A couple of observations on Obama's speech:

• Hooray for broadband in the boondocks! :D (No, really - he mentioned it.  Load the page, hit CTRL-F, type "broadband" in the search field - you'll see it.)  
• Mike Rowe is hopefully delighted. :) 

I'm pretty excited.  This is still a new feeling for me - actually being excited about things that politicians say.  I'm generally not into government spending, but we do have infrastructure needs, and there's the whole need for alternative energy sources.  I'm pretty OK with this blood infusion, we just need to make sure that the wounds in the economy get closed as well.  The gov can help with that at a regulatory level (and they should!), but there's also work to be done at an individual level. 

If we were to distill the economic crisis down to its essence, I think we'd find greed sitting at the bottom of the pot.  Financiers created financial vehicles that no one seems to understand in order to wring more profit out of the system.  Banks made higher interest loans to subprime borrowers, thus generating more profit on higher risk.  (and then of course they required mortgage insurance to cover it) People borrowed way more money than they were prepared to repay, I guess thinking that it was "magic" that they were suddenly able to afford houses and stuff.  Our economy became an unsubstainable system, and it unsurprisingly crashed. 

Well, that's way more preaching than I intended to do today.  :P I just wanted to get that recorded for my own reference years later.  I also need to mention that I have a bunch of foolishly acquired debt myself.  I gotta work on kicking the credit addiction. 

So, without further ado, here's the link to the article -
NPR.com: Obama's Remarks on Stimulating the US Economy

I'm reading In Praise of Slow, the cover of which drives me absolutely batshit insane.  Well, OK, not really, but I do really cringe every time I look at the clashing orange and pink lettering. Argh!

Anyway, in the introduction, Honore points out that people did manage to get by for quite some time without  time.  Well, without a way to segment time into hours, minutes, etc.  Some times were always pretty obvious, like sunrise and noon.  However, in the absence of watches, people did stuff whenever it needed doing, or whenever they felt like it.  That sounds so refreshing.  Especially now that time is even more arbitrary ... the extension of daylight saving time for another month, for example. 

While I was in Texas last week, I actually enjoyed CDT.  It's an hour behind EDT, and its alignment with the sun just seemed more natural somehow.  *shrug* 

So far Honore has made two points about time that have really rung my bell:

• Not everyone thinks time is linear like we do in the West.  Westerners think that time is rushing constantly forward to what, Armageddon?  Not all Westerners believe in Armageddon, bless their little heathen hearts, but I think it's fair to say that a majority of Westerners do think that time marches on in one direction until the end of it all.  Whatever that may be like.
• Westerners weren't quite so wound up about time until they tied the idea of money to it.  People used to be paid for objects/services delivered, not for doing something for x amount of time.  Once money and time itself were bound together, managers started trying to squeeze every bit of money out of every second. 

I'm looking forward to Winter Break so that I can just ignore time.  Hide all the clocks.  Hide the status bar on all my computers so that they won't break the spell.  I don't think a weekend will work ... I need a longer span of time so that I can let myself sync up with the sun however feels right.  

Meanwhile, why in the hell isn't it time to go home yet?!? :P ;)