07-05-2010

Hey everyone,
Today is AUGUST 3rd 2010 and I'm waiting in the train station in Mompelliar sitting like an absolute homeless man next to a plug I found and a bit scared of the night ahead. I have a train at 3pm TOMORROW and no place to stay tonight because this place has no hostles and I wasn't about to pay $100 for one night of hotel which in hindesight, even though we are not yet done with this night, may be one of the stupidest things I do. I can't imagine train stations are very safe places to be all night but these are the cards that I am choosing and w'll see what happens. My plan is to approach a nice looking person or group and try to sit with them but for now my iPod needs a charge and it is relatively early (9pm) so I'm not too worried yet. I donno, my last hostles Internet was kind of shit and I didn't feel like going out to find Internet to plan out the next few days so I am in a bit of a pickle having to plan everything as it comes. I've survived through 50% of the 6 weeks, I'm hopeful the rest will work out.

Anywho, onto the real entry of JULY 5th. Man I'm almost a month behind, good thing I'm a jobless bum when I get back to the states and will have time to catch up with this blog and hopefully and ideally with my other one, today I learned. 

Seriously though, onto July 5th:
Today was actually a pretty relaxed day as I sat in the lobby of the hotel and worked on my blog enteries while the rest of the gang went out in Shiraz. It was actually rather nice time with the lobby of this hotel being pretty extravegant in terms of view of a pool in front of you and a mini waterfall providing nice relaxing sound. 

After I was done working on the blog I definitely snagged the menu from the place for my collection on the way back up to my room. Once the gang ot back we had a lunch of sandwiches from this same shop we had ate the day before. It was very good and after lunch we checked out and went to airport to fly back to Tehran. 

Once back in Tehran, an off the hot-as-hell plane, we went back home and changed to go to atisaz, the home I lived at as a child. It was a strange visit as the place had changed a lot and yet stayed the same. For example, the yard that I used to bike at or the areas I played soccer as a kid were all the same but a lot smaller than I remembered them. For me atisaz was huuuge as a child and I guess I really have grown because it no longer seemed so large.

There were definite changes too in terms of an increase in the number of units in the community (more than 3x as many now) and a explosion in number of cars. When I lived there as a child there were plenty of empty spaces for cars but now they were parked everywhere a car could possibly fit. It was a strange site cuz although the overall number of units has increased, the new units are in a new area so these cars haaave to be those of the same number of people living in the units I used to live in but now these people have multiple cars I guess. 

There were a couple more things of note from atisaz. One, this place is siiiignificantly cooler than central Tehran were we are staying. Even though it is only 15minutes away from the center I think a mixture of elevation (it is a bit higher) and whatever else is making it cooler. Two, there are a great number of trees and flowers here and it gives the place an overall a homee ambiance. Thirdly, the place seems a bit more liberal as we saw a couple of girls sitting and chatting without wearing their headress.

After our visit to atisaz we went to a reallly nice restaurant for dinner and I had a food my mom makes, fesengoon, to see how it was compared to my mom. For me it was too sweet and I didn't like it so much but when my mom tried it she said this was reallly excellent and how they really make it. I found it interesting that I guess you get used to how something tastes from what your mom makes and that becomes the "right" and version. 

Once we got back home we watched a bit of tv and suddenly I found myself in a reallllly deep discussion of capitalism with my uncle. He is a Marxist and obviously does not like capitalism at all and I wanted to see why. I obviously though chose a tooough lil opponent to argue in favor of capitalism. He was verrrry thorough and one by one rejected my position. 

Because I found the argument so interesting I actually wrote down few of his points that I remembered afterwards to maybe on day find a responce to them.

One he argued that although the system shows the winners and encourages ideas through monetary reward it fails to show the losers. He, somewhat correctly, argued that for every winner in the capitalist system there are many many losers and that is a big flaw. 

Furthermore, because money equates to power in this system, the interest of few people are represented. For example, if companies or rich people pay to advertise the benefits or negatives of some laws, the truth of the affect of these laws for the genral public may remain hidden. 

Another good and thought-provoking argument he had is that advancement without a monetary reward still can occur and will occur. I argue that this is not true entirely but I do think that a great number of people do things for the idea of good rather than the monetary reward and his argument becomes interesting because if you increase the social safety net and increase the size and accessibility of the middle class (by shrinking and taxing those who earn more) then people will be less afraid to take a chance and do something for sake of good with fear of failure and poverty. The problem with this model however is it assumes that there is enough people willing to do something (anything) yeh are truly passionate about without the motivation of the monetary gains. I don't think that is a type of society we live in nor one we will have anytime soon. The strenght of his argument in this point though (even though he failed to mention it) is current systems that already use this no reward model. For example wikipedia, goodle dev team, firefox, and Linux. Although there are a few people who do make money in these ecosystems, th majority if the power of the systems is drived from the while community and they hav shown to be successful. One caveat however is that these system use a very large population on the Internet and many things cannot be redused to and represented in the same way to such a gigantic audience. 

The final point he had was an expansion of winner and loser idea where he pointed out that the losers in a capitalist system are not only the people who are competing for making that discovery or opening a business. Rather the losers extend all the way through the world as the human resources are limited and those living a life of riches are taking unnecessary resources from the poor. Wether it be that fourth car, the third house that has two pools or whatever it may be, living in luxary means that you are taking resources that could e used maybe by a family who needs the first cart or first house. 

At the end of the day, as sound as his argumets were, I was not completely convinced because even if the US follows more of a soialist path rather than a capitalist, I think some other country will see the opportunity to fill that void. I don't know, I just wonder how a capitalist could convince me against these arguments he presented.

Anywho, that was all for that day. It's about 10pm here and I'm gonna go try to find some peeps to sit with and see what the night has for me and also enjoy my dinner of nutella, bread, and redbull.

I had pretty low standards of happiness before this trip in terms of luxaries. I eat anything and can asleep anywhere and was not very picky but this trip is erasing any and all standards I ever had for life. Hah. 

Wish me luck,
-NZ

[as of this posting it is actually 11am the next dy and I survived the night.]