America’s self-reliance obsession makes it more acceptable to applaud working yourself to death than to argue that doing so points to a flawed economic system.
This country is becoming more and more f.cked up, and for once it has nothing to do with trump.
@zenandpi it’s so cheap because of how unfashionable the area is where we are. It’s more like $400-$550 elsewhere. Though I used to just park it in the street, I simply don’t have the time or energy to move it twice a week anymore, or deal with anxiety of not knowing if it will take 15 minutes to find a spot or 40, each time we go somewhere.
Having a car, even a 14-year-old one like ours, is a luxury – but a really nice one, and we use it a lot.
I don’t care for this city anymore, and it makes me a little sad.
All I do is commute and hang around the dead area near home, and the park. To get anywhere, I have to drive, as subway and bus is impractical, and Lyft is too expensive. It’s just as isolating as suburbia with less space and more noise, and $250/month to park the car.
A major turning point in the history of humankind has arrived.
In prehistoric days, we ventured into the forest to hunt. If that is the first chapter of human history, then the second is when we succeeded in securing a stable number of food calories in the form of rice and wheat.
The curtain rose on chapter three as waves of industrialization arrived in what we call modern times; chapter four saw telecommunications and computers fuse, opening a new door.
We are now witnessing the opening of the fifth chapter, when we are able to find solutions to problems we had been unable to solve. This age in which all things are connected and all technologies fuse is the advent of “Society 5.0”.
Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan, addressing CeBIT 2017, Germany (via inthenoosphere)
A homeless (?) single mother of two (according to her spiel that I have no reason to doubt) on subway asks about the HIAS button on my backpack after I give her a dollar. I am a sucker when I hear about small humans now. She responsibly did not bring them along. She looks Russian, and there might or might not be a detectable accent. It’s hard to tell, homelessness makes one ageless and erases one’s ethnicity.
What does it mean, “my people were refugees, too?”, she wants to know.
I don’t know what to say, not knowing how to make this conversation short. so I meaninglessly answer, “it’s just HIAS”. She says that she agrees and moves on.
I read Cal Newport’s Deep Work recently, and came across Enrico Bertini’s essay about tracking deep work sessions. Here’s what my current log looks like:
Like Bertini, I think the idea of tracking Deep Work is a great habit; also like him, I think using the following criteria for Deep Work to be very persuasive:
How do I distinguish between deep and non-deep work? Very easy. I have a simple rule: deep work is work I track. If I don’t track it, it’s not “deep work”. It may seem odd but it works for me. The thing that makes it work for me is that when I track “deep work” I have to consciously think: “this thing I am going to do now is going to be deep work”. In turn, this is a signal to my brain that I am going to shift gear and that it’s time to get rid of distractions. Intentionality (similar to what happens in meditation) plays a big role here: it feels like “tuning” yourself to a specific mode.
Bertini didn’t release his Google Sheets template, but I’ve copied it based on his Medium post, with my limited spreadsheet skills. Feel free to copy this (link to sheet, again) and use it for your own purposes!
I like it. This is how I keep track of billable work, but I probably should do the same for everything else that would warrant “deep” qualification.
Tonight, at my regular coop shift, worked with someone who works at HIAS, an org that helps with Syrian refugee resettlement.
Apparently, the Trump’s “pause” at accepting refugees is very deliberately set at 4 months, and has everything to do with how refugee-helping organizations in the US are funded.
4 months is the magic number that would make them all run out of funding and lay off their staff.
Even with the current court orders in place, the damage is already being done, and the funding is drying up because there are a lot fewer refugees coming in!
This is very clever and has our Leninist-in-chief Bannon’s fingerprints all over it.
She didn’t know about the plan to make refugees’ sponsors reimburse the US government for any assistance refugees receive like Medicaid, food stamps etc.
tinfoilparachute 