Codex

Well, I had forgotten one of the major drawbacks of school – being constantly judged. One would think, it being such a major component, that it would be impossible to forget about it, but somehow I managed it. After getting a C+ back on one of my papers, I remembered why it was that I didn’t try all that hard in high school or college – I really hate getting bad grades, at least if I feel that I’ve put real work into them. This being grad school, and pretty much everyone here being as smart or smarter than I, I guess I’ll just have to get used to it, and keep on working. There is a distinct advantage to being in a class with a bunch of really bright people – group projects are great. The two I’m doing right now I have a pretty optimistic feeling about.
Something I had thought grad school would change was the whole “random ideas popping into my head” phenom – I was wrong, of course.  It just means that my ideas are more closely related to what I’m studying, and I don’t have time to think about them for very long.  The earlier post about education is good example, and I’m about to throw up another, so if longwinded explanations of theoretical programs or political changes bore you, now is a good time to stop reading.

We had a lecture about NGOs in one of my Intro to Planning classes, which was all about economic development and reinvestment of income.  Given it was in a third world context, but it got me thinking about development in rural America.  The traditional way in the U.S. to make your income grow (substantially, insteady of insanely slowly) is by investing it in the stock market.  The trouble with this is that most companies in which one may invest don’t really represent a “local investment”.  You might work at GM and have stock in the company, which in some ways is a further local investment of money.  The problem is that GM is a global company, and so your dollars are going all over the world instead of increasing local capital.  A solution might be to set up very small scale rural stock markets for local businesses.  I’m not sure that this could work at the city level.  Small towns are just too small for a stock market to be stable, I would think.  Maybe the better approach would be at the county level, or associations of townships.  Either way, I think that this could be a great way for people to 1: reinvest money in the local economy; 2: provide an alternative to banks and credit unions for supplies of money for developing small businesses; 3: create a more healthy economy by providing customers frustrated with poor service provided by a local business to shift resources to a better competitor.

I have to wonder if someone has already thought of this; if so it has probably already proven itself a bad idea and failed, as I have never heard of it.  It could be risky, especially because of the small size of the market involved.  I think that a good way to minimize risk would be to adopt a couple of rules, more stringent than those on a standard market.  First, provide that the originator of the business must always either have half or more of the shares of the company, or always have more shares than any single stockholder.  This way hostile takeovers are limited or eliminated, which is important because that kind of economic strategy could be devastating on the social well-being of a tight-knit small town.  The first condition would be ironclad protection against takeovers, but would limit potential investment in a business.  The second would be much more flexible and allow a far greater amount of investment, but stockholders would have far greater say in how the business was run.  The second condition would be to limit how quickly shareholders could purchase and sell shares, to prevent catastrophic changes in available capital for local businesses.  If at any time all of the available money could be withdrawn, and the shareholder pool is small enought (and the local rumor mill strong enough) to make instant selling of shares possible, local economies could be completely devestated by panic (think mini-1929s).

I wonder if this idea has any viability at all.  It may be completely off the wall.

Well, in an not-so-shocking turn of events, grad school has eaten up most of my time.  This has, of course, lead to less posting, since I have more valuble things to do during my down time.  Like playing games on PopCap.

The positive side to this is that I’m back in school, which for the most part rocks.  All of the incoming urban planning students seem really damned smart, which makes for fantastic class discussion.  We’re assigned insane amounts of reading, which realistically cannot all be done.  However, it does mean that there’s always something interesting to think about.  The only down side to all of this that I can see is that I feel like I’m at risk for developing some kind of weird inferiority complex, as it seems like everyone in the class has had FAR more experience than I in housing/policy/other planning related fields.  Still, this is much much better than being surrounded by a group of of poorly prepared/not that bright/completely uninterested and detached people, which was often the case in college.

My morning-routine website Pharyngula recently posted a link to a fun little potential law passed by the House: HR 2679, which denies lawyers compensation even when they win a case against a government official concerning the establishment of religion.  This is a pretty typical tactic of the current far right wing – find a way to completely cripple those who disagree with you, in a way that is complicated enough that the media isn’t going to want to spend the time to explain it fully to those effected.  By taking away compensation, this law would remove any incentive (apart from moral, and we all know how well morality serves to motivate people) of lawyers to go after public officials for stamping blatant christianity all over public actions and places.  This is a CRUCIAL piece of legal protection against theocracy, but because it can’t be boiled down into a 30 second soundbite, it won’t get any play, ever.  Maybe the senate will vote it down; maybe if it does get enacted into law it will be demolished by the first challenge by the ACLU.  We can only hope, and maybe vote down the bastards who voted for it.

I’ve been reading a certain post at Pharyngula, specifically the discussion part, and I find it kind of fascinating.  They’ve been chewing over the definition of faith.  Some seem to feel that it is more or less analogous to belief, and others feel that it is a special subset of belief which has no evidence supporting it.  I have actually pondered this one a bit myself, so maybe this is a good time to throw in my two cents.

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This weekend Marla’s parents dropped by to start prepping the house for sale.  Things sometimes get a little tense in these situations, and I did very little to help by retreating to the confines of the computer screen for extended durations.  I’m considering a self-imposed 1 hour daily limit on computer/video games, a la a TLC show that we watch.

I also finally got to see Stephen Colbert’s now-famous speech at the White House Correspondant’s Association Dinner.  I guess I see where some people didn’t find it funny; it is certainly uneven, both in level of humor and tone.  What I don’t understand is how people could fail to see that this is dead-on and important political satire.  Also, parts of it were damn hilarious.  This:

“I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.”

will never cease to amuse me, because just like the entire speach, it is not only a critique of the mishandling of the war, but of the entire conservative ideology that drove it.  Great stuff.