51–60 of 835 posts
Its all peaks and valleys, crests and troughs. It will get better, it always does. Just takes a while. Make strategic moves and maybe it works out for you.
From the instant the idea to do something pops into management’s heads, or is explained to them by sales (who heard it from a customer), the clock is ticking. Actually developing the software necessary is just an irritating overhead. Something to be reduced to near zero. A one-dimensional “scalar”. This isn’t about building. It’s a sort of conditioned response, like a chicken pecking at a lamp to get a grain of corn. Quality, maintainability, simplicity, doesn’t come into it and all management hear from you is technobabble, like Scotty explaining why the dilithium crystals need time to cycle.
Reject the bad, evil, dark.
Focus on the good, true, love, kindness, compassion, right, lovely, righteous.
> People are noisy as fuck and dont seem to give a shit. Seems like every night there's someone with loud as exhaust on "sportish" car ripping around the neihborhood. For months this guy would start up his loud car at 7am and no one care when I complained. > Police seem to not give a shit anymore. I've noticed what seems to be total lawlessness going on in my world. Folks stealing shit. People driving absurdly danger…
We should reexamine our views of history. If we write the history books we would be inclined to paint ourselves and situations in a good light saying everything was great and everyone treated each other great.
From the perspective of someone who is not in the ruling class, we should try graphing our collective freedom and prosperity on a 2000 year scale. Things were pretty good over the last 50-300 years and are still not too bad.
We have short memories and tend to block out the bad stuff over time.
We may also just be spending too much time on the Internet and consuming news media.
Or maybe we legitimately live in crappy neighborhoods and cities where everyone treats each other poorly. We then have a tendency of moving somewhere else and bringing that negative, cynical and stressed out mentality with us, thus benefiting from other people's remaining goodwill and social cohesion while simultaneously destroying it.
It's more constructive to engage in our interests and build than to criticize and tear down others, we should concentrate on that.
The energy gradient which powers civilization is decaying. Civilization must conifgure itself around a new, steeper gradient. Only catch: it must use the old gradient to power this transformation. https://gist.github.com/clumma/214831723c7d567cc343cc0767273...
Try optimism for a change https://effectiveaccelerationism.substack.com/p/what-the-f-i...
I think you're way off base. It's called rosy retrospection, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection . As you already mentioned in your comments, you're judging the past disproportionately more positive that the present. If you really want to know if everything is declining, try measure it everyday for the next five years. For example, every day, rate your personal well being, track how (un)happy you are wit…
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Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio (2022)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8
Basically we're on the downward part of the cycle of wealth. That has NOT happened in our lifetimes, but it's happened many times before to other countries (Netherlands, Britain, China).
Some things go in 150 or 250 year cycles and they're hard to see.
Basically the idea is that in the long term, countries need to actually produce wealth in accordance to how much money they print.
HOWEVER, the problem is that you can actually get away with NOT doing so for 50+ years -- the span of more than one generation. Particularly if you have the reserve currency of the world, as the US currently does.
Dalio links a lot of our ills to Nixon's untethering of the dollar in the early 1970's.
That reminds me of a good tweet -- What if your entire personality depends on low interest rates ?
The idea there is that the habits and culture we've grown up with have been enforced by this distortion of wealth.
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To create wealth as a country, you need education, rule of law, cooperation, trust, etc. There has to be real output, and people have to push in the same direction.
But if you can just print money instead of doing the work of those things, then why bother getting educated? Why not just rip people off?
Why not rip off the government? They're just printing it anyway. So the social order is hugely affected by monetary policy.
TBH I didn't come around to this until ~2020 ... In 2016, everyone I knew thought the sky was falling ... But I was living in wealthy area with a good job. Now that I'm a bit removed from that, I see that the rest of the country is having big problems
I think Jeff Bezos has said -- "I don't worry about next quarter -- it was already determined 5 or 10 years ago". Unfortunately the social trends for the US were determined 40 or 50 years ago. But that doesn't mean everyone should give up and do nothing! Don't be a nihilist
Honestly software is one of the places where you can create real wealth (not fake, extractive riches) with a few people. People in other industries aren't so lucky
(Related to a previous comment about gambling and crypto: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33910537 -- if huge portions of society engage in NEGATIVE SUM games, then that has consequences. I conjecture that gambling is commonly banned because societies that banned it are the ones that survived. Others went down in flames.)