ruby Quartet, “Swing for Dudley” (from Look Both Ways)] Stephen J. recursosenrede - Lengua castellana Skip to main content Create interactive lessons using any digital content including wikis with our free sister product TES Teach. Get it on the web or iPad! guest Join | Help | Sign In The Great Philosophers 8: Theodor Adorno © Getty Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was born in Frankfurt in 1903 into a wealthy and cultured family. His father, a wine merchant, was of Jewish origin but had converted to Protestantism at university. Teddy (as his closest friends called him) was an extremely fine pianist from a young age. Until his twenties, he planned for a career as a composer, but eventually focused on philosophy. In 1934, he was barred, on racial grounds, from teaching in Germany.
The evils of meritocracy © Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP/Press Association Images One of the few ambitions shared by politicians across the political spectrum is that of creating a fully meritocratic society, that is, a society in which all those who make it to the top do so only because of their own talents and abilities (rather than thanks to unfair privilege: upper-class parents, a friendship with the boss etc.). Throughout the Western world, all governments have (in theory!) the common goal of trying to create a hierarchy based on actual ability, replacing posh, chinless halfwits with the meritorious, wherever they may be found and whatever age, colour or gender they might be. © PA/PA Wire/Press Association Images
Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Piketty – review This is a VIB – very important book. Nearly everyone agrees about that. But the reasons for its importance have changed in the months since it was published. At first it was important because it was a big book on a big subject: a book of grand ambition about inequality, written not by the latest "thinker" but a respected academic economist with real numbers to go with his theory. We hadn't had anything like that in ages.
Why You Should Bribe Your Kids: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast [MUSIC: Pearl Django, “La Rive Gauche” (from Under Paris Skies)] Stephen J. DUBNER: Hello, John List? John LIST: Stephen Dubner, how are you doing, man? Why do we value gold? Image copyright British Museum Mankind's attitude to gold is bizarre. Chemically, it is uninteresting - it barely reacts with any other element. Yet, of all the 118 elements in the periodic table, gold is the one we humans have always tended to choose to use as currency. Why?
Scientists: Rich People, Poor People May Have Shared Common Ancestor ITHACA, NY—According to a study released this week by geneticists at Cornell University, substantial evidence indicates that rich people and poor people—disparate populations long thought to be entirely unrelated—may have once shared a single common ancestor. “After conducting careful DNA analysis, our research team was taken aback to discover that the wealthy and the working class actually have a considerable number of genetic similarities,” said study co-author Kenneth Chang, adding that despite the disparity between the modern-day affluent and low earners in terms of behavior, appearance, and lifestyle, numerous genetic markers revealed that their predecessors may have once lived beside one another without any noticeable differences. “Side by side, poor people and rich people look almost nothing alike, of course.
Followership Followership refers to a role held by certain individuals in an organization, team, or group. Specifically, it is the capacity of an individual to actively follow a leader.[1] Followership is the reciprocal social process of leadership.[2] The study of followership (part of the emerging study of Leadership psychology) is integral to a better understanding of leadership, as the success and failure of groups, organizations, and teams is not only dependent on how well a leader can lead, but also on how well the followers can follow.[3] Specifically, followers play an active role in organization, group, and team successes and failures.[4] Effective followers are individuals who are considered to be enthusiastic, intelligent, ambitious, and self-reliant.[1] The emergence of the field of followership has been attributed to the scholar Robert Kelley.[4] Kelley[3] described four main qualities of effective followers, which include: Followership Patterns (Types)[edit]
Sick of this market-driven world? You should be To be at peace with a troubled world: this is not a reasonable aim. It can be achieved only through a disavowal of what surrounds you. To be at peace with yourself within a troubled world: that, by contrast, is an honourable aspiration. This column is for those who feel at odds with life. It calls on you not to be ashamed. I was prompted to write it by a remarkable book, just published in English, by a Belgian professor of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe.
It Matters How Rich the Rich Are John Aziz at The Week argues that it does not matter how rich the rich are. I believe he is wrong for a number of reasons. The Impoverished Do Suffer Because the Rich Are Rich The Danger of Financial Jargon The most important mystery of ancient Egypt concerned the annual inundation of the Nile floodplain. The calendar was divided into three seasons linked to the river and the agricultural cycle it determined: akhet, or the inundation; peret, the growing season; and shemu, the harvest. The size of the harvest depended on the size of the flood: too little water, and there would be famine; too much, and there would be catastrophe; just the right amount, and the whole country would bloom and prosper. Every detail of Egyptian life was shaped by the flood.