ideometric

I dunno why, but this is the kind of music I like to listen to on a sunny afternoon.

A couple months ago I lent $25 to a woman in Peru who wanted to buy more beans to sell at her local farmers’ market.

It’s not charity; she bought the beans for her business and has been slowly paying me back from the profit she makes on that investment – I’ve gotten $12.50 back so far. Lenders like me make no profit, but the organizations managing the loans charge interest to cover operating costs.

Kiva is the microlending site that makes this possible. Microlending is when you make small loans to people, often in developing countries where small amounts go a long way towards providing opportunities to escape poverty. These people are generally trying to start, maintain, or expand a business but lack the funds or availability of credit.

Kiva connects you to in-country organizations that screen applicants and disburse the money. This is different from charity because it provides the means to self-sufficiency and development. I think it also respects the dignity of people that are trying to make it in adverse conditions.

I think Kiva is still relatively young, but this kind of grass-roots, networked style of economic development has a lot of promise. It’s the sort of thing that Obama’s team picked up on with their fundraising tactics, drawing in millions of small donors to raise more than any previous campaign.

Facebook’s “25 Things About Me” meme seems harmless enough; people write 25 facts about themselves and post them on their Facebook pages, just as they do with videos, status updates and photos of last weekend’s party. An estimated 5 million of these notes — that’s 125 million facts — have appeared on the website within the past week. Assuming it takes someone 10 minutes to come up with their list, this recent bout of viral narcissism has sent roughly 800,000 hours of worktime productivity down the drain.

That’s a lot of sharing.

Source: Time

An interesting little article in NYT about the experience of Indian Americans turning back to India for work.

I found this idea intriguing.

If there is a creative class, in Richard Florida’s phrase, there is also emerging what might be called a fusion class: people positioned to mediate among the multiple societies that claim them.

Cultural education is key in a globalized world. Learning how to negotiate cultures – a skill children of immigrants build by tough necessity – is a definitely a competitive advantage in the global marketplace. However, I think its value outside the market is ultimately much greater. The culture wars, ethnic conflicts, tensions caused by immigration, conflicting religious beliefs, etc. all require us to find a way to relate to each other civilly (lest the clash of civilizations thesis prove accurate), which I think means learning how to replicate the kind of “in-betweenness” that immigrants and especially children of immigrants are forced to negotiate.

Saw this on Youtube a couple years ago, then it disappeared, but it’s back again.

Han River Angels, old school Korean band that did covers in the 60s.

Photo: Taking a break from reading @ Yri Cafe in Hongdae

Started reading Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks. It’s pretty comprehensive making the case for the importance of policy change and institutional shift in favor of openness and freedom for information technologies (away from incumbent industries’ and government support for proprietary models that stress ownership and access control). His key argument is that there is potential in the network communications paradigm for advancing justice, democracy, and freedom. How much of this potential will be realized depends on key decisions made now – regarding network neutrality, copyright and patent policy, the DMCA, DRM, etc. etc.

It’s dense though, I’ll write more when I have time to digest it. But so far so good – it makes a lot of points that I was trying to get at in my thesis, but only marginally succeeded in supporting.

Here’s a talk given by the author @ MIT It’s really fast paced but worth a listen.