la Renfe a RAC1

ens acaba d’arribar aquest arxiu d’MP3, i mentre l’escoltàvem bocabadats començava el debat sobre si es tractava d’una broma o no. una ràpida cerca ens ha tret de dubtes: es tracta d’una broma del “Versió RAC1″… ja abans s’apuntava que podia tractar-se d’una broma: “RENFE no permetria que un treballador seu digués això” // rèplica: “tampoc l’exèrcit hagués permés al General Mena dir el que va dir” // contrarèplica: “tocado y hundido”

en qualsevol cas, el que haguem dubtat sobre si era realitat o ficció dóna algunes pistes del nivell d’estrés amb què es viu el tema per aquestes contrades.

sean ansiosos. sean descabellados.

arrel d’una petita i interessant entrevista a en David per part d’El Morrocotudo, he anat a parar al blog d’en Carlos Verdugo, una de les ments al darrera del diari ciutadà, si ho he entés correctament. sense desmerèixer la resta d’entrades, m’ha cridat l’atenció el discurs d’en Steve Jobs a la ceremònia de graduació de la Universitat de Stanford del 2005. aquí va la transcripció, en anglès, per facilitar-ne la lectura a una altra ansiosaydescabelladacriatura a què aquest article em remet (per cert, que en Carlos facilita la versió castellana):

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

l’amor no és l’hòstia

avui incorporo aquest pin a la meva jaqueta -gràcies Laia! demà és el dia mundial contra la violència de gènere… de normal tals efemèrides em provoquen certa urticària – cada dia és un dia més en aquesta batalla. ara bé, conscient de l’apreci que tenim per dotar d’aquest cert ordre nominal al calendari (l’ara fa un any, el d’aquí un mes farà cinc anys que, etc.), aquí va el banner. l’amor no és l’hòstia, ni l’empatia ens ha de portar a disculpar certes actituds que es donen en l’amor. aquesta ve sent la meva particular campanya des de fa uns mesos.

alea jacta est

avui he aprés que Ministeris d’Afers Exteriors i Ambaixades tenen tanta relació com el papa de Roma amb en Nacho Vidal. és a dir, – aclariment per a les ments més creatives que segurament trobaran connexions- les seves feines estan més aviat poc comunicades… porto tot el dia aguantat bronques de Missions Permanents et al. em retreuen que se’ls comuniqui amb tan poc temps la seva participació als Diàlegs a Ginebra, o inclòs que se’ls informi de la seva existència. destoo…. disposàvem de comunicacions oficials de les respectives capitals confirmant la participació. en alguns casos també el nom del representant. i oh sorpresa unes capitals han informat a 48-24h vista a les ambaixades corresponents del que els toca fer dilluns i dimarts vinent (que sovint han respost enviant als seus homòlegs a passeig, bo, a mi, que dedueixo se suposa que també hauria d’haver assegurat la comunicació interna ministerial – sense nòmina funcionarial, és clar), altres esbrinant avui que feia mesos havien estat formalment designats (i a qui han enviat a passeig? –sic)

bo. s’han cobert alguns forats. la barca no s’enfonsa. ara ens queda arribar a terra. de moment, el cap de setmana ja està aquí, i Ginebra a tocar. yhastaaquípuedoleer.

ah, no,

bon finde

i feliç aniversari

 

càncer

darrerament he parlat molt sobre el càncer… hm, els càncers. repassant ara les darreres Contres de La Vanguardia he trobat una de les definicions més líriques que he llegit mai:

El cáncer es el intento de una célula anárquica de volverse inmortal dentro de un cuerpo mortal, y lo logra.

l’entrevista a en Carlos Cordón és prou interessant.

ouch

squash up

he vist que l’entrada anterior se m’ha allargat una mica.

aquí va doncs una imatge per encarar el cap de setmana

- si és que hi arribem en unes condicions…

tensos des del començament

acabo d’escriure un email que he pensat que reconvertiria en entrada ja que complementa a l’entrada d’ahir, tant en relació a la coordinació, o més aviat desavinences, entre Institucions de Bretton Woods i Nacions Unides com quant a l’informe del Panel, al que he pogut fer una ràpida ullada. per cert, que crec que l’article del CATDM m’estalvia una de les entrades que vaig prometre fer sobre elperquèdetotplegat ja que la trobo prou didàctica – n’hi ha d’altres articles que són igualment útils i senzills… ahílodejodicho ;-p

Just found an article by CADTM that describes quite clearly the origins of the relationship between IMF & WB and UN, and the last two paragraphs are self-explanatory of the weaknesses of the (still) current relationship:

From 1961, when most colonial countries had won their independence and become UN members, the General Assembly on several occasions adopted resolutions condemning the apartheid regime in South Africa and Portugal’s iron dominance over several African and Asian countries. In 1965, in view of the continued financial support of the Bank and the IMF for these regimes, the UN made a formal demand: “To all the specialized agencies of the United Nations, and in particular the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Monetary Fund (…) to refrain from granting Portugal any financial, economic or technical assistance so long as the Portuguese Government fails to renounce its colonial policy, which constitutes a flagrant violation of the provisions of the Charter of The United Nations” [14]. It issued a similar demand concerning South Africa.

The Bank’s directors met to take position and a majority of executive directors decided to continue making loans. To justify this decision, they invoked article 4, section 10 of the Bank’s statutes [15] which forbid political involvement! All the most industrialized countries, backed by a certain number of Latin-American countries, voted to continue the loans. In 1966, the Bank approved a 10 million dollar loan to Portugal and a 20 million dollar loan to South Africa. Subsequently, under further pressure, the Bank stopped making new loans to these countries. However, a UN structure, the Decolonization Committee, continued for 15 years to denounce the fact that the Bank allowed South Africa and Portugal to apply for World Bank financing for projects in other countries. In addition, the Bank sought the favours of South Africa to obtain donations to IDA [16].

–— yesterday was presented the Report of the High-Level Panel on System-Wide Coherence… sadly, in this field, the Report Delivering as One only recommends:

As a matter of urgency that the Secretary General, the President of the World Bank and the Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund set up a process to review, update and conclude formal agreements on their respective roles and relations at the global and country level. These reviews must be periodically updated as well as assessed. This process should be undertaken on the basis of the enhanced performance, strengthened delivery and more influential role that the UN will have if our reforms are implemented. • And at the Global level. The participation of the Bretton Woods Institutions in the annual spring meetings of Economic and Social Council, and the biennial High Level Dialogue of the General Assembly, should be more substantive. The focus should be on areas of common interest and on concrete measures to promote policy consistency to achieve the internationally agreed development goals. The UN’s status and participation in the Development Committee should be enhanced. Joint research and staff exchanges and peer reviews should become regular. The sharing of information and opinions on draft reports and strategic documents should be improved.

Plus the World Trade Organisation is only mentioned once, and to ask for better coordination with such forum at the country level:

At national level, governments should establish an “all-of-government” approach to international development to ensure coordination in the positions taken by their representatives in the decision-making structures of all relevant organizations, including the Bretton Woods Institutions and the World Trade Organization. Pursuing consistent policies in the different settings can ensure that all relevant governing bodies effectively promote system-wide coherence to achieve internationally agreed goals.

… this despite UN official texts having delegated notable development responsibilities to the WTO such as in the 2005 UN World Summit Outcome – its article 31 is a little example of it: We will work to accelerate and facilitate the accession of developing countries and countries with economies in transition to the World Trade Organisation consistent with its criteria, recognizing the importance of universal integration in the rules-based global trading system.

microcredit is a great tool as a survival strategy, but it is not the key to development

En Walden Bello ha aportat, també aquest cop, la veu crítica habitual arrel de la visita d’en Wolfowitz a l’Índia:

… Microcredit is a great tool as a survival strategy, but it is not the key to development, which involves not only massive capital-intensive, state-directed investments to build industries but also an assault on the structures of inequality such as concentrated land ownership that systematically deprive the poor of resources to escape poverty. Microcredit schemes end up coexisting with these entrenched structures, serving as a safety net for people excluded and marginalized by them, but not transforming them. No, Paul Wolfowitz, microcredit is not the key to ending poverty among the 75 million people in Andhra Pradesh. Dream on.

…

So probably the best way we can honor Muhammad Yunus is to say, Yes, he deserves the Nobel Prize for helping so many women cope with poverty. His boosters discredit this great honor and engage in hyperbole when they claim he has invented a new compassionate form of capitalism—social capitalism, or “social entrepreneurship”—that will be the magic bullet to end poverty and promote development.

coherencia en el sistema

veo en directo, a través del UN Webcast, la presentación del informe del Grupo de Alto Nivel sobre la Coherencia en todo el Sistema de las Naciones Unidas – éste es uno de los ejercicios con que Kofi Annan despide su mandato, junto al Informe de la Alianza de Civilizaciones que puede aparecer en los próximos días. se trata de un tema que el Secretariado ha trabajado, ya que desde siempre se ha insistido en la necesidad de integrar organismos multilaterales, como la OMC, FMI y BM, en el seno de Naciones Unidas, proceso que vemos preferible a la situación actual. ¿y por qué no nos gusta como funciona ahora? porqué en la actualidad, si bien una convención trabajada en Naciones Unidas y ratificada por los Estados Miembros insiste en el derecho universal a la educación, por ejemplo, éste será irrealizable mientras otros foros como el de la OMC decidan que la privatización de los sistemas educativos nacionales es más eficiente y mediante decisiones poco transparentes y coercitivas fuercen la obertura de tales servicios en el sur. y es así porque una vez el Estado no responde de tal derecho, ¿cómo evitar que entonces el nuevo proveedor cobre por facilitar este servicio? por pequeña que sea la cuota, esto puede suponer que miles de niños dejen de acudir a la escuela. O es conocido que las estrictas condiciones bajo las cuales el FMI presta fondos para el desarrollo suponen para muchos de sus receptores la imposibilidad de invertir lo necesario en educación, de contratar los profesores necesarios, etc. sin embargo, ni OMC ni FMI deben rendir cuentas a las Naciones Unidas. asimismo, en las declaraciones finales de varias Cumbres de Naciones Unidas existe una preocupante delegación hacia estos foros de la responsabilidad de promover el desarrollo…

con sus problemas y deficiencias, la ONU es actualmente el único foro internacional en que la que todos los Estados tienen un mismo voto (vale, existe el tema del Consejo de Seguridad, pero NU es mucho más que eso…), donde la penetración de la sociedad civil es notable, donde la transparencia permite al menos pedir rendición de cuentas a la organización sobre su propia gestión (de aquí que se conozcan capítulos de corrupción), etc. no debemos olvidar que ha sido en su seno donde se han acordado principios generales en los campos de derechos humanos, medioambiente, etc. a menudo el escepticismo es grande, pero incluso a los más escépticos respondería que, como en el caso de la democracia, las Naciones Unidas parecen haber sido el menos malo de las alternativas posibles.

necesitan, sin duda, repensarse a sí mismas – veamos que dice el informe…