I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
No one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.
— Walt Whitman
For the second time in six months our house has been threatened by fire. That threat continues right now, and is so absorbing that I have no choice but to write about it. Or about a subject close enough to serve our purposes here.
Our house is in Santa Barbara, a town that exists by temporary exception to the viscissitudes of nature. Soil studies show that it has burned about about four times per century, going back to the Pleistocene. Earthquakes violent enough to level rock walls come about every seventy-five years. Tsunamis come about every five hundred. The last was in 1812, along with an Earthquake that leveled the city's famous mission, for the first of several times. All of which means that putting a city in this place is a bit like ants building a nest in a footpath.
Yet we do. Ambition and industry in the face of inevitable destruction is the job of life, which includes all the human conditions. So I'm not in full agreement with Whitman on that one. Nor do I agree with other assertions in that passage. But the one I chose for a title has always hit home for me. Because I believe in ownership. Not because I belong to the Austrian economic school or any of its descendants (though I am in sympathy with it in some ways), but because I believe possession is 9/10ths of the three-year old. And because we're all still toddlers in more ways than we'd like to admit.
We are grabby animals -- even more than pack rats and lower primates. We like to possess stuff. Where would a three-year old be without first person possessive pronoun? No response is more human than the one that says "Mine!" And yet, in spite of all their economic advantages, possessions are also burdens. I have a friend whose childhood home was burned twice by the same nutcase. He's one of the most sane people I know. Can't say that's why, but it makes a kind of sense to me.
It has always been interesting to me that open source is so often seen as an affort to ca
I have a rule: unless I can get all my data back through some sort of export or dump function in a non-obfuscated format, I won’t go there. I recommend this rule to others as well. - Eric S. Raymond
Source: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=932#more-932