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The Who Cares Era

dansinker.com

221–230 of 765 posts

Re: The Who Cares Era

#221
I agree with many of the comments here, but also feel part of this is caused by the declination of our collective physical and spiritual health.

It's easier to care about your job when you're capable of doing a good job. But the average person nowadays is more likely to be dealing with obesity, hormonal imbalances or a variety of other modern ailments/vices that make it harder to think clearly or perform consistently.

And then social media gives us post after post about how your coworkers are not your family and how dumb you have to be to give 100% to your work. A lot of people seem to mindlessly prescribe to this train of thought that would otherwise have questioned it if they went to a church or had some belief system that emphasized the inherent importance of doing good work.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#222
Our leaders have forced a third our population to accept, defend and repeat bald face lies and deception on a daily basis, how can things like this compete? It is the point of all that deception to make us apathetic.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#223
People don't have any goal. It's not surprising at all.

110 years ago it was WW1, then it was WW2, then postwar euphoria. Then it was Democracy vs Commies, golden age, space race, rise of Hollywood, disco, fast cars, cheap housing, economy booming.

What is there now? Everybody is scared shitless of war (and for a good reason), economy is not doing good a small guy (only for trillion dollar behemoths), space race is dead. Mindless scrolling, degradation and grinding are the only things left.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#224
What this article gets wrong about this situation is that it's not really about caring versus not caring, it's about desperation moves from struggling, declining businesses versus thriving, growing ones ones.

You won't find AI writing at The New York Times because their leadership has a sustainable business model. They have adapted well to the digital media upheaval, using their gaming, cooking, and product review businesses to drive up subscriptions to a point where subscriptions are contributing a larger share of revenue than they did in the print era.

The Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Enquirer are papers that have struggled financially in ways that better-managed media companies have not.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only an example of people being bad at their jobs or not caring if you are referring to the management/administration responsible for staffing and scheduling over that time period. The people who are actually out of the office are presumably using approved PTO.

Sure. LOL.

Nah, but for real - why wouldn't they take PTO?

Re: The Who Cares Era

#226
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no contradiction between stocks going up and things being mediocre due to focus on short-term profits.

Looks like a contradiction to me. If you're sacrificing the long term for the short term, your stock isn't going up.

Why not? You’re still profitable, just with mediocre stuff.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boeing consistently went up for many decades prior to the MAX crisis. So did GE. Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down. It's not about prioritizing short term results.

>> 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. > Boeing consistently went up for many decades prior to the MAX crisis. So did GE. The point is they could have probably kept going up if they hadn't done that. It's like how if you choose to eat your seed corn, you'll be fa…

> The point is they could have probably kept going up if they hadn't done that.

No company goes up forever. They all eventually strangle themselves with bureaucratic inefficiency.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#228
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.…

Take a look at the poor construction quality of new build homes too--there's an entire subgenre of social media where home inspectors find all sorts of horrifying and "hilarious" issues with newly assembled McMansions. This runs the gamut from beer bottles overturned in insulation to doors that don't fit in frames, fire hazards, etc.

I've seen the same in apartments I'd rented over the last few years. The owners (management co's in many cases) will perform the most quarter-assed repairs and the poorest paint jobs imaginable before renting the place to the next schlub, while charging you for "wear" on the cheapest model dishwasher on the market.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#229
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

>> 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. Did I miss that, or was I commenting on that exact thing ? >> 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? What's your point with that…

It's not just a political derail to bring up a highly-visible example of the described behaviour. People don't care if they aren't forced to care, and in a world driven by deadlines, we're only motivated to care a certain amount.

There used to be an intrinsic motivator of "well, my kids are going to suffer if I don't push for long-term relationships", but now we aren't having kids, so that carrot doesn't work, and that attitude is bubbling up into the corporate world.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#230
post #104
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 A lot of this derives from people not respecting what they do. We're too elitist as a society to care about the quality of what most people consume and experience on a daily basis. I've never worked at a newspaper, but I went to college with journalism majors for four years, and I know that 98% of a newspaper consists of content that journalism students consider w…

>We're too elitist as a society to care about the quality of what most people consume and experience on a daily basis.

Eh, I disagree with elitist...

We're too capitalist. Lines must go up, that is all that matters. Well, lines for the capital holders, paying the workers less to the point they don't care is fine.

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