Author: isi

The austerity delusion

isi / / Stuff that matters

theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2015/apr/29/the-austerity-delusion
Excellent Guardian article by Paul Krugman

May 2010, as Britain headed into its last general election, elites all across the western world were gripped by austerity fever, a strange malady that combined extravagant fear with blithe optimism. Every country running significant budget deficits – as nearly all were in the aftermath of the financial crisis – was deemed at imminent risk of becoming another Greece unless it immediately began cutting spending and raising taxes. Concerns that imposing such austerity in already depressed economies would deepen their depression and delay recovery were airily dismissed; fiscal probity, we were assured, would inspire business-boosting confidence, and all would be well.

People holding these beliefs came to be widely known in economic circles as “austerians” – a term coined by the economist Rob Parenteau – and for a while the austerian ideology swept all before it.
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What defines a generation?

isi / / About

What defines a generation? Born in the same time bracket? But what if your parents got you really young, but your friend’s parents got their kids late? So you &  your mate might be 15 years apart, but you were both raised by people from the same generation/same time bracket/same historic background…so you are both confronted with same influences, but have different timelines and subliminal hums in your background…

So, what makes the fine grain? There are generations between generations, and types between categories, yet where does natural empathy and true understanding end?

 

Jobs of tomorrow

isi / / Stuff that matters

Preparing for the jobs of tomorrow

Apr 25, 2014 - LinkedIn article by James Arvanitakis
Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis¡ University of Western Sydney

It is obvious that the Australian economy is facing a number of adjustments. The closure of Ford and Holden, as well as the recent announcement of Qantas, highlights that the opportunities that once existed, no longer exist.
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Reason above all else

isi / / Beauty

About Ayn Rand

While in high school, she determined that she was an atheist and that she valued reason above any other human virtue.

Ayn RandAyn called her philosophy “Objectivism”, describing its essence as “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” She considered Objectivism a systematic philosophy and laid out positions on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy and aesthetics.

What an utterly inspiring woman.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

Zur Farbenlehre

isi / / Beauty

Good old Goethe – His Theory of Colours by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is a book about the poet’s views on the nature of colours and how these are perceived by humans. Published in 1810, it contains detailed descriptions of phenomena such as coloured shadows, refraction, and chromatic aberration.

Goethe_Farbenkreis_zur_Symbolisierung_des_menschlichen_Geistes-_und_Seelenlebens The Theory of Colours stands as an absorbing account of the philosophy and artistic experience of colour, bridging the intuitive and the visceral in a way that, more than two hundred years later, continues to intrigue.

On Wikipedia is more about it, a quite interesting read

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Colours

Philipp Otto Runge was a Romantic German romantic painter and draughtsman. In 1803, on a visit to Weimar, Runge unexpectedly met Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the two formed a friendship based on their common interests in color and art. Runge’s interest in color was the natural result of his work as a painter and of having an enquiring mind.

He arrived at the concept of the color sphere sometime in 1807 by expanding the hue circle into a sphere, with white and black forming the two opposing poles.RungeKugel