Children are in a position of disadvantage, they are absolved of power. As a kid there aren't that many things in life you can really decide on, because your mandate keeps getting overruled by a higher office all the time. It would be nice to have some autonomy in this totalitarian regime, but in practice it takes a lot of negotiation and concessions. It's pretty fine diplomacy because of your great disadvantage, it's like Luxembourg negotiating with France. A kid would make a fine political adviser.

Of course, when you're a kid you deal with this everyday, all this is self evident. But people grow up and forget. When I was a kid, I vowed never to forget. Never to become one of those parents who don't understand kids and just pass arbitrary laws. Students are in this position too, they have no power. I always thought that if I ever became a teacher, I would remember what it was like to be a student.

Well, so far I haven't actually put those theories to the test, I'm neither a parent or a teacher. But sometimes I'm reminded of how my values have changed over the years. The other day I saw a couple of people standing in the street. One was holding a bike, the other was standing very close. Since they were far away and both wearing big coats, I couldn't make out what they were doing. "Is it a couple? Are they hugging?" The angle made it hard to see. "No, it's a father and a child sitting on the steering. But why are they just standing there? Oh of course, they're watching the crane!" There's some road work being done in my street these days, they've been digging and they even brought in a crane to help out.

It's hard to remember your values once they're no longer your values, you have to be reminded. One of my biggest moments in early life was operating a small digging machine in an amusement park. I have a picture of it, and it clearly shows how focused I was on what I was doing. When you see a kid, suddenly these things come back to you.

We've all seen loan sharks in movies, and they aren't very attractive characters. What they do is not unlike stock brokers. They first give you some money, but then they want it back on time, with interest. This one-to-one relationship makes the deal very transparent. The stock market is more complex, but it's essentially the same thing: the only way you can profit is from someone's loss.

Let's say you're a successful investor in the stock market. What does that actually mean? It means that someone created a company, worked hard to sustain it, then decided to go public with it to be able to expand it, and thus sold shares in the company. What you've done is bought those shares cheap and sold them to suckers at a much higher price. Thus you profit.

So you make money by investing money, but what does that actually mean? You haven't created anything, haven't created any wealth. Haven't performed any service. Haven't delivered a product of any kind. You've essentially done nothing. You solely profit at someone else's loss. So the stock market is like a lottery, only with good odds. Most lose, some win.

Of course, you could say that as long as people go into the market willingly, and abide by the rules of the game, it's fair that one person wins what another loses. Still, is the profit anything to be proud of?

Norway has a lot of income from selling oil and the government decided at some point that it would be wise to collect some of these profits to set aside for the future. It's called the Oil Fund. But they haven't sat on the money idly, they decided to invest it, mostly in bonds. Now, ironic as it is, considering Norway's reputation that it's the oil reserves that have made the country wealthy, the government now actually profits more from trading bonds than it does from oil mining. Here's a whole country whose welfare is based in part on trading bonds, buying cheap, selling expensive.

There's nothing very odd about this, it's the times we live in. But how could this possibly be moral? One government directly benefiting from the losses of others?

I recall "blogging" being born out of the first Content Management System (CMS) switched from being used to operate a whole website to being used by just one user. It may have come about in some other way, but that's not really important. What I'm driving at, though, is that in those days it was the most casual, uncommitted kind of writing/ranting, which noone took for anything else.

Of course there were people writing long before they started doing it with dynamic pages, just by composing static html and publishing it. But that's not blogging, blogging is closely tied to the idea that you have dynamic pages, which allow you to easily publish new content from anywhere, and allow you to receive comments. For anyone to create static html, there is a bit of a barrier to it, it almost seems like there should be a purpose to it. As such, html scribbling never was as widespread as blogging. Blogging made this so incredibly easy that people who had things to say, but never would even consider touching "the geeky stuff" were empowered. And it is so easy that you can effortlessly rant and rave without ever having to do any work to publish it or lay it out on a page. Consider that the way in how you use something impacts how (and for what) you use it. That's what blogging has changed.

But the status of the blogger has changed too, since then. Beyond the Atlantic, "the bloggers", as they are called by the media, have become a political entity with some influence. It's strange to hear about "the bloggers" in that context, because I'm "a blogger" too and I have nothing whatsoever to do with that. Blogs aren't about people's lives anymore, they are political influence, social commentary, artistic and commercial promotion, they are all kinds of things. Which is why you see stories like "Bloggers can make money, but most keep day jobs" and it looks out of context. Why wouldn't they? What is it that they do that is so valuable to society that it becomes their job? That's the thing, some people take blogging seriously. Which is something I've never done. :P

Does "blogging" actually mean something else now? Are bloggers actually writers with a lesser title? If you're a writer I can understand that it's your job.

Yes, this is one of those sweeping generalizations. Doesn't apply to everyone, of course, in fact the professionals don't fit into this profile, but it describes the casual practitioners (and the semi-serious ones) to fairly wide extent.

It's a Norwegian saying that "you're born with skis on your feet". This sounds silly, I have the feeling that skiing is losing ground and going from completely universal (as it was when I grew up) to more of a special interest discipline. Mind you, going that way, I'm not at all suggesting skiing isn't popular anymore.

Now football is the biggest sport, everyone's played at one point, most boys have played on a team as well. But when you see people play football, they approach it as an exercise, less so as a game where you play to win. I was out Saturday night on the astroturf by the Rosenborg stadium, great field, we've played there for years. With us, two young (~15-16) kids, looked maybe Turkish. Out in the rain and wind, playing for almost 2 hours, just like we've done all these years. Commendable, they have the drive for it no doubt, and judging by their skill they do this often.

So how did they play? You could see from far away that they play at a club, and they've had that Norwegian football influence shape their concept of the game. It's uncanny, Norwegians treat football as a stamina exercise. A way to get sweaty and feel good about yourself. No wonder they dress up for football just the way they do for cross country skiing, because what they're doing out there is very reminiscent of it.

The mindset has changed, it's more about ball skills now. You see little kids out there with waay more skills on the ball than my generation had. The pitches are better too now, we used to play on gravel. The Norwegian classic is the corner kick. If you see about 7-8 guys playing, with one guy taking a corner and the rest stacked in the box, waiting for the ball (and not really caring whether it comes to them or not), you can be sure they're Norwegians.

But in a sweet kind of irony, those kids with ball skills and decent general ability still play like it were cross country skiing. There's intensity to the game that comes from running and keeping up a pace, but there's no explosiveness, there's no sprints, no real athletic kind of desire to win. These kids that played on the other side of the field from us, what were they up to? They passed the ball to each other, ran around in small circles and took shots on goal. But not once did they accelerate at full pace, not once did they take a really strong shot, not once did they launch a forward pass way ahead for a real run. It was all so casual and shy, so Norwegian. It's almost as if there's more aggression in cross country than in football with these people.

It's like, if I run at full pace, then the guy marking me will too, because it's his responsibility (and Norwegians have a very strong sense of that) to not let me go past him. But he will *never* sprint on his own account, because it's just not in his blood.

Of course, when you play competitively for a club then you don't do this, when you run you actually run. But when it's casual and "just for fun", that real instinct never comes out, and that's something I've never been able to understand. If you never run at full pace in practice, how are you ever going to do it in a match? Are you saving yourself or something? If so, why? The whole point of playing is to do the best you can, that's when it's the most fun. So why hold back?

Location, location, location! Remember when that used to be important for business? Well, it's not important for e-business. Take GNi (mentioned in the last gentoo newsletter). Nowhere on the front page does it mention where their offices are. It doesn't say "we're a San Jose-based company ... ". How many clicks does it take you to find their location? I first went to "About Us", but that had no mention of it. Apparently, location is not relevant to a page about the company. Then I went to "Contact Us", which is usually a safe last resort. And sure enough, there it is. But GNi has a small website, on some company sites it takes me a bit of effort to even locate the "Contact Us" page, it's buried somewhere deep in the hierarchy, or the link is in 6pt font, so you're not meant to see it.

So I can only conclude from this that location doesn't matter. And in our globally interconnected world that may seem obvious. On the other hand, it may not. If you're looking for a web host, wouldn't you rather pick one in your timezone? So that when the server crashes, they have office hours at the same time as you? Or wouldn't you prefer a partner in your timezone for just about any kind of business? Or in fact in your vicinity, so that you don't have to fly to Cape Town for meetings?