Praxis

See juan@acm.org in left nav if new here. About 23 million developers, etwa 0.3% of 7.8 billion, but life long commitments are less common. About a working class lad ...

Why Purpose and Discipline Promote Psychological Well-Being

2019 -

The « domain » (領土) is a nexus of my work from this time with —

1. domain driven design of my apps and bespoke others,
2. generic domain KE support,
3. a system for unified operation of i, ii, and
4. an autonomous DNS (域名) peering scheme.

---

2020-02-29 02:00 UTC Jaime Carbonell's CV just came to my attention from his wiki obit and web site. He was 5 mo. older and his CV shows a career as an academic very different from the ragtag one I had in industry. His says he started research in AI in '71, 3 years before I did my first programming at one of the trade schools CDC ran. His simple 2 page CV contrasts starkly with my 10 pager and the busy "CV space", However going forward, I will let the working things I built myself serve as the post 2018 CV.

Fixed Cost General Contracting

Mostly worked remote since late '90s. May do a job at no charge which is an application of my stuff, otherwise can net 30 bill 90% of any job upon completion with 10% at or soon after start. The doorbell links to facilities for desktop sharing and video conferencing to support same. No charge for from the hip estimates in man days at the current concierge devops rate. No hoops please, avoiding the bad feels is priceless, for everything else, there's Mastercard!!

1974 - 2018

CV space Tour.
The wage labour moeity of my work life, given fine detail with the responsive bootstrap tour, a summary cover page, and a 10 page resume, the latter two linked at its top.

1974 is the actual start because that's when I took training at the schools Control Data was running and actually did first programming, but I went back for a 4 year degree majoring in Math and CS and only had operator jobs until 1980. I did have a DP course at a community college before CDC in '73 which pushes it back to my teens. The Control Data Institute I went to btw, was in the building shown on the Bob Newhart Show at that time on Michigan Avenue as being where he had his office.

From the late nineties I mostly worked remote, but did work on-site in Buffalo in '14, and from the late 80s 60% or so of my work was on a contractor basis, by the turn of the century independent of job shop parasites. From late '18, for the reason explained in the prior §, I consider this phase of working life ended, the last actual gig was spring '18. The character also discussed in theat §, together with a less than propitious childhood, lead to a less than stellar success in my first working life, as far as success is measured in money and the like. However I think it was a tremendous success in delivering me more or less whole, as a life long learner with a high IQ, and considerable depth of experience as an IT worker, to this point where I can work for myself, society at large, and free, open source production.

The "CV Space" content is preserved as a record of my wage labor worklife, and as a testament to contracted workers and customers. Some content, e.g. the responsive CV space Tour, things related to the long tail technical debt mentioned in the README (juan@acm.org), may be maintained. Other, especially older stuff such as Shockwave Flash (like the Old Web Portfolio), works if you have the client support for it and some older content broken by TLS (https), modern browser constraints, etc., will remain broken.This page replaced the linkage in the left nav to the following content:

Agile Praxis		Jobs FAQ
	WAGELABOR.TCB
Ft Concept		UI/UX Artistry

Rest of this § a digression on political economy in this period.

I am very far from thinking that the acquisitive instinct is fundamentally wrong or that altruism is necessarily right. I definitely believe that selfishness which does not harm others can be a virtue, it's just that so far, a social form that makes it so has not been achieved and indeed the apparent trend is away from a high point in the last century, not as was thought then as a result of totalitarian socialism but rather ironically as a result of the global dominance of doctrinal capital with its supposed philosophical base in individualism.

Defined as a basing of society solely on the principle of accumulation, Capitalism will ultimately be unsustainable because of the unappreciated aspect of mortmain. Every social order puts someone, a class, in charge. Globlaized Capitalism is unique in that it just puts a class in charge and an abstract one at that. It's just false that that class operates in the way former orders did to control and order society actively, indeed they are incapable of doing so since the globalized class is inhibited by a number of practical reasons from being the same kind of conscious actor that a national bourgeoisie can be and most simply pursue their own interests and genuinely don't desire power aside from that which accumulation confers. It is this rudderlessness which ultimately will cause a return to Capitalism just being an economic regime within society organized on some other principle(s) as was the case in its progressive period, and is the case, e.g. in Communist countries where a strong party controls it.

To paraphrase 邓小平, it is indeed glorious to become rich, but not by expropriation and not at the expense of the best possible development of society at large.¹

---

¹

From the earliest age, I have been resistant to authority, which for the most part, given the state of human societies through to the present, is generally illegitimate. Why? Because essentially every society up to this time is organized on the principle of domination of others in order to extract the value of their living labor, make individuals conform to local belief systems, etc. Progress is ever countering this over the long march of history because it is inimical to human nature but paradoxically, in this time, 資本主義, the doctrine of the extraction of value from labor, is also the one that makes it possible for individuals to be free of domination, if they can work for themselves. To the extent that it is organized for the well being of all the members, like a healthy body in relation to its cells, the authority of society is legitimate, and because this is the reason for society to exist at all, over time the progressive outcome becomes more certain and manifest.