Who are you? You sleep in the sky, and I dream of you, and suddenly you laugh and I roll towards you and remember.

I wrote this to you:

…there are two ways to think… either running on and on and on… Or… stopping to go deeper and deeper into it, to let yourself seep into it, permeate it and let it permeate you, until you’re thoroughly in it and it is in you, you are it, and then you let it breathe and live through you until suddenly it comes bursting forth as brilliant light.

]]> http://www.syntheticzero.com/?feed=rss2&p=1582 http://www.syntheticzero.com/?p=1568 http://www.syntheticzero.com/?p=1568#comments Sun, 04 Mar 2012 18:40:44 +0000 mitsu http://www.syntheticzero.com/?p=1568 What saddens me about recent attempts to rehabilitate Marx’s thesis of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall as a story about the historical inevitability of the collapse of capitalism is that it sidetracks a large number of otherwise smart people into what is essentially an intellectual dead end. This isn’t to say everything Marx wrote or said is wrong; there are lots of interesting insights in there, but the large-scale historical model has a clear flaw: if Marx were correct, it would mean that, over the long term, capitalists would ultimately tend to spend more and more each year, in money terms, on production equipment. That’s ultimately what it boils down to. There’s no reason why this would occur as a kind of inexorable historical inevitability: the entire thesis is confused by the fact, I think, that Marx is speaking in terms of “living labor” and “dead labor” as though “profit” were simply “living labor” / “dead labor” and dead labor just increases inexorably over time while living labor remains constant. But as I argued in my last post, this doesn’t make sense. Dead labor cannot accumulate indefinitely (Marx did understand this, of course, but he didn’t think it through far enough), living labor is actually changed in a nonlinear fashion by production equipment, and finally in any situation there’s going to be an optimal value for the amount you invest in production equipment in any given year, and this optimal value is not going to asymptotically, historically, approach 100% of your expenses for reasons which should be obvious, even if it does go up over the course of an economic cycle. Yet, many very smart people seem to be attempting to rehabilitate Marx on this score.

But, of course, the converse: libertarian Ayn Rand thinking, is also on the rise, and I’ve discussed in the past why that’s wrongheaded as well. I was writing an email to my cousin, an economist in DC, about this — we’ve sometimes had good-natured discussions about this because I tend left and he tends more towards economic libertarianism, but neither of us are doctrinaire about either. I realized that the central problem with both perspectives can be summed up in terms of limits of computation.

Let’s look at one of Marx’s initial hypotheses, that there will be a phase in which everything is centrally planned. I hate to invoke a right-wing hero here, but the essential argument of Friedrich Hayek against this is, I believe, correct: that central planning cannot work efficiently, even if totally benevolent, because of information processing bottlenecks. Intuitively, it is obvious that you cannot effectively centrally plan because the amount of information the planners must process efficiently is far too great; planned economies inevitably break down in inefficiency and poor resource allocation. I won’t go into the details here because they ought to be pretty obvious. In brief, the problem is in a planned economy there’s an attempt to refocus all economic “computation” if you will (decision-making) to the high-level (planners).

But the problem with unrestricted free markets is also a computational problem. What happens with unregulated free markets is they tend towards instability, mispricing of risk, and they don’t price long-term environmental depletion, as I’ve argued before. But why? In theory, one might argue that markets could, in theory, price in long-term risk and really “should” — but they don’t do very well at this in practice. Bubbles and crashes happen, environmental degradation occurs leading to collapse in some cases, and so on. I think there’s considerable evidence that the deregulation from the 80’s on led to a re-destabilization of the markets, where we started to see wilder swings in the markets a la the 19th and early 20th centuries.

But it seems to me the simple intuitive reason this occurs is an inversion of the computational bottleneck of central planning. In this case, for markets to correctly price in long-term risk and long-term resource depletion, every individual decision-maker needs to factor this into their decision-making process at the local level. Local decisions need to factor in high-level, large-scale, long-term considerations. But they obviously don’t, in practice. You buy the thing that is cheaper, or you invest in the thing that you think is going to make you money in the short term. It’s obvious that, in spite of the small countervailing force of futures markets as a hedging strategy, in general the 2008 crash (and pretty much every other crash, everywhere), shows that markets are biased towards taking into account short-term price signals. And that’s obviously how it must be, because individual decisions are made locally and prices tend to reflect, therefore, local and short-term factors.

So what we have are two mirror-images: wrong policy ideas which stem from ignoring computational limits at either end of the economic scale. Central planning tends to fail when it attempts to move what ought to be distributed computation to a central location; libertarian/free-market ideology fails when it relies on local, distributed computation to take into account long-term, large-scale considerations.

What this implies for policy, I think, is what I think a number of people have suggested: government’s function should not be to micromanage the market at a small scale, but rather to set large-scale, long-term boundaries, limits, and rules which don’t attempt to choose winners and losers in the market, but do attempt to bias the market into having longer-term costs (including environmental costs) and long-term risk more accurately reflected in short-term prices. The market should be allowed to function relatively freely at the small scale, but regulations should be designed to attempt to allow larger-scale factors to shape the larger-scale direction of the market.

Let’s take the steady-state case. What if a capitalist spent on new machinery only exactly as much as the old machinery depreciated? I.e., let’s assume a commodity which has been produced for a long time, and further assume no innovation whatsoever; new machinery is exactly as productive as old machinery. And let’s say, for whatever reason, that there’s an optimal *amount* of such machinery, any more of which would result in no increase in productivity. In such a case a capitalist could rationally choose to invest only precisely the amount he needed to maintain and replace aging machinery, i.e., the depreciation value, and if wages stayed constant, the rate of profit would tend towards an equilibrium over time. There’s no necessity I can see in such a scenario for any declining rate of profit, whatever.

Marx seems to assume that the rate of expenditure on constant capital will always rise, because it’s the only way to increase profit. Yet he says that for this very reason, the rate of profit should fall. To me, this doesn’t really make any sense. If purchasing new machinery doesn’t increase profit, then why purchase it? It would be irrational.

Now, I’m here eliding over the difference between price and value, but ultimately if there is to be a crisis of declining profit, it would have to show up at some point in prices, so for now I’m going to talk initially about prices (monetary expenditures).

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the capitalist actually spends more money per year on fixed capital than the depreciation of the old equipment. So, every year, as Marx outlines, the amount of fixed capital the capitalist owns grows in value, as the “stored value” in the machines gets used up more slowly than the amount of new expenditures every year. Meanwhile, let’s say the amount he spends on labor stays more or less the same.

Where is the surplus value? Marx seems to argue that the surplus value must remain fixed in this scenario; the value in the commodity being produced is being contributed by labor-time, plus the amount contributed by the depreciation of the fixed capital. It’s like there’s this huge pile of value stored up in the fixed capital, and a tiny bit of additional value, proportionally smaller and smaller, contributed by labor.

But there’s something obviously wrong with this picture. What is the point of having more and more fixed capital (i.e., spending more on fixed capital than the depreciation of the old fixed capital) if it doesn’t lead to increased productivity, enough to offset the expenditure?

There are two points to be made here. First, obviously the effect of fixed capital, machinery, is not merely to add to the value of the products produced, but to *multiply* the effect of labor-time contributed by the labor force. Marx understood this, but I don’t think he worked through the implications of it, fully. The labor-time “stored” in the machinery doesn’t merely add to the labor-time of the other workers, it *multiplies* the value of the labor-time contributed by the other workers.

So it would be rational to spend more on machinery as long as the aggregate additional value produced by so doing is greater than the expenditure on the machinery (unless the managers of the company were incompetent or mistaken). Certainly, it COULD mean that the total rate of profit might fall, but the total GROSS profit will still increase — and a declining rate of profit but increasing gross profit would not really be a crisis. If, however, investing more in equipment than the depreciation would result in a DECREASE in gross profit, then it would no longer be rational to make this expenditure, because the additional expenditure may have gone past the optimum for the effectiveness of that particular investment.

In other words — value is and cannot possibly be simply a matter of linear adding of labor-time, but rather it can be multiplicative and nonlinear. The effects of investment, in fact, in real life situations, are not merely going to be multiplicative; the effects may have an optimum value which cannot possibly be predicted in advance, in some general theory such as Marx proposes. The optimum may be at, less than, or greater than the depreciation rate. In any event while it is POSSIBLE the rate of profit might fall as a result of these investments, it could just as well stay steady indefinitely or rise — but in any event on average, the GROSS profit does not necessarily have to fall, at all. (Of course, this is even ignoring the fact that newer equipment might well have a greater multiplicative effect on the labor-time input of the workers, which will provide at least a temporary boost to profitability until competitors catch up — but when they do it will just tend to revert back towards the equilibrium case I noted at the outset of this… the assumption made by some critics of this argument is that the new equilibrium would be settled at a lower rate of profit — but that’s only the case if the total expenditure on the depreciation of new equipment is higher. But innovations could also lower the price of the new equipment, something which is obviously quite likely, rendering the new equilibrium potentially stable).

What would be the point of accumulating more and more capital if it didn’t, in fact, have this multiplicative effect on labor-time? You might as well fall back to replacement level investment — the steady state case.

It’s easier, I think, if you imagine the capitalist doesn’t actually own the means of production, but just rents it for the rate of depreciation (plus interest, perhaps). Would a rational capitalist constantly increase the amount of money spent on renting equipment, every year? If so, why? It would only be if the increased expenditure was worth it — would return more value. Presumably the increased expenditure would have a multiplicative effect on labor-time input, so there is going to be, in any given competitive environment, an optimum level of money spent on renting equipment.

Another point to be made here regarding the math — if you think about it, another assumption Marx makes is that labor-time is additive within a given context. But suppose, instead of a capitalist purchasing equipment from another entity, the capitalist owned two factories; one which makes widgets and the other which makes machines which make widgets. In this case the labor-time of the workers making the machines that make widgets would actually MULTIPLY the effects of the labor-time of the other employees making the widgets! All sorts of these kinds of nonlinear effects are, I would argue, far more realistic in the real world.

This doesn’t even touch on the information economy, for instance, where the whole labor-time construct really starts to break down in bizarre nonlinearities.

In brief: I think Marx’s entire analysis is way, way oversimplified: it assumes things are far too additive and linear, it ignores optima (which exist in real biological systems), it ignores systems effects… ultimately I have to say I think the entire concept is just not very useful to understand or predict real systems. There are far more compelling critiques of capitalism, in my view, related to the fact that unregulated free markets tend to misprice long-term risk and environmental depletion, and focus primarily on short-term economic signals.

To me, a much better way of thinking about this is that any economic system is really a way of organizing the computational-energetic activity of a system. In other words, economic systems, notions like paper money, for instance, or markets, versus central planning and so on, are really computational mechanisms, signaling mechanisms, or feedback mechanisms.

In other words: energy, entropy, information, computation. A political-economic system is a computational strategy, or architecture.

To my mind, both the libertarian and the Marxist analysis falls down, they’re both way too simplistic. Thinking in terms of computation and complex systems theory (with a healthy dose of psychology, limited information decision theory, etc.) I think is the general way forward. It seems to me that once you think of economics in complex systems terms, the theoretical and political perspectives become far richer, and admit to a much broader range of interesting policy questions and perspectives.

I would have thought that perhaps somewhere in my unconscious memory there would have been a fragment of knowing the answer was “Houston” but even using an internet search in my dream, I couldn’t call it up. I think this dream was my unconscious telling me there are limits even to unconscious knowledge, and while I believe in hunches I shouldn’t rely too much on them; sometimes you just have to wake up and find an answer out in the world.

Due to the magic of credit card rewards points, I’m staying in by far the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed in in London, the Novotel London Greenwich, which I chose primarily because it’s reasonably close to Jenny’s place in Deptford. My room is actually almost normal-sized by American standards, even though it’s the most affordable room type in the place. It’s a bit funny, however, because, despite the fact that it’s quite spacious, it still sports many of the same features present in the super-cramped closets that you find at most budget London hotels; as though the fact that hotels often have to radically conserve space has set up a “standard” which hotel designers follow even if they have the space to do it differently. There are some tiny closets for hanging your clothing, but no dresser drawers at all. The bathroom has one of those microscopic London sinks (even smaller than this one) next to the toilet, even though, inexplicably, it also has a normal-sized sink. There’s a towel rack placed on the other side of the toilet from the bath/shower/sink, making it quite difficult to access and forcing you to step near the toilet when you’re trying to reach one of the towels (not exactly the most hygenic feeling), something that would make sense if the bathroom were too tiny to allow a more convenient arrangement, but in this case, completely unnecessary, given the spaciousness of the room.

I arrived in the early evening with a friend who had been to the protest a number of times already; we wandered about the park, which was quite crowded and well-organized; there was a food area, many bags of garbage neatly stacked, people cleaning the park obsessively, many people standing in small groups talking or trying to squeeze past each other, a table where the anarchists were passing out guidebooks, and it was for the most part relatively calm. I stayed for the entire General Assembly meeting, to get a feel for the process. It was, at times, rather excruciating to have to wait for every sentence fragment to be repeated by the group, but overall I came away quite impressed with the thoughtfulness, organization, and deliberation of those gathered there.

It opened with a long explanation of the process, the hand signals we were supposed to use, and the fact that this night (prior to a feared cleanup and eviction which was not to come to pass) required some urgency. Bloomberg had told the protesters they had to vacate the park temporarily to allow the owners to clean it; the protesters, in a little-reported move, responded by obsessively cleaning the park themselves. Many of the announcements during the meeting related to the cleanup or to temporarily removing stuff the protesters had been using for safekeeping during the cleanup. In addition there were brief reports from the various working groups, ranging from legal to “direct action” to Internet… but what I found most interesting was the debate at the end of the GA regarding the drum circles, which, as my friend pointed out, gave one a feeling a bit like observing an ancient Greek debating assembly.

The discussion opened with a report from a representative of a working group responsible for liaising with the larger community (in this case, as represented by the Manhattan Community Board). He started by telling a brief story about how strongly Scott Stringer, the Manhattan Borough President, supported the movement, and how intensely he had defended #ows’s right to assembly and free speech to the press. This was a relatively clever rhetorical move on his part, I thought, because he clearly wanted the crowd to be positively disposed towards their proposal… which he phrased as a compromise, or a request, which was, basically, that really loud drumming (drum circles) be confined to two hours between the hours of 11am and 5pm. A number of people raised concerns, questions, and issues, at which point he pointed out that this wasn’t a “they” trying to oppress the protesters, but rather people who so strongly supported the movement that they were going to come out and sit in solidarity with the protesters at 5am to resist the eviction by the owners. I thought it was a brilliant move on his part to hold that information until later in the debate, to help turn the tide.

Finally, before the vote, there were two “blocks” — i.e., people who felt so strongly about the issue they were willing to block consensus. A couple of the drummers felt that the drumming helped draw people to the park and the hours should be longer than 2 hours — more like 4, or that the window should be extended to include evening hours. The community board liaison countered that the drummers could bring the issue up again at a later Assembly, and reminded them that individual, intimate drumming performances would always be allowed. The drummers persisted in their block, so they moved to “modified consensus” rules at this point — which means that the community could override the consensus with a 90% vote, which occurred.

I had several observations about this: first, I was impressed with the rhetorical skills of the participants. I was also impressed with the willingness of the assembly to work with elected officials (who repaid their trust later on, as Bloomberg later said a big reason the eviction was called off was due to a flood of calls from elected officials to the park owners). The “modified consensus” process seemed to be well-thought-out and ultimately effective. I was a little concerned about what seemed to me to be a bit of a cultural/ethnic divide, however, in the debate about the drum circles — which is one of my general concerns about activism in the US in general (see below) — the two drummers who attempted to block consensus and some of the other people voting “no” were African-American, and, as is common in many activist crowds, most of the people there were white. Overall, however, the portrayal of some in the media of the movement as being rather disorganized, unfocused, etc., was belied by the reality of the thoughtfulness of the rhetoric, the willingness to cooperate with the local community, and the careful organization of the working group reports and cleanup announcements throughout the meeting.

I have to admit my initial feelings about #ows had been ambivalent; I had been happy, of course, that someone was finally protesting the terrible inequities in our current economic system. However, I often feel that activism in the US tends to be rather insular; culturally and even somewhat ethnically insufficiently diverse, disdainful of the need to talk with people of good will of differing views: lacking in sufficient outreach to the very communities progressives hope to help. There can be a bit of an echo chamber feeling, in my mind, where activists talk mostly to each other rather than to the community at large, and too many seem to come from a similar cultural niche; these are people devoted to inclusion who often seem not to include enough people among those we all hope to help (working class people, minorities, and so on). However, there’s no question that this time, for once, a progressive protest in the US has finally really gained the attention of the nation and the world, perhaps for the first time in decades. Adbusters was right, after all: public, physical protest, carefully positioned, can make a significant difference in the public dialogue.

Every person I passed seemed to shout at me their condition, their situation, so to speak (not that “their condition” actually means something all that well-defined…) and so I started to contemplate this. The tremendous sense of responsibility, a desire to try to work with this odd situation, this strangely okay yet at the same time suffering- and error-filled “situation”.

After a while I started to think, well, this is sort of hubris, it’s not as though I don’t still have much to work on for myself, but the whole “project” of working on my own practice seemed a bit odd. It’s clearly possible for humans to live in this radically, radically different manner, vastly more open and present and engaging with much more of the present being-ness than we usually consciously engage with. Yet at the same time, what’s the implication of that? It seems to be the primary implication is at the same time everything opens up in this vast way, one is also hugely aware of the suffering as well (although “suffering” isn’t really as problematic as it seems, it’s still a serious matter). It just seems to me all my “projects” really ought to be contextualized in this larger situation of the whole world and suffering and pain, so even as I continue to work on my own errors and issues, the problem of how to work with this larger context is still always vividly present.

It is beginning to feel as though part of my larger self includes a vast net which catches the beauty and the pain of the world all at once. It’s excruciatingly, even painfully beautiful and powerful and vast and wise and sad and lovely and breathing and tired and vivid and tragic and satisfying and nourishing and dirty and depraved and cruel and compassionate and light, light, light. The net drags on, gossamer-like, invisible, without weight, trawling up all this and feeding it through my body/energy/mind which isn’t separate from any of it.

As an engineering manager in the tech industry, I have to say this article is totally, utterly misguided and wrong. If anything, college has already moved far too much into the vocational school arena. The purpose of a university education isn’t, I repeat isn’t and shouldn’t ever become mere job training. If you want job training, go to ITT Technical Institute. If you want an education, go to a liberal arts college or university.

One of our singular strengths as a nation is our post-secondary educational system. While we lag far behind the rest of the world in primary and secondary education, we remain far ahead of the world in terms of college education, at least at the elite level. Our top universities consistently rank far ahead of the rest of the world. Furthermore, only in the United States and Canada does the ideal of the liberal arts education really have a strong foothold — and this is something we should continue to encourage, not move away from as this completely misguided article suggests.

As a manager who is constantly looking for employees who can think critically, I am constantly grateful for the liberal arts tradition in our country. Liberal arts doesn’t mean simply the existence of degrees in literature and the humanities — it means that every student at our colleges has access to a broad educational palette to choose from. Even people who graduate as physics or engineering majors typically also have taken some literature and history in college; it’s usually required that students take a broad array of distribution requirements. This is not something which happens in other countries; in the UK, for example, students go straight from high school to medical school or law school, completely skipping the undergraduate level, with the notion, perhaps, that getting a broad education is unnecessary if you’re going to go into a profession such as medicine or law.

But what we need in today’s economy is broad-based critical thinking. I don’t want or need to hire an engineer who can’t communicate well in English or who has no ability to work with designers, marketing people, project managers, user researchers… Building products for the next century requires not only a deep but a wide understanding of the human condition, of how people live, how they think, how they function in the world. I’ve hired engineers who were English majors and designers who have degrees in architecture and technical project managers who are also novelists in their spare time. And all of those hires were spectacularly successful, in no small part to the liberal arts education they all received as undergraduates.

We have a proud and long tradition of the liberal arts in this country. It’s no wonder that Europe and Japan, which lack this tradition, have been unable to catch up with us in areas of tech innovation. They don’t and have never understood the value and power of liberal arts. Now is not the time to start copying them.

Moving away from the liberal arts ideal is not only bad from an intellectual and moral standpoint; it’s bad from an economic standpoint.

For many, many years after I left the Coop I had dreams about the place; in particular, in my dreams I would often find hidden passageways with more rooms. (Later I found out many of my fellow former Coopers had the same recurring dream, oddly enough.) We lived together, cooked together, had strange conversations late into the night. There was an air of possibility, of new ideas, a sense that at any moment we might stumble upon the secret to the universe in one of those bull sessions. And I think we did, at times, touch on parts of it; it wasn’t just a feeling that it might happen, it really did, sometimes, in fragments.

It’s been many years since I’ve spent a lot of time with Elisabeth (not for want of trying — long story); we talked about all sorts of things, ranging from educational policy to Deming quality control to the tech industry … but we also talked about the old days. She reminded me of a few incidents which stood out for her in her mind, things I did — for example, one of her most vivid memories of me was when, one day, she was making bread in the kitchen, and the counter was covered in flour, and I came in and just leaned over until my nose was an inch from the flour, and I stayed like that, for quite a while, not making a sound, until Elisabeth couldn’t resist coming over and tapping me on the back of my head so I got flour on my nose. We both laughed, of course, and she asked me what I had been doing. I said, “I was experimenting with horizontal and vertical.”

1) Real wages for the middle and lower classes have been stagnant for the last few decades (particularly the last decade) while income for the top 1% has skyrocketed and continues to climb. The net effect of the above is that, due to massive improvements in efficiency and productivity, wealth generated by American businesses has gone up steadily for decades, nearly all of the benefit of this has accrued to the ownership class.

2) The speculators invented a crazy system of securities in the wake of financial deregulation which hinged on an unbelievably stupid application of the Gaussian copula function for estimating default correlation. This one mistake amplified what could have been a “normal” real estate bubble into a bubble of gargantuan proportions. The danger to the real economy was drastically worsened by the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the lack of regulatory oversight of the shadow banking system. As far as bubbles, they’re not all alike; I personally would much rather see a bubble caused by excessive speculation on actual companies (i.e., IPOs) than a bubble caused by speculation on synthetic securities whose value was based on a fantasy. At least venture capitalists are trying to build something new, and if we have to go through some mild crashes as a result, I think that’s worth some risk (the economic consequences of the tech crash of 2000 were far less severe than the synthetic  securities crash of 2008).

It seems to me that 1 and 2 are relatively independent problems. 1) is probably caused by the decline of unions, the rise of Ayn Rand thinking among the upper classes: the ownership class believes that it truly is virtually solely responsible for the generation of wealth, almost single-handedly taking all increases in proceeds and giving none of it to the people who actually do the work. Furthermore the drastic lowering of tax rates on the wealthy has further contributed to this steady, unfair imbalance. 2) is a problem of speculative bubbles and insulating the regular banking system from the speculative system. Obama addressed 2) to some degree with financial regulatory reform: the creation of a somewhat weakened Volcker Rule, intended to isolate speculative activity to some degree from the operation of “normal” banking, regulation of the shadow banking system, and so forth, but he has not yet significantly addressed 1).

Ryan’s plan saves money simply by slashing benefits. Out of pocket spending would go from a minimum of $6,000 to $12,000, right off the bat. And then, after that, there’s no limit to how much seniors would be expected to pay, because it is *payments* which are capped, rather than expeditures by seniors. Furthermore, he uses the money “saved” by forcing seniors to pay much more for medical care by slashing taxes even further on the wealthy.

It’s a laughable plan which is simultaneously draconian in its impact on seniors and politically absurd. Americans don’t want massive cuts to Medicare, they don’t want to cut taxes for the wealthy even more than they are now.

Even more absurd is the fact that the Ryan plan does nothing to address cost increases in health care, except by capping payments. We already spend, in this country, due to our extremely inefficient, private insurance system, almost twice per capita what every other industrialized nation spends, and contrary to rumor many other nations have vastly MORE choice when it comes to choosing doctors and hospitals (try to get your HMO to pay a doctor outside of its plan, for instance: in France, you’re free to go to ANY doctor, and wait times are less, on average, than in the US).

We are reaching and exceeding Banana Republic levels of income disparity, and Republicans want to slash taxes for the wealthy? It makes no sense at all, the entire thing isn’t serious, in the least. Ryan himself would not have proposed this “plan” if he actually thought it had a chance of really becoming law. Yet “seriousness” is the rhetoric Republicans are using, a strange Orwellian doublespeak.

Hey everyone. I’m relocating to San Francisco, temporarily, for the summer (possibly a little longer), so I’m looking for someone to sublet my loft. It’s a large, 1200sf loft condo with huge south-facing windows, solar power (reduces power bills), free laundry room in basement, bathroom with clawfoot tub, and convenient access to the 4/5/6 and 2 trains. It’s an open plan loft with two walk-in closets and a bedroom and a huge open living room and kitchen area in a brand new, converted industrial loft building in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx, the closest part of the Bronx to Manhattan, an area where artists and others have been moving. Our building itself has artists and musicians along with other folks. It’s a very warm, friendly building, with easy access to the city, about 15 minutes by 4/5/6 to Grand Central and 20 minutes to Union Square (basically anywhere on the east side of Manhattan is easy to get to — the west side is another 10 minutes, typically, to get cross town on the L or 7, or 9 blocks from the 2 which goes to the Upper West Side).

I’m looking for someone to sublet from June through August for $1850/month, the exact end date is negotiable (can be a little earlier or later), or alternately someone who would swap their San Francisco apartment (of any size) for those same dates. I have two cats who would either stay here (to be taken care of by you) or come with me to San Francisco.

The building is dog and cat friendly. The neighborhood is mostly low income and not super gentrified yet but it has plenty of local shopping and restaurants. There are a few restaurants catering to the local artist/professional crowd, however. There’s an art gallery on the first floor of our building. It’s pretty safe, crime rates are down to about the national average, even though in the past it was a fairly dangerous neighborhood, 15 years ago: major crime is down 90% from the early 90’s.

The rent includes heat and gas, but not electric (however electric bills are lowered somewhat by the solar panels, typically $60 or less even at the peak of summer). It’s wired for cable internet and satellite TV; if you’d like to take over those for the duration of your stay, internet is $50/month, and DishNetwork is about $85/month. I can also suspend one or both of those during your stay, if you don’t need one or both.

The apartment is furnished with flat screen TV, couch, bed, dining table, kitchen, dishwasher, fridge, pots, pans, microwave, toaster oven, etc.

Email me if interested!

In a post on the IDP blog, Nancy Thompson quotes John Welwood’s Towards a Psychology of Awakening:

If the absolute side of our nature – undifferentiated being – is like clear light, then the relative side – differentiated being – is like a rainbow spectrum of colors contained within that light. While realizing undifferentiated being is the path of liberation, embodying qualities of differentiated being is the path of individuation in its deepest sense: the unfolding of our intrinsic human resources , which exist as seed potentials within us, but which are often blocked by psychological concepts.

….How fully the suchness of you shines through – in your face, your speech, your actions, your particular quality of presence – is partly grace but also partly a result of how much you have worked on polishing your vessel so that it becomes transparent.

There’s another twist to this story, however. One way of thinking of things is this:

ABSOLUTE / (relative)

I.e., sort of two “levels”, with the absolute the big container of everything, which differentiates itself into the relative, where all the “stuff” is and where “things happen”. This picture has its value, but it’s also very misleading, because it makes it seem as though these are two different levels of reality which are somewhat independent of each other, or where you have to kind of reach out from the relative world to pull in something from the absolute. The absolute reality starts to seem sort of far off, a bit detached from ordinary concerns. But there’s another picture which I think is a bit more accurate, or includes more features of what is actually the case, which is captured in the Buddhist Heart Sutra:

form is none other than emptiness, emptiness is none other than form

The way I imagine it is something like this: ordinary things are like an iceberg, where you see the top of the iceberg but it’s of a piece with this larger and larger ice but in fact the iceberg itself ends up being connected with the entire universe if you really fully appreciate its full substance. This is not just a theoretical idea but something that is concretely present at all times. It’s something we can actually rely on. The way “spring cleaning” is usually presented is: in order to work with relative “things” (the self, our concerns, things, other people, etc.) we have to use other relative “things” (psychological ideas, moving stuff around, arranging our lives). And there’s nothing wrong with that as far as it goes. But there are alternatives: that is, to participate more fully in this vastness of even ordinary “things”, to follow those out and allow them to become more what they actually are. From a psychological perspective this could just be something along the lines of appreciating the unconscious, all of that which we’re not ordinarily aware. But the point is, that which we’re not aware of can be directly relied upon (like an athlete going into the “zone”, not attempting to control every element of what they’re doing consciously, but relying on processes and forces far outside their conscious control, which tends to improve, rather than degrade, performance.) Problems which seem very intractable in ordinary space become much less so when you have a larger dimensionality to work with (which is where we all really live: we don’t live in just the apparent conscious reality, we live in the whole enchilada.) That allows us to live in both the relative and absolute worlds at the same time, to appreciate them as the same world. There’s a spaciousness present in each ordinary moment which is always available, but we don’t ordinarily appreciate. We aren’t limited to the confines of Flatland; we exist in a much larger dimensionality, even if you consider the “much larger” to just be that which is beyond conscious awareness. It’s a different sort of approach to spring cleaning.

…as a country we’ve engaged in all sorts of terrible actions abroad, and I’m very aware of those; overthrowing Mossadegh in Iran, overthrowing Salvador Allende, supporting dictators like Pinochet, funding the contras in Nicaragua, our covert operations in Angola, and on and on. We’ve engaged in atrocities and massacres. Not to mention the probably unnecessary dropping of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one of which killed my father’s aunt and uncle and probably gave cancer to my uncle. We have a very chequered past when it comes to foreign involvements and in many if not most cases we’ve done much more harm than good.

Furthermore any use of violence is already at a point where things have deteriorated to a terrible phase. Contemplating all this I can’t in any way find a way to think of the use of violence as something “good”. It’s always bad; weapons are, as the ancient saying goes, “instruments of ill omen”. It’s sad, regrettable, awful. At best I think violence is something which is only sometimes the least bad of a spectrum of bad options, and only warranted in the highly unusual circumstance where other options are likely to be worse.

As far as who gets to decide this: obviously there’s no way you can know for certain. My only argument is that sometimes I do think, unlike some, that it is something that any civilization ought to hold in reserve, as a last resort, to protect people. Far better to avoid the need for it in the first place, far better to use any other option short of it, but in extremis, I think it should be there. There was a sad reason for samurai to exist, for warriors to exist, violence I believe is a part of nature. It is not necessarily a view which all Buddhist teachers would agree with and I respect those who disagree. This is my personal view.

When it comes to Libya, as I’ve said before, in my opinion the lives saved by this intervention will exceed, even in the long run, the lives it will cost. At the same time I’m highly sympathetic to my pacifist friends who are skeptical of every American international involvement, whether it is sanctioned by the UN or not, out of what seems to me to be a well-founded distrust of our motives abroad as well as our past history, and an additional skepticism of the usefulness of the use of military force in general.

Ultimately, however, I cannot agree with their blanket criticism of our foreign policy simply because I don’t really think it’s appropriate to view any given situation in terms of taking one side versus taking another. My aunt’s boyfriend and I once had a long discussion of this a few years ago; both my aunt and he are progressive political activists and he in particular had seen first hand the atrocities we had committed or supported in Central America during some of the darkest days of the Cold War. While I absolutely accepted his accounts as I’m quite familiar with many of those operations (they’re now public knowledge for the most part), that didn’t change my view that sometimes, just sometimes, we’re not on the wrong side. He then asked me, who do you think has the ideal government? And I said, “they’re all bad!”

What I meant was, every government of every country at some point in history has engaged in both virtuous and terrible acts, has been both a supporter of justice and freedom and a supporter of oppression and injustice. The crimes the United States has committed are long: the genocidal ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population of North America is perhaps one of the most egregious, not to mention our sanctioning of slavery, and on and on. But then again the atrocities committed by other countries are no less heinous and in many cases even worse. Every ethnic group, every culture, every nation has done terrible things. So in my view we ought not to judge situations through the lens of taking sides, either for or against any given nationality or ethnicity, but rather we ought to stand and discern each situation as human beings living in the world. The enemy of justice is not a specific nation or nations, either our own or others, it is oppression, it is dictatorship, it is injustice itself.

I don’t believe this particular operation is, in fact, motivated primarily by a capitalist agenda to control the oil supply. I happen to think that we, and our allies, are actually primarily motivated by humanitarian concerns. We are also motivated, I think rightly, by a national security interest, in that Qaddafi retaking power militarily would be a negative sign in the region, and would encourage dictators to try to hold onto power through bloody means — which would only tend to encourage extremism and the same forces which attacked us on 9/11. However, that doesn’t mean we ought to intervene militarily in Yemen and Bahrain and everywhere else: if there is a path to resolving the crisis through diplomacy or via other means, then we ought to utilize that approach. Military intervention is a last resort. I think in the case of Libya, it has become, through the actions of Qaddafi, the least worst remaining option.

Iraq in 2003 was not such a case. Bad as Saddam was, he wasn’t at that moment using heavy weaponry to directly attack massive numbers of civilians. He wasn’t positioning snipers to shoot people at the entrances to hospitals. He wasn’t firing antiaircraft guns at peaceful protesters. Maybe he would have done such things if provoked, but preventive use of military force is in my view always illegitimate. They didn’t greet us as liberators, throwing flowers at our feet. We went in and thousands of civilians died and we created chaos and disaster in the name of imposing democracy. Rather than supporting an internal, grass-roots rebellion, we were dictating to their country by force of arms what they ought to do.

In this case, however, I think the majority of people in Libya will be grateful to us. At least there is evidence of this, judging by this video of a march in Benghazi:

There are hundreds of similar videos posted by many different organizations online already. When the opposition takes over cities, there is celebration in the streets. When Qaddafi is in control, people cower in fear in their homes because snipers are shooting anyone who moves. As a human being on the planet Earth, I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that in this case, the always regrettable use of military force happens to be on the right side of history. This time.

I wrote the following in response to this, arguing that it’s a little of both, in reality:

The Japanese consensus approach can have the effect one of the participants described (i.e., a way of shaming people into going along with something they don’t really agree with) but it simply isn’t just a “snow job”. Japanese decision-making really is different, they go about making decisions differently. I have done contracts for Japanese companies, my father is Japanese, my mother is Japanese-American; our family decision-making style is radically different from the style I’ve seen in most American families.

There are dual pressures in a Japanese consensus situation; the first is the group wants to accomodate the needs of everyone in the group, and the second is people in the group are subtly expected to go along with what the group consensus appears to be headed towards. The former is the “positive” side of consensus and the latter is pretty necessary otherwise Japanese groups (families, companies, etc.) would never be able to decide anything, but it can also lead to some bad things happening as well, where people go along with bad decisions.

I grew up in the US so my experience of “Japaneseness” is skewed by this, but whenever I visit my relatives in Japan, etc., they have a similar style, though perhaps a bit more extreme in various respects. In both my family and my relatives’ families (in Japan and here) there really is an emphasis on consensus, harmony. It’s not just a “snow job” as John seems to cynically suggest — I always felt my parents took my concerns or issues quite seriously. At the same time, I felt a strong desire to accomodate them as well. It’s a two-way street. If anyone had a strong objection to a proposed decision, we’d pivot and go in another direction. Didn’t matter if it was my mom, my dad, me, or my brother. I observe the same thing in my relatives’ families. Obviously not every family in Japan is the same; I’m talking about my own relatives as well as my family who I think are representative of at least a certain common style in Japan.

There’s a downside to it. I feel myself, though I grew up here, a strong desire to go along with the group decision, if the people are close to me (coworkers, etc.) I remember this one time when my company (Electronic Arts at the time) held an offsite team-building exercise. We were supposed to decide as a group how to best deal with a situation where we were stranded in the arctic due to a plane crash. The idea was each of us were supposed to give our own individual answers to the questions, then we were to discuss as a group and come to a consensus.

Of course, the theory was that the group decision was supposed to be much better than any individual decision. I was assigned to a group of programmers.

The result: The managers group did really well. Their score was the highest of all the teams. And their group score was significantly better than any of their individual scores. My esteem for EA management went up a bit.

Our team of engineers didn’t fare as well. Our group score was dismal. And I had participated in the discussions, and had agreed with what the group had decided. I had gone along with it. The irony was, my own individual answers were actually almost all correct. My individual score had been close to the managers’ group score. I learned from this that perhaps I am a bit too Japanese sometimes. And also: if you dump a bunch of nerds into the Arctic, they might all die…