I decided to take some suggestions from fans of the site about what topics they’d like to see me talk about. Here’s my stab at the question of whether some folks (e.g. primitivists, anti-civ folks, green anarchists, etc.) may be right about the idea that automation in an anti-work society would lead to more alienation.…
The internet is at times (all of the times?) a capsule from the weird to the absolutely bizarre. And sometimes there comes a time when something happened, was recorded and the people who did it decided to put it on the internet. Such is the case for the CIA and their Timeless Tips for “Simple…
I have seen Fight Club three times in my life now. The first time I saw it, I was on vacation in Albuquerque visiting my uncle. It was around 2010 or maybe earlier or later, I don’t remember. I remember flipping on the television and catching Fight Club somewhere in the middle of the story.…
Introduction This is another one of my “debate reviews”, I’ve done one before for Bryan Caplan debating Robin Hanson on automation. If you’re curious about that, check it out here. Basically, I’m going to offer some critical comments on both Bryan Caplan and Will Wilkinson’s points about a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Caplan is arguing…
There are many ways in the workplace that we are contorted and twisted to be the “best” worker imaginable. Best, from the bosses standpoint of course. And from that standpoint we shall be on time, no matter if there are snow storms or not, the customer is always right (even if they’re making rude comments)…
The New Yorker had a great article last month (which I only got around to reading yesterday) about how the “gig economy”, e.g. jobs like Uber, Task Rabbit, Fivver celebrate overworking to death. Those jobs and others like them are ones made up of an economy that encourages the breaking down of jobs into bite-sized…
I rail on liberalism a lot, even with Donald Trump in power. This may not make sense but most of the writers I see actually struggling with work most of the time are liberals. Most of the sites I’m reading aren’t going to be The American Conservative and instead are going to be venues like…
There’s an interesting paradox that I’ve written about before: The poor are working less than the rich. This has been written about elsewhere and explained in three theories: 1. The availability of attractive work for poor men (especially black men) is falling, as the availability of cheap entertainment is rising. 2. Social forces cultivate a…
Recently I mused on Twitter and elsewhere that I wasn’t sure what was worse: Socialists who wanted to universalize the suffering of meetings or capitalists who want to privatize the most important meetings to themselves. In the latter, at least only a handful of the population is (theoretically) suffering from meetings and how boring, long,…
I wasn’t sure what to expect from this movie. I had heard so little about it that I hardly knew who was in it or that the famous, “You complete me” line was contained somewhere in it. The line, “help me help you!” is also in here, which is promptly dismissed and laughed at by…