13 APR 2025 by ideonexus
"Having" Mode and "Being" Mode
The American essayist and biographer Agnes Repplier saw leisure as necessary for the completion not just of individuals but of civilizations. Leisure, she noted, “has a distinct and honorable place wherever nations are released from the pressure of their first rude needs, their first homely toil, and the rise of happier levels of grace and intellectual repose.” She believed that every investment and allowance should be made to support a leisure class—a fortunati—not so that its member...12 APR 2025 by ideonexus
The Problem of Leisure
Over a decade of writing and thinking about modern work and its opportunity costs, I have generally mentioned the “problem of leisure” only in passing, largely because I would like to believe that it is soluble. Yet the political situation in the United States (and some other industrialised democracies) demands a reckoning, and it cannot be understood without reference to misspent leisure. Not only have working hours steadily declined over time, but most work (all those “non-essential...20 SEP 2024 by ideonexus
Pension-Fraud Correlated with Longevity
Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It’s closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an ol...26 AUG 2024 by ideonexus
Increasing the Number of Researchers to Perpetuate Techno...
Over the past century, we’ve seen relatively steady, though slowing, technological progress. Sustaining this progress is the result of a balancing act: every year, further progress gets harder, but every year we exponentially increase the number of researchers and engineers. For instance, in the United States, research effort is over twenty times higher today than in the 1930s.27 The number of scientists in the world is doubling every couple of decades, such that at least three-quarters of ...26 AUG 2024 by ideonexus
The Rate of Change in United States
Imagine you are a typical inhabitant of the United States in 1870.11 You live on a rural farm; you produce most of your food and clothing yourself. Your only sources of light are candles, whale oil, and gas lamps if you’re lucky. If you’re a man, you face gruelling physical labour, sometimes from the age of twelve onwards. If you’re a woman, you face unrelenting toil as a housewife: one calculation found that in 1886 “a typical North Carolina housewife had to carry water 8 to 10 times...26 AUG 2024 by ideonexus
Hiroshima's Remarkable Recovery
Other examples of remarkable societal resilience are more recent. We can consider, for example, the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945. The bomb the United States dropped was 1,500 times more powerful than any previously used.32 The fireball at the hypocenter of the blast reached several thousand degrees Celsius within one-ten thousandth of a second before igniting all flammable material within one and a half miles.33 Ninety percent of the city’s buildings were at leas...Folksonomies: civilization disaster recovery
Folksonomies: civilization disaster recovery
28 APR 2024 by ideonexus
Anecdote About the Timex Sinclair
Walking on, he explains to her that Sinclair, the British inventor, had a way of getting things right, but also exactly wrong. Foreseeing the market for affordable personal computers, Sinclair decided that what people would want to do with them was to learn programming. The ZX 81, marketed in the United States as the Timex 1000, cost less than the equivalent of a hundred dollars, but required the user to key in programs, tapping away on that little motel keyboard-sticker. This had resulted bo...Folksonomies: computer history
Folksonomies: computer history
25 MAR 2022 by ideonexus
How Games Influence Strategic Culture
Rules define many of the ways a player or team can achieve the primary goal in a given game. For example, because American football requires teams to advance the ball a certain distance over a series of downs or give up the initiative, the game evolves as a series of set-piece plays. Soccer, in contrast, is far more fluid, with virtually continuous activity throughout the game. Soccer and American football do share one common rule in that both last a standardized period (albeit with opportuni...28 FEB 2021 by ideonexus
Why Automation Didn't Result in Increased Leisure in the ...
Back then, many theorists believed that a progressive reduction of work time was the inevitable byproduct of mechanization and increased efficiency. Even John M. Keynes, noted father of modern mass-consumption economics, argued in 1931 that, within two generations, industry would satisfy the real needs of humanity and lead to “three-hour shifts or a 'fifteen-hour week.” This reduction in work time, said Keynes, would allow us to “devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.” ...Folksonomies: automation leisure
Folksonomies: automation leisure
28 JAN 2021 by ideonexus
Computing is Pop Culture without History
Binstock: You seem fastidious about always giving people credit for their work.
Kay: Well, I'm an old-fashioned guy. And I also happen to believe in history. The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field.
Binstock: You once referred to computing as pop culture.
Kay: It is. Complete pop culture. I'm not against pop culture. Developed music, for instance, needs a pop culture. There's a tendency to over-develop. Brahms and Dvorak needed gypsy music ba...Folksonomies: computing computer science
Folksonomies: computing computer science