The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing.
Readit Newsranprieur commented on Why an abundance of choice is not the same as freedom aeon.co/essays/why-an-abu... · Posted by u/herbertl
Because he's jealous?
A great book on this subject is In The Absence of the Sacred by Jerry Mander. He argues convincingly that the correct biological metaphor for technological progress is not evolution, but inbreeding. We are turning our attention more and more into worlds of our own construction.
Still, there's a lot of cool technology out there, and a lot of room to use it better.
ranprieur commented on The year of peak might and magic filfre.net/2025/07/the-ye... · Posted by u/cybersoyuz
I agree with the author: Heroes II is my favorite of the series, just for the innocent vibe. Also, Heroes IV is underrated. It got bad reviews because it came out buggy, but the bugs were fixed in updates, and of all the HOMM games, it has the best soundtrack.
ranprieur commented on Successful people set constraints rather than chasing goals joanwestenberg.com/smart-... · Posted by u/MaysonL
I like this idea, but my problem is with the word "successful". Setting constraints rather than chasing goals leads to doing interesting things. But there's no guarantee you'll ever be recognized or rewarded.
I think a lot of harm has been caused by "automation" actually meaning "distributing parts of the same tasks among a bunch of people". As far as I can tell that's one of the main outcomes of "efficiencies" from computerization of offices, among other places: they mostly just made it feasible to carve up the job of e.g. secretary among everybody, adding to the number of things and processes each worker has to understand and deal with.
"Efficiency" is selfishness. It's a word for when people in power want to give less and get more.
ranprieur commented on How friction is being redistributed in today's economy kyla.substack.com/p/the-m... · Posted by u/walterbell
Key sentence: "When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break."
ranprieur commented on Observations from people-watching skincontact.substack.com/... · Posted by u/jger15
There's some good stuff here, but some of it is just wrong. Sometimes the person with the loudest laugh is laughing the most authentically.
Other writings about this: A book chapter, The Currency of Cooperation: https://ascentofhumanity.com/text/chapter-7-02/
And a short piece about Brakteaten money: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Brakteaten_Money