WDRL — Edition 264: Establish Principles, Long Work, Simple Living

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Hey,

This week, right before the long Easter weekend here, I stumbled upon “The beauty of being satisfied enough”. In times of advertising everywhere, discount days like ‘Black Friday’, and everyone telling you “you need this” or “save here” we’re constantly tempted to buy things we don’t necessarily need. We browse in online shops because we received a newsletter that told us products are cheaper now. But we end up spending a lot of time to find things we don’t really need. Once we move our household, we’re reminded how much clutter we own, how many things we have and don’t use. We don’t sell them because it’s too much effort and brings too little money, so we stick with them or put it into trash. In parallel, we try to earn more money to continue our livestyle. We try to get the most out of our money by investing into shady financial stock markets and bonds — no matter if these companies we invest into are acting ethically to our believes.

What if we simplify our lives by stop buying things we don’t need, by stop buying new stuff while the current items are still working, by stop caring about stock markets because you save more money by doing nothing and buying nothing. By reducing working hours because you suddenly need less stuff. By embracing what we have, by realising that more things in our lives doesn’t mean more satisfaction, more happiness. If you own less, you will have to worry about less, your trash cost will shrink, your happiness about the few items you have will grow. And it’ll be easier to maintain the household during a normal work week, it’ll be easier to go on vacation or come back. In the past three months, my partner and I tried hard to reduce our household to a minimum (and everyone needs to find out what minimum means for them). There’s still way to go for us, but it already feels much better and lighter.

Generic

• How does running Python in the browser sound? Michael Droettboom explains why Mozilla tries to enable that and how this would work and enables data science experimentation in the browser.

Security

• The Google AMP project announced that they’re going to ‘simplify’ AMP domains in Google Chrome. This means, users would see the original URL in the browser bar while really being on a Google AMP server. An interesting approach, given this is what browser vendors always try to not allow to other parties to prevent URL spoofing. But apparently this is different, if it’s a Google on a Google product that spoofs “in the interest of the publisher”.
• Keybase is now supporting Mastodon and everyone else. This is great because it means the popular encryption service now allows the independent web and not only the big players.

Privacy

• Joseph O'Connor put together a list of websites not available since GDPR went into effect May 2018. This is a good reminder that these are the sites that aren’t worth it to be compatible with this essentical privacy law that sets a bare minimum of standards for transparency on data sharing.

Work & Life

• Nathan Barry on how we can establish principles in the company we started with a system that lets you argue the opposite of the principle, and how to share it with the team and live the it.
• When did performative workaholism become a lifestyle? A culture of business, hustling, and the weird love we develop to working faster and more. But what about our lives when we work for 12 or 18 hours a day? What’s with that promise of automation will take off the work from us?

—Anselm