Month: October 2019

Work in a detached way

Some stuff about meditation and work by Chiara Cokieng that I find repeatedly useful so I’m putting it here for reference.

People work because they crave. “Without craving, without attachment, how can anybody work?” Goenka’s students ask all the time.

Oh because you have not learned how to work in a detached way.

Oh.

When you’re attached, you’re so tense inside, you’re so self-centered. I’m working for me. For me. For me. And once you become detached, all tension goes away. Now you work.

Oh. Is that how you do it? Work? To do it in a detached way, not because you have to do something you desire or hate, but because you decided the work is worth doing? If I can do that, will I be able to do anything I say I will do, without any angst? Is that possible?

I think I get it… If only barely.

I still believe you shouldn’t spend your life slaving on something you hate. But I do believe in training, writing this article, waking up in the morning and being a good human being

“the resilience of a system corresponds to its adaptive capacity tuned to the future.”

Tuning to the future

“While counterfactual reasoning helps restore our feeling that the world makes sense, the problem with it is that it doesn’t help us get better at avoiding or dealing with future incidents. The reason it doesn’t help is that counterfactual reasoning gives us an excuse to avoid the messy problem of understanding how we missed those obvious-in-retrospect actions and signals in the first place.”

The problem with counterfactuals

The writings of Lorin Hochstein about resilience engineering are immensely valuable and illuminating. It’s nice to be able to read the thinking of people who are current with the cutting edge of a profession.

Parental leave

One of the biggest regrets I have is that we couldn’t arrange it so that I had parental leave by myself. In large part, this was because you don’t get twice the duration (28 months) when you birth twice the kids and I could only take three full months.

The American libertarian view on privacy is so tiresome and so ridiculously irrelevant and I wish we would stop hearing about it so much.

“As I flick off the power switch on the back of the Macintosh, the whine retreats in a gentle diminuendo, until it finally gives way to silence. I have accomplished a feat that is no longer possible: My computing session has ended.”

I love how many things come together in this piece about how to write on vintage Apple computers.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/06/why-30-year-old-macintosh-works-better-todays/591154/

Lifestyle Liquidations

https://www.groene.nl/artikel/broer-ik-heb-mijn-9mm-helemaal-geleegd

A very revealing article about the liquidation wave in the Netherlands of the past years. Some of the interesting points:

  • Things started going off after the police decided not to spend too much attention on victimless crimes (drugs) anymore. This allowed the drug trade (mostly cocaine) to get out of hand without too many people noticing it.
  • A lot of kids are at risk to roll into this world because they have a bad start, problems at home and at school and they want the fast money that crime offers.
  • The people you see driving around the big cars or on Instagram have probably never had a regular job in their life.
  • One way for a kid to make headway into the organization (and also financially) is by doing a hit which nets around €50-60k.

Wir üben keinen Druck auf unsere Mieter aus. Kein Mieter wird bei uns verdrängt. Das würde gegen unsere Werte verstoßen.

A quote by Ralf Spann the boss of Akelius, a private housing corporation in Berlin, who are known to intentionally shut down hot water and other amenities to get people to vacate their apartments.

Akelius is one of the corporations that is on the chopping block to be expropriated.

https://taz.de/Mietendeckel-in-Berlin/!5628554/