Και τώρα ΕΙΔΗΣΕΙΣ!

Οι διανοούμενοι αλλά και η πλειοψηφία των απλών ανθρώπων παρακολουθούν από τα μέσα ενημέρωσης, σαν να επρόκειτο για παραλλαγές του ίδιου "show", τόσο την πολιτιστική τους θεματολογία, όσο και τις διεθνικές αντιπαραθέσεις.	Intellectuals, like the majority of people, observe through the mass media both cultural topics and international antagonisms. Just like it were different scenes of the same "show".
Ταυτόχρονα, ο πολιτισμός που αναπτύσσει κάθε λαός μέσα στα εθνικά του όρια, ακόμα και όταν είναι εξαγώγιμος, αδυνατεί να φέρει ουσιαστικά τους λαούς πιο κοντά στην αλληλοκατανόηση και τον αλληλοσεβασμό.	At the same time, the culture each nation develops inside its borders, even if it's exportable, is unable to bring nations closer to understanding and respecting each other.
Τα τραγούδια των Beatles, η ζωγραφική του Goya, οι στίχοι του Αριστοφάνη, η βία, οι σκοτωμοί, οι τραγωδίες, εναλλάσσονται μέσα στο γυάλινο Colosseum της απαρχής της τρίτης χιλιετίας.	The Beatles' songs, Goya's paintings, Aristophanes' lyrics, killings, tragedies, all mix inside the glass colosseum of the beginning of the third millennium.
Η βία μέσα από την οθόνη μοιάζει έτσι ανώδυνη σαν ένα παιχνίδι. Ο εκπρόσωπος κάθε έθνους μέσα στην ασφάλεια του "δικού του" "γυαλιού" συμμετέχει στο παιχνίδι.	Violence through the screen seems this way to be innocent like a game. The representative of each nation, inside the security of "his" "glass" participates in the game.
Στο τέλος όμως, όταν πια η βία φτάσει στο κατώφλι της καθημερινότητάς μας ο "πυροβολισμός" θα ακουστεί εκκωφαντικός.	However, at the end, when violence has reached the steps of our daily life, the "shot" sounds deafening.
Όπως δηλαδή συμβαίνει παντού στ' αλήθεια.	Just like in reality.

Το βίντεο έχει δημιουργηθεί από μια ομάδα ανθρώπων και το βρήκα σε ένα μη ενεργό ιστολόγιο (Τυπογραφικό λάθος). Το κείμενο που παρέθεσα είναι από την ιστοσελίδα των δημιουργών.

Ακολουθούν Οι Ειδήσεις. 

What the Internet is doing to our brains

Σε μια συζήτηση τις προάλλες στο ιστολόγιο του πρτφ, κάποιος από τους σχολιαστές (ClouD) πέταξε ένα σύνδεσμο που αποδείχτηκε πραγματική τροφή για σκέψη. Δυστυχώς το κείμενο είναι στα αγγλικά και αρκετά μεγάλο για να το μεταφράσω. Για τους αγγλομαθείς, που διαθέτουν υπομονή και όρεξη για σκέψη, το παραθέτω αυτούσιο:

What the Internet is doing to our brains

by Nicholas Carr

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace  anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum  observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing  proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor  carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman  eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

Σάμουρε

Μια ταινία μικρού μήκους σε σκηνοθεσία - σενάριο του Θεοδωρή Παπαδουλάκη (2005), από τις πολύ αγαπημένες μου...

21st century the century of ...LESS

It is true..in the 21 st Century:
> Our communication - Wireless
> Our telephone - Cordless
> Our cooking - Fireless
> Our youth - Jobless
> Our Ladies - Topless
> Our food - Fatless
> Our labour - Effortless
> Our conduct - Worthless
> Our relation - Loveless
> Our attitude - Careless
> Our feelings - Heartless
> Our politics - Shameless
> Our education - Valueless
> Our follies - Countless
> Our arguments - Baseless
> Our boss - Brainless
> Our Job - Thankless
> Our Salary - Less and less
>
> our life - meaningless / pointless ??
> ------------------------------

Is there a democratic economy?

Sniffing around internet I came across this video... Needless to say that this opinion IS food for thought

Richard Wolff a professor of economics at UMass Amherst talks on the current "financial" crisis and capitialism in general. A form of socia...all » Richard Wolff is a professor of economics at U Mass Amherst and he talks on the current "financial" crisis and capitalism in general. A form of socialism is presented as a possible alternative. This talk was presented by the Association for Economic and Social Analysis and the journal Rethinking Marxism

Ο Βασιλιάς / The King

Σήμερα φίλοι η ανάρτηση είναι για τους κινηματογραφόφιλους αλλά και γι' αυτούς που μπορούν να διαθέσουν λίγο από τον πολύτιμο χρόνο τους, για να δουν μια ταινία που μου έκανε τρομερή εντύπωση.
Μιλάει για πολλά από τα στραβά της κοινωνίας μας και προσπαθεί να σπάσει πολλές προκαταλήψεις. Συγχαρητήρια σε όλους τους συντελεστές της ταινίας που απέδειξαν ότι υπάρχουν ακόμη άνθρωποι...και επειδή τυχαίνει να είναι και ελληνική, με κάνανε και ένιωσα και εθνικά υπερήφανος (κάτι που είχε πολύ καιρό να μου συμβεί).

Η ταινία είναι ο Βασιλιάς και μπορείτε να την δείτε εδώ.

For all the non-Greek people that may stumble upon my blog, I have a film suggestion this week. The King is a Greek movie,with english subtitles , and can be watched here for free.
Great movie handling society issues and biases. Enjoy!

Self-serve and slave

Επιστροφή στα ξενόγλωσσα άρθρα σήμερα. Tο σημερινό το ξεσήκωσα από την εφημερίδα International Herald Tribune (Sat.-Sun, July 19-20, 2008).
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/18/opinion/edgoodman.php
To εν λόγω άρθρο μου έκανε πολύ εντύπωση για διάφορους λόγους. Καταρχήν είναι απίστευτα καλογραμμένο με πολύ καλά αγγλικά. Δεύτερον είναι γραμμένο από αμερικάνα και το θέμα του είναι οπωσδήποτε τροφή για τη σκέψη. Τέλος επειδή ως γνωστόν η αμερική έχει προχωρήσει σε αλλαγές πολύ πιο πριν από εμάς, ορισμένα από τα χωρία του είναι μια μικρή ματιά στο εγγύς μέλλον, για το τι πρόκειται να επακολουθήσει στη χώρα μας και σε άλλες χώρες που ακολουθούν το παράδειγμα της.
Απολαύστε το!


I finally drew the line at a dinner invitation.
My husband wanted to try a much-touted restaurant where they present you with a platter of raw foods and a hot pot. The prospect of this adventure in dining didn't exactly thrill me. If I want to cook my own food, I answered rather testily, I'll eat at home.
Until then, I had drifted along with the do-it-yourself economy. I bused my own lunch trays. I booked my own movie tickets. I checked myself in at hotel kiosks. I even succumbed when an upscale seafood restaurant expected me to swipe my credit card through a handheld computer as if I were in a supermarket.
But maybe it was the election-year rants about the offshoring of American jobs from steelworkers to computer programmers that finally got me. The outsourcing of work to other countries has produced endless ire. But what about the outsourcing of work to thee and me?
For every task shipped abroad by a corporation, isn't there another one sloughed off onto that domestic loser, the consumer? For every job that's going to a low-wage economy, isn't there another going into our very own no-wage economy?
I'm not just talking about do-it-yourself gas pumping, which is by now so routine that the memory of an actual person washing your windshield has receded into the mists of AARP nostalgia. Back when gas cost $2 a gallon, self-service was offered at a discount. Today, gas is more than $4 a gallon here in the U.S., and in most parts of the country, full-service - a retronym if there ever was one - is available only at a premium.
What's happening on land is happening in air. We are now expected to book our own itinerary, print our boarding passes, and do everything at the airport except pat ourselves down for liquids.
In this self-service economy, we also serve (ourselves) by having intimate and endless conversations with voice-recognition machines simply to refill a prescription drug or check our bank balance. We are expected to interact with "labor-saving technology" without realizing that it's labor-transferring technology.
The job has not been "saved," it's been taken out of the paid sector, where employees have a nasty habit of expecting salaries, and put into the unpaid sector, where Suckers 'R' Us.
I am tempted to say that customer service has gone the way of the house call but that reminds me that even medicine has been outsourced to patients who buy do-it-yourself kits to test and track everything from HIV to blood pressure.
In an era when operations are done on an outpatient basis, nursing care has already been outsourced to family members.
The axis of this evil isn't really globalization, it's privatization. Consider the jobs that have now become part of our personal portfolio.
We've become our own computer geeks as help lines become self-help lines. We've become our own pension planners and financial analysts left to manage our 401(k)s. We are even expected to be healthcare analysts, determining which star in the galaxy of drug prescription plans covers the ever-changing cast of pills in our medicine cabinet.

All of this is framed in the language of free choice. As opposed to, say, free time.

An MIT economist assures me cheerily that many Americans are willing to accept less service for lower cost. In a society built on the value of self-reliance, I am told, we may even feel virtuous when we put together our own bookcase or install our own hard drive.

But I have yet to find an economist who has figured out the human cost of "lower cost," or tallied up the transfer of labor from companies to customers.

I've yet to find a consumer who has added, subtracted, or multiplied the amount of time we are now spending on the second shift of life management.

Remember when women were asking, "Can we have it all?" The answer was that we could have it all only if we could do it all ... and all by ourselves. Now men and women have both won equal opportunity in the do-it-all-by-yourself world. We have officially become our own nonprofit centers.
Welcome to the self-service economy where we are never without work to be done. Let's celebrate by dining out together. Bring your carrot peeler.

Σώστε τον πλανήτη; / Save the Planet?

Μερικές φορές η σάτιρα έχει πολλά να μας διδάξει. Το παρακάτω βιντεάκι είναι εξωφρενικά αστείο. Περιέχει δε, πολλές σωστές σκέψεις για το περιβαντολογικό ζήτημα. Είναι στα αγγλικά and it makes ...sense! Enjoy!

Συλλέκτης... παροιμιών - αποφθεγμάτων

Από μικρός είχα μια μανία με τις συλλογές. Μάζευα ότι μπορούσα. "Χαρτάκια" με ποδοσφαιριστές, γραμματόσημα, αυτοκινητάκια, τηλεκάρτες, νομίσματα ελληνικά και ξένα και ένα σωρό άλλα πράγματα τα οποία ή σκονίζουν τώρα σε κάποιο ράφι του πατρικού μου σπιτιού ή πολύ σοφά πράττοντας τα έχει πετάξει η μάνα μου στα σκουπίδια. Ενώ πλέον έχω καταλάβει την ματαιότητα του όλου εγχειρήματος, οφείλω να παραδεχτώ ότι είμαι αθεράπευτα συλλέκτης μια που ακόμα και στα ..'άντα' μου συνεχίζω να συλλέγω...
Σήμερα μοιράζομαι το μέρος της συλλογής που είχα σε ηλεκτρονική μορφή και ελπίζω στο μέλλον να βρω το χρόνο για το υπόλοιπο που είναι γραπτό...

A fool utters all on their mind. The wise waits till afterwards.

Actions take less time to come true than wishes.

A well-trained horse isn’t less exciting than a wild one.

Most anger is only fear, most depression is only anger.

Knowledge is power, but wisdom doesn’t need power.

The heart can be an enemy to the intellect.

Everything happens at once.

Answer not a fool according to their folly, lest you be like unto them.

The chicken is only the egg’s way of reproducing itself.

Measure twice, cut once

The true church is one's own heart.

One that deals in evil shall flee to their own doom, let none stand in their way.

Music can soothe more than just the savage beast.

Where there is no wood, the fire goes out, so where there is no talebearer, the strife ceases.

Don't let friends impose on you. Work calmly and silently.

In youth and beauty, wisdom is rare.

One that is void of wisdom despises the neighbor, but the one of understanding holds the former at peace.

Open rebuke is better than secret love.

A gentle person points out the admirable qualities of all and does not point out bad qualities. A petty one does just the opposite.

A body at rest tends to stay at rest, while a body in motion tends to stay in motion.

When wearing comfortable shoes one forgets that they have feet.

Nothing is by chance, everything happens because it has to.

Self discipline is a skill.

Strange coincidences may be but the normal workings of the universe.

Will the impossible - accept the inevitable.

Study the past, live in the present, prepare for the future.

For all, the attainment of sincerity is the path to virtue.

By nature, all are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.

A kind word with forgiveness is better than charity followed by insult.

A civilization that regards nuclear energy as important and cooking as trivial is surely headed for destruction.

Sometimes we must learn to ask for what is needed.

Life is a wonderful habit.

The sanctity of one's beliefs should be respected.

Wisdom is more valuable than valuables and all things that can be desired hold no comparison.

Confidence in one unfaithful in time of trouble is like a broken tooth, and a foot out of joint.

Giving others space, frees oneself in turn.

Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.

Everyone prudent deals with knowledge, but a fool lays open their folly.

The slothful one says, 'There is a lion in the way, a lion in the streets.'

The secret of life should not be known as then it would no longer be a secret.

"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."

"Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win."

Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling.

"As empty vessels make the loudest sound, so they that have least with are the greatest babblers." Plato

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay

"The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well." - H.T. Leslie

To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad. - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

"Never trouble another for what you can do for yourself." - Thomas Jefferson

"If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one." - John Galsworthy

It is wise to put your anger in problems, not people and your energy in answers not excuses.

"Worry does not empty tomorrow of sorrow - it empties today of strength." - Corrie Ten Boom

"We judge ourselves by what we are capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Every man dies. Not every man lives. –Tim Robins

Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it. - Seneca

A closed mind is like a closed book; just a block of wood. - Chinese Proverb

A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline.-Harvey Mackay

After the game, the king and the pawn go into the same box. Italian Proverb

The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected. Swedish Proverb

After three days without reading, talk becomes flavorless.Chinese proverb

Behind an able man there are always other able men. Chinese Proverb

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness Chinese Proverb

By asking for the impossible, obtain the best possible. Italian Proverb

By learning you will teach; by teaching you will learn.Latin Proverb

The church is near, but the way is icy, The tavern is far, but I will walk carefully. Ukranian Proverb

Cuando amor no es locura, no es amor. (When love is not madness, it is not love.) Spanish Proverb

Don't be too sweet lest you be eaten up; don't be too bitter lest you be spewed out. Jewish Proverb

Don't empty the water jar until the rain falls. Philippine Proverb

Eat and drink with your relatives; do business with strangers. Greek Proverb

Eating while seated makes one of large size; eating while standing makes one strong. Hindu Proverb

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Arab Proverb

Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think.Chinese Proverb

Even a clock that does not work is right twice a day. Polish Proverb

Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent, and discerning if he holds his tongue.
Miscellaneous Prover

Everyone thinks his own burden heavy. French Proverb

Every animal knows more than you do. Native American Proverb (Nez Perce)

The eyes believe themselves; the ears believe other people. German Proverb

Fall seven times, stand up eight. Japanese Proverb

Fear less, hope more,
eat less, chew more,
whine less, breathe more,
talk less, say more,
hate less, love more,
and all good things will be yours.Swedish proverb

The first drink with water, the second without water, the third like water. Spanish Proverb

First secure an independent income, then practice virtue. Greek Proverb

Fish, to taste good, must swim three times: in water, in butter, and in wine. Polish Proverb

Go often to the house of a friend; for weeds soon choke up the unused path.Scandanavian Proverb

He is rich who owes nothing. French Proverb

He that does not ask will never get a bargain. French Proverb

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever. Chinese Proverb

He who is not impatient is not in love. Italian Proverb

He who knows little quickly tells it. Italian Proverb

He who knows nothing doubts nothing.Italian Proverb

If work were good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor. Haitian proverb

If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of he game, the stakes, and the quitting time. Chinese proverb

L'amour faite passer les temps. Les temps faite passer l'amour. (Love makes time pass. Time makes love pass.)French Sundial Motto

Listen to all, plucking a feather from every passing goose, but, follow no one absolutely. Chinese Proverb

Live your own life, for you will die your own death. Latin Proverb

The loveliest of faces are to be seen by moonlight, when one sees half with the eye and half with the fancy. Persian Proverb

A man is not where he lives, but where he loves. Latin Proverb

Never do anything standing that you can do sitting, or anything sitting that you can do lying down. Chinese Proverb

Never rely on the glory of the morning or the smiles of your mother-in-law. Japanese Proverb

Observe your enemies, for they first find your faults. Greek Proverb

One drink is just right; two is too many; three are too few. Spanish Proverb

Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow. Sweedish Proverb

There wouldn't be such a thing as counterfeit gold if there were no real gold somewhere. Sufi Proverb

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first. Chinese Proverb

Those who sleep with dogs will rise with fleas. Italian Proverb

To attract good fortune, spend a new coin on an old friend, share an old pleasure with a new friend, and lift up the heart of a true friend by writing his name on the wings of a dragon. Chinese Proverb

A tree never hits an automobile except in self defense. American Proverb

Vision without action is a daydream. Action with without vision is a nightmare. Japanese Proverb

Vulnerant omnia, ultima necat. (All the [hours] wound you, the last one kills) Latin Proverb

When two quarrel, both are to blame. Dutch Proverb

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other. Chinese Proverb

Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart. Confucius

Whoever gossips to you will gossip about you. Spanish Proverb

Who travels for love finds a thousand miles not longer than one. Japaneses Proverb

The wise man has long ears and a short tongue. German Proverb

You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep. Navajo Proverb

"Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't."-Margaret Thatcher

"The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts." - John Locke

"A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read." - Mark Twain.

"Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question." - Albert Camus

"Live so that your friends can defend you but never have to." - Arnold H. Glasgow

"Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking."- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. "- Jim Elliot

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."- Pablo Picasso

"When you can think of yesterday without regret and tomorrow without fear, you are near contentment."

"Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you." - Nathaniel Hawthorne

"He who thinks by the inch and talks by the yard deserves to be kicked by the foot."

"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible." - Albert Einstein

"Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything." - Blaise Pascal

"Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish." - John Quincy Adams

"Decide what you want, decide what you are willing to exchange for it. Establish your priorities and go to work." - H. L. Hunt

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind. - William James

"If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought and could be."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead." - Louisa May Alcott

"Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely." - Rodin

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw

"Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter." -- African Proverb

"Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use."

- Wendell Johnson

"Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge." - Audre Lorde

"Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all." - Dale Carnegie

"To be always thinking about your manners is not the way to make them good; the very perfection of manners is not to think about yourself." - Richard Whately

"Life is too short for traffic." - Dan Bellack

"No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted." - Aesop

"Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights." - John Wooden

"A soft answer turneth away wrath." - Proverbs 15:1

"Know how to ask. There is nothing more difficult for some people, nor for others, easier."
- Baltasar Gracian

Great ability develops and reveals itself increasingly with every new assignment. - Baltasar Gracian

"Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality." - Jules de Gaultier"

The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time." - Abraham Lincoln

"The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes." - Frank Lloyd Wright

Όλες οι μεγάλες αλήθειες ξεκινούν ως βλασφημίες. -George Bernard Shaw

History is on every occasion the record of that which one age finds worthy of note in another.

In history the way of annihilation is invariably prepared by inward degeneration, by decrease of life. Only then can a shock from outside put an end to the whole.- Jakob Burckhardt

"Our greatest victories and those which are most enduring are our victories over ourselves"-Napoleon

"What hashish gives with one hand it takes away with the other: that is to say, it gives the power of imagination and takes away the ability to profit by it." - Baudelaire (1860)

- There is nothing so strange or unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopheror another. -Rene Descartes