The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.
— Baruch Spinoza, born on this date in 1632
“I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite,—only a sense of existence.” Henry David Thoreau, letter to Harrison Blake, ... read more
We're Hurtling Towards A Post-Job Future (Because There Won't Be Any) What Might That Look Like?- “What would society and civilisation be like if we didn’t have to ‘earn’ a living – if leisure was not our choice but our lot? Would we hang out at the local Starbucks, laptops open? Or volunteer to teach children in less-developed places, such as Mississippi? Or smoke weed and watch reality TV all day? I’m not proposing a fancy thought experiment here. By now these are practical questions because there aren’t enough jobs.”
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Each Age Imagines That Technology Will Make The World Better. There Are Problems With This Idea…
Technological utopianism is always self-aggrandizing. “We stand at the high peak between ages!” the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote in his “Manifeste du Futurisme” in 1909, predicting, among other things, that the Futurist cinema would spell the end of drama and the book. Every other modern era has seen itself in exactly the same way, poised at the brink of an epochal transformation wrought by its newly dominant technology, which, as Carr notes, is always seen as “a benevolent, self-healing, autonomous force […] on the path to the human race’s eventual emancipation.”Think The Critics Decide Whether Or Not You’re An Artist? Nope. It’s The IRS
“It is all well and good to say that artists need to be businesslike, rather than bohemian, but those who want the IRS to accept work-related deductions (price of materials, studio rent and insurance, travel expenses, advertising and promotion, photography, postage, shipping and other costs) on their federal tax returns do not have a choice. Because, if the IRS believes someone isn’t really in business, those deductions will not be allowed.”
Taxing cases on a horizon by Robert Gottliebsen