Incommn

“There’s people making babies to my music. That’s nice.”

—Barry White, American musician, born September 12, 1944

More Things To Worry About That Are Completely Out of Your Control

As a general rule, we shouldn’t worry about what’s out of our control. We certainly should not worry about what’s none of our damned business, with “business” generously construed.

But what do we do with the stuff that is our business, again generously construed (like generation change and the imminent takeover of the oceans by giant, poisonous jellyfish, is way out of our control?

Dunno. Your move. Why don’t you come to DELA, have lunch with some interesting people, and stop worrying?

Events Today

Easthampton—12:00–2:00PM Don’t Eat Lunch Alone
Holyoke—4:30PM Expand Your Network Western Mass
Northampton—5:00–7:00PM Click Workspace Entrepreneurship Fall Bash
Easthampton—5:00–7:00PM Greater Easthampton Chamber Networking by Night
Northampton—5:00–8:00PM Northampton Area Young Professionals September Networking Social
Springfield—6:00–9:00PM SCORE Business Planning and Cash Flow

Reading

Dem Bones

“…Social systems around the world have become highly interconnected. Good innovations can now spread around the world in the blink of an eye, on the scale of history. Island biogeography suggests that such rapid inflows and outflows among the many social systems have moved and will move us closer to monoculture; at this limit this makes us a single global point of failure….”
Catastrophic Social Change

These Kids Today

72 million Millenials pose challenges to the culture of workplaces and other social and economic institutions. They’re widely considered to be lazy, entitled, narcissistic, and restless by business superiors from the two previous generations (Baby Boom and Gen X). Sounds familiar, right? “Greatest Generation” bosses and parents had very similar reactions to the Boomers (I know: I was there), and Boomers looked down on the hapless Gen-Xers (ditto). The literary evidence strongly supports the hypothesis that the poor younger generation has never done anything right in the eyes of its predecessors since time immemorial.

Nevertheless, at 72 million strong, this is the largest cohort to join the workforce and society at large since the Baby Boom. So get used to it. The world will change in their image, just as the Baby Boom upended everything in the 1960s and 1970s.

“…Boomers and Gen-Xers need to be ready, Schewe said. ‘The point is, as an older cohort with a different set of values, you can’t just say, “they’ve got to bend to us; we’re not going to bend to them.” There are just too many of them, and their values are too pervasive and too deeply embedded to be ignored.’
Generation Next

Never Mind the Millenials. Have You Heard About the Jellyfish?

“….To understand why jellyfish are taking over, we need to understand where they live and how they breed, feed, and die. Jellyfish are almost ubiquitous in the oceans. As survivors of an earlier, less hospitable world, they can flourish where few other species can venture. Their low metabolic rate, and thus low oxygen requirement, allows them to thrive in waters that would suffocate other marine creatures. Some jellyfish can even absorb oxygen into their bells, allowing them to “dive” into oxygen-less waters like a diver with scuba gear and forage there for up to two hours…‘We are creating a world more like the late Precambrian than the late 1800s—a world where jellyfish ruled the seas and organisms with shells didn’t exist. We are creating a world where we humans may soon be unable to survive, or want to.’”
They’re Taking Over

The Last Word

“The older one gets the more one comes to resemble oneself.”

—Maurice Chevalier, French actor, born September 12, 1888

“Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and the cathedral will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.”

—James Jeans, English physicist, born September 11, 1877

The IT Tech Tax on Track to Repeal

We had the first in the new Tuesday InCommN-Click-Hidden-Tech Workshop series last at the Community Room of Hampton Court in Northampton. Most of last night’s session was a lively and informative discussion of the 6.25% IT Sales Tax that was sprung on the Massachusetts tech community this summer.

Scott Foster, partner at Bulkley, Richardson & Gelinas, is deeply involved in the political battle against this confusing, unfair, and inequitable tax. He led our discussion, and shared his insight into the political manouvering that appears to be on the brink of forcing repeal of the the tax. Jeff Rutherford, of Jeff Rutherford Media Relations, and Don Lesser of Pioneer Training gave us the benefit of their close study of the law and its ramifications and the communications they’ve had with their state representatives and senators.

The good news is that public opinion is highly negative about the IT Tech Tax, and vocal about it. Prominent and powerful legislators are on board to repeal it, and the Governor has officially come down on the side of repeal.

But it’s important that everyone who has a stake in this express their support for repeal to their state reps and senators, particularly Senator Stan Rosenberg, who is still on the fence about this matter and needs to hear from as many of us as possible as soon as possible.

In contacting legislators be calm, be polite, but let them know what your opinion is. Snail mail is better than email, and telephone calls are better than letters. Find your representatives at Members of the House of Representatives, and senators at Members of the Senate, and let them know you want the IT Tech Tax repealed ASAP.

More information about repeal efforts is available at Sparkcoaltion.org.

Continue reading “Massachusetts IT Tech Tax Update”

“Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.”

—Cyril Connolly, English journalist, born September 10, 1903

On Not Finishing Books

Once I went to the library on a Saturday morning and took out some books, came home, read them, and returned them in the afternoon, so I could get some more. I was seven or eight years old, and had just gotten my first library card.

It’s long been my belief that most of life is a set of more or less unpleasant chores that you have to get out of the way in order to get down to life’s real business: reading.

Now, I still read all the time, for pleasure and instruction. But I finish less and less of the books I start reading. Much of the reading I do is on the Internet, in the form of blog posts and other articles. There’s simply less time for books.

My attention span is also shorter, and my patience is limited. A book that starts to bore me gets abandoned. I guess I don’t feel any obligation to finish them anymore, as I once did. The scanning habit has become natural.

There seems to be more to read, too: as if a greater infinity of reading matter exists on the Internet than the already-infinite amount of stuff there was to read in libraries and bookstores, like Cantor’s distinction between the infinity of integers and the greater infinity of real numbers.

Continue reading “I Read Therefore I Am”

“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.”

—Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist, born September 9, 1828

Asian Markets

Second trip of the week to the asian markets in Hadley and Amherst. We found that the Gohyang Korean Grocery had gochujang (red pepper paste) back in stock. Considering its importance in Korean cooking, I was surprised that they could possibly run out. Distribution problems, presumably

It took three tries to find the dried silverfish (no, not those insects in your attic) and Szechwan preserved vegetables I was looking for, but I found them at Mom’s House in Amherst. It’s pretty interesting what the different stores do and do not carry. To an outsider to the cultures whose foods they stock, it can look like they have a random collection of everything. Markets are funny that way. Visit Trans World Market, International Food Market, and Ecuador Andino Store also.

Four Five thriving businesses serving people from all over the world signals that diversity is on the rise in Western Massachusetts. We welcome new neighbors from around the world for their contributions to the local economy and the richness they add to our shared regional culture. 

Continue reading “Cultural Diversity along Route 9”

“Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”

—Darryl F. Zanuck, American director, born September 5, 1902

Have an A-1 Day

“Breaking Bad” is so good right now that I can hardly stand it. The writing, the acting, the direction are all superb. It occurs to me that television has grown up in the shadow of the cinema just as mammals did in the shadow of the dinosaurs. American cinema is over-specialized, and would not be able to survive rapid change in the ecosystem it dominates.

Here’s an interesting take on why we (baby boomers) got to see so many good movies on TV in the olden days (1950s and 60s) and why younger people have so little experience of cinema from before their own time. If you’ve ever experienced the I-don’t-watch-black-and-white look of horror and aversion, you know what I’m talking about. Old Movies and New TV

Continue reading “Asteroid Destroys Hollywood”

“Any living cell carries with it the experience of a billion years of experimentation by its ancestors.”

—Max Delbruck, German scientist, born September 4, 1906

Paging Horatio Alger

We had a very spirited discussion at Tuesday’s Northampton DELA (it didn’t quite come to blows) about work-life balance, the alienation of “consumers” from the essential human virtues of work, and what’s wrong with these kids today. You should have been there.

Last time, Jeff Conn and Rick Feldman took a stroll down memory lane, extolling their boyhood business experiences with paper routes to the point where I’ve been considering getting one (in my copious spare time). The paper route appears to have been the making of both of these gentlemen. Typically, Rick’s approach was cool-headed, analytical and systematic; with a keen eye to profit and ROI. Jeff, of course, had more of a romantic, picaresque adventure. Classic DELA.

Continue reading “Why You Should Come to DELA”

“The road was new to me, as roads always are, going back.”
—Sarah Orne Jewett, American author, born September 3, 1849

I hope you had a great holiday weekend: we did, although we did discover that replacing a dedicated GPS with a smartphone or tablet is not without its downside in a world without universal cell service. I’m looking at you, southern Vermont.

Continue reading “Roads”