Tag: Environment

Impending Incident

The North-East is once again bracing for a gathering storm.

Climate change and the prolonged cold front.

Satellite tracking has improved weather forecast substantially.

Other things in life seem less certain e.g. financial market and food/fuel prices.

The Queen of England was reported as saying “how come no one saw this coming?” (in the context of this past Recession).

Our 21st-century narrative should have bluntly shown the Elephant in the room.

And that was with all the predictions of Nobel-prize-winning economists.

After averting an avalanche, we now face a cliff.

All impending incidents. Everyone was aware of the Sequester. The budget cuts and the cancelled contracts.

700,000 jobs are to be eliminated, to bring the unemployed population to just about 13 million. Adam Smith got hand (invisible) but not heart.

To survive, one needs to be tough . This is a test of not manhood but nationhood.

There is a piece about Finding Love in Walmart (18 States). What about Walgreens?

Too convenient and high-priced?

Let’s face it. The Elephant has stood there in the room.

Much has been written about it, but it refuses to budge.

Still high unemployment, still high fuel prices.

The best brains simply surrender, while the top 1 percenter simp;y accumulate. That is an impending event (as of this edit, the DOW has just reached its all-time high since 2007, much of it came from institutional investors).

So we join a new spectator’s sports: space traveling (of course you have to be very rich to ride). Aristocracy in the age of Austerity. Our version of the dream has just been upgraded and most impossible to realize. Well, we can always rely on the weather man for better odds. With space stations, weather forecast, once a hard uncertainty, has now become a soft one at that.

P.S. The area did experience end-of-season snow blizzards, just as predicted.

Trust as currency

I have had great team experience.

Been looking for an encore.

When team works out, we can skip the prelim and go straight to solving problems.

It saves a lot of time. Besides, trust binds us together.

Online, it’s hard to know who is who.

Hence, trust online comes at piecemeal.

Tit for tat.

Amazon has earned our trust (click here and the books get delivered ).

Or, as kids, we know we will get picked up after school. So we learn about trust.

Lovers expect Valentine cards. Trust.

Government deducted our paycheck. Hope they pay out when we are old.

Trust (hopefully they don’t keep moving retirement age).

Without hope and trust, we would go array.

Can’t function. We need that certain amount of predictability to operate.

Expect the best, plan for the worst.

The best compliment one can get is “he/she can be trusted”.

Past behavior and consistent nature tend to increase trust.

Knowledge of each other and yes, a few fights in between, also deepens trust.

Conversely, trust issues are up there in company’s priorities (escorting a sacked employee to the door).

Been there, done that.

Somehow we need to build trust into organizational culture (cash donation for self-served lunches. Not only it saves company’s time – but also can serve as an exercise in trust. Conversely, the fridge at work is the worst place when no one is in charge).

Transparency, constant updates, keeping people in the loop, on the same page etc… all build trust.

Leadership skills. Communication skills. Group huddle. He who trusts others will receive it in turn. Trust as currency. And this currency tends to multiply.

The trust virtuous cycle. Keep investing in it.

Seasons and symmetry

Traffic in the past few weeks has come from the opposite direction: country side to city streets. Tet is over.

We had joy we had fun we had seasons in the sun. Now it’s time to ramp up, to deliver.

There are things that can only be understood in hindsight:  a failed marriage, a single parent who hangs on to his now-grown daughter etc…

Never second-guess yourself. If only I could do it over….

You got one shot at life but not blindly, since all the hints and signals were there.

As long as we don’t play “solitaire”, others would be glad to point them out to us.

For years, I have lived with the flow (time and space) i.e. could never come back to the time and place where I was from.

I have been wrong on that count.

Seasons do come around, in symmetry.

Fall aging, Summer fun, Winter loneliness and Spring hope.

There is not a thing that goes to waste under the Sun.

Years ago, I couldn’t understand why my American friend would major in horticulture. Growing up in the city all my life, I found his field of study utterly foreign; it might as well be nuclear physics.

Now we have organic foods, co-op, environmental conservation etc….

(there was a 6.4 earthquake in Peru a few days ago).

We will never be “cooler” than under current ecosystem.

One planet, one shot deal.

Love the ones you’ve got: a crescent moon, blooming flowers, a child’s smile.

Even when you decide to burn the candle from both ends, it still is the only candle you’ve got.

I can understand youthful ambition, false confidence and the illusion of grandeur.

After all, we all work with unchecked assumptions.

Yet, “an unexamined life is not worth living,” says Socrates.

The Aztecs used to run under a very different calendar than ours. So did the Mayans and most Asian countries (Lunar calendar). Circular and cyclical rather than linear or Alpha-Omega .

Because it will come around, people are more conscious of consequences (could be arriving in next life). So Tet is over, but its season of hope has just started.

Traffic is back and workers are turning on the assembly line switches.

Just as they did last year and the year before.

But next year, again with reverse traffic flow,  but the aging mother and father might not be around waiting for them at home. It’s not the unexpected. It is to be expected. We ‘ve only just begun…with seasons in the sun, its symmetry and surprises. Savour it!

Pause-Reflect-Play

We are each given a remote control.

But not all of us know where the PAUSE button is.

We press PLAY or oftentimes FAST FORWARD.

Then we are looped in by stimuli  from all directions (Preview, Blu Ray slide show etc..).

Attention grabbers and assaults to our senses.

We have slowly been anesthetized. Our sensory perception goes numb.

Terminator 2, Transformer 3 etc…

If you count the shell cases spent on one of these action movies, you will find they quite exceeded the bullets

of all Western movies combined. Western genre now comes across as pathetically slow-motion.

Drone time.

Doom time.

Heat-seeking weaponry. High tech warfare. You can run but you can’t hide (as long as you still generate body heat).

I was across the street from Three-Mile-Island back in 1979. News media crews ate late dinners at the only restaurant still opened in town.

We were facing what was then considered a close call.

Now the Spill.

Oil leak and nuclear leak raise doubt about our technological prowess.

(As of this edit, there were explosion at a Navy yard in New Jersey).

There isn’t a better time to be a scientist. There isn’t a worst time to be a technologist.

Testing a solution and solving a problem in real-time, both at the same time.

No PAUSE, no reflect. Just pure play.

One shot. We have gone to the Moon and come back, many times.

Now the challenge is at the bottom of the ocean.

Who would have thought and seen it coming. During the Gulf big Spill, we were shown and stared at the graphic that showed “DAY XX”, as if the nation is held hostage by the Oil Spill.

We need a Reagan-esque take-charge voice, which theatrically pronounces “Mr BP, hold down that cap”.

A local captain committed suicide a few days ago. He was too close to the center of things.

And he did not allow himself the luxury of just playing along.  How many days has it been, DAY 70?.

The man should have watched it on video, sort of Peter Seller’s BEING THERE, instead of actually being there and got eaten up by the hole.

Peter Seller never knew where the PAUSE button was, nor did he care if life on and off-screen were different. All the same to him and actually,  it’s more real on than off-screen. Reality bites hard and in least desirable places. Please show me the PAUSE button. I want to get off.