Consider the Flea

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that as threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea--and put him at the head of the procession.

-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"

Priorities

"If there's something you can imagine that's even worse than wasting your life, if there's something you want that's more important than thirty [years], or if there are scarier things than a life of inconvenience, then you may have cause to attempt the impossible."

-Eliezer Yudkowsky

Success

A kinder, gentler philosophy of success - video from TED

The economics of suicide

The economics of suicide:

"after people attempt suicide and fail, their incomes increase by an average of 20.6 percent compared to peers who seriously contemplate suicide but never make an attempt. ...Once you attempt suicide you suddenly have access to lots of resources—medical care, psychiatric attention, familial love and concern—that were previously expensive or unavailable. ...psychological and familial resources become 'cheaper' after a suicide attempt: It is difficult to find free medical care when you are sad, but once you try to kill yourself, it's forced on you."

Hubs

Buffalo is a rust belt city. Long ago it was a hub of industry, near the Erie Canal, on the St. Lawrence Seaway and a major rail stop directly between Chicago and New York City. Buffalo hosted factories and grain elevators.

When Manufacturing left America, it left Buffalo.

Today Silicon valley is the business mecca of America, possibly of the world. There is no particular geography that lends itself to high tech business, but when one company after another starts up in an area, it becomes the easiest place to hire skilled workers, and the easiest place to find work if you have the right skills. With both employees and potential corporate partners flocking to northern California, it becomes difficult to justify starting a company anywhere else.

Any city would be challenged to turn itself into the next Silicon Valley. For Buffalo, a city challenged just to survive, it may seem impossible.

Despite this, there are advantages that our city could leverage to get a leg up in the climb out of obscurity. We have ready access to cheap hydroelectric power and we are already a world leader in the field of bioinformatics.

We still lack a diverse community of high tech workers. This is what Buffalo Hackerspaces can help remedy.

A Hackerspace is a combination of a community workshop and a social/educational venue. It allows people to pursue technical hobbies that they wouldn't have the resources to do otherwise. It gives people a place to share knowledge, collaborate on projects, and use expensive tools and equipment they would not otherwise have access to.

Besides the obvious benefit of potential advances and businesses growing directly out of the work done at the hackerspace, this is a very visible form of hi-tech community. Workers deciding where to relocate will see a place they can go to meet people with similar interests. Employers will see evidence of a pool of highly skilled workers. Recruiters will have another needed talking point for Buffalo.

This process has positive feedback. The more business is in a city, the more reasons other businesses and workers have to come here.

(friday...) Video: Charter cities

This Ted talk by Paul Romer on Charter cities is amazing. He talks about how to get damaging rules revised.

"We can't just tear down, We've got to find ways to build up as well."

Youth-led media

Youth-led media - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Youth-Led media is any effort created, planned, implemented, and reflected upon by young people in the form of media, including websites, newspapers, television shows and publications."

I occurs to me that by far the leading form of youth led media is online, but that it probably isn't normally recognized as youth-led media, even by the youth leading it.