Wednesday, 10/21/2020

23:35 in praise of idleness

bertrand russell http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

there is far too much work done, and the belief that work is virtuous causes immense harm!

it is not necessary for all of us to be idle and to fill ourselves; a man earns and spends, and in spending he gives employment

the man who lends his money to the government is no better than the murderers of those people

in industrial enterprises, hen these operations succeed the money is well spent; otherwise, these enterprises fail, wasting a lot of human labor in the process. (note: i question what is 'failure' and what is 'worthwhile' here)

a great deal of harm is done strictly because of the belief in virtuous work, and the road to prosperity leads to eliminating it. work is:

• altering matter

• telling others to do so

• land ownership: others pay for the privilege to exist and work. their idleness in fact spurns the industry of many others, and their desire for idleness spurns all of this other work!

the second can be indefinitely extended and abstracted duty i just a means for the ohlders of poewr to live in the interests of their masters, but they persuade those under them that they should share these interests labor is still valuable in this framework precisely because leisure is good; to save someone lots of time is worth some work yourself the idea that the poor should have leisure has and always will be shocking to the rich it is unjust that a man consume more than he produces, as he will incur undue labor from another!

other reasons we work:

• the necessity of keeping everyone content while taking care of oneselv

• pleasure in mechamism, in making changes to others and the earth's surface. this feels very 'manifest destiny'

• happy from toil! work should always be considered a necessary means to a livelihood, from which leisure can derive happiness and enjoyment

  a passage on academia being divorced from real life; it's sort of an emulated leisure class, in which academics are expected to produce some fascimile of results in exchange for some grant-funded fascimile of real, productive work to lated be used in exchange with others

local-first software

src motivation boring; collaboration clearly insecure when dependent on owned centralized service 'git is the standard' for how collaboration should be maintained and synchronized

prioritize the use of local storage and networks, as software is just better without a constant reliance on internet! every utility should 'just work' without the need for a constant internet connection, and most services should be started and used without such a connection at all. it's so clear how much error is introduced by any sort of client server model, even if it's the serving of a simple static site

• security and privacy by default

• long lasting, saved now

• retain ultimate ownership and control

CRDTs! conflict free replicated data types, designed to be multi user from the ground up through infrequent network communication; operating on richer data types than just text.

CRDT technology works and developers have great time when working with Functional Reactive Programming especially

perhaps all applications should be designed to be local first!filecoin, golem, libp2p, NAT, relays, wifi offloading, mesh networks

Beaker Browser: a p2p browser scuttlebutt: a simple decentralized social network