The Local Yarn 
Jerry Seinfeld pointed out the silly aspect of rooting for sports teams which have no hard connection to their own players. “We’re rooting for clothes!”
(Via episode #111 of the 99% Invisible podcast.)
The above is a note added to an earlier post…
This thread on reddit started out describing how IBM System/360 mainframes, still running after fifty years, monitor their own hardware and automatically order new parts when needed. I was able to find some corroboration to these stories on a recent Telegraph article:
Modern machines inform IBM of problems and automatically dispatch an engineer with the right parts. The first thing many customers know of an issue is when an IBM employee arrives to carry out maintenance. (source)
Equipment that “self-maintains” in this way is actually getting fairly common in the data center. But will any of these newer devices still be ordering their own parts fifty years from now?
The longevity of the machine itself is only about half the marvel here; the other half is the longevity of the corporate mothership.
Understanding Poetry from Incidental Comics by Grant Snider
The two best lines are “If you return to a poem, it will grow in meaning” and “If you memorize a poem, you will see it everywhere.” Poems work subconsciously and across time, rather than being comprehended at first reading.
The above is a note added to an earlier post…
From The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl:
“Lowell fell into more laughter at the idea of being inspired by his own poetry, but in truth, he was. Why shouldn’t he be? The proof of poetry was, in Lowell’s mind, that it reduced to the essence of a single line the vague philosophy that floated in all mens’ minds, so as to render it portable and useful, ready to hand.”
— The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl, p. 34
The above is a note added to an earlier post…
What is the value of poetry? How does it make itself felt?
The notes to this post will focus on “found answers” to these questions from literature and from all over the web: answers which are themselves brief and poetic.
Thomas Piketty’s breakout book Capital in the 21st Century has a lot of people talking about the failure of capitalism. It’s only fair to give some of this podium time to G. K. Chesterton; after all, Piketty has essentially just documented what Chesterton prophesied.
So last night I took the text of G. K. Chesterton’s Outline of Sanity and converted it into an ebook for easier reading:
outlineofsanity.epub
outlineofsanity.mobi
Distributism seems to be popping up more often lately — not just among armchair hobbyists like myself, but in places where it could actually matter.
It may be that I’m just starting to look in the right places, but I think the increasing frequency of writings like these show that Dism has turned a corner. When I first learned about it in 2012, I found it incredibly strange that I hadn’t heard about it before — that it wasn’t being talked about. I felt it badly needed an update, and a fresh discourse which I’m not qualified to lead (or even visible enough to start off). Now it seems to be happening.
Yes, all of these writers are approaching the subject from a Catholic background. And I would still like to see a broad secular (or at least post-Catholic) case being made for Distributism. But perhaps a good first step is to get Catholics and other open-minded evangelicals to think about Distributism on its own terms. Two years ago, when I attended a meeting of the American Chesterton Society dedicated to the topic of Distributism, what I found were a lot of capitalist Catholics who, though pleasant and well-meaning, were interested in it mainly as another bludgeon to use against Democrats.
Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt →
This short series by NPR makes for a straightforward illustration of things as byproducts of a relational web.
The above is a note added to an earlier post…
You can look at it like this: we spend our lives doing just two things, evolving relationships and shifting atoms.
Any activity in one area affects possibilities in the other.
Every made object you see around you represents some exchange of effort between people, and therefore has as its origin a human relationship.
You may have never met the producers of most of the things you own; but still, each thing is the byproduct of a chain of relationships connecting those people to you.
A middle-class American family sits relatively near the top of a vast food-chain of relationships, of which all their physical possessions are the byproducts.
That which we call “Thrift” is simply maximizing the value that flows up to you through this chain of relationships, while limiting your own contribution up the chain.
Add Henry Blodget of Business Insider to the list of people who imagine that short-sighted growth-maximization is somehow a brand-new perversion of capitalism rather than inherent in it.
“…over the past three decades, what began as a healthy and necessary effort to make our companies more efficient has evolved into a warped consensus that the only purpose of a corporation is to ‘maximize earnings.’
“This view…is a short-sighted and destructive view of capitalism, an economic system that sustains not just this country but most countries in the world.”
— “Sorry, But There's No ‘Law Of Capitalism’ That You Have To Pay Employees As Little As Possible”
(Business Insider, March 29, 2014)
Blodget complains that corporations are being selfish when they pay the lowest possible wage for a given skill set, and that they are therefore somehow bad capitalists. Unfortunately for his argument, the many sad outcomes he observes in the labor market are exactly those prescribed by capitalism, which says that the fair price is what the market is willing to pay, period.
The above is a note added to an earlier post…
