I just wanted to say thank you because this place recently hit 250 subscribers. Only a few months ago, I had the goal of hitting 150 by the end of the year and we went right past that by the “deadline”. Now I hit 200 shortly after that around the end of March and I’m at 250+ subscribers today, with more than a few driven mostly by Notes. It’s hard to say how much it means to me.
With that being said, things are somewhat difficult in other areas. I missed the second post regarding my comic book I was planning for the end of March because I’m having problems with my laptop and that’s limited my ability to do some of the work that I was planning. It’s also unclear what the end of May is going to look like given the problems I’m having.
Having “so much time”:
Recently, one of you commented about the fact that I have a lot of content planned for TV’s Moral Philosophy. Which is true. A lot of the reason for that is because I was able to write before I started to have trouble with my laptop. I’m still attempting to get work done, but it’s much harder. Hopefully it all works out but given my track record, it’s unlikely to go my way.
The reason I have so much time on my hands to get writing done is because I don’t have anything else to do other than look for work. I’ve been chronically unemployed since 2012, only really being able to get some volunteer work and a single contract job which I was only able to get because of a government program that subsidized my pay check for the company and you’re only allowed to access it once. So that’s out going forward.
A large part of why I haven’t been able to get work is because of how completely we screwed up the response to the 2008 financial crisis was. My last full time job in 2012 went down because of the Eurozone crisis, the company I was working for downsized because they were based out of one of the European countries that was in crisis. I’ve mostly worked in retail and customer service for most of my life. Amazon gutted the retail industry and the post-2008 move to “virtual assistants” and digital communication has done something similar to customer service jobs.
CoVid Book:
It’s part of why I’ve been so critical of the CoVid response. I could see how bad things were going to get today with inflation and other problems in March 2020. So it was only going to make it even harder for me to find work in the aftermath. Which has largely been true.
So the only thing I really have now that gives me anything worth doing is this newsletter and a few other writing projects. Like my comic book and the CoVid book. I could really use your help getting out of the problems I’ve been dealing with. If you can stay a paid subscriber after the 3 month free trial I offered to many of my most active subscribers at the 2 year anniversary, it would very much help. The 3 month free trial ends for most of you on Sunday. Hopefully things are fine but because of many of my problems, I won’t necessarily be able to fix any issues that come up until Monday.
I sorta delayed the rolling out of the CoVid book because right when I was planning to give people an option to be added in February, Substack launched a new feature, private Substacks that people can apply to join. Now that I feel comfortable with the new feature, I’m giving people the option to sign up. Here it is:
For context, here’s one of the examples of why it’s called what it is. Here’s one and another one.
If you do sign up, I can’t guarantee that you will be approved right away, or at all. I’m somewhat nervous about the book so I’m not going to approve just anyone regardless of who it is. But at least you have the option now. The book is generally in bits and pieces of chapters that I’m looking to build out in more detail. Which is what I want those who will become part of the early approved users to help me with.
As you might guess from the subtitle, a lot of it is going to tackle the issue of CoVid from the perspectives that I write about here. Namely from a moral philosophy standpoint. Looking at the way in which narratives played out and why people did the things they did. Not from an accusatory view of people in charge or anything, though I have my criticisms of that given a lot of what people did was driven by what people in charge said and did.
Mostly, the idea is constantly asking, why did people take a particular action? Either on an individual level, a policy level, or a scientific level. Was it a good idea? Why or why not? Those are kinda the underlying questions and ideas being thought through in the book.
One of the things that I did during lockdown was read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It’s very much in that spirit that I want to tackle the issue of what happened during CoVid. Not that I’m comparing myself to him, just that this is the framework under which I’m trying to operate in writing my CoVid book. It’s one of the main inspirations.
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Newsletter Update: Hitting 250 subscribers, CoVid book and why I have enough time on my hands
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Hey everyone,
I just wanted to say thank you because this place recently hit 250 subscribers. Only a few months ago, I had the goal of hitting 150 by the end of the year and we went right past that by the “deadline”. Now I hit 200 shortly after that around the end of March and I’m at 250+ subscribers today, with more than a few driven mostly by Notes. It’s hard to say how much it means to me.
With that being said, things are somewhat difficult in other areas. I missed the second post regarding my comic book I was planning for the end of March because I’m having problems with my laptop and that’s limited my ability to do some of the work that I was planning. It’s also unclear what the end of May is going to look like given the problems I’m having.
Having “so much time”:
Recently, one of you commented about the fact that I have a lot of content planned for TV’s Moral Philosophy. Which is true. A lot of the reason for that is because I was able to write before I started to have trouble with my laptop. I’m still attempting to get work done, but it’s much harder. Hopefully it all works out but given my track record, it’s unlikely to go my way.
The reason I have so much time on my hands to get writing done is because I don’t have anything else to do other than look for work. I’ve been chronically unemployed since 2012, only really being able to get some volunteer work and a single contract job which I was only able to get because of a government program that subsidized my pay check for the company and you’re only allowed to access it once. So that’s out going forward.
A large part of why I haven’t been able to get work is because of how completely we screwed up the response to the 2008 financial crisis was. My last full time job in 2012 went down because of the Eurozone crisis, the company I was working for downsized because they were based out of one of the European countries that was in crisis. I’ve mostly worked in retail and customer service for most of my life. Amazon gutted the retail industry and the post-2008 move to “virtual assistants” and digital communication has done something similar to customer service jobs.
CoVid Book:
It’s part of why I’ve been so critical of the CoVid response. I could see how bad things were going to get today with inflation and other problems in March 2020. So it was only going to make it even harder for me to find work in the aftermath. Which has largely been true.
So the only thing I really have now that gives me anything worth doing is this newsletter and a few other writing projects. Like my comic book and the CoVid book. I could really use your help getting out of the problems I’ve been dealing with. If you can stay a paid subscriber after the 3 month free trial I offered to many of my most active subscribers at the 2 year anniversary, it would very much help. The 3 month free trial ends for most of you on Sunday. Hopefully things are fine but because of many of my problems, I won’t necessarily be able to fix any issues that come up until Monday.
I sorta delayed the rolling out of the CoVid book because right when I was planning to give people an option to be added in February, Substack launched a new feature, private Substacks that people can apply to join. Now that I feel comfortable with the new feature, I’m giving people the option to sign up. Here it is:
For context, here’s one of the examples of why it’s called what it is. Here’s one and another one.
If you do sign up, I can’t guarantee that you will be approved right away, or at all. I’m somewhat nervous about the book so I’m not going to approve just anyone regardless of who it is. But at least you have the option now. The book is generally in bits and pieces of chapters that I’m looking to build out in more detail. Which is what I want those who will become part of the early approved users to help me with.
As you might guess from the subtitle, a lot of it is going to tackle the issue of CoVid from the perspectives that I write about here. Namely from a moral philosophy standpoint. Looking at the way in which narratives played out and why people did the things they did. Not from an accusatory view of people in charge or anything, though I have my criticisms of that given a lot of what people did was driven by what people in charge said and did.
Mostly, the idea is constantly asking, why did people take a particular action? Either on an individual level, a policy level, or a scientific level. Was it a good idea? Why or why not? Those are kinda the underlying questions and ideas being thought through in the book.
One of the things that I did during lockdown was read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It’s very much in that spirit that I want to tackle the issue of what happened during CoVid. Not that I’m comparing myself to him, just that this is the framework under which I’m trying to operate in writing my CoVid book. It’s one of the main inspirations.
So, yeah, thank you again.