Praxis

See juan@acm.org in left nav if new here. About 23 million developers, etwa 0.3% of the planet, but life long commitments are rare. 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 on his web site. He was my age and his CV shows a career as an academic very different from the ragtag one I've had in industry. He started research in AI at 17, 3 years before I did my first programming at one of the trade schools CDC ran. Nonetheless I wouldn't trade my current state wrt to doing in that field with his, even if he weren't dead. His simple 2 page CV contrasts starkly with my 10 pager and the busy web content of a "CV space", however going forward, I have a chance to have no need for a CV, with working systems that provide a living and speak for themselves.

1974 - 2018

This was the wage labour moeity of my work life, which is given fine detail starting with Praxis Tour which has a responsive bootstrap tour, c. 2015 with drupal sites for desktop and mobile devices, a cover page and 10 page resume, etc..

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.

Jobbing

Cover 1 page and full 10 page resume downloads at top of Tour link.

This content is preserved from the transition to job creator, as a record of my wage labor worklife, for prospective coworkers and clients/customers/consumers. Some content, e.g. the responsive CV space Tour, things related to the long tail technical debt mentioned in the README (juan@acm.org), are 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

Pretty picky these days about jobs. Avoiding the bad feels is priceless. For everything else, there's Mastercard !! I only work for and as American Kybernetik

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.