Thanks to Larry Coon (via Pounding the Rock) we learn that the lockout is extraordinarily more expensive than the marginal percentages at stake in lockout negotiations. Now, as someone applying for jobs in computer science, and someone that has recently been obsessed with proper solutions to problems on small and large scales, maybe I can weigh in here with my (probably idiotic and reductive) two cents.
Wendell Barry's great essay "Solving For Pattern" (warning: PDF) is a fantastic burst of sense that tells us lucidly about "holistic" and "organic" solutions to problems without falling into ideological or mystical claptrap. Barry tries to differentiate between good solutions and bad solutions and uses as an example some case studies in agriculture. In his view, good solutions don't create problems outside the scope of the solution or the original problem. As Barry attempts to show, good farms mimick nature in her elegance, rather than in her bare-stripping brutality. Good farms don't pollute the surrounding area with manure. Good farms don't demand too much in resources of the world outside the farm, don't deconstruct their own long-term goals with short-term cash grabs (for example, by destroying the farm's topsoil with a monoculture). Good farms turn (as much as is possible by the Great Eroder) cattle waste into fertilizer for plants and plants into feed for cattle. Good farms are really good (if highly artificial) ecosystems with a sustainable yield. Good farms are not so large in scope or size that they cannot economically sustain the humans needed to tend to them. Good farms are good interrelated processes with the overall goal of social health and well-being.
Now, Barry is not just talking about some pie-in-the-sky utopia rooted in Ecclesiastes' meditations or some sort of Platonic or Randian ideal where a farmer is some sort of virtuous, compassionate genius or anything. No, Barry just calls for the existing attention and intelligence and vision of farmers to be directed to appropriate solutions, rather than directing that mental power to ameliorating work and liabilities with directionless amalgams of short-sighted band-aids (that in the end tally, says Barry, are unsustainable on every level). Barry recognizes that any solution not rooted in a whole understanding of problems, any solution that is not recognized as a process with its own qualitative demands and yields (he uses the analogy of an organ in the body) is doomed to fail at resolving the solution's goals in some ultimate sense.* Transparently, Barry's argument applies to just about any organization and its problems.
