2026-09-10

Testing some changes

Test. Let's go.

• Testing from orb — 2026-09-10 15:12:41 CEST

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2026-09-09

Is sexual attraction overrated

Is sexual attraction overrated?

The stratification of individuals into different value levels or ‘leagues’ within dating, based upon their perceived beauty, intelligence and career success, is a brutal reality of today’s relationship culture – one which K is actively rebelling against to assert their own value beyond looks. “As a mid- to plus-size person, depending on my weight fluctuation, it’s rare for an attractive person to also be into me. I used to hold conventionally beautiful people’s attraction to a high value and be like, ‘Oh, this really attractive person is attracted to me, so I should hold onto this relationship.’”

With the way that beauty culture intertwines with white supremacy, ableism and patriarchy, as both a reflection of these values and something which can perpetuate them, it’s worth scrutinising our own preferences in partners and what they might mean. Leanne Yau, a polyamorous relationship educator, has already witnessed some of this work being carried out within the non-monogamous community. “As a polyamorous person, something that I often deal with on the internet is people perpetuating the stereotype that polyamorous people are ugly, and it’s something that I’ve really put a lot of effort in pushing back against,” she says. 

Yau argues that gravitating towards people who don’t embody traditional beauty standards is a way of undermining the (often discriminatory) social biases about who is deserving of love. “We place a lot of emphasis, as a society, on how conventionally attractive and, therefore, how valuable someone is, to determine their overall desirability or worthiness of being in a relationship,” she explains. “I think that queer people, polyamorous people, people who have questioned relationship norms in general, are much more likely to decentre conventional attractiveness in their dating lives because we want to push against those norms.”

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2026-09-03

What will be scarce

What will be scarce? #ai #work

Economics is the study of decision-making under constraints, i.e., scarcity. If advanced AI brings material abundance—if machines can produce many if not all forms of human production at very low marginal cost—does economics become irrelevant? No, we will still have scarcity, but the kind of scarcity that matters will change. Ultimately the answer to any question about the future economics of advanced AI begins with identifying what becomes scarce. After answering that question, the rest of the analysis is pretty straightforward. In this essay I’m going to explore what becomes scarce when automation can replicate many if not all human production, and what that may mean for the types of jobs that emerge.

After Work, We’ll Have Each Other

Very interesting take on work. I was drawn in by the quote: Once you realize what that means, you’ll be giving two cheers for the American work ethic.

Relational living comes to us naturally. It’s the most common form of social organization in human history, and millions of people around the world are perfectly happy with it. But when our personal dignity comes from our membership in a group, everything the group does reflects on us — and everything we do reflects, unavoidably, on the group. It’s not a coincidence that Russian princes and Bostonian Italian day laborers spent most of their time gossiping (or, if we want to be technical, constructing and enforcing norms of behavior). They were defending their collective reputations: the thing that mattered most to them in the world.

This is why so much contemporary discussion of work and meaning is misguided. It’s very clear that humans don’t need work or anything like it to live meaningful lives. Nor do we need the things that people who talk about “meaning” mean — individual self-actualization, personal growth, serving a greater purpose. We can get by just fine without any of them, as historically most of us have. What we absolutely can’t live without is a social framework for understanding ourselves in relation to the rest of our society and gaining the respect of our peers. The most important thing work gives us — after money, of course — is an alternative way to meet those needs. Not all jobs are pleasant or rewarding, but all of us benefit from living in a system where we can earn respect and dignity as adults from what we do, not who we know, or who we are.

And this is exactly what we see when we look at what Americans actually get out of work.

love the way it ends

This brings us back to what we already know: The modern labor market has dissolved the bonds of tradition, family, and clan. In the modern world, relationships matter less. And because they matter less, we can do much more inside them. They are freer. They have room to breathe. 

As with so many things, the Scottish Enlightenment understood this first.11 The possibility of friendship in a commercial society was a serious concern for Adam Smith, David Hume, and Adam Ferguson. Specifically, they believed that commercial society made friendship possible. In the bad old days before impersonal markets and bureaucracies, the only way to survive was through personal ties to allies or to kin. As a result, every personal relationship was transactional.

When we can all support ourselves by our own labor, these transactions are no longer necessary. For Smith, the absence of necessity created room for a better form of friendship, based on “natural sympathy” instead of mutual need. This sympathy between individuals would in turn serve as the basis of a more universalist social morality, not bound to the competing needs of feudal institutions or family groups.

Our attitude to work is just one part of the historical transition to a liberal, democratic, individualist culture, but it is an important one. Today, work makes our personal independence materially possible. But even if our material needs are met, relying on our personal relationships to meet all our needs for identity and belonging creates a similar kind of dependence. We can see it in Ostrander’s ladies: When we take away more impersonal forms of work from the rest of the package, the older ties reassert themselves.

I’m not certain that that’s what we’re facing now. I said that I don’t like making sweeping statements about the relationship between technology and cultural change, and I meant it. If a more relational world is the most serious problem AI causes, I’ll certainly be relieved. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m looking forward to it. I like my job, and I like liberal individualism. If the former will one day be a casualty of progress, I hope the latter will survive it.

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