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…
(Nick’s Notes: Edmund was kind enough to let me republish this, please check out his original here) Revolutionary Luxury, Bureaucratic Administration Any politics that seeks an encompassing notion of liberation and freedom must, first and foremost, be oriented towards the future, and must pursue this horizon through goal-oriented actions. This effectively sets up a feedback…
Preface I’ve been hearing about Scott Santens for a while. I think I’d even read one or two of his articles before I started digging into his handy FAQ. A month ago or so I read over a few posts by his, mostly on the subjects that personally interested me and the questions I have…
I want to, as organically as possible, work in the terrifying world that I feel like I am living right now. I don’t want to make every post somehow about Trump or about fascists or about how liberals are totally inadequate to deal with these challenges as they have always been. Much like other projects…
Nick’s Notes: Kevin gave me full permission to repost this a while ago but I totally forgot. Thanks, Kevin! Robert Balthazar. The Discrete Charm of Economic Growth. Part I: The Bilinguals; Part II: The Making of an Overriding Collective Preference (2016). At the outset Balthazar briefly summarizes his own intellectual journey as an economist, looking…
I try not to rely on an article’s title too much to dictate the title I use for myself because it can often come off as lazy. …But then when did that ever stop me? So here we have a fairly extensive and interesting look at work by Michael D. Yates at truthout. It was…
Before we begin let me be clear that I am only responding to an article by Scott Santens entitled Deep Learning is Going to Teach us the Lesson of Our Lives: Jobs are for Machines. I want to do a full length study at some point on the UBI and my problems with it but…
There’s a lot of things to like about Rushkoff as someone who is critical and skeptical of work in general. I even hosted one of his articles about jobs and whether they were obsolete a few years back. In addition there’s a few books, essays and so on and so forth that I’m sure I’d…
There’s this excellent article on Salon called Corporate mindfulness is bullshit: Zen or no Zen, you’re working harder and being paid less. And as far as titles go (and especially given the location of Salon) the article is just an overall winner. I love titles that are brutally honest (or involve puns) and this post…
One of my fondest memories of working at Kohl’s was when I purposefully went slow on a particular night. We were doing the usual drudgery of taking clothes off a container and putting them in them in the appropriate place. This was fairly mindless, uninteresting, repetitive and frankly, insulting work that I generally disliked. It…