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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#161

Post by WalterBright »

saubeidl wrote: post #155
sp0rk wrote: post #66

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 in…

The solution to this is worker's self-management, an economic model that was pioneered by Yugoslavia, but has mostly disappeared with its dismantlement. Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market. This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.

Was Yugoslavia an economic powerhouse?

Re: The Who Cares Era

#162

Post by squigz »

sam-cop-vimes wrote: post #120

It comes down to what is "popular" culture. When I was young, society presented mostly people with intellectual achievements as role models which spurred a generation to strive. Hard work, humility, respect for others were actively inculcated into the growing generation. Children had few external influences other than their immediate circle of family, friends, neighbours and the school community. Now we have reality…

> Hard work, humility, respect for others were actively inculcated into the growing generation.

Sure, and then, after we started getting more "external influences", we all realized that "hard work" isn't going to get us anywhere.

It's really easy to blame this on some kind of change in individual values - kids these days don't respect hard work, etc. It's harder to come to terms with the idea that maybe those values were a lie - or, perhaps a better way of putting it, a coping mechanism - in order to keep us placated with the status quo. Now we're really starting to wake up to the fact that employers do not reward things like hard work or loyalty. So why keep up the pretense?

Unfortunately this does indeed result in this issue - a lack of caring. But I don't think we're going to get people to care again by appealing to those older values.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#163

Post by II2II »

sp0rk wrote: post #66
0_____0 wrote: 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.…

> 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 in…

I'm not trying to absolve employers here, since they are almost certainly the ones who initiated this trend, but there are very few incentives to care about employees when employees take advantage of it. The end result is they make life more difficult not just for the employer, but for their fellow employees.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#164

Post by amanaplanacanal »

0_____0 wrote: post #32
XorNot wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?) This doesn't happen because nobody cares. It happens because the financing dries up, or labor is straight up not available. And that still comes back to money.

Yes, and... I had my renovation stall for 6 weeks because someone at Mass DEP couldn't be arsed to approve an asbestos abatement work plan. My contractor called the guy's boss and it was approved the next day.

Wouldn't surprise me to find out that they are trying to do it with way too few people and in your case, the squeaky wheel got the grease, and you jumped to the front of the line.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#165

Post by dfxm12 »

0_____0 wrote: 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.…

Maybe people are bad at their jobs. Maybe they have poor management who is always increasing the scope of their job, in an attempt to maximize their profits at a cost to customer satisfaction.

In my experience, there's certainly a mix of both, but the latter is much more common.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#166

Post by almosthere »

0_____0 wrote: 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.…

Society standards have been dropping since 2010, COVID accelerated it. Most of it is people mad that they are barely making it, and often they are in service of people that don't even realize prices have risen.

I've been saying this for years and people are still dumbfounded.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#167

Post by WalterBright »

sndean wrote: post #16
0_____0 wrote: 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.…

> a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs. Is this similar to the Peter principle, though? And not that it is exactly that concept, but that book is from 1969. People have been making this observation for a while. In this context, it's more comforting to really pay attention to very competent people. I had a home inspector spend ~5 hours on my house and was amazed by every little detail he discovered and…

> People have been making this observation for a while.

A lot longer than that. See C. Northcote Parkinson's books.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#168

Post by theptip »

“Who cares” is one way to frame it, perhaps a bit blame-y.

I view this as more epistemically significant, it’s the Post-Truth era. Politics and national discourse has been heading this way for some time, but now AI may mean that nobody can distinguish truth from falsehood, at least for online content.

We need new methods for attesting and chaining trust.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#169

Post by pixl97 »

palmotea wrote: post #136
deadbabe wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior. > So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die. So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then? > Same with companies. Things change so fast now th…

>That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior.

You seem to miss that companies that think quarter to quarter behave just like this.

>So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then?

You mean like the current administration that's trying to get rid of the EPA?

Re: The Who Cares Era

#170

Post by toomuchtodo »

WalterBright wrote: post #157
palmotea wrote: post #102

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…

> it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results I've heard that my whole life. If that were generally true, company stocks would be going steadily downwards.

GE [1]? Boeing [2] [3]? The stocks go up because management and shareholders pull forward the gains as financialization destroys the long term value of the enterprises. Works until it doesn't.

[1] Power Failure: The downfall of General Electric - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102034 - May 2025

[2] Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-Standing C-Suite Greed - https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/boeing-corporate-... - April 9th, 2024

[3] HN Search: Boeing - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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