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The Who Cares Era

dansinker.com

141–150 of 765 posts

Re: The Who Cares Era

#141
post #5

I was just kvetching about this to my partner over breakfast. Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs. The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left. The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?) Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.…

In my town they seem to have spent a decade building "luxury housing for seniors" in a project that seemed about as bungled as a building a nuclear reactor. They blame the pandemic but the project stretched on for years before the pandemic.

Of course they find out when it is ready to rent that there is no market for "luxury housing for seniors" because seniors who have money either split for Florida or go to Kendal [1], and the remainder are on a fixed income and looking for "affordable housing".

[1] https://kai.kendal.org/

Re: The Who Cares Era

#142
It's emblematic of the post-modern mindset. When feelings are the diver for truth then there is no moral compass. This kind of mindset redefines "excellence" as anything that helps you feel "good". Is it any wonder that character traits like diligence and sacrifice are diminishing?

Oh, and I'm sure this comment will get voted down by the masses because it doesn't "feel" good!

Re: The Who Cares Era

#143
post #5

I was just kvetching about this to my partner over breakfast. Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs. The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left. The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?) Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.…

They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work. Not a new principle. Turns out that extreme capitalism results in extreme inequality results in similar outcomes as socialism.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal? > I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride…

Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term. So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die. Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for gener…

> Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term.

The opposite seems far more obvious to me. Short-term results aren't going to last. Planning for the long-term - whether that's a career, family, or whatever - is critical to a fulfilling and healthy life.

> Results now are way better than results later.

I don't see why you can't have both.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#146
post #5

I was just kvetching about this to my partner over breakfast. Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs. The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left. The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?) Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.…

it's Boston

When I drove around Boston in the 80s, I discovered that each street had 3 names:

1. the name on the map

2. the name on the street signs

3. the name given by the person giving you directions

I learned to navigate by counting intersections.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#147
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. Even worse, it's become a sort of cultural expectation. Among my friend group here in the UK, people think you're weird for even trying and classify you as a tryhard for simply doing well. It's very different to Asia and I'm not surprised the UK is falling behind.

For many, it's a morality, not just an expectation. You're a bad person if you're not mediocre. See this from a recently posted article 6 hours ago: > It does preclude, practically from first principles, those exceptional individuals many of us have encountered in our career who seemed to be able to hold the entire code base in their brains. Arguably that’s a net positive. Those individuals were always problematic si…

It feels particularly bad if these capabilities come as part of one’s natural state.

I don’t think I’m an exceptional programmer or anything like that for example (on a whole I’d say I’m average), but the ability to keep a codebase in my head just kind of appeared after hitting a certain threshold of experience. It’s not something I intentionally developed. To meet social expectations, what am I supposed to do, pretend I don’t have that capability and handicap myself, ultimately making my workday harder? That doesn’t make any sense.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#148
The Who Cares Inception.

> As Elon Musk's DOGE rats gnaw their way through federal agencies, not caring is their guiding light.

He wouldn't have used this wording if he had actually spent sometime on understanding how wasteful the previous governments have been. So in a sense, Elon was correcting the previous Who Cares mistakes and not actually committing new Who Cares mistakes. This shows that even Dan doesn't care enough to ground his opinions in facts.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#149
I read the title and it triggered something I've been thinking a lot lately: there's too much for everyone to care about right now. Article didn't really touch on it directly, but:

> something that sounded like every other thing: some dude talking to some other dude about apps that some third dude would half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a fourth dude about plans for later.

It's not that the dudes don't care, it's that the dudes have 15 other things expected of them, which weren't expected 15 years ago and caring capacity feels like a biological limit. There isn't the required amount of caring available in the average human any more, and caring is needed for standards to be maintained.

15 years ago, the world was in awe that stuxnet, a cyber attack, had impacted the real world. I was in cyber at the time, and the idea that day to day lives of normal people would be impacted in the real world was like Hollywood fiction: unthinkable.

A few weeks ago, I didn't even notice the reason my local big brand store shelves were empty was because of a cyberattack. It was a week later I saw the article explaining it on BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg4zrpk5p7o

I feel like a cynical old man, but I'm sure most here will relate - the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us thought we were working to create.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#150
post #5

I was just kvetching about this to my partner over breakfast. Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs. The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left. The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?) Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.…

I did some business with the a city department at one time. I discovered that from Thanksgiving to New Years, no work was done at that department. Everyone was "out of the office" or will "be back later".
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