Shit, let me tell you about my year.

I moved out of my parents' house and arrived in Denver with $2,000. Had some excellent luck finding an apartment right away with no job or parental support. The only job I could get was canvassing - I worked for school board campaigns I didn't care about, signed people up for healthcare as an on street canvasser (that job was the pits) and then ended up working as a delivery driver.

What a slimy job it was. I was 'on contract' meaning I wasn't being paid by the hour. Only tips and delivery fees. The money was good at first - it was winter, after all - but then I came to realize... my taxes are going to be 30%. The restaurant started to slow down. Half of my check was going to rent. I was totally unstable. My income would fluctuate anywhere between $200 - 600 per week because of holidays and city events. After three months of driving I started looking elsewhere, and ways of saving money while still driving.

Jose, one of my co-workers, came to me with a 'business deal'. His housemate wanted to trade his car for a truck so he could do some lawn aeration. He knew I was looking around for car that would get better mileage than my 96 Ford, so I bit. As soon as I made the trade I found out that the odometer had been turned back - so I was stuck with an old Jetta with 200,000+ miles on it. Needless to say I was rageful about it, and it only got worse when the starter burned out one day when I was working. I spent Easter fixing that god damn car. So I threatened to sue. We ended up trading back in exchange for some money since he had done some repairs on my truck. There went my savings. But I managed to get my truck - and thus my job- back.

It was about that time that I was put in contact with a guy who owns an audiobooks studio. He wanted to bring me on the team to do research - basically making sure that place names and proper nouns were being pronounced correctly in their recordings. It was THE job, the ONLY job that my degree is perfectly tailored for (Linguistics). I've always wanted to be a voice actor so it was a natural fit. Then the lady who was supposed to train me, who worked their for 26 YEARS quit without notice and I was let go after half a week's work. Kicked in the dirt, I almost just gave up.

So I was back to doing delivery - this time part time. My finances were running thin. I was looking desperately for work and found some through a friend. While I wasn't delivering food I would sit at the coffee shop next door and work on this project. I made a game for a robotics company that sold for a few thousand. I think if it wasn't for that project and that coffee shop I'd be elsewhere. I've started a business out of it and have some more freelance projects to do.

But the last thing I wanted to do was deliver food. It doesn't pay well and sometimes I'll lose money on a day. Today for example, I've been waiting around for 4 hours and have had two deliveries - four hours for $10. I've been interviewing for months and finally someone is willing to give me a chance.

And I'm starting a new job on MONDAY working at a small company that makes toys.

TOYS :)

I'm expecting my rent to increase ~50% this January and I feel completely cannibalized. Cannibalized by some meager fuck of a landlord who just collects, collects, collects because I'm their investment. It is my work and toil that they have purchased and apartments are money farms for those who own them. Mark my words, absentee land ownership is downright usury since the landlords have started talking. Just think about the feudal origins of the word, combined with unscrupulous optimism for profit being broadcast on internet. Collectively they can say "It's just the market".

I moved back to Oregon.

Love you, rain. Love you, isolation. It's great.

Habibi. I went through it in a day because the calligraphy is so damn good.

Middle America:

You either talk about Television, Relationships, or the Weather, and when you're talking about Television you say how great/bad the sports game was or how hilarious that one show is. Fuck.

Everyone knows it but nobody thinks it. At least, that's what we'd like to say while ranting. Good on you, my pres, but I doubt they still lynch in Cleveland. Wish I could help, but I've never been to that part of the country.

It really depends on how much of the content or expression I care to absorb. For example, it's taken me about a year to finish half of A Thousand Plateaus partly because I take rigorous notes and find the implications so reeling that I have to take breaks from time to time.

Ulysses took me about two weeks, but I was spending hours per day engrossed in it, meaning that the jump from everyday conversation to the language in the book wasn't happening; the better primed you are for a genre, it seems, the easier it is to trudge through it. I definitely think it was a milestone, not only in my reading, but in my attention span. I'd guess an 80% comprehension of content, but the expression was just too good to let go of.

Currently I'm reading Nietzsche and Philosophy. If my estimates are right, I will have completed it in ten days. Since I'm familiar with the style of the author, it's easier to plan and think ahead and to find the main points. This certainly helps, particularly in fiction that is formulaic (The Magic Treehouse series, one that I read in my childhood, comes to mind).

But again, on priming: I think that, on one hand, if you read a similar (fuzzy) genre in sequence, it makes it easier to critique and look into the details. On the other, everybody has their limits. For example, reading ten non-fiction books on climate change written for a general audience will at some point become too repetitious to bear. In my view, it is best to approach a book as you would a transit map, in order to see what line you should transfer to, or what stop you should get off at. Selective reading is good. Reading to put yourself to sleep is pointless.

----

Specifically on your questions: 1) Brave New World took me a day, but a similar length book, The Uses of Pessimism took me six. One was made to be easy to digest, the other was challenging in terms of my own ideology.

2) Reading books is not a competition. You can read any number of books. My mother has a collection of Steven King books in the dozens, but there is not the intellectual challenge, I think, in the fewer books that I read.

3) I think it is best to view reading (so be it, lists) as a demarcation of your literacy. The CIA World Fact Book claims a 99.6% literacy rate here in the US (last I checked), but that statistic does not consider the depth of field of the recognition of letters; it may only consider basic, basic understanding of the alphabet and how to pronounce words. It other words it is the meta-linguistic knowledge of what to gain from a book, versus how to merely sound it out, that is the true literacy.

If you are interested in what I'm saying here, I would suggest this book: How to Read a Book

Lasagna! It works ridiculously well in a crock pot. Found a link to a recipe here.

I also frequently make chicken broth with mine. Simply throw in a carcass, a chopped onion, and water then let cook for 24 hours on low.

You will have to do this in order to be the master of the subway.

The Pig.

I was in an interpretive dance group with an evangelical edge.

It was Pike's Place Market in Seattle where I abandoned my religion.

The story is as follows: after speaking with one member of our group, I started talking with a wheelchaired man who needed to go somewhere, presumably to buy heroin, and I took him too it.

We traversed through a crowd of people, and I pushed him though it. On my way back I saw that a hobo held up a sign... Luke Chapter Something which really hit me. I told him that the man up the way, with the busker, all alone, bloodied and hankered, needed some Water.

"Water of the Lord"

Then I became abducted by this anxiety - I could no longer 'praise' in the same way that I had before. I at first thought that I was sick, that I had acquired some sinful way about me.

What I found out later is that it was actually an anxiety attack, and that I had realized that all my prior teachings and learning had been at major fault. To this day I am still trying to reconcile it.

I took the man to the place he wanted to go, and on my return was chastised for it. After all, I was 17 and didn't have rights to my own. Since then I have been very careful - whom I trust: those that are candid and willing to explain their root MO.

The reason why is because I was eventually ostracized by my community; I was very quickly put aside by these people because, at least I though, thinking more critically then them at the time.

Listen, there are times in everyone's lives where they have a change of heart. But, in my view, it is something to be embraced, and not to be forgone. These types of lifetime moments, you'll never forget. And don't you forget it.

I'll tell a tale. I worked as a CSR-like role (that means customer service representative, to cut the jargon), albeit indirectly, with Uber. I have an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) that's pretty strict, so some of the following language has been sanitized. There's a local office in the city that I may or may not currently live in which has a lot of drivers and a good relationship with the airport, meaning that it's a relatively 'old' city by their book. 'Old', of course, means that they've cut rates a few times, and they have a lot of customers. I worked in-house dealing with driver side issues, ranging from payment issues, compensation for cleaning costs, and on-boarding.

It was New Years Eve, 2015 and we had an office party. There were two 4K monitors in the main part of the office. One was displaying an internal application that showed every online driver represented by a car; if they were moving to pick someone up, it was highlighted red; if they were currently carrying a passenger, it was highlighted green. There were also red dots on the screen that represented every person in the city viewing the app on their phone.

The other monitor was displaying a global view, and it was a data visualization of the total number of rides serviced during the course of the night. There was a countdown to 1,000,000 rides that completed before I left, hours before midnight. There was a dateline that progressed from the easternmost side of the map to the westernmost. Each major city that the company operates in had a circle with the center pinpointed at the location of the city. Every time a transaction ran, the bubble would increase in size. NYC took up a good third of the eastern seaboard, and major cities in China were likewise gigantic. Western Europe has its fair share of heavyweights as well.

And it was amazing. The most interesting thing about Uber and where it stands compared with other private, highly valuated, companies. Ref: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21659745-silicon-valley-should-be-celebrated-its-insularity-risks-backlash-empire-geeks

But staying private has risks, too. One is that firms under no obligation to make public a full set of audited accounts will remain veiled from the scrutiny of analysts and short-sellers and so act irresponsibly. America’s tech “unicorns”—firms that have reached a valuation of more than $1 billion—are worth around $300 billion between them. The danger that some of this capital is being misallocated is high.

Perhaps it has to do with brand association. Because of the vernacular 'to google' I tend to associate it with 'non-knowingness'. You google something because you don't know about it. Nobody wants to google their friends all the time. That seems to be it. To make a successful social product I think they'd have to keep it as far away under the umbrella of Google as possible.

"The factors that make State war total war are closely connected to capitalism: it has to do with the investment of constant capital in equipment, industry, and the war economy, and the investment of variable capital in the population in its physical and mental aspects (both as warmaker and as victim of war). Total war is not only a war of annihilation but arises when annihilation takes as its "center" not only the enemy army, or the enemy State, but the entire population and its economy. The fact that the double investment can be made only under prior conditions of limited war illustrates the irresistible character of the capitalist tendency to develop total war."

-Deleuze and Guattari, 1k Plateaus

I have a few rare books. One I'd like to share is Duik Múun: Universo Mítico de los Aguaruna. It's an Aguarani/Spanish bilingual reader on the Amazonian tribe's mythology. It has unique illustrations:

http://imgur.com/a/6gOzr#0

The human being is no longer a component of the machine but a worker, a user... Of course, it was the modern State and capitalism that brought the triumph of the machines, in particular of motorized machines...; but what we are referring to now are technical machines, which are definable extrinsically.

The wage regime can therefore take the subjection of human beings to an unprecedented point, and exhibit a singular cruelty, yet still be justified in its humanist cry: No, human beings are not machines, we don't treat them like machines, we certainly don't confuse variable capital and constant capital...

The differences between variable capital and constant capital could be exemplified in the variation between minimum wage and rent.

Well, he certainly hasn't come out of his activist closet, so until then I think anyone who's remotely progressive finds it trivial. Like, what's the first fact you'll know about Tim Cook? "CEO OF APPLE," not "GAY CEO OF APPLE," as if there's a straight one as well. Epitaphs such as these take precedence. Echoing cxavier,

There is no doubt in my mind that had Tim Cook come out earlier in life, he most likely would not be in the same position that he is in today. He has the ability to say he is proudly gay because it doesn't matter at this point- he's the fucking CEO of Apple. He's untouchable. He's got nothing to lose- unlike myself.

My impression is that it has a serious problem of predetermined power users as a result of its invite-only system under a probably dishonest ethos of privacy. It seems like kind of a reversal, actually, where the early adopters of it - super publicized - have a significantly higher influence because it is by them and only through them that you can access the site. Kind of like a pyramid scheme in the realm of social capital, if you will.

With that paragraph, you have made a work of literature.

There is an un-natural pressure on new grads to perform above their pedigree. And as newly-graduated degreed people enter the job market, there is even pressure on food industry workers to be certified and (officially) educated in their line of work. I find this troubling.

I remember veen - haven't been here for a while, though.

I am notably more right than the most of you. I never thought I'd be saying that.

I just deleted my facebook after having the account for 9 years. This just looks like esoteric Ruby to me.

I am out

The update was a surprise to me. What I've always liked about DDG is its consistency. When I search an exact phrase a second time, for the most part the same results appear. Since it's anonymous, I can presumably do the same thing from any computer. Meanwhile Google searches change drastically based on who is searching and from where. I think there was a TED talk on this about searching for "egypt" during the 2012 revolution. They found that someone who had just been googling for vacation packages got a lot different results than a guy who had searched about their politics.

yess

What about in the face-to-face world? Has anyone made a hurtful wrong assumption about you based on a false interpretation?

I was denied entry to a public event a few weeks ago and was not supplied with a reason.

So here's the story. My business partner and I were going to a mining convention - an industry that has historically been dominated by conservative males. We were dressed... pretty frumpily, to be honest. I had a sweater and jeans (I look student-aged, so I was passable) while by business partner had a black SPACE t-shirt and a backpack. At the ticket booth, there was a guy in a suit behind the woman selling exhibition-only passes (advertised as open to the public) who whispered a few things to her. When my business partner got his turn to buy a pass, she said "I'm sorry, we cannot let you in."

Now he's actually a pretty well respected guy in mining research despite his appearance. Two masters degrees from the school that was in part sponsoring the event, in fact. Still denied entry. When he asked why, we received no answer and we were bounced out by another guy in a suit. Very strange.

Day 2 we returned in suits, armed with business cards, and AGAIN the woman at the booth said no. She said it was out of her control and that her superior made the decision. We demanded to speak with him.

So he came and spoke with us and we explained that we were there to network and do business. We showed him our cards, and he apologized. He thought the day before that we were environmental activists who were going to protest the speech that was being made in the next room. I informed him that there was no dress code specified for the event, and we thought it was open to visitors. That was in fact true. To make up for it, he comped our tickets AND gave us VIP passes to the event, which actually turned out to be quite helpful.

I learned a lot in those 48 hours, and I'm not sure if all of it is expressible here. Certainly I got a more accurate view of myself and it has sharpened my self-perception. Sometimes another's assumptions useful for your own self-realization.

What I find most interesting about the increase in users is that it has changed my 'depth of field'. There are now corners of hubski that I am unlinked to.

Flame me, ostracize me from Hubski, whatever, but Hubski deserves to know what one of its most beloved commenters thinks or evidently at least thought 3 years ago.

I don't give a damn about your popularity contest. kleinbl00 is fine. Leave critique to those that are actually good at it. So many accusations!

I would love to pitch in a few thoughts.

Currently I work at a pizza chain that is expanding rapidly. They plan to open three near stores per year, and they just opened their twelfth. They have even started broadcasting TV commercials. I am a delivery driver.

Upon being hired, I was told I would be getting minimum wage (7.76 in this state), 1.25 per delivery, and, of course, tips. However, for the first two weeks of training we were delivering free pizzas for marketing purposes to bars, hotels, and other businesses. Hence, no tips. Also, they refused to pay me per delivery, because "it's the training period." I told my manager quite pointedly, "You realize you are paying me sub-poverty wages, right?" He said he was just doing his job and it was out of his control. I knew it was bullshit.

They held a Yelp party. I wanted to picket it. I knew that with that sort of publicity, I could at least get them to give in to a simple request: I want a living wage. If not, there would be some very negative Yelp reviews (how embarrassing to have a worker outside picketing), which for a new store would be detrimental. I chose the morally utilitarian route for my immediate coworkers and chose note to protest. In the meantime, I already had to sell some of my items to pay for gas. I can't imagine what I'll have to do to make rent. My student loans? There's no way I can start paying those. I wonder if my co-workers are in the same situation.

I just graduated college in June. I have no savings, but I have dreams, ideas, and a degree in Linguistics. I am well educated, bilingual in Spanish, I know a few other languages, and have a good grasp of history. No one will give me a fucking chance.

If this keeps happening, if (more or less) specialized people like myself can't thrive here, there will be a flight of young Americans and intellectuals. I know I'm not alone.