A price is paid for the abundance, however. The complexity of 21st-century life increased, making many people uncomfortable with their new high-energy environment. Gradients in the distribution of abundance annoyed many more people. A populist groundswell developed around the world with the stated goal to return to simpler times.
Category: Society
Finding Lost Children
The very first obstacle that must be overcome to reunite the children with the families is to remove the parents from detention. This can be done with a bond. A bond releases the parents from detention. Once free, they are allowed to seek out their children, which is another set of hurdles.
THE (NOT ART) EXPERIMENT
At any rate, let’s get back to why we are having this conversation. We are here to use the language of art to search for a boundary between Art and (Not Art) in a real example. Surprises occur at boundaries. Surprises are the basis of humor. So … we might know when we are close to a boundary between Art and (Not Art) when we start laughing.
Why Healthcare Cannot Be a Completely Free Market
The concept of supply and demand is the cornerstone of economic theory. For simple commodities, the theory predicts that the demand for a product decreases as the price of the product increases and consumers are unwilling to pay the higher price. The supply increases as the price increases and suppliers increase production to capture increased profits. The actual price of the product is a compromise between the desires of consumers and the acumen of suppliers.
The Decline and Fall of Globalization
To understand what happened in the recent US Presidential election, we have to go back to the early 1980s. At that time the overall global social mood shot upward, probably as a consequence of growing international financial integration that tended to undermine the age-old paradigm of “international diversification”. As the social mood became ever more positive, feelings that “everyone is a potential friend” grew stronger and drove events toward increasing interdependence, trade, and cooperation. It’s no accident that the European Union was formed during this period, along with the World Economic Forum in Davos. This story is graphically shown in the diagram below, where we see globalization totally flat until the mid ‘80s, where it exploded until around 2008.
Some Modest Proposals
I am a social-media whore. I am awake after midnight fascinated by what people might say next. Now that Mr. Trump won the Presidential election, the future no longer seems to be constrained by civilized precedent. Any proposal is now taken to be credible; even the dismantling of the extremely popular Medicare is on the table.
Lessons From the Biggest Air Disaster
On March 27, 1977 the greatest airline disaster in history took place at Los Rodeos Airport on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Two 747 aircrafts, KLM Flight 4805 and Pan Am Flight 1736, collided in fog. The crash killed 583 people, with just 61 survivors. The accident has been analyzed in depth and the conclusion is that it was caused by a cascade of errors in both communication and human nature.
The Strange World of Texas Politics
We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills . . . critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education . . . which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the students’ fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
2012 Platform, Republican Party of Texas
Complexity Gaps Lead to Inequality
American political scientist Francis Fukuyama announced the “end of history” in his essay of the same name published in 1989. In that article, Fukuyama argued that communistic social and economic principles collapsed along with the Soviet Union thus leading to a victory for liberal-democratic capitalism in their decades-long battle. What many people missed in Fukuyama’s essay was the part in which he wondered whether citizens in the West would proceed to lose moral and spiritual purpose now that the Cold War had ended the East- West ideological conflict.
Crisis of the Middle Class
One of the most talked-about films of 2014 was Richard Linklater’s epic Boyhood, which gives a blow-by-blow account of the maturing of a young man in twenty-first-century America. While the film covers over 4,000 days of the growing-up of the film’s star, Mason Evans, Jr., the actual filming took just 39 days of shooting. Linklater describes his film as an “epic of the intimate,” which is very descriptive as we see the hero deal with various life trials that a young man confronts in early twenty-first-century America.
Traces: Ants and Urban Design
An individual ant is not very interesting. Its level of intelligence is minimal; its problem solving skills miniscule. But even these limitations allow for rule based behavior. Paired with asynchronous forms of communication such as pheromones in scent markers or trails, or the ability to categorize and count other ants, complex behaviors emerge. Those behaviors either contribute to the survival of the colony or they don’t, so environmental pressures help select for what works.