The Fountainhead

Fiction.
Stranger than life.

The Fountainhead

The Fountainhead's protagonist, Howard Roark, is an individualistic young architect who chooses to struggle in obscurity rather than compromise his artistic and personal vision [in] an establishment centered on tradition-worship.

While Roark is working in the quarry, he encounters Dominique... There is an immediate attraction between them, which results in flirtation followed by what many readers interpret as rape.

[Ellesworth] Toohey sets out to destroy Roark through a smear campaign he spearheads.

Roark and Gail become great friends, although he does not know about Roark's past relationship with Dominique.

Roark... dynamites the building to prevent the subversion of his vision

The jury finds him not guilty. Roark marries Dominique.

The End.

Questions

If you ask your questions long enough and often enough, you get answers.

Most of the time.

The problem is that you eventually run out of questions. Well, not quite. You still have questions but they're minor and the answers are trivial or arbitrary or too easily found.

Jobs Fading Out Again

Dice listings declined to 50.5K after rising to 53K in October, 2009. Indeed.com monthly listings also declined in December, year over year, and January's numbers already look poor.

Desperation

The university is surrounded by small single and duplex rentals for students, all carrying the traditional "For Rent, call (XXX-XXXX)" signs for the past year until Christmas when this sign appeared -

Quandry

The problem with figuring things out is that easy quantifiable questions get replaced with difficult ethical questions. Are we the arbitrators of justice within our own local domain?

Satanism

A fallout from my Wiccan incident was a brief review of Satanism. I'm hardly an expert but it seems to me that Satanism has more in common with Libertarianism than it does with Christianity or Libertarianism with Communism. Satanism and Libertarianism are ideologies that stress individualism while Christianity and Communism are ideologies about the group.

Con Artistry

A common element in con scams is that the mark ("sucker") front-loads his own money in hopes of gaining more money in the future. For instance, the mark might pay into a health care fund today in hopes of universal health care coverage in 2013...

"Claim: expand coverage to most uninsured

Fact: All bills do this. Fine Print: Coverage starts in 2013"

True Value

In periods of saturation, true value comes from the margin... from the most unexpected area of your world.

Novelty Meme Pattern

We attended the premiere of "Death, Sex & The Holidays" and I came away with two thoughts.

1) The young aim for shock value because it's easy

2) the six vignettes combined Common Context interwoven with The Unexpected

Refer back to Branded Bandwidth, Feb of 2006 - Mental bandwidth can be divided into two mutually exclusive sets - bandwidth which seeks to conserve itself (The Mundane) and bandwidth which seeks novelty. Last week's "Death & Sex" play successfully threaded both bandwidths into a single story.

It's another meme design pattern - bind to common context, threaded with novelty.

Autonomy

Autonomy is inversely related to complexity. It's possible to optimize autonomy but in general, it's bounded by complexity. Autonomy is a rough proxy for flexibility.

Arab Central Bank

"Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia signed and ratified the pact... towards setting up a joint central bank and... single currency."

My comments from Sept, 2006 - "major international blocs have been planning to abandon the US dollar... Asian and Arab regions have their own schemes underway".

It's going to happen.
"Dishonest money breeds dishonest people".

2010

I think Harry Dent is the percentage bet - a second market crash in 2010 that leads into a deeper downturn for at least two years. I hope he's wrong, or that the Federal government can counter-balance the demographic forces. A second crash would shoot unemployment up to Great Depression levels and lead to bankruptcy and federalization of many State & local governments. Probably gut many pension funds, too.

Sometimes i wish my Echo hadn't been wrecked. I don't need much else except a reliable car. On the other hand, it was nearing 200K miles and if I ever work again I'd buy something better. The Echo was fine but far from my dream car.

Shoot The Messenger

The Great Reckoning repeatedly warns that the general population can't comprehend The Great Reckoning and will tend to blame the messenger once it begins.

I see now that it's true. Most people can't think outside of their environmental context and past experience and many are provincial and petty. Previously, they were regulated via cultural norms and only a few were smart enough to understand the underpinnings behind those norms. But as the 1982 Credit Bubble began, cultural norms washed away and behavior deviated towards short-term outcomes.

A trend reversal is likely, where most people are forced back into more "traditional" behavior.

Obushma

Inspired by the Rolling Stone article?

Recession Scorned

Noted for posterity. On July 15, 2009, I posted my Google trends prediction to CalculatedRisk, predicting the recession's end based on trend change in Google keyword counts. Although I'm uncredited, the timing (July 17, two days later) of Larry Summer's public announcement of recession end based on Google keyword counts is suspicious.