Very cool video by friend inspired by Occupy Wall Street protests
Saturday, November 5, 2011 at 9:09AM Michal Shapiro is a good friend of this blog, longtime reader and occasional mentor. She just joined Wikistrat because we want her analytically sharp but artistically infused perspective, which she shares regularly in a blog at HuffPo. Why? We don't want Wikistrat to simply replicate the closed society of intell/consultants from the real world. We want breadth, so that means subject matter experts from around the dial so blind spots in thinking are rooted out ("Has anybody ever considered . . .?") in the simulations we pursue.
Michal is an amazing artist (one of her paintings hung in Don Draper's office in "Mad Men" - and now hangs in my home office thanks to her gift) and turns out to be an amazing singer too, as this video shows.
"Up the Spout" (thanks, Occupy Wall Street) from Michal Shapiro on Vimeo.
Find it to play here at Vimeo.
Reader Comments (4)
Tom.
Thanks for sharing this with us and what a good call for including her in your wiki. I feel that too often "think tanks" include only like-minded people that come up with pre-assumed conclusions, filtering out conflicting evidence. The whole wiki model is a good one – keep up the good work.
Nice song. The thing that disturbs me about the OCCUPY movement is that the 'words' I see from it are mostly VICTIM type of words. Someone else makes 'me' weak idea. Someone else is responsible for my innovation... or someone else is responsible for my success or failure.
The decades of 'entitlement' thinking has come to roost.
If people didn't spend what they don't have, didn't buy into a mortgage and seriously considered 'the terms, etc, they would not have lost their homes. I had to face many of the same decisions.
I wish it was a group with new 'ideas', new innovation, new articulation that was about personal responsibility, etc.
But I note my own bias not having 'worked for, as an employee' for better part of my life. I've always created my own job of sorts.
Well a part of the problem has been that the whole system is beyond the capacity for your average American to understand. Michelle Bachman even boasts that she had a postdoc in tax lawyer school, which just makes me ask a basic question, "Why do we need someone to have postdoc training out of law school to understand the tax code?" Contracts are ultimately very complex, and it is not always due to legislators. Hidden fees and charges and the like are all around us. Even for a simple political add has microscopic print, why? Why can't I as an American read something in the basic vernacular?
That's a part of the problem. Carl Sagan once said about science and technology, "We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces." Now that we have applied science and technology to fundamental economics and removed the common man's understanding we will see such popular uprisings. Equally, whenever complex derivatives were often called "too complex for people to understand" meanwhile we understood them as basically insurance. Which they were called complex derivatives to avoid insurance regulations. We are now at the inflexion point upon which the very basic economic transactions are farther and farther removed from the common person. This is why we had a very Jacksonian response last election cycle.
Now we have the other half of that movement. The question is whether these "99ers" will be socialists in the old vein or perhaps like the ancient and dead Whigs we do not know yet. However, if we consider the consumer activism and the move out of large scale banks to credit unions I remain hopeful that these may give way to a Whig response to the Tea Party's Jacksonianism.
We have shifted our nation from a nation that wants to escape being a part of the labor force and away from being say a plumber or electrician to becoming a lawyer or a medical doctor. Those are most certainly worthy careers for some people, but college graduation rates have now spawned people indebted to society with "useless" degrees in areas such as women's studies. As we have weakened technical training and focus to move towards purely intellectually driven work, the most successful people in various fields are not those that are purely experts but rather those that can combine various skills together to synthesize and create new industries. Sometimes they are engineers with a passion for the arts like Jobs, or even a high school girl starting a fashion blog. While both were using technical skills but also a sense of "higher" aesthetics and commoditized upon that to create successful businesses that employ others.
Instead we have taken the route towards "well rounded education" that focuses on trying to punch out a one shoe fits all nonsense that does not condone people towards having various forms of interests or masteries. Nor are the transition from high school to work force equally stable, one most take a side route to college or trade school and dwindling apprenticeships. Today, though, "internships' have returns and transformed into a new treadmill for young workers that are not true apprenticeships in any sense since they do not automatically lead to a full time job.
In a way we compete for the best in society when hiring workers, but we have also cannibilized the base of a very large and pissed off generation that we will not easily get back from the years we invested into their educations as a society. Without those first rung jobs that even Steve Jobs needed a first job to get connected to people inside of his own industry to land the necessary investment monies to start Apple in the first place. Instead, some of those kids are stamping around with those mustachioed masks asking their country, "What now, I did what you told me to do and more?"
Then as we grow older, we're going to rely on these people to take care of us in our old age? To pay for our medical benefits, social security, and to care for us in the nursing home? They have a right to cry victim. It's a bait and switch routine. The implicit contract was not as explicit in our social contract per law for benefits for old people, and today AARP will fight for those "rights we paid for because we are X amount people strong." Which will only grow especially with the baby bust that's occuring now if this continues.
We had the opportunity to be nice to the younger generation, and lost them now. If they go blame victim, they have every right to because we lifted up the latter to success before they came of age. We made promises to them, and made promises against them. We broke the first without breaking the last. If in the future the Millenials do make massive cuts to spending after the Boomer largesse, we have no one to blame but ourselves. From both a fiscal discipline side as well as a revenue side, because the damage we have done will create long term ripple effects if this shell game with the economy persists for years.
Hi Mr. Hare:
Having actually been down to Occupy Wall Street,(as opposed to hearing reports about it) I'd say that there is no one attitude or dogma that they are putting forth. Most of the message I got was that EVERYONE WANTS TO WORK but they feel betrayed by a system that they perceive to be hypocritical. Of course there are some odd birds down there too. The day I was there, there was a Caucasian lady singing Native American chants and blowing incense at the cops. But she was certainly not representative.. If anything I'd call your attention to the Texan man in my video. I thought he was pretty down to earth.