Category Archives: challenges

335. shoddy everything

After WW2 and before Japanese competition upped the standards, we built shoddy cars, and the rest of the consumer world went with them.Cheap, not long lasting. We built housing and offices and stores that are cheap and won’t last long. The result is, we have a replaceable society with no money to replace what is …

March 2, 2010 – 7:15 am | By | Posted in challenges, essays | Comments (0)

216. Kierkegaard

I’ve been reading his Concept of Dread. He builds an entire book on what we might thin of as a small deal, but as he makes clear, dread is a pervasive aspect of human lives, maybe all lives, and yet we do not recognize it, not make much of today. In the past, say in …

August 9, 2009 – 9:51 pm | By doug carmichael | Posted in Education, GardenWorld, challenges, essays, ideas, sustainability | Comments (0)

213. Higher Taxes May Be Only Solution

To increased number of poor. Do I beleive it? Sort of, but there is also the coming agricultural economy. With the march of technology, the size of a future American underclass dependent on public support for part of its livelihood is hard to predict: 10 million, 20 million, 100 million? We could imagine cities where …

August 9, 2009 – 8:41 am | By doug carmichael | Posted in Community, Financial system, challenges | Comments (0)

171. Obama now

it looks like he will deal with, in order 1. health 2. finance and employment (this is a complex system) 3. climate change while trying to improve international relations in all directions. It looks like he might 1. fail with medicine because he allowed special interests to *increase* costs and lose those voters who are …

July 21, 2009 – 11:44 pm | By doug carmichael | Posted in Financial system, GardenWorld, challenges, sustainability | Comments (0)

166. challenge

Doug North, whom I’ve been reading traps us in a mechanical vocabulary, but steps out when he challenges us. to improve the human prospect we must understand the sources of human decision making. That is a necessary condition for human survival. Understanding the process of economic change,  2005 It might be good to know what …

July 20, 2009 – 2:41 am | By doug carmichael | Posted in challenges | Comments (0)