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I feel like one of the issues with economic malaise is pretty clearly the fact that if you look at 1826 -> 1876 -> 1926 -> 1976 -> 2026, every one of these 50 year periods saw a massive, qualitative, jump in quality of life, except the last one

Like the Internet and computing haven't delivered the kinds of gains of previous industrial revolutions, and welfare politics kind of stalled out

The remaining big problems that I think we can solve, and haven't really been solving: 1. Reducing work hours 2. Reducing the influence of disruptive corporate processes on people's lives 3. Allowing people to live where they want

Working hours are reduced, it has just been obscured by the fact that we transitioned from hourly labor to salaries. In a factory, eight hours was eight hours. With white collar salaried work, you can do only shopping at work and “W”FH on Fridays and duck out for doctors’ appointments and get…

…sucked into dumb Bluesky threads on company time and even get sucked off on company time if you play your Grindr cards right.

erosion of boundary between work and non-work goes both ways tho. clock out at the factory job and you're done. a lot (not all) of white collar jobs can hit you with the emergency email at 8pm on a saturday that requires you to suddenly log back in

Real trick here is get a government job ;) but yeah my work from home days still feel like work because if I step away for more than a few minutes and get a call from my boss I’m in trouble.

I mean it’s work, don’t get me wrong, but I often cook and clean during meetings where I’m not expected to talk much, so I’m not doing meal prep for work outside of my work week (which in some ways less than 40 hours a week but in other ways is way more, since I think a lot about work outside of…