[LAU] OT: talent and craftsmanship [was: Re: OT: Dub Fx]

[Ken Restivo]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 09:49:11PM -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 9:21 PM, Charles Henry <czhenry at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Aren't we all talented craftspeople and artists in some way? ?Does it
> > vary by culture? ?Or more by personal circumstance? ?Or the times in
> > which we live?
> 
> as i noted, i think its quite difficult for most people to *discover*
> where their talents lie. in the industrialized nations, have a society
> worldwide that puts enormous value on certain types of skills, and
> makes it much harder to persevere at something that falls outside of
> this judgement.

This is an excellent point.

What the fiat, debt-based monetary system "values" is very different from things that most healthy humans and healthy social systems "value". The monetary sense of the word "value" is thus divorced from the philosophical, personal, and moral sense of "value", in a way that makes modern industrialized society, for want of a better word, psychotic. 

To help fix this, I have been working with a group creating alternative currencies-- basically, "open source money"-- where the currency itself values  whatever the community of its users value. This is similar in many regards to the FOSS movements, and what we're doing is not only based on the technology that came from the work of Richard M. Stallman, but also based on some of his philosophical and tactical approaches.

The group, by the way, is here: http://sfbace.org, and the code for our website is here: http://github.com/bace/oscurrency ; it's forked from a group in Austin Texas that originally wrote it.

If you like hacking Ruby-on-Rails or CSS/XHTML/JS and want to help, let me know off-list, and I'll send  you the link to the development site and the bugtracker. Most of the active tickets that we need done are UI enhancements and GUI stuff. I am doing the best I can with that, but I'm a command-line guy, so I'm kind of out of my element.

> 
> as was noted by someone else in the thread, i think its possible that
> a lot of "talent" involves just the right level of self-criticism. i
> am not aware of many things that i am not very good at, mostly because
> i had the talent/curse of observing quite early on that i just didn't
> think i would ever be good at certain things (e.g. playing tabla) and
> just dropped them. its quite easy to construct a personal history of
> immense success if you are good at rapidly navigating away from things
> that you don't have much (obvious) chance of excelling in.