Tuesday, April 28, 2015

The Dvorak Countdown

Today being my reverse Sabbath day, I had to see if Dvorak was on my computer already, something I had been avoiding because of a vague dread that somehow all the websites were wrong and my computer somehow uniquely did not have it.  It's not something I stopped and thought about; it just flitting in and then out of my mind, as do so many of blocks that cause us to procrastinate -- many, many are just phantoms of the mind.

Well, it's there.




I have been doing lessons on this site, focusing just on the home row (which accounts for 70% of all the strokes I'll be making in the system).  On the first day of the summer, I am making the switch . . . total cold turkey at that point.  

Cold turkey is going to be necessary because now that I am over the initial feeling of terrible discomfort (something that really only lasted 30 minutes), I am on to a type of intermediate hell where it's not what I'm learning that is the problem, but instead my old habits.  Since I am doing so much of my typing in regular 'ol qwerty, I keep retrenching where the "s" and "d" keys are in qwerty. I can tell that a very large part of my mastery of Dvorak will be un-learning those key keys (and key key combinations).  Also, I will just have practice, practice, practice until the new keys become a matter of muscle memory.  

This step is perhaps the most important in developing compassion.  After all, this step means that intellectually know what you should be doing, but your old habits keep zapping you.  So, let's take the case of a young person trying to be responsible, or even ethical.  Just because they "know better" really isn't enough.  I need to give someone trying at least as long as it takes me to get my key strokes right on this new typing system.  

And probably longer.

Monday, April 27, 2015

An Unspeakable Dream

As much I love the site Early Retirement Extreme, I have noticed that it really unsettles people when I talk about being retired at the age of 40.  My first instinct is to want to say, "hey, listen, Jacob at ERE was able to to retire at the age of 30.  I mean, come on,  I'm committing myself to working 10 years more that!"

But I have found that in communication -- especially when the stakes are highest -- your first instinct is usually wrong.

One trick I have found is to not talk about "retirement," but self-employment.  And while you, fair reader, could stretch the meaning of word "employment," in my case it is actually strictly speaking true. I want to plan on working on average 8 hours a week to get money to pay my expenses.  This will allow my money to compound in case an emergency comes up, and as insurance against infirmity.

I set the number at 8 hours on the theory I am probably half as smart as Jacob at ERE (article on his 4 hour work week), and hugely less cunning and self-promoting than life-hacker extraordinaire Tim Ferris (look up the 4 Hour Work Week for yourself; the dude has enough links).

Another way to speak of my dream is to speak of it as an unspeakable dream.  This has become the euphemism of choice around our household.

I am well on track for my unspeakable dream of bumming around with some causal work thrown in self-employment by 40.

Saturday, April 25, 2015

Dvorak

I am starting to learn the Dvorak typing system, which is a typing system with the most commonly used keys on the "home row."

I'm not learning it for speed.  I am already a good touch-typist, able to freak kids out by rapidly typing things they say on the screen while scanning the classroom and making eye-contact with the kids.  If you're already good at typing, then the Dvorak method doesn't promise to dramatically increase your typing speed.

I decided to make the Dvorak switch for 3 reasons:

1.) For joint health.  The efficiency of the key placement means your hands move a great deal less over the course of a typing session, and thus over the months and years it can save miles of hand movement.

2.) To go awkward-feeling steps in learning.  This one sounds counter-intuitive, but anything you learn is going to have these steps, so I think everyone should learn to become comfortable with being uncomfortable toward greater learning goals.  In my profession as a teacher, it is especially important to experience learning awkwardness so you can have more compassion for your students who are learning.

3.) It give me a knew field of things to learn and play around with.  Such as this video:


So because of Dvorak, I have discovered the engineerguy Youtube channel, which I imagine will serve me well as I try to develop skills with mechanics and building.

This benefit should not be minimized.  One of the reasons to do something like learn is so you can find new sites you never would have been able to find otherwise.  More and more frontiers open, whether it is Dvorak or Dutch, and you never know where it will lead.  And that is a big part of the joy.

Update
I now type in Dvorak and have to search and peck (more or less) whenever I am stuck on a QWERTY keyboard.  But, yeah, I love Dvorak, and probably find it worth investing all the time (and awkwardness) over the summer to learn.

Slow Carb is Dead, Long Live the Diet

180.6

I'm off the slow carb diet.  At least the way I was doing it, it made me too spacey and cranky (bad combination).  I suppose I should have ate a lot more beans, and probably should have tried to re-experiment with fasting until 3:30.  Life and learn.

Two other factors: 1.) slow carb caused some friction with my wife about the places we could eat and what I could make for dinner and 2.) I have grown to hate most meats at most restaurants, so there was a gross out factor that kept plaguing me these last two weeks.  Trying to figure out what and where to eat with a brain not working right and getting increasingly frustrated with

I have in the past lost a lot of weight under the slow-carb rules, and so that was why I wanted to to do it again, but I have also lost weight simply going 6 days a week on 1,300 calories, and then a free day.  My numbers show the slow-carb diet was faster at getting weight loss, but quality of life has to play into this decision as well.

I really want to crack 177.  This is the weight at which I would usually start diets in college.  Several times that weight became my "wake up call."  When I weighed 200 pounds, I thought with sadness how long it would take to even get back to that number.  I think it would be great -- very motivating -- to be below that number again.   That's why I was willing to slow carb again, and even deal with a little pain.  But it was getting ridiculous, and I can't afford to be mean as a teacher or husband.



Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Reverse Sabbath

Ever since writing about an idea I had read, I have been experimenting with what I am calling now "a reverse Sabbath."  This doesn't mean I work only day and completely rest the other days (I wish).  Instead, I concentrate into one day a week every thing I have not been working on, especially what I have been feeling guilty about not doing.  


Monday, April 20, 2015

Slow Carb: After 1st Free Day

182

My new strategy is to go a little nuts . . .

Today I ate 4-5 almonds every hour, starting when I got to school.  This kept down hunger pretty well, something I noticed as a problem last week when I was trying to fast until 3:30.

I was also able to try to re-start greasing the groove for push-ups, something I had unfortunately let slide during the last part of the debate season.  By coupling the push-ups with the eating, I actually got it done.

Only 5 a set for, so I can get into the habit.

Added: Reading in 3 Foreign Languages

I have made 3 additions to my bucket list: being able to read smoothly in Spanish, Dutch, and French.  So that establishes who will do it, but let's go through some of those other W-5 and H questions. . .

What?


I will define reading smoothly as being able to understand on sight 98% of the words on pages aimed at average adults.  I know from Spanish that once you hit that 98% point, you actually can figure out most of the words by context, or at least get through the text with one or two quick glances at a dictionary.  Anything below that is pretty much tortuous for me.  I don't have a personal tolerance for the not-knowing.

Wikipedia articles are a good benchmark.  Novels for a general audience (not classics or "literary works") also fit.  Though I want to read some classics, that kind of reading is usually very arduous, even for languages where you are a native speaker.


How 


When I finish my 1,000,000 word challenge in Spanish, I am going to cross it off the list.  I am probably at the 98% level in reading right now, but I am going to hold crossing off a finished goal as motivation for my challenge.

I have a large personal library of Spanish books and the public library has a good selection as well.  Finding interesting stuff to read, even more my picky tastes, is not that difficult at all.

I own 7 physical books in French, and will let myself supplement that number when I get to French.  Also, by some miracle, I own 3 printed books in Dutch.  Lastly, there is quite a bit of good materials available for free online in all three languages.

Since I have an obsession with thinking about methods, and organizing those thoughts, I will present the extended version of my plans:

First, while finishing the previous language, I start playing with the next one on Memrise.  I find the only thing I like there is the "no typing courses."  When I hit the winter of feeling comfortable with a language, I will switch to  doing a tweaked version of Iverson's wordlist method.  I did a trial run with it on some Dutch words, and found it much more time efficient, or least far more pleasant, than doing a memrise course that requires typing.  Also, it should be noted that my goal is really reading only -- I want the best version of people's ideas and I have no desire to pump more small-talk into the world, especially in another tongue.  With enough words, you really start puzzling out texts, even if your grammar is far shakier.

After 5,000 or so words in this method, combined with 2,000-3,000 words and sentences from Memrise, I will start reading parallel texts as soon, moving up from children's literature to more and more authentic, grown-up texts.  I am going to do this first in Dutch, then in French.

When


As long as it takes.  If my wife and I have a child, then my focus will clearly be elsewhere.  So I estimate that this could take 10 years at the maximum, and 2 and a half at a minimum.  We'll see.

Where


Just at home.  I really don't like travel.  I wont be chatting online.  I will keep getting conversation practice in Spanish, so I do plan on being bilingual, but after that I am only working toward being poly-literate.

Why? 


It's fun.  It's good for the brain, and looks as impressive as nearly any of the other bucket-list goals.

No, seriously, why Dutch?  


I heard it was easy for an English speaker to learn, so I have played with it in the past and saw I liked it.  One thing I really dig is how the "g" makes a very phlegmy "hhhuuu" sound.  I like how Dutch has more agglutination than English (without going all agglutination crazy), and I like how it as least gives me a taste of the Germanic side our language (and sure, I might learn other Germanic languages one day as well).

Dutch is a really fun language that deserves some of my play-time.


Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Slow Carb, Day 2

180.8

Wow.  It always amazes me when I get that initial burst of water-weight lost.  It also shows that I had been doing a better job treading-water on my weight than I had thought.  This gives me hope that after this month's slow carb push I might be able to keep my weight in a normal range simply "adjusting my relationship with food."

Todays' pre-dinner snack was chard from cooked in garlic and butter, followed by me using the same pan to fry two eggs with dandelions and onion greens . . . from the garden.

Monday, April 13, 2015

Slow Carb-ing Again. Day 1.

185.6 pounds

This time my slow carb experience is going to have several tweaks:

First, on my Sunday "free days" I will still not allow myself any simple sugars.  I have found that on weeks where my "free days" don't get to 4,000 calories, I lose weight quicker, which makes a lot of sense.  Without sugars my free days shouldn't spin out of control.

Secondly, my lunch is going to go back to "the set point" diet of two spoons of extra-light olive oil and then coffee.  (The coffee around the time of the oil might not be technically allowed, but I found that it was fine the last time I was doing the set-point diet).

Thirdly, I have a better at-home quantity of vegetables and foragable weeds than ever.  Today, I came home and made a huge salad of arugula leaves and flowers.  I made a delightful balsamic vinaigrette for it, with enough left over that I went casting about for more greens: making a second bowl-sized salad with clover and a bit more arugula.  Tomorrow, I can make a salad with lettuce and radish, or wilt chard greens, or soak enough mint to get enough leaves for a large salad.  This will be a lovely experiment in getting enough fiber.

The Abolition of Work

This is a piece by Bob Black.   Though I really don't find the politics or the life of Bob Black to be for me, I agree with 95% (or so) of this particular piece.   It is not under copyright, so I have copied it here:

==================


No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of the same debased coin.

The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for "reality," the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously -- or maybe not -- all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.

You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn't have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn't triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I'd like life to be a game -- but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.

The alternative to work isn't just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, it's never more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I promoting the managed time-disciplined safety-valve called "leisure"; far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is the time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacation so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation.

I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it's done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or "Communist," work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.

Usually -- and this is even more true in "Communist" than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee -- work is employment, i. e., wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In the USSR or Cuba or Yugoslavia or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions -- Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey -- temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millenia, the payment of taxes (= ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.

But modern work has worse implications. People don't just work, they have "jobs." One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don't) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A "job" that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who -- by any rational-technical criteria -- should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.

The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as "discipline." Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace -- surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching -in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn't have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.

Such is "work." Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the "suspension of consequences." This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; that's why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens),define it as game-playing or following rules. I respect Huizinga's erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel -- these practices aren't rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be played with at least as readily as anything else.

Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.
And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately deStalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. 

A worker is a part time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?

The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it.

We are so close to the world of work that we can't see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the "work ethic" would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labeled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed, the Calvinist cranks notwithstanding, until overthrown by industrialism -- but not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets.

Let's pretend for a moment that work doesn't turn people into stultified submissives. Let's pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And let's pretend that work isn't as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would still make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do we keep looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. But workers do. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!"

Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that "whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves." His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed "to regain the lost power and health." Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to "St. Monday" -- thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecration -- was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancient regime wrested substantial time back from their landlord's work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants' calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov's figures from villages in Czarist Russia -- hardly a progressive society -- likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants' days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.

To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes' compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of life -- in North America, particularly -- but already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than Germans climb the Berlin Wall from the west.) The "survival of the fittest" version -- the Thomas Huxley version -- of Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientist -- a geographer -- who'd had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled "The Original Affluent Society." They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that "hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society." They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were "working" at all. Their "labor," as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schiller's definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full "play" to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. As he put it: "The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity." (A modern version -- dubiously developmental -- is Abraham Maslow's counterposition of "deficiency" and "growth" motivation.) Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that "the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required." He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work -- it's rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work -- but we can.

The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial Europe, among them M. Dorothy George's England In Transition and Peter Burke's Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Also pertinent is Daniel Bell's essay, "Work and its Discontents," the first text, I believe, to refer to the "revolt against work" in so many words and, had it been understood, an important correction to the complacency ordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, The End of Ideology. Neither critics nor celebrants have noticed that Bell's end-of-ideology thesis signaled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology. It was Seymour Lipset (in Political Man), not Bell, who announced at the same time that "the fundamental problems of the Industrial Revolution have been solved," only a few years before the post- or meta-industrial discontents of college students drove Lipset from UC Berkeley to the relative (and temporary) tranquility of Harvard.

As Bell notes, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, for all his enthusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smith's modern epigones. As Smith observed: "The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized, unorganizable malaise of the 1970's and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEW's report Work in America, the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. That problem is the revolt against work. It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economist -- Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner -- because, in their terms, as they used to say on Star Trek, "it does not compute."

If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others which they cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words. Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are killed annually in this country on the job. Over two million are disabled. Twenty to twenty-five million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus they don't count the half million cases of occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases which was 1,200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die every year, a much higher fatality rate than for AIDS, for instance, which gets so much media attention. This reflects the unvoiced assumption that AIDS afflicts perverts who could control their depravity whereas coal-mining is a sacrosanct activity beyond question. What the statistics don't show is that tens of millions of people have heir lifespans shortened by work -- which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their 50's. Consider all the other workaholics.

Even if you aren't killed or crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of auto-industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly, or indirectly, to work.

Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing -- or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.

Bad news for liberals: regulatory tinkering is useless in this life-and-death context. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration was designed to police the core part of the problem, workplace safety. Even before Reagan and the Supreme Court stifled it, OSHA was a farce. At previous and (by current standards) generous Carter-era funding levels, a workplace could expect a random visit from an OSHA inspector once every 46 years.

State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything, more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here. Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow subway. Stories reverberate about covered-up Soviet nuclear disasters which make Times Beach and Three-Mile Island look like elementary-school air-raid drills. On the other hand, deregulation, currently fashionable, won't help and will probably hurt. From a health and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days when the economy most closely approximated laissez-faire.

Historians like Eugene Genovese have argued persuasively that -- as antebellum slavery apologists insisted -- factory wage-workers in the Northern American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats and businessmen seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious enforcement of even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill. The enforcers apparently appreciate this, since they don't even try to crack down on most malefactors.

What I've said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are fed up with work. There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work. And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also widespread among workers themselves is that work itself is inevitable and necessary.
I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes, except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that shouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.

I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing, and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkeys and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes.

Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the "tertiary sector," the service sector, is growing while the "secondary sector" (industry) stagnates and the "primary sector" (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That's why you can't go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn't the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the past fifty years?

Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant -- and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model-T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend on is out of the question. Already, without even trying, we've virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.

Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks around. I refer to housewives doing housework and child-rearing. By abolishing wage-labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor. The nuclear family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of labor imposed by modern wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been for the last century or two it is economically rational for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork to provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called "schools," primarily to keep them out of Mom's hair but still under control, but incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers. 

If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of the nuclear family whose unpaid "shadow work," as Ivan Illich says, makes possible the work-system that makes it necessary. Bound up with this no-nukes strategy is the abolition of childhood and the closing of the schools. There are more full-time students than full-time workers in this country. We need children as teachers, not students. They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because they're better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge the generation gap.

I haven't as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence would have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly they'll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps they'll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies. Perhaps. I myself am no gadget freak. I wouldn't care to live in a pushbutton paradise. I don't want robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labor-saving inventions ever devised haven't saved a moment's labor. Karl Marx wrote that "it would be possible to write a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class." The enthusiastic technophiles -- Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B. F. Skinner -- have always been unabashed authoritarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more than sceptical about the promises of the computer mystics. They work like dogs; chances are, if they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any particularized contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, let's give them a hearing.

What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.

The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I don't want coerced students and I don't care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure.

Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy baby-sitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile, profoundly appreciate the time to themselves that you free up for them, although they'd get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when they're just fueling up human bodies for work.

Third -- other things being equal -- some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed. This is probably true, to some extent, of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can. 

Activities that appeal to some people don't always appeal to all others, but everyone at least potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety. As the saying goes, "anything once." Fourier was the master at speculating how aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to use in post-civilized society, what he called Harmony. He thought the Emperor Nero would have turned out all right if as a child he could have indulged his taste for bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse. Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organized in "Little Hordes" to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding. I am not arguing for these precise examples but for the underlying principle, which I think makes perfect sense as one dimension of an overall revolutionary transformation. Bear in mind that we don't have to take today's work just as we find it and match it up with the proper people, some of whom would have to be perverse indeed. If technology has a role in all this it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation. To some extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morris considered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution. Art would be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as a specialized department catering to an elite audience, and its qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from which they were stolen by work. It's a sobering thought that the grecian urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store olive oil. I doubt our everyday artifacts will fare as well in the future, if there is one. The point is that there's no such thing as progress in the world of work; if anything it's just the opposite. We shouldn't hesitate to pilfer the past for what it has to offer, the ancients lose nothing yet we are enriched.

The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps. There is, it is true, more suggestive speculation than most people suspect. Besides Fourier and Morris -- and even a hint, here and there, in Marx -- there are the writings of Kropotkin, the syndicalists Pataud and Pouget, anarcho-communists old (Berkman) and new (Bookchin). The Goodman brothers' Communitas is exemplary for illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to be gleaned from the often hazy heralds of alternative/appropriate/intermediate/convivial technology, like Schumacher and especially Illich, once you disconnect their fog machines. The situationists -- as represented by Vaneigem's Revolution of Daily Life and in the Situationist International Anthology -- are so ruthlessly lucid as to be exhilarating, even if they never did quite square the endorsement of the rule of the worker's councils with the abolition of work. Better their incongruity, though than any extant version of leftism, whose devotees look to be the last champions of work, for if there were no work there would be no workers, and without workers, who would the left have to organize?

So the abolitionists would be largely on their own. No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. The tiresome debater's problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values is coextensive with the consumption of delightful play-activity.

Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not -- as it is now - -- a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play, The participants potentiate each other's pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.

No one should ever work. Workers of the world... relax!

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Close . . .

Yesterday, I had a student finish second at state in the event of domestic extemp.

Very close to crossing something off the bucket list.

Update: the next year I coached the state championship team in Public Forum Debate.  I am now doing other things with my life.

Saturday, April 11, 2015

A Slow-Carber Again

Now that the debate season is over, I am going to go back to the best method I have found for weight loss: the slow carb diet.

Starting Monday, I am going to go 6 days a week, basically with no carbs other than beans (this includes fruit. . . only vegetables).  Then one day I week, I am going to allow carbs into the diet.  However, since I am trying to have no refined sugar until next February, that will be out days.  So, just pasta and rice to fill the "free days."

I am going to try it for a month and see how it goes, with two months being my maximum until I switch into another procedure.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Yet Another Take on Beating Procrastination

This one has cartoons and more colorful language.

Part 1: Causes of Procrastination

Part 2: How to beat Procrastination

I think the advice is solid, but I would tweek the following passage:

No one “builds a house.” They lay one brick again and again and again and the end result is a house. Procrastinators are great visionaries—they love to fantasize about the beautiful mansion they will one day have built—but what they need to be are gritty construction workers, who methodically lay one brick after the other, day after day, without giving up, until a house is built.
Nearly every big undertaking can be boiled down to a core unit of progress—its brick. A 45-minute gym visit is the brick of getting in great shape. A 30-minute practice session is the brick of becoming a great guitarist.
As sad as it might be, sometimes 30 minutes can be too daunting of a block.  Maybe that was just me when I was depressed, but depressed people need the help the most.  So, 30 minutes is a good block when you're rolling, but when completely starting, cut the task down into as small a piece as it takes to get self-compliance.

The piece sorta misses an important point: it is possible to make the task such a small piece that it doesn't even feel bad at all to do.  And then, most of the time, you can associate something you like with that small piece, getting you through the crucial first step in an enjoyable fashion.  After that, momentum often will carry you through.

Still, overall, I think it was a great post.  If you are having problems with procrastination, you should do 5 sit ups and then read the post, and then do another small productive task, and then work on planning to follow its advice.

Monday, April 6, 2015

Yahtzee: a Solved Game

Yahtzee, it's a fun dice game.  If backgammon is in the sweet-spot of skills and luck (which I believe it is) then Yahtzee moves a little more into the luck category, which can be good for drumming up a game.  In Yahtzee if you roll a Yahtzee and no one else does, you're probably going to win.  If you roll two Yahtzees and no one matches it, you ARE going to win.  So the game is really play slots with someone, trying to see who can get the jackpot.

In the other circumstances, when the Yahtzees equalize out (often at no one getting one) there are some important choices to make that can impact competitive equity.  And if you find yourself playing a lot of Yahtzee, realize that those decisions can be objectively rated, and the game can be studied.

Yahtzee, at least in terms of going for the highest score you can is a solved game, meaning all of the combinations have been calculated.

If one wanted to (and I'm not sure I do; I have a lot of gaming interests going at any one time,) then it would be a simple matter to find an implementation of the Optimal Yahtzee Player and use it to figure out "reference points" for certain kinds of common decisions.  If you pick the right ones, you will have the "borderline cases" memorized so that you not only get those decisions right, but you will also know what to do in cases stronger and weaker.

With all that said, if you opponent rolls two unmatched Yahtzees, then you are going to lose.  But learning itself is fun, and it is often nice to do learning play (it's not really work, now is it?) in the space of games because there can be more objective progress, even if you don't necessarily win more games immediately.

I might be talking myself into studying Yahtzee when I get more time, maybe over the Summer Break.

Update:

Nope.  This is a popular post for some reason, though. . .

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Another Take on Beating Procrastination

This is one is from the site One Hundred Dollars a Month. 

It looks pretty basic, but that might reach someone.  One potentially new idea worth experimenting with:

Set aside one non-procrastination day.  It’s the day you don’t get to do any procrastinating.  Period.  If you get enough done in that one day, you may be able to slack off guilt-free for the rest of the week.

I like it.   I think that in one day a person can clean up a lot of little "mosquito tasks."  A nice, general rule taken from the Getting Things Done universe is to work on any item that comes to your attention that would take five minutes or less to do. 

Another winkle to experiment with: work for five minutes on anything that comes to your attention.  If a monster projects comes up, even just to your mind, work on a 5 minute slice of it.

Here's the rub: this process would have to be exhausting.  I find all time management to be susceptible to this problem.  But that's the beauty of limiting this kind of procedure to only one day.  I like the set-up of 1 day for no-procrastination, 5 days for a more normal balance of work and play and 1 day of rest.

Update
I now call doing this a "reverse Sabbath."