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Modern Malaise

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Re: Modern Malaise

#131

Post by carapace »

seydor wrote: post #127
carapace wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've never been to war, eh? > Define 'comfortable'. Hot and cold running water, a toilet, shower, electricity and internet, shelter, medical care (not dying of easily curable diseases, for example.) Really, IMO, the baseline is what folks at the Google campus have. If everyone in the world had that QoL as a baseline I think we could declare victory and go home.

the soviet union provided this level of 'comfortable', decent basics for literally everyone . somehow its people didn't 'declare victory and went home'

So, your answer to the original question

> Why not simply make sure that life is comfortable on the tail end of the of the curve and call it a day?

Is that "that's not enough"?

Where are you going with this?

Re: Modern Malaise

#132

Post by anon291 »

seibelj wrote: post #117
anon291 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"hard work" is not a traditional value. That's an American thing which is relatively young as far as tradition goes. Do your friends value an integrated life? Community? Leisure? These are the traditional values missing and they're so missed even so called conservatives have forgotten they exist.

Yes there was no such thing as hard work before America. All of civilization sprung up from nowhere in a life of leisure where everyone relaxed, then America came around and made everyone work hard.

That's not at all what I said. I merely said that excluding leisure and an integrated life as similarly important traditional values is ahistorical. Work is a traditional value in western culture, but it's not the only one.

Re: Modern Malaise

#133

Post by deltathreetwo »

epgui wrote: post #61
formulatwothree wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did trigger me. Read your first reply to me. Your comment really pissed me off, it was intentionally rude. "New flash" Either way it got me curious and I started reading your other comments and I realized you're just not a very nice person and highly mistaken about a lot of things. You're not very logical or scientific or academically inclined. So I just wanted to help you out and teach you some stuff that's all.…

I can accept that it was rude, and I apologize for that, but you should know that it wasn’t the intention.

It was the intention. You are lying to my face. The format: "News Flash: Statement of something obvious." is very rude. Implying I don't know the obvious thing.

I hold no grudges but your previous statement is a total lie. Don't pretend it wasn't intentional.

Re: Modern Malaise

#134

Post by deltathreetwo »

feet wrote: post #95
peyton wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the liberal western form is not an exercise in working together towards some mutual goal. Rather it is in satisfying some baseline level of acceptance of how society works, property rights, etc. Power comes from the people, not by divine mandate or military might.

>Power comes from the people Right, but that was my point. Its a step closer to people coming together to accomplish or fund some goal instead of just some rich guy saying "I have money, I'm paying you all to so this now"

It doesn't have to be a rich guy. But some form of centralized rich power. Like a corporation for example. But even complex structures like this involve a cluster of individuals who own the corporation or have seats of power within the structure. This small population of people controls wealth and resources and deploys it accordingly.

In the beginning though, before complex structures like corporations formed, civilization began with rich guys telling poor guys what to do.

Re: Modern Malaise

#135

Post by roenxi »

svnpenn wrote: post #100
roenxi wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you refer to any evidence that inequality makes systems unstable? There is no reason that I can think of for that. OnlyFans looks pretty stable, in fact. And It doesn't make sense that a political system gets unstable when some people get wealthy. Political systems fall apart when large numbers of people can't afford food (an issue which has nothing to do with equality).

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake

Inequality much more extreme than that was quite stable. Antoinette was only wealthy compared to people in the 1700s. She was basically an equal to the peasants wealth-wise compared to the inequality we've seen since after the industrial revolution.

We've probably got more poor people today than were alive then in absolute numbers, and our wealthy are orders of magnitude more wealthy. And the situation is much more stable.

Re: Modern Malaise

#136

Post by [deleted] »

JaimeThompson wrote: post #38
nxmnxm99 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

>There's nothing wrong with income inequality. People are just envious. It isn't envy some feel when they can't afford medical care for themselves and those they care about. This applies to a lot of things in additional to medical care. If they ultra wealthy lived under the same system as everyone else then perhaps, but they don't. They have oversized influence of most every aspect of our lives which isn't conducive…

[deleted]

Re: Modern Malaise

#137

Post by MichaelZuo »

d0liver wrote: post #118
peyton wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you give an example of a billionaire bringing tens of thousands times as much value as an average employee at a company? Imagine that they are not already a billionaire. Yeah, Jeff Bezos took his idea for an online bookstore from working as an employee at DE Shaw and delivered way more value by systematically derisking the business over decades. There was a market worth many trillions: online retail. When Bezos…

What you're talking about is using other people to leverage the value of your judgement, right? This is similar to what a manager does when they manage a team - they make sure that things flow well in the team or the whole project fails. In that case, at the end of the project, is it fair for the manager to get up and say, "I personally created all of this value because without me it wouldn't exist"? No, of course no…

Why can’t ‘good judgement’ at the right time be worth 20000x more than a mediocre judgement at the right time? (Or good judgement at a mediocore time?)

In the most extreme case, say some military general’s correct judgement to avoid launching a nuclear missile during a false alert, may be worth more than everyone else’s combined. i.e their ‘good judgement’ during a critical few seconds would be worth 8 billion times more than the average.

Re: Modern Malaise

#138

Post by aklemm »

anon291 wrote: post #112
PontifexMinimus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But this requires people to care for religion, which again is a self imposed change people have decided on. Self-imposed? People can't just choose to beleive in God, and most religions like their adherents to sincerely beleive in their stuff.

I mean at the end of the day everything the article complains about is people not believing in God. Americans have a clear religion and its god is money. Also, I'll point out the religious belief is basically inherited. A lot of the problems we see today are the previous generations refusal to pass on values and attitudes passed on to them.

Which God? Am seeing that leads to violent conflict every single time and undermines your argument a wee bit.

Re: Modern Malaise

#139

Post by aoki »

voidhorse wrote: post #25

Interesting article. I pretty much agree with most of the political and economic points, but one thing that’s palpably absent is an analysis of the structural patterns and habits inherently imposed by technologies, beyond their ties to the political economy. So many of the systems and technologies for discourse we engage with have reduced the amount of content presented on a given topic at a given time down to the sm…

I took the "numbered theses" format as being a deliberate reference to the Central European writing tradition to which you allude, e.g., Benjamin's theses on history, or Marx' theses on Feuerbach. Writing in the "merciless telegram style" implies that the reader is expected to fill in the gaps with their own store of knowledge and their own effort. Like modern mathematical writing, it's more about "high bandwidth" scholar-to-scholar dialogue than explication for a broad audience. Taken in this light, it's has the opposite intent of compressing down to "hot takes" (sparking internal dialogue with the reader vs. sparking lazy emotional acceptance of the argument).

Or maybe she's just a lazy writer who clicked "numbered paragraph," who knows.

Re: Modern Malaise

#140

Post by d0liver »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #137
d0liver wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're talking about is using other people to leverage the value of your judgement, right? This is similar to what a manager does when they manage a team - they make sure that things flow well in the team or the whole project fails. In that case, at the end of the project, is it fair for the manager to get up and say, "I personally created all of this value because without me it wouldn't exist"? No, of course no…

Why can’t ‘good judgement’ at the right time be worth 20000x more than a mediocre judgement at the right time? (Or good judgement at a mediocore time?) In the most extreme case, say some military general’s correct judgement to avoid launching a nuclear missile during a false alert, may be worth more than everyone else’s combined. i.e their ‘good judgement’ during a critical few seconds would be worth 8 billion times…

This only works if you're leveraging your judgement through other people. The people who put you in a position to make the meaningful judgement are just as important. For example, if the person who made the monitoring system that you're using to inform your decision didn't mess it up, then they're just as responsible for the good outcome. Same with the people who made the parts that they used to build the system and on and on.

It's still the same thing: Taking credit for other people's work and claiming it as your own. It's also probably a good reason to democratize decision making when there's a lot on the line. Because, ultimately, everyone suffers from the bad decisions that people in power make.

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