Still, every computer I buy comes with Microsoft tax and their OS preinstalled. In all these years I always left a small Windows partition, in case I need it. Never booted it.
Very often misquoted as being a blunt attack on religion, but people often just cut out the second half of the quote --
"opiate of the masses... heart of the heartless world"
Marx was despairing at the heartlessness of the condition of working class people in industrial slums, people one generation or less removed from the flight from rural landless dispossession and starvation into the polluted cities and factories and tiny apartments in slums in search of survival. He saw religion as one tool people used to salve the pain, to reduce the suffering.
Far more complicated than "religion bad, we should ban it, mmkay"
There's probably an analogy here around the "attention economy" and "social media."
Look for root causes. If you turn everything and everyone into a commodity -- "market yourself!" -- don't be surprised when the consumptive model takes over all consciousness.
The commodity form is the [post|hyper]modern religion.
I enjoyed this article and think it's good advice, and I also think that the punchline (title + last sentence) is wrong. Not that it makes a big difference, I just treasure texts more that I feel the author thought through to the last detail.
If you don't design your career, in most cases I guess no one will. In the comments are good examples, like the random walk of the drunken sailor. The cases in which you could use the phrase "someone else designed it for me" in a meaningful way seem rather rare to me.
Stock buying as a political or ethical statement is not much of a thing. For one the stocks will still be bought by persons with less strung opinions, and secondly it does not lend itself well to virtue signaling.
Well, two things lead to unsophisticated risk-taking, right... economic malaise, and unlimited surplus. Both conditions are easy to spot in today's world.
I gave the author a bit more benefit, made it through the part where he describes how some guys impressed him by talking in a way that sounded smart, straight to the interjection that many people subscribed to his whatever in the last years.
Then finally I was convinced enough that this did not sound in any way like what I think intelligently articulated communication sounds, and I also gave up.
As is the sample in this article. You will surely find as many physicists saying earth is flat, mathematicians who hold that Cantor was wrong, and medical doctors that tell you vaccination against measles is overall worse than not.
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