ways of living

From Wired article on information and tech jobs moving to India - this

computer terminology is littered with traces of what were formerly jobs: printers, monitors, file managers; even computers themselves used to be people, not machines.

and this

The [Bhagavad] Gita opens with two armies facing each other across a field of battle. One of the warriors is Prince Arjuna, who discovers that his charioteer is the Hindu god Krishna. The book relates the dialog between the god and the warrior - about how to survive and, more important, how to live. One stanza seems apt in this moment of fear and discontent.

"Your very nature will drive you to fight," Lord Krishna tells Arjuna. "The only choice is what to fight against."

From SJ Mercury News, a lesson in fairness

via Crooked Timber, then Brad DeLong, read Ken MacLeod on morality ("Morality has very little to do with choosing sides...")

CJR Campaign Desk on givers and takers, who (respectively) aren't who you'd expect:

"Republicans seem to have become the new welfare party," opines Pink, "their constituents live off tax dollars paid by people who vote Democratic." That's partisan spin, of course -- but the numbers he cites are not.

John Quiggin -

...the Internet is like a magic mirror. More precisely, it's like Harry Potter's Mirror of Esired, which shows the viewer whatever they most want to see. Among the academics and other geeks who built the Internet this was a co-operative world in which sharing based on mutual esteem would displace the profit motive and render large corporations obsolete. In the United States, where stock market mania predated the dotcom boom, the mirror showed a route to instant riches...

Michael Taht:

I remember life before spam. It wasn't that long ago, really. It was a good life. I could post to newsgroups, freely, and get back replies from strangers that I wanted to read. Now, sorting through my email is like machine gunning down a swarm of armed maniacs all trying to sell me something.

Excerpt from Temple Grandin on the motivation for working on Open Source software -

People in the business world are not able to comprehend why the computer people give their work away. I am unable to think about this without becoming emotional. It is no mystery to me why they download their intellectual ideas into the vast, evolving and continually improving computer operating system. It is because their thoughts will live forever as part of the "genetic code" of the computer program. They are putting themselves into the program and their "intellectual DNA" will live forever in cyber-space. As the program evolves and changes, the code they wrote will probably remain hidden deep within it. It is almost like a living thing that is continually evolving and improving.

Or is it more a reflection of the different ethical systems for the Information, Commercial, and Guardian spheres?