The Green Philosopher

Along with a lot of help from the team I work with I created the Bankruptcy Town Hall site.  It's open to the public and loaded with good information and some very detailed exclusive content, check it out.

Thanks,

John

Causal Domain Shear: The tendency for distinct and completely seperate "causal domains"(groups of things linked by cause and effect relationships) to influence one another through tenuous or temporary relationships.

    So it's finally happened to me.  I've been lured out of an environmentally friendly lifestyle and into an 80 mile a day commuter lifestyle.  OK, so lured is probably the wrong way to put it, I'm was terrified by what I learned about our economy over the last year so I started looking for a full time job instead of trying to run my own business through a greater depression cycle.  And that's what we're really entering, a greater depression cycle.  And this time, like the last time, it's fundamentally about too much debt.

    Most people I know who follow the economy assume that the central cause of our economic instability is based on the huge amount of bad real estate debt out there, and yes that is part of it.  Unfortunately it's only a very small part of it, just the tiny spark that has started a fire on banking sheets across the globe that will bring to light the enormous amount of debt that has crept into every aspect of the modern economy.  It's almost comical how many businesses, across the globe, run their operations on borrowed money.  And with how razor thin the actual cash reserves of modern businesses are (with very few exceptions), these businesses that are built on credit will begin to fail as the credit becomes unavailable or the interest rates on the loans rise directly cutting into the business profits.  It kinda snowballs from here on out.

    And the government responses have been patently ridiculous.  You can't solve a debt based problem by piling more debt on the people whom the economy depends on to keep it moving!  That's just absurd! Read more...

So, I'm going to complain to the ether, so if that's not your thing you can stop reading now.

    My brain hurts!  So with a load of new responsibilities I have to get my PHP coding skills back up to par, learn Adobe Flex and at school I need to learn MIPS assembler and architecture.  So of course my brain hurts.  The PHP part is pretty easy, I've done some coding in it before.  It's a nice language with tons of useful functions and lots of alternate syntaxes.  The API I'll be coding PHP with, Drupal, is very clean and very nice architectually.  So in all it's kind of an ideal high level language and API combination to be working with.  Except... Read more...

This is my proposal for an Ubuntu EEE logo, this is just a quick draft in black and white but the final would definitely be colored and polished.

   I named the game "carnage" and aptly enough it does seem to be turning out that way, although it is definitely my own carnage.  I should know better than to trust misleading user names.

  Boy do I feel rusty, it's been many years since I last played...

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 Bg4 4. h3 Bxf3 5. Qxf3 Nf6 6. Be3 Be7 7. Nc3 O-O 8. O-O-O Qc8 9. dxe5 Ne8 10. exd6 Nxd6 11. Nd5 Bd8 12. Bc5 Re8 13. Bc4 Bg5+ 14. Ne3 Bxe3+ 15. fxe3 Nxc4 16. Rhf1 Qe6 17. b3 Ne5 18. Qg3 b6 19. Bd4 Ng6 20. Qxc7 Na6 21. Qb7 Nb4 22. Rxf7 Qxf7 23. Qxf7+ Kxf7 24. Rf1+ Kg8 25. e5 Nxa2+ 26. Kb2 Nb4 27. c3 Na6 28. g4 Nc5 29. Rf5 Nh4 30. Rg5 Re6 31. b4 Nd3+ 32. Kc2   *

[Event "Online Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2008.08.02"]
[Round "1"]
[White "jpwarren00"]
[Black "iknowlittle"]
[Result "*"]
[WhiteElo "1200"]
[BlackElo "1277"]
[TimeControl "1 in 1 day"]
 

     Ever wonder why the dollar is in a steady decline? Ever wonder why so many foreign corporations and companies own so much American property?

     It's really quite simply because we have ceased to be a producing nation. Not that we are not very productive, very busy, very hard working. It's just that we no longer produce very much physical material for all of our hard labors. This is not to say that our exhaustive intellectual property or managerial and IT service isn't worth anything, it has value, in it's own way.

     But here is the problem: all this intellectual property, managerial whatnot and IT services, you can't eat them, you can't wear them, they will not quench your thirst, they will not power your machines. They are luxuries.

Can you build a country's economy solely on luxuries?

Yeah, I didn't think so either. Read more...

     So I've heard numerous arguments against growing some of your own food in an urban environment, arguments such as: “It's a lot of effort for an insignificant contribution to the environment.”; and “You still have to use fertilizers and lots of water to grow stuff so it's a negative energy gain.”, and those were just the comments by people who were suppose to be environmentally conscious. So before I get to documenting my work on balcony gardening, let's be clear about why this is important. First we need to consider that the world is heading towards the post-industrial era and what this means.

• Primarily it means that everyone, rich and poor could suffer greatly from the loss of industrial supply chains and industrial farming.

• It means that the money you currently spend in a month on a wide assortment of food may only buy you a 50 pound bag of rice with which to survive for the following month.

• It means that even if there is an abundance of food in other parts of the country, you may not have the means or ability to travel there to buy it.

So, how do you keep from suffering severe malnutrition if all you have to eat that month is a 50 pound bag of rice? Read more...

I went into a public library to quickly check the weather at a public terminal and what did I see on the desktop?  Openoffice.org and a couple of GPL applications.

At first I stopped thinking about the weather.  Could it be?  Is the local government possibly adopting, at even this peripheral level, "open source software"?!?

Maybe we won't all die a Roman death, unaware that we squandered all our resources until it was too late.

Maybe we do have some hope for a bright future...