variation
September 2009
146 posts
Reblog with your first job and age you started working.
asie:
Grocery store produce department. 14 yrs.
Cheesequake Pharmacy, 15
Shelving books at my local public library, 15. I loved it — discovering all the books people were reading, learning about new authors, and wandering into sections of the library I’d never been to before was just the best thing. And the people were all so nice!
Lifeguard, 16
Comic book store clerk, 14
12? Paper route, Valley News. Eugene OR.
August 2009
140 posts
“Think of it like a movie. The Torah is the first one, and the New Testament the sequel. Then the Qu’ran comes out, and it retcons the last one like it never happened. There’s still Jesus, but he’s not the main character anymore, and the messiah hasn’t shown up yet. Jews like the first movie but ignored the sequels. Christians think you need to watch the first two, but the third movie doesn’t count. The Moslems think the third one was the best, and Mormons liked the second one so much, they started writing fanfiction that doesn’t fit with ANY of the series canon.”
—How to Explain the Religions of Abraham to the Hollywood Generation (via azspot)
“There was a lot of talk last year about how Barack Obama would be a “transformational” president — but true transformation, it turns out, requires a lot more than electing one telegenic leader. Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system.”
—Paul Krugman
“They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it. They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it’s really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment. They can interview Lisa Murkowski, Evan Bayh, Jeb Bush, Bob Casey, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Dan Lipinksi, and Harold Ford, Jr. about personality responsibility and the virtues of self-sufficiency. Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz can provide moving commentary on how America is so special because all that matters is merit, not who you know or where you come from. There’s a virtually endless list of politically well-placed guests equally qualified to talk on such matters.”
—Glenn Greenwald (via azspot)
“These technophobes are right about so many things. The technium is the phenomenon that is centrally determining all of Western history. It is outgrowing our capacity of understanding. It is advancing faster and faster without end. It is proceeding on an autonomous course. It is an end in itself. It is a kind of fate. This is scary. We have birthed a child more powerful than us, rocketing off to remake our essential nature, yet it zooms beyond our capacity to understand or control, accelerating in power, yet biased in its direction. No wonder the autonomy of the technium provokes such genuine concern. Yet the very same innate forces of extropy and self-organization that nurture the technological imperative, also are responsible for real progress. We have birthed a child more powerful than us, rocketing the advance of diversity and intelligence, it multiples on its own, yet it is headed in the direction we’d all like to go — more options, choices, possibilities and free-will.”
—
Kevin Kelly The Technium (via azspot) (via 2020)
“… is centrally determining all of Western history.”
Why would a professional futurist hang on to an obsolete term like ‘Western’ history?
