Kelake

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.”— Buddha

I just got off WeChat with my former company’s HR representative. I dread seeing anything from them, and though I am always polite, I’m sure they at the least think I am difficult, likely worse.

This time it’s about flight reimbursements which were part of my contract. Many were unable to receive this part of their offer, for one reason or another, and warned me not to expect it. I wasn’t concerned as I didn’t stress the financial side of our agreement, as I should have.

Of course the rules were never explicitly stated on how to get reimbursed, perhaps due to negligence, or perhaps a clever method to not have to pay. More likely a symptom of a bureaucratic system mired in fixed procedures, in which no single person is aware. Empathy is in short supply.

I realize my perception is overly negative.

This distrust came as a result of a deeply flawed on-boarding process which poisoned what could have been a normal working relationship. They became the adversary, not a collaborator. Imagine if all contact with HR was positive, professional, constructive, and helpful. That would set a different tone. Unfortunately that wasn’t the experience I had.

I also don’t work well with long restrictive rules, a major part of the company’s and China’s culture. I work best in a human centered approach that treats people with respect.

In the end I see this as a failure on my part, to not maintain an air of positivity when working within a strict bureaucracy, despite all the bad experiences. To let bad situations overly influence my thinking, and not be my usual easy-going self.

Positivity helps develop a mental capacity that allows us to adapt with ease during adversity, to develop a set of powerful mental traits that allow us to have faith, courage and a ‘letting it happen’ attitude to cope with the crap that comes our way.

Smile and don’t dwell on the negative.

Perhaps a read of The Power of Positive Thinking is in order.

A couple photos of one of my favorite places to drink my favorite beverages with a side of cheesecake. I haven’t yet found a coffee shop that compares – certainly nothing in Charlottetown. As I contemplate our relocation here I realize that my interest in having a hobby roasting coffee beans may take on a more urgent need.

Coffee is one of my favorite subjects on my instagram feed, including my many visits to Ink Café in Hsinchu.

The above photos are from Inks’ own Instagram photos.

In a few hours half of the US will be weeping while the other half rejoices. The fact that this election is as close as it is has had me perplexed for weeks.
You have a president who is universally derided, a wrecked economy, disastrous wars of dubious if not criminal purpose, record budget deficits, and a foreign policy that has ruined the country’s standing abroad. The list goes on, with little to no positive counterpoints. How could so many people fervently support the party which holds the ultimate responsibility for the debacle of the past eight years?
Perhaps there are two Americas one that looks back and one that looks forward. Perhaps it’s cultural or class based. I don’t have enough insight to have a real answer but if you look at the results from previous American elections you see that when it comes to electing a president America has been somewhat evenly divided through-out it’s recent history (The Reagan era may be an exception).

That gives historical perspective but not an answer. It’s going to be hard to focus on work this morning.
Via How will it feel on Nov 5th? and Where’s my country…

Identity, Policy & Character in Politics – America Idol Trumps All.
Deep down millions of Canadians and Americans “know” that something terrible is on its way. Middle and working class know that they in particular are going to be in the eye of the hurricane. No Golden Parachutes for them. Like Germans in 1931, they want to feel safe. Like Germans in 1931 they seek a Father and a Mother figure who will make it all go away. They want simple answers even if they know that they are wrong. Also, Why do the working class want to vote Republican or Conservative here in Canada?
The Palin-Whatshisname Ticket.
But race is just one manifestation of the emotion that defined the Palin rollout. That dominant emotion is fear — an abject fear of change. Fear of a demographical revolution that will put whites in the American minority by 2042. Fear of the technological revolution and globalization that have gutted those small towns and factories Palin apotheosized.
And, last but hardly least, fear of illegal immigrants who do the low-paying jobs that Americans don’t want to do and of legal immigrants who do the high-paying jobs that poorly educated Americans are not qualified to do.
From Hype to Fear in American Politics.
When the economy is doing reasonably well, the debate is dominated by hype — by the claim that America’s prosperity is truly wondrous, and that conservative economic policies deserve all the credit.
But when things turn down, there is a seamless transition from “It’s morning in America! Hurray for tax cuts!” to “The economy is slumping! Raising taxes would be a disaster!”
But there’s a powerful political faction in this country that understands very well that any real change will create losers as well as winners.
American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety.
Why, then, are twenty-first-century Americans more fearful than their counterparts sixty- five years ago or across the Atlantic? The “roots of American fear,” Stearns suggests, lie in traditions extending back to the colonial period of “fears attached to race and Evangelical fears associated with God’s wrath” (p. 74). He also invokes the post–World War II proliferation of science fiction scenarios of alien invasion and global annihilation, along with “the contemporary American sense of the strangeness of death” (p. 88). But the underlying cause is a “new fear culture” that began to take shape by the 1920s and that manifested itself most powerfully in childrearing advice and practices (p. 93). No longer taught to master their fear through courage, Americans were now socialized to avoid it or, when avoidance was not possible, to vent it. Meanwhile, an earlier sense of fatalism gave way to beliefs that most risks are preventable (as seen in changes in tort law and insurance practices)—beliefs that heightened Americans’ fears “when their expectations are contradicted” (p. 137). They were “left less emotionally prepared than desirable for unexpected intrusions” of fear and “more open to manipulations that either prolonged fear or promised decisive remediation” (p. 110). This “new socialization” combined with “decades of war-level alerts”—Stearns retraces the red scares, the nuclear threat, and a series of Cold War crises—to produce a populace prone to emotional overreaction (p. 198). Too much fear, in turn, has generated distorted psyches and policies. Via The Journal of American History.
Update 09/16: Jeffrey Zeldman’s A modest proposal is worth linking to. Imagine, discussing the the real issues and weighing each candidates resume and views on these issues. Revolutionary! Excerpt: “If you’re selling toothpaste, your claims must be vetted by legal and medical professionals. But not if you’re selling a candidate.
If you’re selling a candidate, not only can you lie about his record, but more to the point, you can lie about his opponent”.

I just spent a couple hours procrastinating by reading a number of American political blogs with leanings toward the Republican political spectrum. I won’t say conservative because though many label themselves conservative, the values and opinions they express are anything but.
With the exception of Drudge (which I think is funny like the Onion) and the Huffington Post (which i guess is ‘liberal’ and funny like the Onion) I never read sites such as these.
It’s their community’s which are especially illuminating. So here off the top of my head a short list of memorabilia:

• Russia wants Obama to win the election so they can run all over him
• Obama is a pussy. Anyone not tough enough or who doesn’t advocate war is a pussy
• If off-shore drilling will save me 2 cents a tank where is the downside? (unless you live on the coast of course)
• Hummer’s seem to be a necessary accessory
• Liberals all want to spit on the constitution
• Lots and lots of tough aggressive talk – like I remember conversations in high school or while drunk
• Lots of black and white thinking. Us and them. Liberal or Conservative. Against us or with us.
• The media is run by liberals who are against ‘us’
• Though proven ineffective torture is ok and desirable
• The Republican leadership can do no wrong
• It’s not the administrations fault ‘things’ (always see this word and never clear points) have gone the way they have
• Obamedia
• Liberalism is a mental disorder
• There is a fight to take America back … from Americans (wtf?)
• It seems anyone with an education is branded dumb and elitist. Especially if they went to an ivy league university

My uncle back home, who is one of my favourite people in the world, had similar thinking. He never voted on the issues or the person on the ballot but has fallowed the Liberal party religiously for as long as I can remember. But he was neither aggressive, nor violent, and was generally very kind to people regardless of their political or racial make-up. The kind of thinking I read was so utterly narrow that I can see how fractious debates in the have become.

“The first large-scale surveys of the internet’s impact on artists and musicians reveal that they are embracing the Web as a tool to improve how they make, market, and sell their creative works. They eagerly welcome new opportunities that are provided by digital technology and the internet.
At the same time, they believe that unauthorized online file sharing is wrong and that current copyright laws are appropriate, though there are some major divisions among them about what constitutes appropriate copying and sharing of digital files. Their overall judgment is that unauthorized online file-sharing does not pose a major threat to creative industries: Two-thirds of artists say peer-to-peer file sharing poses a minor threat or no threat at all to them.
Across the board, among those who are both successful and struggling, the artists and musicians we surveyed are more likely to say that the internet has made it possible for them to make more money from their art than they are to say it has made it harder to protect their work from piracy or unlawful use.”
Read the Research Report

“… for this list we were looking for truly brilliant ideas, the forehead-slapping kind, the ones that make you say: Now why didn’t we think of that?”
Read the full article.

I’ll be saying a little prayer tonight that Americans have abandoned their political zealotry, done some thinking, and decided that the last four years were a mockery of their country.
I wanted to record my thoughts about this event but somehow now words escape me. The US isn’t my country and yet no country or person can escape the effects of this election. How a man such as this could have such popular support and can get away with such obvious lies is a mystery. One must just open their eyes and see. Perhaps that is one of the gifts of the power base that surrounds him. The ability to frame all thinking around the context of their choosing. They must be the most masterful of propagandists.
Bush once said something to the effect that he will be remembered in history, let’s hope he is remembered as a hiccup, a mistake, and not a representative of what America believes. I had a feeling from the beginning that he would be a two term president, I hope that I was wrong, for the sake of America and the world.

“Londoners create invisible mobile phone booths, while Parisians talk in the middle of the pavement and people from Madrid share their phone with friends.

These are some of the findings from a Surrey university study into mobile phone use in three European cities.

Despite differences of approach, all of them had one thing in common, they all loved their mobile phones.

Like a rosary, the mobile has this function of keeping the mind busy. People are cuddling their phones because it promotes well-being from touching a familiar object.”

Read City Dwellers ‘Cuddle’ Mobiles.

“While there is a lot of talk these days about the Semantic Web being the crack-addled pipe dream of a few academic naifs, in reality it’s a lot closer to realization than you might be thinking. Now I want to be clear about this point: I’m not suggesting that we stand on the brink of a fully achieved, widespread Semantic Web. I am suggesting that some of the major pieces of the puzzle are now or will soon be in place. OWL, along with RDF, upon which it builds, are two such very major pieces of the Semantic Web puzzle.”
Link: The Semantic Web is Closer Than You Think