In a recent BYU/Magazine (Summer 2009) there is a thought-provoking article titled: “Why Giving Matters”. The author — Arthur C. Brooks, a non-Mormon — makes the case that it is financially rewarding to give in a charitable way. While I found reading the article to be rewarding, I’m not confortable with its tenor or basic conclusions.
I’ve always been impressed with real-time monitoring and control technologies and their ability to improve conditions on the earth. But I had never fully thought through where these technologies might be headed long-term. One possibility is: they are paving the way for sophistricated forms of geoengineering. The whole idea of geoengineering is starting to get buzz in the popular press.
I just gave my employer 40 hours (5 working days) that I can never get back. My sentence: Manditory supervisory training. The upside: It gave me a lot of time to contemplate my “philosophy” of management . . . and occasionally discuss it with the class.
On June 12, represenatives from several NGOs and I arrived in Kampala, Uganda. Our plane trip took way too long: 4 separate flights that covered 4 continents and took 48 nearly-sleepless hours. Our Africa hotel was overbooked, so a friend and I had to stay in a nearby hotel. We were staying in old Kampala, a working-class portion of the city. That night after visiting an Internet cafe, I started to walk alone back to my hotel room over a route I wasn’t familiar with. I wandered slightly of course and fell into a deep stone-and-mortar-lined ditch. I cut my head and lost consciousness. There was urban runoff flowing down the open sewer. The rest of the story I have pieced together from witnesses I could find.