141–150 of 226 posts
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"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." - Blaise Pascal Translations vary slightly.
Computers, TVs, video games, and smartphones have solved that problem. There are now more things to do alone in a room than ever before. It didn't help.
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In general use though slack has an even stronger connotation of e.g. slacking off and not doing anything useful with the time.
Alternatively, ensuring you have enough slack in the schedule is, at least for some tech leads and project managers, an essential tool to enable meeting deadlines. (So, I suppose using "slack" in a positive sense by project management, while probably still being considered a pejorative thing by non technical management or beancounters...)
> Marx, then, argued that the more we subordinate our creative needs to dead capital and its goals, the less we are. But this is also true when we subordinate our creative needs to revolutionary goals in the future. Why? Because the future is non-existential, it does not exist; it is as dead as capital.
https://www.medialens.org/2023/head-trapped-descartes-dawkin...
The author's book, A short book about ego, is also very good.
I really do like the idea and the thinking behind it. I wpuld even argue that modern Europeans are already embracing and practicing much if it. Nearly no one I know in NL and DE works more than 36hrs per week. And we all have a sh”tload of holidays and irregular days off additionally. Need to get kids from school earlier? no prob… Need to spontanously (!) to go the dentist? no prob. (Honest disclaimer: I am talking h…
Europe is not behind because Europeans are working less and taking more vacations. This message that is being loudly broadcasted hides the real problem. Europe is behind because we do not have good leadership. The decisions taken by leadership, no matter what level you look at - local, company, national, supranational - are rarely in the best interest of Europeans. Our markets - housing, rental, labor, capital, pensi…
The problem with creating a quota system is that you have to be able to punish countries who cheat on the quota. Europe doesn't have the capacity to do this except internally. The regulatory superpower idea only really makes sense with the physical power to compel obedience and extract taxes.
In the US we solved these issues like the bankruptcy code with federal law because the federal government is the supreme physical power on the continent that all the states obey for reasons of self-preservation and because they are bribed to obey. US federal transfers to individual states are also much, much larger than the largest EU transfers to member stats and the EU is not a central military or police power either.
This is why the EU member states (and the UK member states as well) should become US territories so that they can benefit from federal law without necessarily destabilizing domestic US politics. They are already dependent on US military power but they do not receive the full benefits of becoming member territories.
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European who has travelled/lived extensively in China and the US. I don't believe our problem is idleness. It's instead a pernicious belief in peace. There's no sense of geopolitical competition in society at large. We generate a lot of wealth in those 36 hours, but an immense amount of it is syphoned into areas that don't help us get ahead. We are too invested in tides that lift all boats. Being well-rested is not t…
> We are too invested in tides that lift all boats. Why is that a problem? Yes, it means less "amazing individuals who own N% of the economy", but it also means that none of my neighbors are starving or can't afford healthcare, definitively a tradeoff I (and most people I'm proud to call friends) are willing to make, even if it makes our own lives a small percentage less comfortable. I'd say that why I personally pre…
And that's amazing, and as an European I would never want to get rid of that. It's a cornerstone of our societies, a core belief if you want to call it that.
But I do think that there is a pervasive feeling of people being "ostracized" for wanting to do better than their neighbours. Like when someone says they are going to run a company the reaction is usually "why, isn't a normal job good enough for you?". Obviously this isn't universal, EU is far too big and diverse for this to be true everywhere. But I've met with this kind of attitude a lot personally, where people have directly asked me if I think I'm better than them by trying to do something good for myself and grow. So now I just don't tell people, or just say I work in software or something, there's no point. It's not even that tide lifts all boats, it's that "we're all in the same boat"(and don't you dare leave it) is a thing that exists.
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> We are too invested in tides that lift all boats. Why is that a problem? Yes, it means less "amazing individuals who own N% of the economy", but it also means that none of my neighbors are starving or can't afford healthcare, definitively a tradeoff I (and most people I'm proud to call friends) are willing to make, even if it makes our own lives a small percentage less comfortable. I'd say that why I personally pre…
>>but it also means that none of my neighbors are starving or can't afford healthcare And that's amazing, and as an European I would never want to get rid of that. It's a cornerstone of our societies, a core belief if you want to call it that. But I do think that there is a pervasive feeling of people being "ostracized" for wanting to do better than their neighbours. Like when someone says they are going to run a com…
But to be fair, I haven't really experienced that so much in other larger countries like Spain, France or Italy, at least not to that extent. Still I'd say it's different than the typical American Individual Exceptionalism, but probably a good difference, we don't to make the same mistake.
Probably a balance between the two is the right approach, you don't want to completely lack either sides, but also not be too dogmatic about it. But it's also hard for politicians to get votes on "You know, both sides have good points, lets figure out a balance", strong emotions sell votes and so on...
I really do like the idea and the thinking behind it. I wpuld even argue that modern Europeans are already embracing and practicing much if it. Nearly no one I know in NL and DE works more than 36hrs per week. And we all have a sh”tload of holidays and irregular days off additionally. Need to get kids from school earlier? no prob… Need to spontanously (!) to go the dentist? no prob. (Honest disclaimer: I am talking h…
I hope that people realize still that LLMs will never ever be able to produce a piece like this. This is extraordinarily written. It is etymologically out of the average. It’s complex. Concepts intertwine and build on each other. The linguistic choices are unusual but perfectly placed. >>“But even idlers, try as they might, cannot ignore the passage of time. In 1911, a dozen years before Capek published his essay, Pa…
If you’re picking apart sentences looking for signs of AI then you’re already rotted. Address how it makes you feel and the argument being made. Determining if something’s AI generated just gives us another reason not to engage. Like solving a puzzle on the kids menu instead of eating the food on the plate
problem with being idle is you end up with nothing to show for it
I don't expect to ever be in that position, but I couldn't imagine becoming a multimillionaire off the backs of my employees and to keep on stacking more money than I could ever spend just to feel like I'm still winning.
Point is, there's enough money being made to employ just about everyone and at fewer than 40 hours a week, but instead we have multi billionaires with more money than a dozen generations could spend.