20 NOV 2018 by ideonexus
The Economic and Cultural Divide in America
For most of the last century, wages in poorer parts of America rose faster than wages in richer places, as inventions were put to work in the hinterlands. After Henry Ford invented the Model T, for example, workers on assembly lines all over the Midwest built it. Now it’s just the opposite. Bright young people from all over America, typically with college degrees, are streaming into the talent hubs of America—where the sum of their capacities is far greater than they’d be separately. ...13 DEC 2017 by ideonexus
Farmers Hurt Themselves Financially to Avoid Paying Taxes
gonzoflip 1 hour ago | unvote [-] I have family that farms in Iowa and I also worked in the agriculture industry there for a while after leaving the military. One thing that increases the stress on the farmers is the way they avoid income taxes at all costs so they rarely save any of the profits from good years to help them float during the bad years. This is all anecdotal but I have personally talked with several farmers that would rather buy new equipment they say do not even need than pay...13 DEC 2017 by ideonexus
The Coal Standard
Here's a thought: maybe we could buy off the simplistic goldbug-minded "money is a commodity" thinkers by proposing a coal standard? That is: treat burnable fossil carbon as money? Like BTC, there's a finite amount of it remaining to be mined. Like BTC, mining the last reserves gets incrementally harder over time. Unlike BTC, if you burn it, it's gone for good, so there's an incentive to stockpile it and not burn it (ideally by stockpiling it in the ground, where it comes from, by buying lan...12 DEC 2017 by ideonexus
The Capitalist-Consumerist Ethic
We are all good consumers. We buy countless products that we don’t really need, and that until yesterday we didn’t know existed. Manufacturers deliberately design short-term goods and invent new and unnecessary models of perfectly satisfactory products that we must purchase in order to stay ‘in’. Shopping has become a favourite pastime, and consumer goods have become essential mediators in relationships between family members, spouses and friends. Religious holidays such as Christmas ...12 DEC 2017 by ideonexus
Credit is Trust in the Future
We’ve already seen that money is an astounding thing because it can represent myriad di12 DEC 2017 by ideonexus
Human Myth-Making is Crucial to Modern Society
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all,10 MAR 2017 by ideonexus
Workspace is Gamespace
It's not surprising that gamespace has become a workplace for hundreds of thousands of "gold famers" who undertake dreary, repetitive labor to produce virtual wealth that's sold to players with more money and less patience than them. The structural differences between in-game play and in-game work are mostly arbitrary, and "real" work is half a game, anyway. Most of the people you see going to work today are LARPing an incredibly boring RPG called "professionalism" that requires them to alter...01 JAN 2017 by ideonexus
The Twelve Life Areas
Values & Purpose Your deeper, underlying, fundamental values and wants. Your philosophy of life. Your sense of purpose, vision, and meaning. Do I have a sense of purpose and direction in life? What do I want out of life? How do I want the world to be different? What is my philosophy of life? What are my fundamental values? What do I truly value? Contribution & Impact How you give value to the world, make a difference, and have a positive impact. How am I giving value to the worl...05 FEB 2016 by ideonexus
Idea Debt
Idea Debt is when you spend too much time picturing what a project is going to be like, too much time thinking about how awesome it will be to have this thing done and in the world, too much time imagining how cool you will look, how in demand you’ll be, how much money you’ll make. And way too little time actually making the thing. If… You tell 15 friends about your screenplay idea, but devote zero time in your week to facing the blank screen. You buy a domain name, spend weeks or mont...Folksonomies: productivity
Folksonomies: productivity
24 NOV 2015 by ideonexus