James May tells councils to stop being "t***s" and build more cycle lanes

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When you are steeped in privilege and/or have earned everything through a mixture of stolen labor and office pantomime, the idea of “effort” is always negative. The process of creation — or affection, of love, of kindness, of using time not just for an action or output — is disgusting to the Business Idiot, because those are times they could be focused on themselves, or some nebulous self-serving “vision” that is, when stripped back to its fundamental truth, is either moronic or malevolent. They don’t realise that you hire a worker for the worker’s work rather than just the work themselves, which is why they don’t see why it’s so insulting to outsource their interactions with human beings.

You’ll notice these people never bring up examples of automating actual work — the mind-numbing grunt work that we all face in the workplace — because they neither know nor care what that is. Their “problems” are the things that frustrate them, like dealing with other people, or existing outside of the gilded circles of socialite fucks or plutocrats, or just things that are an inevitable facet of working life, like reading an email. Your son’s birthday party or a conflict with a friend can, indeed, be stressful, but these are not problems to be automated out. They are the struggles that make us human, the things that make us grow, the things that make us who we are, which isn’t a problem for anybody other than somebody who doesn’t believe they need to change in any way. It's both powerful and powerless at the same time — a nihilistic way of seeing our lives as a collection of events we accept or dismiss like a system prompt, the desperate pursuit of such efficient living that you barely feel a thing until you die.

Ed Zitron, The Era of The Business Idiot

A reminder to myself.

Reading, reading a lot, reading different, weird things was one of the few parts of me I loved about myself, and one that I miss dearly.

It’s something I want to get back. Not sure I can, I’ll be honest with you guys.

And yet, we persist.