I'm not sure, but I think you're thinking of enlightenment as in "the age of enlightenment", whereas the quote is about the zen/buddhist idea of "enlightenment (as in, even after reaching enlightenment, nothing much changes materially).
This resonates with my recent attempts to find meaning and purpose in things I do. As you point out, it's almost the same things I do, but some seemingly small things seem more meaningful...
That's a good point. I suppose there is no real baseline. You can just say that a person it a slave to the extent of their desires/attachments. That's helpful to me, thank you.
Why? If you are making money when you sleep the chances that you are using machines to make money is quite large. I am doing that and I don't have any slaves working for me.
If you can't see the slave analogy being what is nonsensical here then nothing I can say or do is going to convince you. So I guess by your definition you are either a slave or a slave owner. Oh well.
What on earth are you talking about? Do you know what is meant by"equity"? Are you following the context of this article? It seems like you're just spouting random phrases without a clue what we're discussing.
Realistically, most people can't and/or shouldn't do this by building a business or working at a startup. Both of these are very risky and won't generally accomplish what I think the parent comment implies. Instead, the more reliable way is to invest as much of your income as you reasonably can in securities like stocks and bonds so that over time you are indeed making money doing nothing. Also, if your company offers stock options, opt for those if you think the company is going to do well in the future.
How does the reasoning of buying stocks and bonds work over time given the current crisis has wiped out all the gains for many people made in the past several years utilizing this strategy, and before that was 2008 which did the same?
This doesn't work for people who want to have children, who may have healthcare conditions, who need to take care of their parents, etc. Spending significantly less than you earn won't mean much if inflation means anything you earn is worth less year over year.
You need to maintain value or decrease at a very low compounded rate.
You don't need compound gains.
> This doesn't work for people who want to have children, who may have healthcare conditions, who need to take care of their parents, etc.
I'm not sure what this has to do with my point. You need to save more than you earn. If you can't or don't want to, so it goes. Not everyone's a winner.
The S&P 500 has been a solid investment, historically speaking, even with the black swan events. It has more than tripled since 2009, and doubled since 2007 (before the 2008 drop). And with dividends it's even better.
This idea that black swan events keep knocking out all the gains just isn't true, looking at the numbers. But if you don't like stocks, buying real estate and renting it out is also a good option.
But who "generates" those assets you are investing in or trading? Will the action of investing or trading generate them? The cycle must start somewhere.
> Software particularly. A couple thousand hours of sweat, toil and despair and you might just create a perpetual cashflow generating machine.
Perpetual may be a strong word no? Your software will need attention, improvement, etc., its value will drop in time, someone will launch a slightly better version of your software in an attempt to capture your success, or even launch a company where people rent their money to produce something you simply can't compete with.
What about the rest of the things the world needs and are beyond the possibilities of an individual but not beyond those of large groups renting their time? Imagine a highway, or a spaceship.
> But who "generates" those assets you are investing in or trading?
This is irrelevant to the individual. The cycle already exists.
> Perpetual may be a strong word no?
Yes, I'm being slightly facetious. But the possibility of a creating a money-making asset that is unpegged from a 40 hour work week is very real.
Of course there's still work to do but the work is invested in an asset that you own rather than being rented out to an employer. This makes all the difference.
> This is irrelevant to the individual. The cycle already exists.
Sorry to be so blunt but that's a very superficial view and mostly wrong. The cycle isn't "already there" more than the internet, running water, or toilet paper on shelves are "already there". You're asking why would any farmer bother raising cattle and growing crops when they could just go to the supermarket for milk, meat, etc. It's only irrelevant if you don't care about understanding what we're talking about.
> Of course there's still work to do
Your premise was to build a system that generates revenue without your presence being required, in contradiction to your follow-up.
> the possibility of a creating a money-making asset that is unpegged from a 40 hour work week is very real
Agree on this. I'm sure working a classic job is not the only way to make money but my point was different.
So far all of the ways mentioned here for making money by decoupling yourself from the 40h work week are either actually conceptually the same as "renting your time", or work because so many others are renting their time, and they are the niche.
You're either self-employed (you invest the money, produce the asset, and collect profit), or you employ others to bring you profit (you don't produce the asset, just invest money and collect profit). Either way there's no way to remove the "asset producer" from the equation without turning it into 0=0. And just like anything else on the market the higher the supply, the lower the price. The more people only invest for a living, the smaller the returns for each and the fewer assets that are actually created.
Government was always supposed to be influenced 'by the people' those people are usually aristocrats. That is fine if there are enough of them with different ideas. What has happened is the consolidation of the artiscroacy and thus the means of influence of government. This is where we are getting our ugly problems from.
What is the first step to fixing this? Bring voting into the 21ST century AND NOT HAVE VOTING SOFTWARE BE CONSIDERED A TRADE SECRET[1].
Voting shouldn't be as onerous today and things like the Sun Light foundation[2] should be a household name.
We have all met jerks in our lives. People who lie,deciet, and cheat to get ahead. How is having the government covered in obscurity good for anyone?
> The idea that democracy is associated with sortition remained common in the 18th century. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu writes in The Spirit of the Laws, "The suffrage by lot is natural to democracy, as that by choice is to aristocracy."
Sure. They didn't practice what their preaching sounds like to use.
Sortition is still an interesting idea. Especially for filling up larger decision making groups like a parliament. So that the law of large numbers can work.
It wouldn't be that useful for selecting a single post like president.
As a slight modification of straight up sortition, I would suggest that instead of picking the members of parliament directly, we still have everyone vote for their preferred candidate, and use sortition to pick out as many votes as we have seats to fill. (With some sensible mechanism for when the same candidate comes up more than once in the votes.)
That procedure would sidestep many of the problems that come up thanks to Arrow's Theorem in more conventional procedures or citizen's commissions etc.
If a democracy wants authoritarianism Nationalist Party then there is no magic mechanism to stop this, and it might be presumptive to even assume that democracy is most morally harmonious and effective configuration of society. I believe China is seriously contending this assumption, as it races ahead of its Asian and European neighbors with respect to economic optimism.
Also, political parties appear part and parcel with democracy, but that part of the discussion is so often left unloved.
China is certainly effective. The willingness to simply murder dissidents makes things much simpler. I struggle to see how anyone could consider China "morally harmonious" though. Their effectiveness seems to be directly at the cost of any morality.
This is 100% a rightwing talking point, pushed by the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter, and I wish it would go away. Look... if we all want to get along, then we need some way of working together despite disagreements. If 51% of people want to do something, we all must agree that that's okay. Otherwise nothing would ever get done.
You missed one piece - a limited government. The 51% can get what they want, as long as it's within the things that we let government do. If it's outside that, then they need a lot more than 51% - like maybe 3/4 of the states.
I’m astonished the National Socialist experiment in Germany is being ignored by this commenter. Indeed your premise is antithetical to Western tradition, which is presumably good because of its endowments to humanity. See: the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus.
The term Neoliberalism attributed to post 1980 political figures is appropriate in that they tout themselves as classical liberal(hayek,mises,etc.) ideals proponents, but in reality they do not apply or conform to classical liberal ideals. The author does not understand that classical liberal interpretations of economics is an explanation of markets underlying principles. Reading mises, hayek, etc. Is akin to reading the code rather than using the software. The religious references in classical liberal writing is a reflection of how awesome it is to understand how something so seemingly complex works under quite simple principles.
The author conflates modern pseudo classical liberal rhetoric and application with intellectually sincere thought. It is hard to read this article and take him serious. Boiled down, this is just a piece of rhetoric. There is very little intellectual value.
Money, particularly fiat currency, is a useful fiction. You're not a slave of money as such, it's a tool of enslavement by those who control how much money is allowed to exist and how much is allowed to circulate. As Iain M. Banks put it, "Money is a sign of poverty".
The act of enslavement is in fact a two way street. You have to choose to want whatever you can buy with money in order to be enslaved. It's a choice most people just don't know they are making. For many, it's also a choice that makes sense if they want to survive. Money lets you buy food, clothes, and shelter. Making a choice to be enslaved for those is clear(but still a choice). Making a choice to be enslaved beyond that is not as clear.
"The act of enslavement is in fact a two way street. Enslaved Africans had to choose to not want to be whipped and beaten by their slavemaster for attempting to run away"
When the alternative is not something a reasonable person would choose, it's common courtesy to not pretend it's an actual choice.
Other than the author having the ability to use large words I'm not sure what I was supposed to have come away with from this piece at all, it's just word salad.
Well, professor of humanities there. Accusing them of using large words or "having swallowed a dictionary" (like one of the siblings here) is getting dangerously close to an ad-hominem.
He presents some content. Not in the easiest form, maybe, but you're insinuating there's nothing else in there, when really it's more of a refusal on your part to engage.
The guy you are answering to was asking if there is more content than the title. but considering the comments it does not incite me to read the actual article
>Not in the easiest form, maybe, but you're insinuating there's nothing else in there, when really it's more of a refusal on your part to engage.
people on hn do this constantly - as if precise language anywhere but in stem is a sign of an inferior argument. god forbid you have to do the background reading on something in order to truly understand.
Postmodernist arguments and critiques are like the blue/gold dress. Some people see it as pure obscurantism, just all white noise. Other people see it as full of interesting ideas.
I've never seen these two groups successfully hold a conversation about it without getting progressively angrier at each other, mostly devolving into insulting each others' intelligence (like many of the replies to your comment).
Add a layer of politics on top of that, to really rile people up, and this whole thread is just a recipe for disaster.
its hilarious that comments to this effect have been posted multiple times, when the actual content of the article specifically quotes/supports ideas by people like Terry Eagleton, a marxist (/religious) thinker who specifically oppose postmodernism
Sure, yeah. I actually studied in an advanced humanities program and have read most of the people he references. I worried a bit about the characterization. But since the labeling didn't really matter for my point I didn't sweat it too much.
I was really into stuff like this for a few years. After a while, this argumentative style just stopped landing for me.
To each his own though. I go back to the blue/gold dress. I can't explain my issues with it without just making people angry, advocates can't explain why it resonates without frustrating the other side.
So... I just want to say sorry if you thought the link was some kind of offensive misdirected attack on something you like.
If you like this stuff, go for it, knock yourself out.
Seems pretty straightforward to me. He presents an intellectual history of neoliberalism (whose attributes he also describes), and charts out how its evolution has beared down on the present.
This particular author also has a wider thesis that thinking about all of life and the laws of the universe in terms of market interactions has come to replace mystical and religious thinking.
I’m looking for your substantive comment on the article but I haven’t found it yet.
Pot, kettle, etc.
And I realize the irony in the fact that my pointing this out to you is the main subject of my not-substantive comment.
However, I won’t resort to accusing you of being simple minded, as I wouldn’t call someone who couldn’t make it though an article like this simple minded either.
The concepts and history presented are not terribly complicated, but the organization, length, and unnecessarily complex vocabulary make the article a difficult read.
That's reductive and subjective. The grandparent comment said it was a word salad, you made the connotative connection to neurological disorder.
My connotative connection was to failed delivery, like throwing a handful of birthday cake instead of serving it up on a plate.
Your account is less than an hour old. Are you possibly the author on the piece? If so, I empathize. Direct critique in dense comment sections can feel brutal--but feedback can be worth the gauntlet.
100% agree. Flowery prose has its place, but an article calling on a return to traditionalism and denouncing the benefits of neoliberalism isn't it. Doubly on-the-nose is that the article would be inaccessible to many due to being steeped in elitism.
I'd have thought that's exactly where it is placed; is not the neoliberal the efficient, the calculated, the stopwatch on the factory floor? Every word counts, the neoliberal grumbles, because time is money! The plight of the lower classes cares little for what some other gatekeeper deems 'inaccessible', after all, it is the low expectations and streamlined class sorting that determines such a thing either way. If it's valuable, it will be explained by others simply.
Oh my god I'm glad it's not just me. I gave up at:
"...the distribution of wealth and popular acquiescence in the vicissitudes of the market—the hoi polloi might vote themselves welfare states or even socialism."
It's not my favourite style of writing, but it's by no means word salad.
That paragraph presents a single coherent line of thought. They could have chosen simpler individual words, but there's nothing difficult in the phrasing or structure.
And they should have. I can put together a sentence using a lot of words most people won't know. It will be a valid sentence, and it will mean what I want it to mean, but a lot of people won't be able to understand what I intended it to mean.
It's so easy to look words up in a dictionary these days, but for some reason the tech community likes to take a perverse pride in reading at an 8th grade level. "How dare you use a word that happens not to be in my limited vocabulary?"
You are seeing conspiracies where there are none. The average humanities professor has spent their life reading books and has a bigger vocabulary than the average programmer. They’re not trying to pull a fast one on you. They just know more words than you do, and are used to talking to people who are familiar with said words.
The sad thing is that none of the words in the quoted passage are obscure at all. If you don’t know at least most of these words, it’s safe to say that you have a poor vocabulary. This is really, really easy to fix if you just change your attitude. Instead of being angry with someone for knowing more words than you, just look up the words that you don’t know.
Then you can respond to what the person is actually saying, instead of unfairly assuming that they're a charlatan.
Think instead of the Feynmann Lectures. Part of his genius was being able to boil advanced stuff down to a freshman level. When he couldn't, he said "That means we don't really understand it."
The humanities should aspire to that, rather than (or at least in addition to) "big words for big ideas".
Yes, Feynman was the first person in any discipline to give lectures accessible to a popular audience. Goodness knows why no-one in the whole of the humanities has ever done this.
(There is actually a much longer, and arguably more successful, tradition of humanists engaging with popular audiences. We remember the scientists who were good at it because they were so exceptional.)
I suspect you haven't read the article, which in fact is at the level of a freshman humanities student. Not everything has to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Feynman also wrote plenty of stuff vastly less accessible than this article that you and I wouldn't understand - at least not without investing a lot of time and effort. But God forbid that anyone in the humanities write something that requires you to (gasp!) use a dictionary.
The sheer arrogance and imbecility of the typical attitude towards the humanities on HN is really something to behold. Oh, why can't you all be more like this cool physics dude who we think is God's gift to literature because he dictated some amusing anecdotes about strip clubs and colored paint?
Feel free to try to un-press your condescension button; it's not helping you present your case at all. You just come across as rude and hostile.
Let me try to restate a bit better. Feynmann wasn't the first, even in physics (Faraday may have been). But for Feynmann to do what he did in his lectures, he had to find a simpler way to present it - not because the words were hard, but because the mathematics was.
What I want from the humanities is a bit different. Not easier words, but fewer. There's an article about a fifth the length of this one waiting to be written. It would have the same content, too, and would be far more readable (and read!) by non-humanities types. I suspect that even many freshman humanities students would appreciate the difference. (If you're a humanities major, you don't lack for pages to read.)
Now, if you want to say that this wasn't written for the HN crowd, that's probably true. But it got posted here, and here we are.
I assert that there is a possible way of writing that 1) is acceptable within the humanities, 2) does not "dumb down" the content trying to be communicated, and 3) is much more accessible to the non-humanities reader. But I'm not a humanities person myself, so I could be dreaming. 1) might be fundamentally opposed to 3).
It's much more condescending to tell everyone in the humanities that (a) they should all follow the example of a physicist who never even wrote a book length work himself, and (b) that they are obliged only ever to work in the service of extremely impatient and poorly-read readers outside the humanities, whose preferences are the only ones that matter.
Imagine if someone in the humanities expected the sciences to operate under such constraints. Why do you keep using these complicated "equations"? Why is this book about fluid dynamics packed with obscure terminology and strange diagrams? (I guess it must just be padding.)
You seem to be looking to find grounds to criticize what I say, rather than first trying to understand it. This is leading you to creating strawmen - to the point that it begins to look deliberate. In case it's not, though, I'm going to try this one more time.
You are putting words in my mouth that I did not say, and I deny you the right to do so. Did I say "ever"? No. I said that, when talking to those outside the humanities, they should talk differently. (And what is the humanities if they only ever talk to themselves? Physics makes a difference to the world by what it enables us to do, so if the physicists talk only to themselves and to the engineers, they still can change the world. But if the humanities talk only to themselves, that's... not very helpful to society.)
And, despite me explaining it, you continue to misunderstand what I said about Feynmann. When talking to those who aren't at your level in the discipline, can you still make it understandable to them, without making them first have to get to your level? How far can you go to do so?
The problem that I see is that the humanities no longer seem to know how to talk to the culture at large. That's a real problem, because if the humanities are what they think they are, the larger culture needs them. The humanities need to talk to those outside the humanities, and to do so in a way that those outside can understand.
The article we're talking about is accessible to anyone with a bit of patience and a decent vocabulary (or the will to use a dictionary). I'm not in the humanities and I had no problem understanding it. I think it's really weird to use this particular article as an example of some kind of disconnect between the humanities and the culture at large.
Pop science is fashionable, but 90% of it is fluff or pure nonsense. The level of scientific knowledge of the general public remains miserably low. Are the humanities doing so much worse in engaging the public? This is not obvious to me.
I'm confused now about why you brought Feynman into this. Initially, you seemed to be contrasting successful pop science with unsuccessful attempts by the humanities to communicate with the general public, and suggesting that humanists should ape the communication style of Feynman and other famous scientists. I found this odd, since humanists communicate with the general public all the time, to a much greater extent than most scientists. Just read any high quality newspaper or magazine and you'll find lots of accessible articles by humanities professors, authors, critics, etc. (The article we're talking about is one example!)
Perhaps it would help if you could just give an example of some work in the humanities (not necessarily recent) that you actually like. Presumably you don't think that there's never been any good or accessible work in the humanities. So rather than pointing to Feynman, why not tell us which humanists other humanists should be emulating?
> The article we're talking about is accessible to anyone with a bit of patience and a decent vocabulary (or the will to use a dictionary). I'm not in the humanities and I had no problem understanding it. I think it's really weird to use this particular article as an example of some kind of disconnect between the humanities and the culture at large.
The culture at large doesn't have the patience. (They may not have the vocabulary either, but they definitely don't have the patience. And if they don't have the vocabulary, they don't have the patience to look the words up in a dictionary, either. One word, maybe. A bunch of them, no.)
> Pop science is fashionable, but 90% of it is fluff or pure nonsense. The level of scientific knowledge of the general public remains miserably low. Are the humanities doing so much worse in engaging the public? This is not obvious to me.
Fair point. But the sciences have an alternate path to "engage" the public. We use Maxwell's results, even those of us who don't understand Maxwell's equations. Science gives us ideas and things that use them. Those who don't understand the ideas can still use the things (within limits). But the humanities just produce ideas. (And, I suppose, cultural artifacts. But the cultural artifacts are primarily a vehicle for ideas.) If the ideas aren't penetrating the surrounding culture, the humanities have in a sense failed.
Feynmann wasn't doing pop science. He was taking the real thing and making it accessible to people who, by any normal standard, didn't yet have the tools to access it. I wasn't making a plea for the humanities to ape his style - nobody could do that - but rather his drive to make the ideas of physics available to "outsiders" (motivated outsiders, outsiders who were on a path to become insiders, but still at the moment outsiders, at least for the topics being discussed).
> The article we're talking about is one example!
The article we're talking about is accessible to anyone with a college vocabulary and perhaps 15 minutes of undivided attention. The college vocabulary may be not all that common, but in my view it's the 15 minutes of undivided attention that's the real dealbreaker. That has become a much bigger barrier in the days of 140 characters. People will read things that take 15 minutes, but they read it with a different mindset. If what they're reading doesn't pay them back for their attention, quickly - in the first 30 seconds, say - they're out of there. They're not going to invest 15 minutes for a payoff that may or may not be there.
So, like Feynmann in the sense of reaching out to communicate the ideas of a field to those who don't seem to be ready for them, can the humanities communicate to people like that? Maybe so, but not with articles like this. They take too long to get to the payback.
(In fairness, though, while Feynmann was talking to freshman, he did probably have an hour. But the issue in his case wasn't time, it was mathematical and scientific maturity.)
For examples that do what I'm asking for (not that I necessarily like it), would you accept rap music? I specifically picked rap because you can get a lot of lyrics in a rap song. You can actually say something there. And you can still do lots of allusions and metaphor and imagery. And people actually listen - not just college kids and people that read "high quality" newspapers.
For a completely different example, see Francis Schaeffer's "He Is There and He Is Not Silent". Schaeffer is a Christian philosopher. The book in question is a philosophical sketch, really, not a fully-fleshed-out in-depth argument. But he connects basic things to very deep things in a very simple way, and he takes very few pages to do it. You don't necessarily have to agree with his conclusions to see the density of his writing.
Of course, density also takes a long time to read. But he meets my "payback in a hurry" criterion. (He does it by making me stop and think for several minutes, but he didn't take long to get there...)
>The article we're talking about is accessible to anyone with a college vocabulary and perhaps 15 minutes of undivided attention.
Ok, we agree then - I am just baffled that you consider this a problem.
There's something to be said for meeting 'the kids' at their level. So sure, super accessible stuff is great. But there's also the possibility of a downward spiral. The abundance of accessible, no-effort fluff wears down people's attention spans until it's impossible to have any serious public discourse about anything. If people are objecting to an article which takes 15 minutes to read and requires some level of literacy, then I think we might be well into the inner grooves of that spiral.
True. And 'the kids' will read the super accessible stuff and think that that's all there is to understand.
I think the super accessible stuff needs to be written in a way that says "There's more here to understand, and it's worth the effort to do so." So that someone who reads it is tempted to reach for the 15 minute article, or the several-hour book. (In fact, links at the bottom would be helpful in this. "For more information, go here...")
Meh, I’ve been in and out of academia and can be as cynical about academics as the next person. But taken literally, what you are saying is obviously untrue. I was taught by career academics all through my undergraduate and graduate education. How to be a career academic is the one thing that I failed to learn from the experience. I learned lots of other interesting stuff, though.
That’s true in general, but anyone who has difficulty with this particular article just has a low reading level. Tech folks love to mock the humanities, but back when a humanities education was more fashionable, being able to read prose of this level was about the bare minimum expected of an educated person.
I assert the definition of an "educated person" evolves. Today, it is more advantageous to be literate in data and systems than to spend time chasing after humanities fashionability.
Note that my point isn't arguing that humanities is without marginal value, only that the average value is not evolutionary advantageous. As such, it therefore fails to provide for most than its professors. In my view there is a commonality stretching back to Homeric bards. The storytelling gave value, but didn't feed or lead the community.
I'm not sure what you have in mind when you state that tech folks mock the humanities. The point being laid out is that this particular piece is unnecessarily obtuse with its verbose prose, to the detriment of user experience.
I don't follow the thread of your argument. If you think you can get rich by skimping on literacy, more power to you. But are people writing articles in the Church Life Journal of the University of Notre Dame then obliged to condescend to your level?
Your comment is actually a lot stodgier and more obscure than the article itself.
Thank you for the feedback. Received in the spirit it was given.
My prior comment was a representative example of the issue. That you found it stodgy and difficult to follow highlights the same issues the parent commentator points out about the source article.
I doubt that Orwell would have considered any of the relevant words to be particularly obscure. At least, they certainly all would have been in his vocabulary.
I think it is more that they are perfectly fine with advanced vocabularies and complexity but only when it actually serves a purpose. It is fine to go into dizzying and pedantic levels of nuance or loosely related trivia.
It could be surmised as a 'earn your complexity' ethos.
I don't think so. It's chosen because it reflects a particular attitude towards the working classes. (The hoi polloi don't call themselves the hoi polloi.) It's also not in any way an obscure phrase. In the UK at least it's in common usage.
Coded language attempts to convey ideas through subtext. By doing so it’s reducing the carrying capacity of the information channel and lets authors pad words without adding meaning.
That’s more or less the definition of lazy writing. Like a kid starting off with “It was a dark and stormy night...”
It’s coded only in the sense that you have to know what the words mean to understand what the author is saying. Any piece of writing is “coded” in that sense. Choosing to write in a plodding, completely literal style also conveys a subtext.
I'm not sure why you refer to “padding”. “Hoi polloi” is just as concise as any of its less flavorful synomyms (e.g. “common people”). The use of this phrase actually makes the piece more concise, as it removes the need to explicitly indicate the (already fairly obvious) attitudes of the upper classes to the people below them. Some things are significant enough to be worth indicating but not important enough to be worth mentioning.
If you aren’t familiar with “hoi polloi” (and again, it's not actually a very obscure phrase at all!), it takes a few seconds to look it up in a dictionary.
That’s not what coded language means. I don’t think anything used in the article was obscure. The style depends on making things as clear as humanly possible so readers are beaten over the head with the subtext.
As a simple experiment, take the article and write down the meaning being conveyed including subtext next to it.
Ok, I am going to approach this sideways. There is a somewhat related linguistic technique used in the cold war where a politician would go on TV and give a long speech that used the format “If the American people want peace, and the Russian people want peace, and (various junk), and Americans move their missiles out of Crimea, then we can have peace. (more platitudes)” An US intelligence officer would then translate this 20 minute speech into a few sentences of English that contained the relevant information.
Effectively the information could be lifted directly from the speech and was very straightforward, but hidden among a lot of meaningless drivel. I am saying the author’s stile similarly lets the add a lot of padding due to their approach to conveying information.
Correct. To put it another way: he is choosing this word because he is arguing that those in power (neoliberals) view common people as unsophisticated rabble who cannot and should not be making important decisions. It is not the author's view, but one emblematic of the very target of his criticism.
In this case I think all that's going on is that the writer has already used the phrase "working classes" earlier in the sentence, and is following a convention that recommends avoiding repetition in this sort of case.
It's more than just that. If you read the initial part of the sentence (that dhsysusbsjsi cut off) you can see that the author is paraphrasing a worry of the ruling class. In this context it's natural to use the kind of vocabulary that they might have used in their own thoughts.
Critically it’s redundant in the paragraph, much like ‘dark and stormy night’. The point is to convey something else which is made clear by the redundancy.
Same goes for their attitude towards programming languages. How dare you propose a language that I can't read without studying / become productive with in a weekend. How dare you propose using characters that can't be written without an IME on a US-ASCII keyboard.
I find it quite disappointing.
(I've been reading a lot about the APL family lately..)
It's apparently what every obsessive Marx reader ends up producing. Zizek for example. Perhaps it's a clever tactic to lure defenceless and impressionable minds, perhaps just a form of insanity.
>Like the student and other forms of personal debt that prepare undergraduates to say two words—“Yes, boss”—the ideal of the entrepreneurial self serves a fundamentally disciplinary function: reinforcing the precarious nature of work in today’s digitalized, low-wage, precariously employed, and increasingly automated capitalism, one in which you are casually expendable and which places a premium on everlasting metamorphosis: upgrade your skills, your profile, your resume. But don’t worry, complain, or God help you, call a union: losing your job or seeing your skill set rendered obsolescent is an opportunity for “growth,” creativity, empowerment. When your own exploitation can be recast as a project rather than a problem—a source of fulfillment rather than an instance of injustice—then solidarity with others can be vilified as conformism, the herd instinct of normies, the last refuge of losers and mediocrities.
Reading this, one might think capitalism is cruel and entrepreneurship is a horrible struggle. Or one might conclude it perfectly mirrors nature and life. I'm not sure what the fuss is about.
The moral worth of the individual has been lost, leading to more and more what I would define as “market barbarism.” Social relations are now completely profane and not objectively striving for meaning beyond the temporal.
I'm not a religious man, but one quote from a religious leader has always stuck out to me. "Interest is a terrific servant and a terrible master."
The polis, bazaar, and pulpit have always been at odds as a triumvirate. My bet is on the bazaar. Even when people are put in jail economics is manifest, using cigarettes or other trinkets as currency for favors and meager supplies. The "market" the author rails against is a strawman.
Having learned for myself that life has a purpose and there is life after death, with a just judge (and merciful, for the merciful), and that all things will be put in good order (my wording, emphasis on good): that all changes everything, for me at least.
Today is Easter, when we commemorate the empty tomb....
With any downvotes, I would appreciate a courteous, thoughtful comment. I have not understood the possible harm in what I said, only likely disagreement. Disagreement is OK, but it seems that it could be better to write clearly rather than just quietly hide.
I like how you put that, and I think I agree with you. I am also extremely grateful for what I know, and for knowing it (per links provided in the other response). If I can be of service in answering questions I will try.
FWIW it’s worth I didn’t downvote you however your assertion of life after death was provided with no evidence but appears that your are asserting your faith as fact.
That will rub some people the wrong way, me among them though not the way it would have once, I’ve someone what mellowed with age.
Thanks. I can assert that I have learned some things for myself. Details at my web site (linked from my profile--it is a simple site and I hope very navigable/skimmable...).
Edit: I think I have a great deal of compelling evidence that is meaningful to me. Any other person has to decide if it is meaningful to them, but it is extensive (as I have written).
Isn't it obvious that dark retreats as light approaches? :) That's why you are downvoted, despite not writing anything even remotely offensive or wrong.
There is life after death. It's just not going to be you living it. One day, you'll die. After that, it's eternal nothingness. It's not so terrible if you think about it.
It is generated from my own extensive notes, using a tool linked from the homepage: http://lukecall.net
General discussion welcome if you like. I especially appreciate feedback (see site footer for example) on the usefulness and/or navigability & skimmability of the way the content is presented. (Font is the html default, so can be configured in the browser to suit one's general preference. Putting things all in one document would make it huge, and it would be unclear at any given time what should be included vs. omitted as the links go deep in many directions.)
Thanks.
(edit: Is there a link visble to you in my profile? I am of course happy to put it here also, but was only curious if that works as I thought :) All the best to you.)
2. What makes it preferrable to Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Jehowah's Witnessing, Buddhism? Is it more correct in its doctrines?
3. Why not Paganism or an animalistic religion? Do people have a right to believe in the existence of Zeus or Thor?
4. Wikipedia says "Most of the archaeological, historical and scientific communities do not consider the Book of Mormon an ancient record of actual historical events." - is Wikipedia wrong here? What are the eternal consequences for people who get this wrong and think the Book of Mormon is baloney?
Christ is a just and merciful judge, so all will be right in the end, and we will each eventually have the necessary understanding to choose for ourselves. There are different "degrees of glory" (uh ... lifestyles?) in the hereafter, very roughly summarized as a) the Celestial Kingdom (for those who repent aka believe in Him and change their ways accordingly (usually a process as one continues to learn & improve oneself), receive essential ordinances, making and keeping covenants aka 2-way promises where He sets the terms, with God, and who can have eternal families forever etc goodness all around); b) the Terrestrial Kingdom for honorable persons of the earth who were not valiant in the testimony of Jesus; c) the Telestial Kingdom for wicked who eventually paid the price of their own sins and receive a degree of glory (which, I'm under the impression, is better than this life), and d) outer darkness, reserved I think for those who really knew Christ but severely rejected him. But don't rely on me: go to the official sources (scriptures like Doctrine and Covenants section 76, general conference talks, etc).
I am not the ultimate authority but will try. I actually think you can find those answers and much more, eventually, via the links at my site including to official and other sources, but:
1. 2nd bullet here: http://lukecall.net/e9223372036854587340.html , etc: I was born to it, but my ancestors on various branches went through a process of investigation and prayer to decide for themselves, and really I had to do the same thing to stick with it (as in the above link and its subsequent ones), as it is a significant commitment (and hugely personally rewarding: peace in this life, and hope of Eternal life in the world to come, really). Also Mormonism is a misnomer: Mormon was an ancient American prophet whose abridgment etc is called the Book of Mormon, but ... details on the name here: https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/style-guide .
2. We believe that a) Christ created this world and others under the direction of the Father (they are one in purpose and act in harmony, and both speak authoritatively since Christ has received the Father's delegated authority to speak as God to us); b) Jesus Christ is the Jehovah of the Old Testament; c) He was known to Adam and Eve and those of their posterity who chose to follow the truth, but others chose not to, and various beliefs spread among the nations at different times; d) that God has given truths to his children at different times via inspired persons, according to what they were willing to receive and what was best for them (my wording, but see https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/al... ); e) that after Christ's mortal ministry, death, & resurrection, and the deaths of the apostles, that the doctrines were changed by men and worldly philosophies, and the true authority to administer ordinances was lost until being restored (re-established) through Joseph Smith in the early 1800's as part of the preparation for Christ's 2nd coming (see https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/restoration... in various languages or just click English); f) that the Church has the authority to administer the teachings, ordinances, etc today under Christ's direction; and g) that it is the (edit: fix errant paste) only true and living church on the earth today, and guided by living prophets (as Noah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc), and apostles. We respect, love, and are engaged in various partnerships and friendships with various religious and humanitarian organizations across the world, and we appreciate all the good done by all who are sincerely trying. (Site also has links on that.)
3) As above, those are not reflecting known, revealed truth from heaven. But, from our Articles of Faith:
"11 We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.
"12 We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law."
4) Each person has to decide for themselves. Many evidences have come to light since the B of M was translated in ~1830, about ancient civilizations (some collections I have linked, and I added an interesting linguistic one to Wkp about uto-aztecan ties to near-eastern languages), but I also read (and believe) statements repeatedly that such will never provide final "proof" either way, but each person needs to ask the Father for themselves, in the way He said (as noted on my site, with references), to get a reliable answer. Such as described in scriptures linked at http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854743866.html etc.
Also importantly, we believe that everyone will eventually have the opportunity, in this life or the next, to learn truth and receive all that they are or would have been willing to follow, including the essential ordinances, and the opportunity to live in family units forever. That is why we build temples worldwide and do family history work. I believe literally in the Lord's words including "...blessed are all they that mourn, for they shall be comforted." (references linked here: http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581793.html )
I hope that helps. There really is a lot more info and means to answer questions if you look. :)
Everybody wants to consume the goods and services that others work to produce, but doesn't want to do any of the work themselves. The best part of this article was the authors statement of the argument against:
> many intellectuals deny that “neoliberalism” is anything more than a cipher, an elastic anathema for whatever its users find objectionable in contemporary life
Here working with abstractions causes a loss of connection to the various factors that contributed to our path. The resurgence of liberal capitalism came after decades of elites dealing with a 90% income tax rate and unions so powerful that their ability to actually produce anything for a profit was beginning to slip away. But of course the author has little if any knowledge of or empathy for contemporary business people now let alone such folk from decades ago.
All this talk of isms is supposed to be enlightening guidance, but ultimately governments need to set rules and tax rates and respond to various challenges. The mapping from ism to action is hardly ever direct and often ends up lost in mystery and obscurity.
>Those are the gravitational principles of Jensen’s corporate cosmology, but it is also an eschatological narrative in which the kingdom of God has been replaced by capitalism as the consummation of history.
To me corporatism is against the principle of capitalism and free market.
Anyway, this article could have been written by Marx himself.
It’s ad reductio it’s like saying soccer is pushing a ball. You could also say life is waking up eating sleeping and then death. It’s true but it’s definitely an emotional argument. I preferred the lectures on free will by Conway, it does not answer anything but it allows for a nice réflexion
In every HN comment section, there's always, 100% of the time, at least one person who only reads the title of the piece (in this case, a song lyric from The Verve) and still has the nerve to post a comment.
So what? The headline is dumb. Nothing wrong with pointing that out and saying why.
The fact that you say you read the article and this attack was your best comment... well I’d say one of these comments is basically worthless and it’s not the guy who pointed out the problem with the title.
Furthermore, a lot of people go to the comments first for a variety of reasons. Nothing wrong with that either.
“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
Gensis is talking about farmers working the land for food. Modern work is an invention of man built on top of it, it's a degenerate replica in terms of satisifcation, necessity, meaning etc.
It's not the same story.
Edit: I'd like to see the downvoters argue against the notion that some work is more essential than other work. Hasn't the COVID-19 crisis opened your eyes to this reality?
The cool thing about language is that it applies to more than just farming. Working any job for a paycheck just so you can buy groceries is also honest, real work.
That particular priest of the priestly class seeking to justify their predation of their bronze-age neighbors is probably dead. So, unfortunately, we are only left with their hagiographal and/or mythical prose.
Is it expected that I compose a tangential lengthy rebuttal to what amounts to a wildly ignorant hypothesis on the emergence of the Abrahamic faith's idea of an eternal God as a civilizing power in world history? I'd rather be pithy and insinuate anti-social behavior, because a proper socializing actually leads to a more mature appreciation of the facilitation of history between generations than something baselessly contrived, i.e. an argument from silence. Also, I don't have the power to downvote vacuous comments yet.
No, but it's expected that you do better than "You must be fun at parties." We're trying to avoid the classic downward spiral of internet forums here, or at least stave it off a little longer.
Not really. It's not like you are workibg all your life to "earn" oxygen and water. Fortunately(for most of us) we are living in an utopia as far as oxygen and water is concerned. You get them for "free"/with minimal effort.
> First time I’ve read that providing clean water on demand to everyone at a sufficient pressure is “minimal effort”.
Let's look at it from this perspective: what percentage of your country's workforce is actively involved in providing clean water?
If it were such a huge effort to provide for relatively basic human needs, then I'd imagine we'd have more people working on that and less people working on advertising, entertainment, rent-seeking, making & marketing disposable novelty products, etc.
The gist of the argument is that while oxygen is available at no effort, clean, potable water without pathogens and contaminants is certainly not and is a modern miracle. It’s only been a little over 100 years since the discovery of chlorine killing bacteria and whatnot in water.
As for what portion of the population is needed to provide clean water, I don’t see how that is a useful or measurable metric. Certainly the discovery process of cleaning the water, the materials science in creating the pipes, learning about lead poisoning and changing that, and so on and so forth is a huge effort in my books.
Also, going forward, access to clean water is looking like it will be a source of conflict. It’s not in the timescale of the next 5 to 10 years, so people take it for granted, but certainly the grandchildren of today will have to deal with procuring this “effortless” resources.
One might even say the same for oxygen in developing countries where poor people have to live next to factories under a permanent cloud of pollution. They literally can’t go for a run because of a lack of clean air!
> There’s very large swaths of the planet where you are supposed to drink only bottled water
Is that the "natural" order of things? Certainly it isn't, at least no more than markets or money represent a "natural order." In fact, we can make a convincing case that the tainting of fresh water is the direct consequence of this kind of market-oriented thought.
People trading 'things' like favours is pretty natural in that it happens easily. And it's not like the waters of the world are pure and safe to drink by default. There's plenty of parasites and diseases out there. How many hunter-gatherers do you think didn't have worms?
> People trading 'things' like favours is pretty natural in that it happens easily
The author seems less concerned with what "happens easily" than with what is taken as a kind of natural law. The dominant ideology of the present (for which he is presenting an intellectual history) supposes that market forces are this natural law. It is this supposition that cannot stand up to long term history. We are better off reading anthropology and sociology when trying to understand the origins of money and exchange than we are economists, who simply invent facile notions of their origins seemingly out of thin air
Oldest anthropological sites in the world appear to have been used for religious ceremony (community building) and trade (economics). The economists aren't terribly off the mark.
This article seems to want to return to a pseudo-Rousseau view of the world where the wilds are religious.
Water isn’t the problem, it’s sanitation, as in having flushing toilets and sewers.
More people have mobile phones than have access to improved sanitation.
Without it, you die early of disease.
Humanity really didn’t even control their poop all that well until a couple of hundred years ago with the invention of the modern toilet and the S-trap.
The majority of their income comes from government subsidies and from charitable donations. At some universities, over time, that's built up into endowments which support professors.
That's very much the definition of "live on charity."
Charitable donations from wealthy people who, for some reason or another, feel indebted to their alma mater. How successful would these people be without the education they received from their professors?
Educators produce enormous externalities that their students capture and build their lives around. To turn around and say they "live on charity and lecture us on money" is the height of ingratitude.
Many charities produce enormous externalities. That's why people donate to them.
I think OP's point was that those organizations don't necessarily have a good grasp of the reality those of us bound by market forces live under. That's something I've certainly seen from both universities and other ivory towers.
For the past many decades, I've donated to organizations like the FSF, mostly to allow people like Richard Stallman to be funded to do what they want. That gives those people great freedom to do the right thing, and it's well worth the money. That doesn't take away from the reality that those people are now in no position to evaluate the choices I make, without the luxury of that same sort of support.
Hence terms like 'ivory tower.' Yes, we should provide artists, scholars, and others with charity support, but yes, we should accept that distorts their worldview too.
How is then of the possible recent and ongoing attempts to reform the capitalist system like the gig economy, use of automation to make manual labour obsolete, rise of a democratized social media, disruptive innovation etc seem to have more stronger opposition from the left rather than the right, esp in the USA.
Many on the left seem to deeply in favour of preserving the status quo, and seems to not have the means or methods or vision of changing the very broken systems into something better.
A leftist would say that's because neoliberalism, despite having the word "liberal" in its name, is at best a center-right ideology, and would be very surprised at your assertion that leftists want to preserve the broken status quo.
I don't understand in what context this can seem accurate, unless it's one of confusing liberalism and leftism. The US presidential candidate favored by the left, in the current and prior election cycles, is a democratic socialist whose candidacy and appeal are both founded on the promise of restricting the power of, and ameliorating the consequences of, the same laissez-faire (ie unregulated) capitalism so beloved of neoliberals.
The left and the right, as a major distinction between either and status-quo-favoring centrists including neoliberals, have in common the idea that radical change is necessary; the idea has been expressed in terms I roughly paraphrase as "capitalism has failed, and in the face of that, we'll have either socialism or fascism", a statement with which leftists in my circle would not disagree. The difference between left and right lies not in seeing a need for change, but partly in means and entirely in desiderata.
Who is the more vocal critic of the disruptive changes that has happened in our lifetime like the rise of social networks, and gig economy, disruptive innovation, etc. It appears to me the American left is more vocal than the right in criticising/opposing changes.
I can't speak for how it appears to you, but to claim that the right has been uncritical or even less critical than the left, of recent changes in US and global society, is frankly absurd.
Take note of the source of this article. Religion always shows up during dark days and creeps its tentacles around the vulnerable.
For many, you're a slave to religion and then you die. People have used religion to control society way before capitalism
became popular. To this day, it continues to control thoughts and behaviors of billions of people. Those who have acquired power in religious institutions abuse their power to influence all sorts of antisocial behavior. Society hasn't only an issue with capitalism but also religion. There's a strong argument that religion remains the greater threat.
Check out the book the author of this piece has written, "The Enchantments of Mammon." His very point is that neoliberal thinking has replaced religion in a vital sense
One of the outcomes of the present crisis is that capital has in a way lost much of its value. The stock market took a beating, people who bought apartments for renting on AirBNB now have dead weight properties with possibly a mortgage to pay.
Meanwhile lots of people with well-paying jobs, like airline pilots for instance, took a blow putting them on practically the same level as low-paid workers and gig workers.
If this crisis continues for a long-enough period of time, it might just bring about a substantial reorientation of the global economy, and perhaps a new balance between capital and labor.
