Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Former Vice President Joseph Biden, in a recent announcement of his economic plan, used the phrase "shovel ready." There are lots of shovel ready jobs in building infrastructure. One might argue that this is a time in which all liberty loving folks should be directed all their/our fire at the Orange Dynast, not at Joe. Still, I have to have a go at this unfortunate phrase. Politicians talk about "shovel ready" jobs because they want to convey the impression that it is easy for public spending to put people to work. "There are jobs to be done, we [the clique making this claim today] know what they are, and some of it is as simple as pointing a new hire to a shovel, then pointing him to the place where the hole needs to be dug." Biden should remember the phrase "shovel ready," because he and former President Obama used that phrase in their own campaigning in 2008. They won. Those public investment jobs turned out to be tricky to create aft...

I made five Resolutions last year. I have kept, let us say, 2.5. The resolutions were these: 1. Get my car through December 2012 in good working order. I'm happy to report that the car is doing fine. 2. Make an entrepreneurial investment. Did absolutely nothing in this line. Oops. 3. There was a computer-tech related resolution concerning entry into the 21st century. I'm giving myself half a point for this one. I have gotten Skype and and did get the audio problem resolved, but I'm still not comfortable scanning and can't work the printer due to some software problem. 4. My book did come out early this year, but sales fell far short of where I had resolved they would be, so this one counts as a Fail. 5. Venture outside the borders of the US. Success! I did get to London for the Trading Technology conference. So, counting (1) and (5) as full successes, and   (3) as a half success, I get my 2.5 score.  Well ... I've had worse years. For the ...

As some of you may have gathered from my "experiment in chronology" last week, I'm giving a lot of thought to how I will organize my next book. This is going to be the more scholarly re-working of my last book that I've mentioned both in that book and in some of my responses to critics. But it won't simply be Gambling with Borrowed Chips with end-notes and a bibliography added. It will be different in important organizational respects. A narrower chronological focus, in particular. I won't be going back over the Renaissance and Reformation. I probably won't even be going as far back as 1990, last week's "experiment" notwithstanding. I may start in 1994, when a lot of remarkably pertinent things happened. The above photo, BTW, is of a 1994 Ford Ranger. Anyway, my book would distinguish between the big picture items one first thinks of when thinking of a year, and the little pictures. It would discuss the little pictures in four ...