I've heard this claim before, but I've never seen it substantiated. Would you like to do so?
The difficulty is going to be around definitions. There are claims that communism has killed X million people, where both the definition of communism and what constitutes cause are very loose. On the flip side you have people who advocate for communism who claim it's never been tried and everything that has ever called itself communism wasn't true communism. You'll face the same issue with capitalism. The confounding…
Chinese people only became wealthy after major economic reforms that abandoned anything related to communism except for the name and aesthetic
I agree with this on principle, but I just can't shake the feeling that this sort of conveniently "incidentally" leftist NPR story is slanted, and therefor untrustworthy. I've been gaslit by too much media for too long to trust anything I read from anything even slightly mainstream. Everything is politically compromised, with few exceptions (WHO, CDC, UN, the list goes on).
Slanted toward what? Advocating for pulling people out of poverty? Advocating for keeping people in poverty? I'm genuinely interested in understanding why you think this story is slanted and in what direction you think it slanted you and why you think it matters.
This is going to sound egotistical, but it's not intended that way, just the experience of your average prole. The times that I have been the most successful, most motivated, most driven, most productive, and most useful, in study, career, relationships, and life, have tracked exactly with periods in which I've gotten out what I've put in. When I started my career and a company took a chance on me - we absolutely kil…
I'm still early in my career (around 32, 8 years in), and I can heavily relate to what you said at the beginning. The company I work for recently got acquired and the entire culture changed to one of "fuck the engineers, only contracts matter, engineers are just butts in seats, the more the better (quality not required)". My boss is constantly turned down when he tries to advocate for me, or say that I deserve a slig…
I think this thinking is, at least in part, a result of assuming that the decision makers are optimising for the same outcome as you might expect them to, eg. long-term growth, profitability, etc. rather than, say, bleeding the company of its human equity for short-term increases in monetary profit, that otherwise wouldn’t be attainable, and likely as a result likely furthering that decision maker’s career, assuming they exit before implosion.
This is just once piece of growing evidence that poverty damages health, cognition, and productivity. * Being poor reduces raw cognitive capability including memory and decision making. * Being poor increases stress, leads to bad decisions and short term thinking. * Even relative poverty can have this effect. It may be because social status is so important factor in human well-being. It used to be a joke that you can…
So much of conservative policy just seems very shortsighted to me. Cutting the pandemic team, cutting the cybersecurity team; homelessness, prisons and so on costing orders of magnitude more than it would cost to eliminate or reduce them. It's just that people can't stomach less well off people getting a hand, or prisoners being treated nicely. But now we're left with the largest pandemic in a century, one of the lar…
I think it’s worth pointing out that there is nothing “conservative” about cutting funding to a pandemic response team. “Republican”, perhaps. But not “conservative”.
Note that many countries with broadly left wing governments, such as those in Europe, were also not prepared for the pandemic, and will also pay a high cost.
Thanks for sharing, your experience resembles my own. Can you explain your change of heart? You mention it happened in the last year but I’m not sure why. If anything this last year has motivated me to do even more. And I believe we can and will, but I am in a good place professionally. Are you speaking more personally than professionally? It sounds like maybe you did achieve some of what you set out to do but maybe…
The way that my country has, and is handling the coronavirus pandemic, has meant that their vision of the future of society has diverged from something that I wish to be a part of. It's not about my accomplishments, but whether I feel like I have a stake in this. I have no stake in it now. They want a future that I don't want. No social ties, no bonds, no community. No counter-culture. No culture. No high street. No…
Be careful, you'll be called wrong thinker and censored and deplatformed.
There's an old movie called They Live, starring wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper.
It's supposed to be satire on consumer culture, but looking at it now can be thought as time shifted documentary.
This is going to sound egotistical, but it's not intended that way, just the experience of your average prole. The times that I have been the most successful, most motivated, most driven, most productive, and most useful, in study, career, relationships, and life, have tracked exactly with periods in which I've gotten out what I've put in. When I started my career and a company took a chance on me - we absolutely kil…
This is the biggest steaming pile of bull I've seen on HN. Like a monologue from an Adam Sandler movie. https://youtu.be/LQCU36pkH7c
Of course not. But you mention causation. You have to treat your employees well if you want to be successful. It is necessary, but not sufficient.
It just seems too simplistic to me. Sometimes there is struggle. Taking an extreme example, soldiers at war. Are they generally being treated well? I'm not sure they are, and I don't necessarily mean deliberately. I don't think generals want their soldiers to be killed, in general. It just happens that situations arise where there is struggle and soldiers get killed. I remember complaints about CD Projekt Red (makers…
Their marketing outright lying about the progress and leadership not caring made it "necessary" to catch up.
> The last year has been a period in which I've gone from wanting to take part in society, work on big problems like climate change, sacrifice for the greater good, donate my time and money [...] This might be the biggest problem human race has to solve. How to encourage and reward good behavior for the greater good. Economists would say it's a problem on how to price in externalities. It doesn't matter. I see it eve…
This is something East-Germans are lamenting about when comparing East-Germany to West-Germany. Of course some of this self-serving behaviour exists everywhere, but as a society or even community you can put a focus on the "we" or on the "me". Our society happens to mostly stress the "me" part, which leads to the outcomes you describe.
The basis of capitalism is that under most circumstances, focusing on “me” also produces the best outcomes for “us”.
And a pure focus on “us” can lead to poorer outcomes as there is no immediate reward for the person doing the work.
It’s worth pointing out that it’s not clear whether stimulus checks or minimum wage increases reduce poverty. So I am not sure it makes sense to use the conclusions of this study to justify that action, as this article tries to.