Priority will be getting a 'better handle' on crime, Rix says

"If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. But if you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody else."
 
Bruce Constantineau
Vancouver Sun

Friday, June 20, 2008

The Vancouver Board of Trade's new chairman says Vancouver businesses have to become more philanthropic and he'll push that concept aggressively over the next year.

"You can count on that," Donald Rix, 77, said in an interview Thursday after he became board chairman at the organization's 121st annual meeting.

The chairman of LifeLabs Diagnostics Inc. and Cantest Ltd., who's also a well-known philanthropist, told the meeting a recent U.S. survey found just 39 per cent of business leaders believe corporate citizenship is part of their business planning.

"To be successful over the long term, companies have to be involved and invested in their community," Rix told the meeting at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver. "Not just chequebook involvement, but personal involvement.

"If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. But if you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody else."

A work in progress - Stephen


An Hour or So With a Mexican Scribe
From The Washington Post

Is this the way ahead?

Seemingly backwards?

The wonderful Schumacher used the phrase 'intermediate technology' to refine the distinction between tools which put the power into the producers of the tools and home made tools which perhaps don't offer the mechanical advantage necessary.

In the villages of old, imagined societies, not everyone did everything. You had a fletcher - putting the flights on arrows, a blacksmith - shoeing horses, a baker - baking the bread.

A local person was skilled and revered for their skill. That skill was passed down through families. It grew upon a natural aptitude as well as something in the blood.

So no one failed. The large boned blacksmith wasn't forced to use his large fingers to be clumsy with delicate feathers.

In today's societies we are somehow made addicted to self-sufficiency.

I recall an incident about 20 years ago when the sister of a friend of mine wanted her bicycle serviced and asked me to do this for her. I remember being very angry at her refusal to learn from me how to do it herself. I had become obsessed with the self-reliant, we must all do everything approach and this incident exposed my unease with it.

So the story of Mexican scribes using electric typewriters to compose bills, love letters or contracts seems refreshing.

In westernized Vancouver, obsessed with formal learning, of course this would combat the idea of an educated population.As Daniel Quinn points out in 'My Ishmael' and Ivan Illich says everywhere, a child knows everything they need by about 12 years old. The last six years just turn them into insatiable consumers. Consumers of goods and of 'training'.

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So the poor people who did not write would be sent to school in shame and pity.

Equality would be cited; you have to be equal Equally dependant on capitalist baubles and trinkets.

The electric typewriter scribes would be sent for 'upgrading', in shame and pity, to become obsessed with computers and be current or modern and keeping up with the times.

But why should everyone be able, read lonely and independent, enough to know how to do everything that the educational and capitalist society wants?

Could it be that capitalism needs everyone to do everything to sell more of everything?

The photographer used to be called in to take photographs, now everyone has to have a digital camera.

So instead of one camera per say 1000 people there are 500.

A true graphic designer or illustrator used to be a talented person who had a gift.

Now everyone with a computer and a silly amonut of money to buy Photoshop thinks they are talented instead of just tooled.

Every house in a street has its own lawnmower, electric drill and other assorted owned tools used so infrequently that sharing could reduce dependency by perhaps 100 to 1/

So the illiterate would swap their illiteracy for dependence on typewriter and computers.

The social interaction with the scribes would be gone.

The scribes would have no work.

But everyone would have imbibed the expectation to purchase expected tools and be so called self-sufficient.

Progress.
 

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