nico λ

Today, we live in a world in which many, or even most, people no longer have a sense that there is a permanent moral order to the universe. More than that, many have come to regard the traditions of moral practice that were so central to the ancient worldview as too inhibiting—they get in the way of maximum individual freedom. As MacIntyre put it... See more

So much of social media is, by design, condensed information — it’s made to be bite-size. So the internet feels faster paced. It’s been really soothing to go to a space where I’m still meeting my desire to connect with people and talk with people, but in a digital realm that’s slower, and that is allowing for a bit more vulnerability, a bit more... See more

Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems such as democracy, law, and free speech to give individuals a spacious civil order within which they could figure their own life. Common morality, if it existed at all, was based on... See more

Thirdly, it turns out this is all actually brilliant because that's exactly what the real world is like . A handful of assignments (read: good teams) where everyone's effort actually matters, but it's mostly sort of just blundering around until everyone limps past the finish line, declares mission accomplished, then all the savvy people leave... See more

I feel that it's even simpler: The company is the product.

When we have that mindset, we absolutely don't care about the thing that we call "our product." It's just food for the actual product, where we want to fatten it up, and sell it to the biggest slaughterhouse.

That starts almost immediately. You can't even get an A round, without an "exit... See more

The term “dependence” has traditionally been used to describe “physical dependence,” which refers to the adaptations that result in withdrawal symptoms when drugs, such as alcohol and heroin, are discontinued. Physical dependence is also observed with certain psychoactive medications, such as antidepressants and beta-blockers. However, the

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Hope is the rejection of envy and resentment and all that invites them. It’s not difficult to see why those would always seem to be compelling moral postures, because we live in a world that doesn’t seem arranged for human convenience. It’s a world in which human happiness is not the overriding goal, and our plans go awry, and there are terrible... See more

Replacing technology with household help is not a route to higher productivity. It seems more like a route out of the First World and into the Third.