nicbou
Born on October 28, 2015•18041 Karma
I write about German bureaucracy for immigrants. I chose simplicity and succinctness over personality. It works for this purpose, and I got a lot of praise for it, but now it’s harder to differentiate my writing from AI slop at first glance.
My newsletter and social media posts are deliberately more personal. They gave me a chance to loosen up, use idioms, be sarcastic.
Google has been aggressively de-indexing websites in the last few months
In the last two years I've also made money from consulting the government on how to better help immigrants. It's not steady income, but it's good to know that they are trying to improve.
In an ideal world, BLUF and tables of content should do most of the work.
However we interacted as equals and I was free to refuse the conversation or end it when I wanted. I was free to set boundaries.
I would not feel the same if stopped by cops.
> Two studies have found that at least 40% of police officer families experience domestic violence, (1, 2) in contrast to 10% of families in the general population.(3) A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24% (4), indicating that domestic violence is 24 times more common among police families than American families in general.
https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2017R1/Downloads/Comm...
Looks like you’ve wasted about the same amount of time here as I have!
Of course it does! It is possible to have a system where everyone is unhappy, yet incentivised to keep making things worse.
https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
or https://genius.com/John-steinbeck-chapter-5-the-grapes-of-wr...
For a while, I did not have to worry about money, so I could afford to be generous with my time, and to work on things that are not financially viable. It did a lot of good. I've built so many useful things and helped so many people individually.
Now, AI is tightening the screws, so I spend a lot more time worrying about making money.[0] I have to be leaner and meaner, and there just isn't enough time and energy left to work on useful things. Instead of building a community for immigrants, I'm trying to sell them insurance. I share the author's frustration because the economy is blind to the loss, even though people feel it.
I don't really like the government funding models, because I've seen what it funds in my industry. Price signals are a poor proxy for public use, but they're still better than blindly funding useless projects.
Giving people financial slack might be a better way to achieve that. If people have their own "20% time", we might see a lot of economically invisible problems get the attention they deserve.
My wife has also chosen to be a homemaker, and I watch in awe at how much she gets done. She creates a space where the "slack" you mention can happen--that is where we can afford to be generous with our time. I don't see it as a financial income thing, but more of a lifestyle thing (arguably the same thing).
We've lived in both Sweden and in America, and we've modeled our family life by looking at the older families in both cultures that seem to be thriving--and building in this slack, building in someone who can simply _care_ for the others and be cared for in return has been amazing.
I am horrifically depressed and extremely radicalized, both as a direct result.