Rioting

Coverage of the Stanley Cup Riot has mostly focused on lamenting the foolishness and idiocy of Vancouver's wayward citizens (or, according to some account, visitors who came with the intention of rioting).

But this first-hand account by a cop and these photos/FB screenshots show something else - the potential depravity of the human spirit. I can't tell why these people went and did these things, but it seems like the riot was an "event" for them, a chance for them to try something new and do some really crazy stuff.

I don't think they realize (especially those are posting on FB) how much they hurt others. To them, society must be a bottomless pit of funds or a harmful malignancy that screwed them over. Nonchalance or anger are the only two possibilities that occur to me.

David Brooks is Right

David Brooks is absolutely correct here:

I’ll be writing a lot about the presidential election over the next 16 months, but at the outset I would just like to remark that I’m opining on this whole campaign under protest. I’m registering a protest because for someone of my Hamiltonian/National Greatness perspective, the two parties contesting this election are unusually pathetic. Their programs are unusually unimaginative. Their policies are unusually incommensurate to the problem at hand.

This election is about how to avert national decline. All other issues flow from that anxiety.

The election is happening during a downturn in the economic cycle, but the core issue is the accumulation of deeper structural problems that this recession has exposed — unsustainable levels of debt, an inability to generate middle-class incomes, a dysfunctional political system, the steady growth of special-interest sinecures and the gradual loss of national vitality.

Certainly many of these issues can be traced to the various causes of wage inequality, among them skill-bias technical change, and they aren't the government's "fault" in the way the massive deficits from the Bush Tax Cuts are the government's "fault." Moreover, life now is much better than it was a few decades ago in many ways - we have cell phones, open communication, and longer life expectancy. But we could do better - much better.

And that's why Brooks is right. Both Bush and Obama had opportunities to be transformative in '01 and '09, and both rejected those - Bush asked us to go shopping, and Obama failed to capture the national imagination as he struggled with the recession and passing a healthcare bill, in addition to a dismal record of whistleblowers and civil liberties. Obama got away with these things because he was shrewd enough to know that he wouldn't get burned for them - and he hasn't. Our government is more and more inaccessible to the people, even as data and information comes at us via a multitude of forms and ways - Twitter and Facebook among them.

The thing about living beyond our means is that its easy to say but EXTREMELY hard to stop, because voters stop caring about deficits the moment their social security check or medicare payment is at risk. We absolutely must do some belt tightening - I am no Keynesian, and stimulus on top of stimulus won't correct the underlying issues of gluttony that weaken us. But we must fix entitlements, the tax code, and the ridiculous idea that the US can or should hold up the world. Our desire to do everything is causing us to fail in our own self-investment, and those chickens will come home to roost in coming decades.

Building E-Files

As I prepare to move to Madison, I'm very aware that every pound I bring to the city will likely have to be carried out/up/around the city, and in the interest of limiting my amount of "stuff," I'm trying to put all of my business cards/contacts into one master file.

This is difficult. It turns out that there are a glut of secure services that help us to combine phone, facebook, e-mail, and skype contacts together (while letting you invite you don't have on Skype - apologies to the 150 people that just got little notes about that). But after combining them, one then has to decide how to organize them. Making things more complicated, many of my friends from Williams have different employers that they didn't list on Facebook, making it very difficult to keep track of people.

I keep telling myself that this is a better system than the stuffed-full notebook that lives in our famiy's kitchen drawer, but as the hours drag on, I'm less and less sure of that.

My new employer was recently featured in this article about the massive green energy projects that are being undertaken in Verona, WI.

"Epic is an economic engine that's a Wisconsin outlier: A booming business that's about as far from the state's manufacturing heritage as you can get.
The company is moving to wean itself off fossil fuels in a big way.
Already, most buildings on the sprawling campus are heated and cooled with a ground-source heat pump system, which means the campus needs no natural gas for heating and no electricity for cooling in the summer.
About 1,300 solar panels were erected in recent months on a latticelike structure above an employee parking lot."

As you can see from the graph on the right side, Epic is a very quickly growing company; my work will be to help pick up some of the sales and projects that Epic's immense success is securing. But just as importantly, the reasons for that growth are immediately observable: Epic is a fantastic company, with fantastic methods and values, which produces a valuable project that does good and makes money.


I'm so excited to be starting my work there in a few weeks, but in the meantime, I'll have to settle for more research, in addition to preparation for my new life. Anyone selling a car?

Back in Decatur, B.A. in Hand

1000 miles, one hotel, and 4 aunts and uncles later, I'm back in Decatur, in the same room where I laid on the floor for hours, Facebook chatting about Williams with my first Eph friend. She didn't follow the path we were expecting of her during those hot summer nights; I suppose I didn't either, though my WOOLF letter from August '07 was pretty close to home.

And now I become an adult, with my own income, car (once I buy it), and apartment/condo/house (once I find it). Life goes on, but I think I'm ready. I'm so fortunate, though, to have friends from all over the US, in addition to people I met internationally and those from my childhood. I'm thankful for the adults and peers who have shaped my life, directing me to places where I think I was helpful (the Gaudino Board, the Honor Committee, etc) and those who tested me. Ultimately, I am stronger for those experiences. And so now, life begins.

Hopefully, I'll keep this blog a little more regular. We'll see.

Well, I'm done with college

And will post many thoughts on that......what I can finally have time to write. But for now, from the road, all I can say is that I miss Williams something awful. It was a wonderful four years, and I was glad to have it.

Booker Speaks at Commencement '11

What a speech.

Carpe Diem

So goes my high school's motto, and I'd like to think that I have. From one reception to another reception to lunch w/ friend to Ivy Exercises to packing to Baccalauriate to party to bonfire to party to packing, it was a full day.

And in 10 hours, I will be a Williams Grad. Wow.

Four Years of Williams E-mails

10177 messages sorted into folders (for committees/clubs) + 18122 messages in my inbox = 28299 total e-mails in.  10902 messages in my sent mail = 10902 messages out

First messages were around July 13, 2007, 1418 days ago. So, on average, I:

Received 19.96 e-mails per day.
Sent 7.69 e-mails / day.

And when you consider that many of those days were weekends/summers/holidays.....wow.

Q_Q

News Desk: Cowboys and Pit Crews : The New Yorker

For one, you must acquire an ability to recognize when you’ve succeeded and when you’ve failed for patients. People in effective systems become interested in data. They put effort and resources into collecting them, refining them, understanding what they say about their performance.

Second, you must grow an ability to devise solutions for the system problems that data and experience uncover. When I was in medical school, for instance, one of the last ways I’d have imagined spending time in my future surgical career would have been working on things like checklists. Robots and surgical techniques, sure. Information technology, maybe. But checklists?

They turn out, however, to be among the basic tools of the quality and productivity revolution in aviation, engineering, construction—in virtually every field combining high risk and complexity. Checklists seem lowly and simplistic, but they help fill in for the gaps in our brains and between our brains. They emphasize group precision in execution. And making them in medicine has forced us to define our key aims for our patients and to say exactly what we will do to achieve them. Making teams successful is more difficult than we knew. Even the simplest checklist forces us to grapple with vulnerabilities like handoffs and checklist overload. But designed well, the results can be extraordinary, allowing us to nearly eliminate many hospital infections, to cut deaths in surgery by as much as half globally, and to slash costs, as well.

Which brings us to the third skill that you must have but haven’t been taught—the ability to implement at scale, the ability to get colleagues along the entire chain of care functioning like pit crews for patients. There is resistance, sometimes vehement resistance, to the efforts that make it possible. Partly, it is because the work is rooted in different values than the ones we’ve had. They include humility, an understanding that no matter who you are, how experienced or smart, you will fail. They include discipline, the belief that standardization, doing certain things the same way every time, can reduce your failures. And they include teamwork, the recognition that others can save you from failure, no matter who they are in the hierarchy.

This is Atul Gawande at Harvard Medical School's Commencement, talking about the work that I'll be trying to enable doctors to do, starting in five weeks!

If, If, If

I watched a bit of the Harvard Class Day events online a few days ago, streaming the speeches as I cleaned up my room and tried to figure out what to save and what to recycle. It's odd, in retrospect, to think about what could have happened if I had chosen to go to a big Ivy League school - my future would likely have been changed, and my networks would have been very different. Unlike so many of my friends here, I had no relationship to Williams, no knowledge of the Berkshires or even of the college's general location - when we first sketched out college locations for a road trip, we put Williams next to Boston.

And yet, I chose Williams, or rather, with its declarations of values, Williams chose me, and my life is changed.

Isn't that remarkable?

So many people in this world have so much of their futures written or swayed by the circumstances of their birth and the demographic trends of the countries they inherit. So many people will never travel across oceans, will never read such ancient works, will never have the chances that I have had and, to some extent, squandered. I know now, looking back, that I could have done much more at Williams - could have written the book I sketched out freshman year about the desires and beliefs of the "Obama Generation," could have spent an aggregated 20 hours more editing all of my essays (with a probable .1 GPA bump), could have, could have, could have.

But I'm happy with what I did here, and more importantly, with what I learned here. Williams taught me a huge number of incalculable things, many of which are hard to articulate, but I know that I'll be more effective and harder working at all of my future jobs because of it. I could have gone to another school, yes (assuming my admissions to Williams wasn't a lucky fluke), but I'm well-situated now to have the life that I want - to enjoy my work, to have enough income to live securely, and ultimately to become one of the many citizens that makes this country work.

Leaving my deck

Susie Hopkins House, my incredibly lucky residence, has two upstairs rooms that share access to a private deck (the rest of the house can go through a window as well). I'm feeling a lot of conflicting emotions today, as I begin to walk towards the end of my time at Williams in the form of one more final exam, but my deck is a constant; where the weather is great and the view of trees and grass wonderful (if atypical).

But, given the recent failed rapture, I do feel ironically left behind, in a sense. My deck is only wonderful when I share it with the people I love, whether in rocking under an umbrella while singing, holding each other in the rain, or having one of those long conversations that mark true and lasting friendships. I'm never going to pay so little for such a palatial living situation; I couldn't have asked for a better place to end my time at Williams than Susie Hopkins, alongside my wonderful housemates Chris, Asad, Ayyaz, Ville, Mike, Diego, Rosie, and Will.

But I do have to come inside from the deck, and I do have to get food and take this test. I do need to leave this campus, and take my place in the wider world, whatever that will be. People have told me recently that I'll be fine, or that they expect me to accomplish great things, but I know this: luck, as Randy Pausch said, is preparation times opportunity, and I may well be "unaccomplished" in my life. I might not hold the titles and the offices that others have jokingly and non-jokingly attached to me; all I hope is to have enough to live securely, and to hold the titles of husband and father. It may well happen that more opportunities present themselves, and I will take them, but I will not scheme or devise a master plan to lead to any outcome.

My plan, instead, is to do what feels right, and to make decisions day-to-day that I can live with for the rest of my life. If my time at Williams and before is any indication, that may well be enough, and I have to live with both that possibility and the chance that it won't come to any fruition. But as I ended my last record op-ed: I may never uphold my values perfectly, but there are angels in history and the present time to guide me on my way.