Time on Time

This interesting little expose on paradigm shifting from Time Mag (in conjunction with CNN) http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1884779_1884782_1884758,00.html was send over by loyal reader ej. Some really good stuff in the article from which I have cut a few of my favorite parts. The cube shot above is: RCVman studio 5, My friend who reminds me of the cost of petrol, my coffee mug from the 50th PI Seattle Sports Star of the Year banquet in 1985, and a still from Fridays shoot of Wildflower. You can figure out what they collectively mean after reading the article. So long PI, it was fun.

All the while, we blissfully ignored a little concept economists like to call human capital. The cognition you've got up there in your head — your education and training — it's worth something. We can extract value not just from our homes and our portfolios but from ourselves as well. The mechanism for extracting that value? A job. "The income you earn from working is like the stream of interest income you might get from owning a bond," says Johns Hopkins University economist Christopher Carroll. "Think of it as a dividend on your human wealth."

The construction of the interstate highway system, which Congress authorized in 1956, was one of the great can-do enterprises of the post-World War II era, the largest public-works project in history. But now the interstates look like a vast monument to the law of unintended consequences. They turned out to be the great enabler of America's car culture and the fossil-fuel consumption that goes with it. And by making it possible to live far from where you work, they were the key element in the phenomenon of suburban sprawl.

Notions of age-appropriate behavior will soon be relegated as firmly to the past as dentures and black-and-white television. "The important thing is not how many years have passed since you were born," says Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, "but where you are in your life, how you think about yourself and what you are able and willing to do." If that doesn't sound like a manifesto for revolution, it's only because amortality has already revolutionized our attitudes toward age.

Now that major banks in the U.S. are getting by on a government bailout, the idea of creating yet another repository to safeguard your most valuable assets might seem downright ludicrous. And even irresponsible. But that's exactly what some federal officials are hoping to do.

Once the economy rebounds, the survival store will be a relic, right? But hold on. We've lost too much wealth to return to the old days. Even if the economy roars back, could we really be dumb enough to revert to our old habits of conspicuous consumption? From here on out, the market for sensibility will be stable. Survival will always be in season.

Below the megacorporate level, start-ups like the website Good Guide are sifting through rivers of data for ordinary consumers, providing easy-to-understand ratings you can use to instantly gauge the full environmental and health impact of that T shirt. Even better, they'll get the information to you when you need it: Good Guide has an iPhone app that can deliver verdicts on tens of thousands of products. Good Guide and services like it "let us align our dollars with our values easily," says Goleman.