Cooperation and Competition

Competition now occurs mainly between groups, mainly between the rich and the poor. The individual is no longer important. 

The rich have tremendous advantages, and they are determined to use them. The rich being represented by the Republicans in the US.

In the US, I am amazed to also see competition between the generations, with the younger generation claiming priority over the older one. And they are getting away with this! 

Ticos and Trash

I bought a Mr. Coffee machine but could not get it to work. So I put it in a large bag and put it in the trash. A short time later, I noticed the bag was gone! 

Someone had taken it, and this had reminded me, once again. of the difference between the North American and the Latino attitude towards trash. 

We have grown up rich, and they have grown up poor. They carefully sort through the trash, hoping to find something useful. We don't bother with anything so trivial. 

Slums in the US

Every large city has its slums, and cities in the Rust Belt also. Usually, they are Black, but there are Hispanic slums also. 

I was born in an Industrial town, Ft. Madison, Iowa, that is now part of the Rust Belt, where many of the houses, including the one we used to live in, are boarded up. 

When I worked in downtown San Jose, California in the Nineties, I was treated to the sight of drug arrests during my lunch break. The contrasts between the Rich and the Poor - and between the Technical and the Nontechnical was amazing. 

This was during the dotcom boom, followed by a bust - that reduced hundreds of Computer companies to five: Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. 

Our Software Smarts has gone up tremendously, while our Social Smarts has declined drastically. 

Why a Third of Latinos Still Plan to Vote for Trump

 GEN

Latinos are part of the cultural mix typical of Silicon Valley and Los Angeles. A mix that does not include smart thinking. 

Why do I lump these two areas together? This is hard to explain, but easy to feel once you have lived in both areas. 

Los Angeles is the city every other large city in the world is trying to emulate. Its key feature is fast growth, at the expense of everything else. 

Silicon Valley is the same, with the addition of the Computer, which introduces a number of subcategories of its own. 

When I lived in the Valley (in the town of Milpitas) I was next to Alum Rock, a Latino community, where I got to experience its advantages and disadvantages. The young in this area were typical of those in any slum: dangerous people you do not want to be around. 

We don't know What we Are

When I wrote that title, I did not say "Who we are." I said, "What we are." Because we have become objects. 

Object-Oriented Programming does not only apply to Computers, but it also applies to us. And that is a profound change. 

I might as well get personal here, I graduated from the U of Illinois as an Electronics Engineer. This was a smart choice, and I made lots of money during the Cold War, which ended in 1990 when the Computer took over. 

The Computer changed who we were, but we did not realize this. We knew something had changed, but didn't know what. Not too smart! 

Now, dear reader, I will try to explain what an object is. And I can explain that easiest by explaining what it is not. It is not alive. 

We are alive, in fact, we are animals with large brains that often do not work too well. 

And we are doing our best to be objects - something we can never be.

My brother Steve asked me to say more about how we objectify ourselves, and I am happy to do this.  

The Radical Plan to Save the Fastest Sinking City in the World

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I have been to Indonesia and this typical of the thinking there - if you could call it thinking. 

They are likable people, but there are too many of them.

My Chromebook is Working Again

What was wrong with it? I do not know. 

I only know it is working again, with Grammarly, like nothing was ever wrong with it.