Recently, I’ve avoided reading email and such at work and, of course, have been much more productive. The productivity extends to after-work hours, too. Just today, I’ve set up mon for the servers I have to monitor and set Jabber to IM me when I get mail.
In other news, I received a call today that put a bee in my bonnet. As a result, I’ll soon have this server set up to do email (and web) hosting for small businesses.
I finally figured out why I don’t like economics. Sure you can do some interesting things with economics, but the entire focus is to objectify human behavior.
Objectivity is something that we like to think is a good thing. And sometimes it is good. But, we should not be objective about people and their behavior, or we risk objectifying them.
Objectification is, essentially, de-humanization. When we reduce people to rational beings who act in their own best interest (as many armchair economists do), this is de-humanizing. The human experience is a subjective experience. Joe Gregario showed this recently as he described Mark and Dora’s wedding: Those are the facts. And if life was just composed of facts, then that would be all to tell of the wedding.
But, we aren’t rational actors. We’re stupid, clumsy, illogical, loving people. We may often act in ways that can be explained and understood rationally, but, then, just as often, we don’t. And this is a good thing. Because the essence of the subjective human experience is creativity.
Creativity does not exist in a completely rational world. It is often inconsistent with reason. If creativity were reasonable, it would be unexceptional, but the reason we love and reward it is because creativity is exceptional. Creativity allows us to do new things, it opens new doors, it forges new paths. Creativity is entirely subjective.
Economics cannot capture or explain the subjective essence of humanity. I’m sure many economists recognize this. But it seems that whenever I hear someone explaining the economic forces that produce this or that, they miss the entirely subjective nature of humanity. They’ve tried to reduce the essence of humanity to something that can be understood objectively, rationally. And they’ll end up failing.
(For more along this line of thinking, see Nicolai Berdyaev. He’s much better at explaining this stuff than me.)
Stuart Robinson says he uses free software almost exclusivly (as I mentioned I do). He has an “bizarre” analogy of non-programmer : free-software :: mute : free-speech.
Yesterday, I bought a bike rack and detachable child-seat for my bike. The bike rack is so I can ride to work without wearing a backpack and getting all sweaty. The child seat is for, of course, my children.
As soon as I brought it home, the kids turned off the movie they had rented and came out to take turns riding on the bike. I took them in turns (even my six year old weighs less than the rating for the seat) and we rode around the neighborhood and up and down Carrollton Avenue.
Today we were going to meet at the park and bike and have a picnic after I got off of work. Other circumstances intervened and I ended up taking only Basil on an eight-mile ride home from work. We rode down Camp street most of the way. I would normally just take the more trafficed Magazine, but I wanted to be extra cautious since I had Basil in tow.
And what a street! We rode through the beautiful Garden District. The houses along Camp are much nicer, the trees denser than along the more commercial Magazine. And we had a little supper at a restaurant and then rode home.
In hind-sight, taking Basil on such a long, bumpy ride on his first extended time out might not have been such a wise decision. He threw up shortly after he went to bed. Despite that, he had fun and will want to do it again. And his sisters want to try it, too!