vitellan > Recent Status Updates

"As a species, being constrained by the past makes us less perfectly adjusted to the present we know but helps keep us robust for the future we don’t."

"When you’re designing your Imperial Galactic incinerator, or any other technology, don’t just throw in a convenient way to put your hero in mortal peril. Imagine you’re the system’s designer (which you are) and design it properly. Then come up with a more convincing way to threaten your protagonist." For the same reason, Rogue One was a valuable retcon.

"the basic private pilot’s license is bound by visual flight rules, which only allows for flight within sight of the land and with clear visibility. The next stage of training is the instrument rating, which, as the name implies, trains the pilot to rely on the instruments in the cockpit rather than believing his eyes. Flying in space is a lot like flying in cloud. You have no point of reference..."

Also deeply enjoying this chapter: "piloting a spaceship looks suspiciously similar to a video game. The pilot isn’t focused on computers and instruments but reliant on fast hand-eye coordination and quick thinking. Space flight is all about the maneuverability, as our trusty pilot stares out the windows to see what’s coming.
If there’s a fleet, they are all oriented the same way up and neatly lined up."

The cutest presentation of the theory of relativity I've read to date...

"Guilt, you may be thinking warily. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to feel? But guilt doesn’t go anywhere near far enough; the appropriate emotion is shame—shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others."

"So if low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in any way democratic. When you enter the low-wage workplace—and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well—you check your civil liberties at the door..."

"What surprised and offended me most about the low-wage workplace (and yes, here all my middle-class privilege is on full display) was the extent to which one is required to surrender one’s basic civil rights and—what boils down to the same thing—self-respect."

"actual humans experience a little more “friction” than marbles do, and the poorer they are, the more constrained their mobility usually is."

"the choice of food as the basis for calculating family budgets seems fairly arbitrary today; we might as well abolish poverty altogether, at least on paper, by defining a subsistence budget as some multiple of average expenditures on comic books or dental floss."

"But the real question is not how well I did at work but how well I did at life in general, which includes eating and having a place to stay. The fact that these are two separate questions needs to be underscored right away."

"a lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness. You feel it coming on halfway through a shift or later, and you can interpret it the normal way as a symptom of a kind of low-level illness, curable with immediate rest. Or you can interpret it another way, as a reminder of the hard work you’ve done so far and hence as evidence of how much you are still capable of doing"

"It’s a lot harder, I found, to sort out a human microsystem when you’re looking up at it from the bottom, and, of course, a lot more necessary to do so."

"When a Wal-Mart shows up within a television within a Wal-Mart, you have to question the existence of an outer world."

"“The stronger the economy, the stronger the upward pressure on rents.” So I’m a victim not of poverty but of prosperity. The rich and the poor, who are generally thought to live in a state of harmonious interdependence—the one providing cheap labor, the other providing low-wage jobs—can no longer coexist."

"First you are an applicant, then suddenly you are an orientee. You’re handed the application form and, a few days later, you’re being handed the uniform and warned against nose rings and stealing. There’s no intermediate point in the process in which you confront the potential employer as a free agent, entitled to cut her own deal."

"Now, my approach to preemployment personality tests has been zero tolerance vis-à-vis the obvious “crimes”—drug use and theft—but to leave a little wriggle room elsewhere, just so it doesn’t look like I’m faking out the test. My approach was wrong. When presenting yourself as a potential employee, you can never be too much of a suck-up."

"Work is supposed to save you from being an “outcast,” as Pete puts it, but what we do is an outcast’s work, invisible and even disgusting. Janitors, cleaning ladies, ditchdiggers, changers of adult diapers—these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste-free and democratic society."

"What is this assumption that the hungry are free all day to drive around visiting “community action centers” and charitable agencies?"

"True, I don’t look so good by the end of the day and probably smell like eau de toilet and sweat, but it’s the brilliant green-and-yellow uniform that gives me away, like prison clothes on a fugitive. Maybe, it occurs to me, I’m getting a tiny glimpse of what it would be like to be black." Wowowowowowow.

"the “right” answers should be obvious to anyone who has ever encountered the principle of hierarchy and subordination. Do I work well with others? You bet, but never to the point where I would hesitate to inform on them for the slightest infraction. Am I capable of independent decision making? Oh yes, but I know better than to let this capacity interfere with a slavish obedience to orders..."

"Educated middle-class professionals never go careening half-cocked into the future, vulnerable to any surprise that might leap out at them. We always have a plan or at least a to-do list; we like to know that everything has been anticipated, that our lives are, in a sense, pre-lived."

"I don’t know why the antismoking crusaders have never grasped the element of defiant self-nurturance that makes the habit so endearing to its victims—as if, in the American workplace, the only thing people have to call their own is the tumors they are nourishing and the spare moments they devote to feeding them."

"There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs."

"Slowing down the rate of our connections, rather than collecting people like they’re business cards or stamps, and making those connections deeper and more meaningful, luxuriating in them, is itself a step toward liberation."

"The neoliberal era’s expansion of the sports industry seems to both reflect and be reflected in its political conversations. Pro athletes are sponsored by companies ranging from Wheaties to Nike to Visa; politicians, meanwhile, use sporting metaphors for everything they possibly can. That sports are not, in fact, anything like real life doesn’t seem to matter."

"Mark Zuckerberg also has a plan to bring in lots of short-term workers from overseas. His immigration nonprofit, FWD.us, was created to lobby for immigration reform. That sounded nice in the age of Trump, but Zuckerberg’s main concern was increasing the number of H1-B guestworker visas for skilled workers." Oof.

"With the feeling of autonomy comes the feeling that long work hours are a choice; they become a status symbol rather than a sign of unfreedom."

"Gamification is almost the antithesis of “playbor”—a way to pretend that the same old backbreaking manual work is “fun,” a game you can win."

"There’s an app for that, and the app’s founders have no doubt been breathlessly hailed as technical geniuses, even though their real innovation is finding new ways to skirt labor laws. The result has been the gig economy—a patchwork of short-term non-jobs performed by nonemployees who are barely getting by." Really the summary of this book.