I’m going to plunge right in where fools fear to tread, and present where my brain is going via international politics, and the rise of authoritarian, racially combative politics. It’s new strength seems to be mostly a Western cultural phenomena (including Turkey in the West).  It has old strength in lots of other places, but the growth of angry politics where it hasn’t been standard fare – at least not to this degree – for generations is what I’m thinking about.

It’s well represented by The Orange One Who Shall Not be Named (OOWSNN), and I’m much more familiar with him than some of the other political expressions of this trend, so I’ll mostly be referring to stuff in an American context…and this may achieve book length, so might be a few sittings…maybe I’ll split it into chapters.  (Late edition note: it’s 5200 words, too short for a book)

Continue reading “Politics” →

 

Man life is weird, serendipity is calling for attention in too many places for me to chase all of it, so I’m having to parse opportunity in a city where opportunity is out of fashion.  I’m keep thinking some of those opportunities are going to dry up, making it easier to pick what I’ll chase.  I may even be able to pass some of them on to others.

I guess it’s this ‘networking’ that all the MBA folks are all over.  It turns out that building a useful ‘network’ has a lot more to do with treating the people you meet like people, and not becoming a total hermit preventing you from meeting ANY people.  I also generally think of people I meet as friends, or potential friends, or cool acquaintances, or at least fellow travelers of this whole life thing, as opposed to ‘networks’, and that probably helps.  I mean webs are at least organic, did the ‘business speak’ term need to be that impersonal? Continue reading “Future and Possibilities and Stuff” →

 

And what has begun??  There have been a few editorials I’ve read this year that were all – “2016 was a horrible year, good riddance…2017 will be worse” – which is a bit negative really.  That led to me thinking about human “optimism bias”which these articles were clearly not engaged in.

Optimism bias is defined as a ‘cognitive bias’ where people irrationally think bad things are less likely to happen to themselves than those bad things are, or that better things will happen to them then the probabilities state.  It’s part of why statistics often leads to un-intuitive results.  And part of why statistics can be useful.

I have enough personal experience that ‘sometimes it does happen to you’ that it is not a natural fit for me, any more.  Add to that the whole black dog thing (black dog = depression for new readers – go back and read the 2nd and 3rd posted blogs if you’re new, it will help clarify what comes next. And yes they’re long, if that’s a problem you might be in the wrong place :)) and I need to push  a bit to get there…thus the “at least it won’t be boring” thing I repeat to myself even more often than I use it here. Continue reading “Another Year over…” →