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What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

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Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#811

Post by listenallyall »

andrepd wrote: post #740
listenallyall wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point about affording the lifestyle isnt entirely incorrect, but it is skewed by what you choose to include vs ignore. Owning a house? Indeed, grandfather probably had it easier. More space per person in the primary residence? Grandson wins, most likely. Restaurant meals vs home cooked, international travel, ubiquitous air conditioning, threat of being drafted into the military (and actually being deployed!), ex…

In other words: everything to do with economics is worse and everything to do with the inexorable march of progress is better. Yeah sorry but no shit. Technology has progressed since grandpa's day. "TVs are better and cheaper" is not a useful counterpoint when discussing the economy of the 2020s.

You're dense. Likelihood of military service - way down. Widespread diseases like measles, tuberculosis and polio - gone. Number of people lifted out of poverty is in the billions since 1960s (economics). Access to credit - massively up (economics). Commercial air travel affordable to virtually anyone (economics). Abundant, clean, healthy food available to almost the entire world (economics). Government-insured bank accounts (economics). Tax-advantaged retirement investment opportunities (economics). You can also look at civil rights, access to justice (small claims court didnt exist in many places when this dude's grandpa was young), college participation...

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#812

Post by andai »

andai wrote: post #322
marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…

Well it used to be that the government's job was to keep morale high. At some point that seems to have inverted. The coalition-of-Molochs appears to be finding it much more profitable to make everyone want to kill themselves. (Not sure if that's a great long-term strategy, but they seem to have thought this through.)

I assume it had to do with the Malthusian panic (which was very effective, and remains a sticky meme, although for slightly different reasons now).

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#813

Post by gaigalas »

You think IT professionals lost faith? You should look at teachers.

Hate to break it to you, but we're on a dark age, and this whole thing is just another unremarkable development that follows a trend that has been going on for about two centuries now.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#814

Post by duskdozer »

hellohello2 wrote: post #491
marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…

Yeah I'm not sure what happened but Reddit in particular is beyond saving, and I'm not saying it was ever great. I think we simply don't know how to create online communities that make any sense yet. I'd rather have second hand smoke than any more algorithmic "engagement" maximization at this point.

You put it there yourself. The community can't be there to maximize engagement.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#815

Post by josh_p »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #716
josh_p wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention the election cycle and things getting worse. I live in the US and I’ve watched in real time every sad, terrible decision made by the current administration and every sad terrible decision by what’s supposed to be the opposition party. It all makes me want to scream. And then I’m offline and my life carries on because none it has really affected my white privileged middle class tech worker butt. It all fee…

I don't live in the US, I live in Switzerland, and what happens in the US and Iran affects the world. And when I see this kind of shit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ58s4bwzG0 ( bbc Donald Trump dons 'Trump 2028' hat and jokes about 'fourth term' ), I am like, what the fuck? Europeans as a whole didn't have much a great opinions of republicans but I don't even understand how a republican voter can vote for a russi…

The Republican Party is very good at propaganda. And the Democratic Party (the currently elected one, not the one the American people actually want), is happy to go along with a lot of it as long as they get to stay in power. We’re good at political theatre and pedantry here.

All that and a steady diet of “American Exceptionalism” started as early as kindergarten in our public schools deludes whole swaths of the country into thinking that all of this is somehow good for them.

I grew up going to public schools in the 90s and 2000s in a “blue” part of the country. As I’ve grown up into adulthood with kids, I’ve become so disappointed with my own education. It hasn’t gotten better and it’s worse in a lot of ways.

We homeschool our kids and don’t whitewash our history.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#816

Post by Gooblebrai »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

Saw a meme on mastodon the other day contrasting people of the '90s going online to escape from offline reality, and people of the '20s going offline to escape from online reality. There's something to that. I think a big part of it is just how incredibly toxic the web has become. If you spend any time online, as most tech workers do, you have exceptional resiliency if you're able to stay sane and level headed. Going…

> how incredibly toxic the web has become

A reflection of human nature at scale?

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#817

Post by Macha »

altmanaltman wrote: post #804
estearum wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised no one has made the extremely obvious observation that it took literal centuries for printing technology to eliminate the trade of printers, which could not have possibly have employed more than 0.01% of people at its peak. Compared to the potential obsolescence of 40% to 60% of the US workforce over the course of 10 - 20 years? You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is , the…

Yeah + the world was much different than it is today. It trivializes the risk by saying we have seen it before and we were okay when its a fundamentally different problem in many aspects.

Also fails to distinguish between “society came out of it fine” (generally true) and “individuals came out of it fine” (much more mixed of a track record)

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#818

Post by chongli »

altmanaltman wrote: post #804
estearum wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised no one has made the extremely obvious observation that it took literal centuries for printing technology to eliminate the trade of printers, which could not have possibly have employed more than 0.01% of people at its peak. Compared to the potential obsolescence of 40% to 60% of the US workforce over the course of 10 - 20 years? You can argue about whether the obsolescence is real or not, but if it is , the…

Yeah + the world was much different than it is today. It trivializes the risk by saying we have seen it before and we were okay when its a fundamentally different problem in many aspects.

How is the GGP post (by Animats) trivializing the risk? They're saying "it's a survival issue" and saying the printers became homeless and struggling to feed themselves.

Sounds much more like a warning than a dismissal to me. If 40-50% of the workforce ends up like that then we're living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland failed state.

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#819

Post by [deleted] »

dan_q wrote: post #771
mawadev wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea why we go down the route of "us" vs "them" type of thinking. Have you considered both sides to be an abstract kind of hell?

The "us" vs "them" thought pattern is the essence of "Western" (read: white, European, colonialist) culture, dating back to Plato's Republic. Marimba Ani's seminal work Yurugu is a sociological study of this culture from a non-western perspective. I can't recommend it strongly enough if you want to understand the nexus of social/psychological/epistemic factors that sustain the "us" vs "them" thought pattern and its c…

[deleted]

Re: What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

#820

Post by purplemoonx »

gamblor956 wrote: post #372
facepalm1 wrote: post #345

[flagged]

Thank you for proving my point. Enjoy being unemployable. You don't need to be an extrovert to be employed. I'm not, and neither are most of my coworkers. But you do need to not be a hyper-aggressive sack of negativity that emotionally drains everyone around you. So deal with that, and you might be able to land a job before you pass.

[flagged]
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