old-joe-hill

The Swimmer

A man on the beach walks parallel to the shore, knee deep in the water. A wave crashes into his legs, and he stumbles toward the shore, but he again moves back ...

The Seven Tiers of Human Problem Solving

People think in unremarkably similar ways. As humans we all required a certain level of problem solving skills to work ourselves up the chain of civilization. A...

Local Man Realizes He Doesn't Really Need to Spend Money

[BOISE, IDAHO] A completely deranged lunatic walking down the streets of Boise today decided that he could live without spending as much money as he is usually ...

Your house isn't a real investment.

It isn't. Don't think of it like one. "But houses always go up." Riddle me this: If a random house in a neighborhood were actually a good investment, why is the...

The False Mask of Ideology

We are a bunch of monkeys that climbed to the summit of a mountain and in our wonder, gaze out into the vast sea of fog below us, thinking that it is the floor....

Fundamentally Unsustainable

If you were born and live in a first-world country, you should feel lucky that you were born in this era, for there likely will be no era like it, ever again, i...

A Loser's Deal

Diogenes walked backward across the Agora. He kept an indifferent, calm expression, despite the throngs of people surrounding him, who turned to look, snickerin...

Cooking for Lazy People

I don't really like cooking. In my perspective, it is a pure chore; a thing to do simply because I have to do it to stay alive. A painful admission on my part i...

You Probably Won't Make it Blogging

Hucksters and charlatans love preying on the desperate, trying to sell you ebooks, upvotes, webinars, and podcasts, all telling you that by pouring a little swe...

Your 300 Hour Power

There are 365 days in a year. You likely work for approximately 250 of them. Of those days, 8 hours of each day will be sleep. 8 hours will be work. 2 hours lik...

How much shit do you really need?

We are constantly inundated by the words of snake tongued spineless marketers and salesman that want to convince you that their particular product, which you ne...

Don't fall into the trap.

Let's do an exercise. Take out a sheet of paper. Or, open up a word document, or pull up a note application on your tablet. Make a list of absolutely everything...

The Spiral and Anti-Spiral

Everything has order. Life itself, is a cycle, in which each cycle is separated by time, and defined by its inflection points. This is the spiral. There is one,...

[Short Story] I'll check the headlines.

Where are my keys? I can't find them. They must be in my pants. Not those ones. The other ones. No. I didn't wear those yesterday. Check the living room. No. Oh...

[Story] Welcome to your New Life!

Welcome to your new home. Welcome to Azimuth Home, provided for you for your new career in the Azimuth Corporation Enclave, area 44. We hope you – and your fami...

[Short Story] The Night Call

The black cell phone buzzed on the nightstand, blurting the shrill tone of terrible Samsung default. Erik groggily pulled himself up from his bed and answered t...

Welcome to God, Incorporated.

Are you aware of an entity that already exists that can readily improve and replace parts of itself? The singularity effectively already exists. It is the corpo...

Trashing the Stew

You've been given rice because you're the sushi. When you sign up for free services like Facebook, or using Google's suites of software, you aren't just getting...

The Stupid Hole

Internet arguments are the worst. You're never going to win an internet argument, because there is probably a dense layer of caked shit that needs to be scraped...

On the Sacrificial Altars of the Temple of Growth

The gods demand more growth. If we do not show the gods growth, the game they have created is over. The sun shall not rise again. Everything is predicated on gr...