Danu

On Monday September 29, 2008, the US Congress shocked everyone by voting down a $700billion rescue package for investment banks. I'm not going to get into the details of that, it is already being well covered by the zeitgeist. But it is clearly a historic moment, and I predict it will the one people look back on as the day when the debt-based financial system became terminally ill.

The financial system used throughout the Western world has been rotten from the day it was first introduced. In this system, money can only ever be created by making a debt. The more a society produces, the more debt it gets itself into. The US national debt today stands at $9,896,734,646,582, or $32,467 for each citizen of the United States. It grows at an estimated $2.42 billion every day. (Australia's national debt is currently $585 billion.) It doesn't take a genius to know that that money is never getting repayed. In fact, it's impossible. If you add up every single bit of money in the entire country right now, it will be less than the debt.

In a debt-based financial system, there is always more debt in existence than there is money to pay it. Consider any bank. If everyone goes to withdraw their money at the same time, there won't be enough. The bank has bigger debts to its customers than it can possibly afford to pay.

The current financial crisis has come about because banks have been lending money to people who can't pay it back. The debt to the bank becomes worthless and then the bank can't pay its own debts so it collapses, and all the money it owes people becomes worthless too. If employers can't get money from their bank to pay the money they owe their employees, the employees can't pay their debts. If people can't pay their debts to the landlord, the landlord can't pay the mortgage so the debt to the bank becomes worthless and around we go again. It's not a recession - it's a depression.

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My experience with most resumés is that they don't work very well. For the person writing their resumé it's hard to get across the depth and breadth of their life experience and character - most resumés read like a travel itinerary rather than, say, a eulogy. From an employer's perspective, resumés tell you very little - it really takes a face-to-face interview to learn about a candidate and assess their suitability for a position.

This strikes me as wasteful and misleading. For instance, I personally have plenty of desirable qualities and experience as a prospective employee, I'm pretty good at selling and not half bad at writing, yet whenever I try to write a resumé for myself using the usual structure I end up coming across as an unstable, indecisive serial underachiever. I certainly wouldn't give myself an interview. My experience as an employer in selecting people to interview and subsequently hire from their resumés seems to suggest I'm not the only one whose resumé isn't a true reflection of themselves.

So what to do? I propose a different kind of resumé, one that better reflects a person's full life experience and character rather than just a list of where they've been. After all, in a work environment that increasingly demands multiple skills and certain intangible qualities, an employer's focus is more likely to be on a candidate's accumulated wisdom and expertise than any individual achievement. My preferred resumé format would aim to map the candidate's life from three different viewpoints - discipline, timeline and personality.

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First of all, it needs to be made clear that it's difficult to understand the title of this post or the contents of it without first watching a video. This video had me in tears, the like of which I haven't cried in a long time. So here it is.

If you've watched the video, I have my own thoughts I'd like to add.

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It's interesting that chatter about the Iraq war has now made a paradigm shift. Most politicians and commentators (including Bill O'Reilly!) are willing to concede that the original invasion was a misguided strategic blunder, and are instead now focussing on the idea that the 'Surge' strategy worked and the US is 'winning' the war.

On the face of it, sure, the violence has decreased somewhat but that's about all you could call a success. The Iraqis are no closer to gaining control of their own country, the war costs the US 10 billion dollars a MONTH and the fact still remains that the fight in Iraq has nothing to do with what happened on September 11 except to poke the hornets nest even further.

Eventually history will show that the whole thing was total folly, but for now we're stuck with John McCain's version of events.

This week's quote is from none other than Sun Tzu's The Art of War and seems particularly relevant given all the talk we're hearing on the campaign trail at the moment.

"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win."
- Sun-Tzu

Yeah. What he said.

No-one likes to fail, but if failure is your only option, why fight it? Embrace the experience. Failure is a rare and valuable opportunity. Make the most of it.

I became officially bankrupt on February 4, 2008. How I got here, how it has affected me and how I have dealt with it is a story that is intensely personal, difficult to discuss and still unfolding. But it's a story that's worth telling.

Throughout this experience, like many others in my life, I wished there was someone I could talk to who really understood and could give me guidance and reassurance. By sharing my experience, I hope I can be that voice for others who find themselves in a similar situation.

What is bankruptcy?

Bankruptcy has three meanings:

1. Declared in law unable to pay outstanding debts
2. Impoverished or depleted
3. Completely lacking in a particular quality or value

It is the first definition that most people associate first with bankruptcy, but in my experience the first definition was the last stop on a long and difficult road. [click to continue...]

As promised, it's time for an update on how my foray into the realm of writing is going. At the end of July I talked about my experiences in blogging to date and set some new goals for the rest of 2008. To recap, those goals are:

1. Establish and maintain a clear focus and purpose
2. Build a loyal base of subscribers
3. Raise my profile and reputation

Let's look at my progress towards these goals.

Changes in blogging style

If you're a regular reader, you may have noticed my blogging style change significantly over the last month. My previous style was to post a couple of short posts most days, mostly about interesting things I'd found around the web with a bit of commentary thrown in. From feedback I received it seemed to be the commentary and insights that most readers were interested in. Since there were so many interesting things I wanted to share, I found I was simply posting things without much commentary because I didn't have time to gather my thoughts and express them properly.

To combat this, I've changed my blogging habits a bit. I now write longer and more thoughtful posts about a particular subject, but less often. I still want to share interesting things I've found, but instead of firing them all out individually, I pick around five of the best ones and publish them together with a little description of each under the banner of 'Things You Need To See'. I post these whenever I get enough top-class links together, which seems to be around once a week.

The result is the blog has become more measured and thoughtful, a digest of ideas rather than a stream of consciousness. I still enjoy the immediacy of sharing and thoughts and links on the spot, but I've found this is better suited to Twitter, which has become a sort of rapid-fire supplement to blogging for me.
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