Things I Like
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I saw this reliability throughout our visits. Because everyone was enrolled with an EBAIS, everyone was contacted individually about a covid vaccination appointment—most at their neighborhood clinic and a few at home. One woman I met explained that she’d learned about her appointment by phone. I asked her what would happen if the EBAIS folks didn’t call. She looked at me puzzled. Maybe something was lost in translation. She repeated that she knew what week they would call, and they called. I persisted: What if they didn’t? She’d wait a couple of days and call herself, she said. It was no big deal. She asked me how things worked where I was from. I could only sigh.
Imagine if this could be the experience of people in the US. We would prioritize the health and safety of everyone rather than the system we currently have which is difficult to navigate, extremely expensive, and prioritizes those who have the time and money to ensure they get good care.
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Despite the gulf between them, both Amazon and the Postal Service function as part of a much larger and much more insidious global supply chain. We can imagine the entities’ two respective workforces as different sectors of the same organization, an organization responsible for bringing everything, everywhere, to everyone. They are all “Delivery Boys,” as Trump put it, running errands for a gluttonous trade ecosystem that funnels billions of manufactured items from the third world to the first. That chain encompasses overseas shipping, transnational freight, package distribution, and parcel drop-off, all of which we can categorize under the heading of “logistics.”
There's so much going on with our systems right now and this article was quite helpful to understanding that we, as individuals, have very little power to change things. The current system is bad for the environment and for people, but the people with power are loathe to let it be changed.
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It’s when conversational styles clash that problems arise. Those who aren’t used to cooperative overlapping can end up feeling interrupted, silenced, maybe even attacked — which clouds their minds and ties their tongues.
I grew up in a family that was all about conversation overlap. I married into a family where that was rude, and I'm glad to finally understand what's going on within all this.
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Perfectly good stuff gets thrown away in these facilities all the time, simply because the financial math of doing anything else doesn’t work out; they’re too inexpensive to be worth the effort, or too much time has passed since they were sold.
Yup, even more about logistics, this time with all the returns that people make all the time when ordering things online. The amount of waste makes me quite sad.
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Even if tracking might eventually help spot symptoms early, the extent to which it nudges us into better behaviour is moot. While some studies have shown step-counting, for example, can boost motivation and activity, others have questioned its overall effect on the population, particularly after the novelty wears off.
So much in this article creeped me out and with all the new tech around our health, how our data is being used is a huge concern. I've shied away from using apps or devices because I don't know that they help me and I worry about what happens with that data.
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To be clear, there is immense privilege in lying flat. But it’s worth noting that Mr. Luo acknowledged the necessity of making a living, and @hollabekgrl didn’t say she never wanted to work at a job or hone a craft; she said she doesn’t want a “career,” a corporate-flavored word that conjures images of PowerPoints and power suits. While jobs are sustenance, careers are altars upon which all else is sacrificed.
I've read a lot this summer about work, how it's changing and how people's attitudes are changing towards it and I've been fascinated that the way I've felt about work for several years now is finally becoming more accepted and mainstream. Work is what makes the other things I want to do possible and I've not cared about having a "career" (what that word means is a bit of a mystery to me) for quite some time.
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What solves all of these problems—the high return rates, the cost-prohibitive last-mile freight, the logistics nightmares, the buyer frustration, and the monumental volume of consumer waste it all sends to landfills—on some level? Stores. Going to a store.
We are go to the store people. I know, we're weird. But the utter waste of having something shipped to me when I could very likely get it at a store within a 20 minute drive stops me from the online ordering. And here's the thing, it's not that bad to go to a store and it gets one out of the house.
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I had miscalculated the tools of adulthood when I was young, or I had miscalculated the kind of adult I would be. I had taken my cues from Edith Wharton novels and Merchant Ivory films. I had taken my cues from my best friend’s father.
I felt much of what Patchett says in this essay in my soul. For many years we hauled around things that we were given earlier in our lives or that we'd bought thinking it was a good idea at the time. During our last major move that changed and I realized when reading Patchett's words that it was then that I accepted the life I have (and quite like, thank you) and let go of the things that were my younger self's idea of what my life would be or were the ideas of other people.
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The quantitative nature of Thoreau’s deconstruction of eudaimonia was radical, and deserves more attention. In our current moment, we should remember in particular the role of disruption in this intellectual journey. It’s hard to account for the cost of voluntary work if you’re tangled in a cultural context where everyone is getting and spending. Thoreau needed to retreat to a deliberate existence in which the voluntary was rendered obviously voluntarily—only then could he obtain the distance necessary to accurately account for these extra efforts. The Venetian blinds don’t truly feel optional until you’re living in a cabin that cost only twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents.
A bit funny to link to an article about consumer culture and this one that is talking about realizing how much you really need to be happy and raises the question if working long hours to have a lot of stuff is necessary. I acknowledge the privilege that's implicit in asking the question, but as I've found when changing the focus of my own life, it can come across as exceptional to not have all the latest things and to pair down your life.
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In other words, rather than helping us get our own selves out of the way so we can truly attend to others, these platforms encourage us to create thicker selves and to shore them up — defensively, competitively — against other selves we perceive as better off.
Nothing was very shocking in this article, but I found the philosophy underpinnings interesting while at the same time the entire thing made me a bit sad.
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Not an article, but a link to a relatively short podcast series about wildfire in the west, created by Montana Public Radio and The University of Montana School of Business. I've been reading and listening to a lot of things about wildfire over the course of the past 11 months or so, mostly because a wildfire started just blocks from my house last September and took out 2500 structures in my area, so I've been trying to understand what it means for us and where we live. This podcast series is, by far, the best thing I've read or listened to on the subject. The host is empathetic, curious, and he talks to a wide range of people and takes on a lot of the complex issues surrounding the current situation. There are no easy answers, but I highly recommend giving this a listen if you want a better understanding of not only how we got here, but also how we can all live with fire going forward.
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This is not a feature of a healthy society. Even before the pandemic pushed things to further extremes, the primacy of consumer identity made customer-service interactions particularly conflagratory. Being corrected by a salesperson, forgotten by a bartender, or brushed off by a flight attendant isn’t just an annoyance—for many people, it is an existential threat to their self-understanding.
I found the history in this article really interesting and also the way in which consuming has become so central to so many identities. I'm not sure it's the only reason people are awful these days, but it's probably part of it.
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The United States government—whether controlled by Democrats, with their love of too-complicated-by-half, means-tested policy solutions; or Republicans, with their love of paperwork-as-punishment; or both, with their collective neglect of the implementation and maintenance of government programs—has not just given up on making benefits easy to understand and easy to receive. It has in many cases purposefully made the system difficult, shifting the burden of public administration onto individuals and discouraging millions of Americans from seeking aid. The government rations public services through perplexing, unfair bureaucratic friction. And when people do not get help designed for them, well, that is their own fault.
A must read on the problems with our programs and systems in this country, we punish those that need help, making it very difficult for them to get it. Other countries don't work this way. I often wonder how many people don't even realize that it doesn't have to be this way.
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Remote work lays bare many brutal inefficiencies and problems that executives don’t want to deal with because they reflect poorly on leaders and those they’ve hired. Remote work empowers those who produce and disempowers those who have succeeded by being excellent diplomats and poor workers, along with those who have succeeded by always finding someone to blame for their failures. It removes the ability to seem productive (by sitting at your desk looking stressed or always being on the phone), and also, crucially, may reveal how many bosses and managers simply don’t contribute to the bottom line.
My experience with remote work is that it's so much easier to see who's productive and who's not. When you're judged based on the work and the work alone, not how well you can get along in an office, it also brings a new level of confidence for folks who may lack it and lays bear those we are all talk.
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But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.
This is an older post (based on the date in the url) but it's still quite relevant. And it brings up something I've been thinking about a lot with all the talk of shifting how people work post pandemic and so many people taking breaks and looking to change their work lives, but what happens if we all decide to make less so we can't spend as much and therefore we aren't helping to prop up this system? Personally, I'm spending a lot less, as I slow down for a bit, and I can't help but wonder how our system keeps going if a lot more people do that.