Monkey See, Monkey Do

i’m amazed that the legal age for marriage in india is 21 for men and 18 for women. that’s such a contrast to this story of a 14 year old girl there who had been married for two years suing for divorce from her 17 year old husband.

today’s supreme court decision about peer to peer networks and copyright liability isn’t as favorable to those of us in technology development as we were hoping. if you’d like to use a peer to peer network to get a copy of the supreme court decision, visit boing boing.

what i worry more about though, is the use of these kinds of decisions to further cripple the many tools i use every day: like email, blogging, and news services. it’s possible that peer to peer would have over time become another one of those legitimate tools i would use. if digital content must be protected from theft *in general* at the expense of improvement in efficiency and ease we gain from technology, then we’re needlessly holding ourselves back and crippling not only our tools but the potential gains for society. it’s time to seriously rethink our copyright laws. they were designed for a pre-digital age.

i’m preparing a donation of things for good will, and wanted to estimate the value of all these random items from my garage for tax purposes. froogle to the rescue. in a fraction of a second i can determine the ‘new’ value of a wide variety of things, and estimate the used value based on that. ebay has a completed auctions search so for collectibles or very odd items i can also search there.

yesterday we completed our taming the mind class with an all day meditation. amy and melinda and i co-taught this overview of the hinayana path. i was quite nervous at the first of five weekend nights; this was my first formal teaching experience with a buddhist curriculum. but i settled in and loved it. it helped that the class was well attended, students expressed their appreciation, and i really enjoyed reviewing all of the material again.

this just left me crying

i don’t know much about scientology honestly, but found myself reading a few papers about it published by outsiders recently. i’m generally interested in parallels between contemplative systems. scientology appears to me to be primarily a form of regressive therapy designed to clear emotional blockages. it includes meditative practices, electronic devices to help detect emotional blockages, and introspection. reliving past memories in contemplation to “clear” them is the primary initial practice.

what i was most surprised to learn though was that they have a monastic tradition, called the sea org, who forms the core of the organization. sea org members also wear navy styled military uniforms. i guess this is similar to the salvation army, various military forms in freemasonry, and even the dorje kasung in my own buddhist tradition.

i should, in full disclosure, point anyone interested in scientology to some of their most secret documents released through federal court proceedings. including this one where hubbard claims to be the very lucifer described in revelations. he seems to have been influenced by numerous views including freud, the vedas, buddhism, and more modern philosophy though later in life disavowing any lineage.

a followup to my earlier post, poor blogger zach has not yet been heard from since he was sent to a heterosexuality indoctrination camp called “love in action”. because of the outpouring of support and publicity about this, primarily through blogs, the state of tennessee is now investigating the camp for allegations of child abuse.

ironically, the camp held a press conference recently asking for “open mindedness and tolerance” for their beliefs.

since helping to restart a meditation center in silicon valley last year, i’ve had a hard time wrapping my head around the finances of it all. in some sense it’s easy, we have membership based funding and some classes have fees that cover cost. certain programs are even marginally profitable. regular expenses are primarily paid for by membership dues, with some subsidy by those profitable programs. i estimated the number of members that we could support in different rental properties to build a financial model based on cost per square foot of space.

things are going well, in just under a year we now have more than 20 dues paying members and we’re operating a class every other month aside from regular sitting. currently dues are covering 75% of our recurring expenses, and we have cash reserves that will keep us going until we grow to a self sufficient rate. that greatly exceeds my expectations.

but even though that was relatively simple, the underlying assumptions about the model are weird. how do we trade off program fees and membership dues? what kind of discounts do you offer to members? in a for profit business, it’s relatively easy to measure and maximize your business, but without profit or growth as a metric, how do you manage the “business”?

this article by clara miller was really enlightening, both by presenting distinctions that articulate these questions so well, as well as providing a more general overview of non-profits than i have ever considered. she offers suggestions for how to improve things, i’m still mulling them over. but just reading this article has me thinking about financial planning for our meditation center in a new way.

i am a statistic. you can be one too. the results i found really interesting. after you complete the survey you can review them. for example, bloggers surveyed were blogging or reading blogs on average about an hour each day. they also survey what topics people are blogging about and other methods of communication. can’t wait to see the final results and some correlations.

the latest attempt at a flag burning constitutional amendment is to me just an attempt to codify how citizens of the US collectively should feel about and how we should represent our sense of ‘nation’ and identity. the pledge of allegiance is similar. they represent a separation from the rest of the world, and a specific identity in that separation.

the thing is, globalization is doing more to erode the sense of boundary, the sense of separateness in identity, than any internal protests using the flag. perhaps this holding up the flag is a reaction to the eroding of national identity and separateness that is happening beyond everyone’s control.

in another 100 years, will there be an america the way we know it now? of course not, because the world is getting smaller and smaller. global warming, economic policies, and terrorism all demonstrate that we’re more deeply interconnected with each other as the years pass. but why is eroding our national identity a bad thing? i, for one, welcome a more global way of viewing things and a more inclusive form of governing. even though that means i personally may be poorer and with less privilege. but that’s just how it has to go. the more nationalistic americans become, the less in touch with reality america is. the more out of touch, the more the whole world suffers.