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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#251

Post by chrisco255 »

The decline of newspaper journalism has long been observed. Readership has declined and along with it, salaries and talent. AI looks to be the final nail in the coffin. Nobody cares about fake articles in Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer because nobody reads them at all. You've got a skeleton crew managing the decline of a barely profitable institution with shrinking staff and declining YOY revenues for going on two decades.

It used to be a staple of society to read the paper. Everyone read the paper. We read the feed now, and it's been that way for some time.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#252

Post by Lichtso »

I think caring and competence do correlate.

If you do not care about something you are not going to become competent. And once you are competent you are also more likely to care:

E.g. once you learn a music instrument, or a craft, or the arts, you suddenly see all the flaws in other peoples work as well, not just your own. Sometimes it can even be hard to enjoy these things like you did back when you were ignorant.

Unfortunately, if you have neither you are stuck.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#253

Post by softfalcon »

The hardest thing to do in life is to care.

It's easy to not care, anything bad can happen and you can blissfully wash your hands of it. You don't care, so it doesn't matter.

I remember being a teenager, my defense against anything bad that happened to me was, "I don't care" with a snide attitude. I was lying, I did care, but I built up a mindset that not caring about anything made me stronger.

As an adult, I know this is wrong. Caring requires strength. Caring is hard. That's why we need to do it.

I recently had a conversation with a friend who is now no longer my friend. He said, "so, what you're saying is, you go out of your way to try and deeply understand as much of everything as you can?"

I answered, "Yes. Being curious about others, issues outside of myself, and the world around me, is in my opinion, a moral good."

His only response was, "that's not for me, that sounds exhausting."

We started the conversation because he was openly making fun of other people who were not like him. He thought it was okay to laugh at other people for being different. To mock others if their differences were amusing to him.

His lack of curiosity, his lack of caring for others made him a repulsive person. Be careful what you choose to "not care" about.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#254

Post by palmotea »

WalterBright wrote: post #227
palmotea wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

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

So they should act to strangle themselves faster? It feels like your reasoning is equivalent to, "Eventually you'll die, so there's no point taking care of your health. Go save money by avoiding the doctor, take up smoking, and eat junk food all the time."

Re: The Who Cares Era

#255

Post by qwerpy »

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #158
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.…

This parallels an article that someone I follow wrote a couple of weeks ago. His way of describing this is the "second world effect". The article is better than I could write (link below). But basically, the "third world" is a low-trust society and everyone understands that and behaves in a defensive way. The "first world" is a high-trust society where things work. There is a discontinuous jump from third to first wo…

Thanks for the link, I thought it was a good read. I assumed it would dance around the causes but he was pretty direct with it. Getting society to recognize what's happening and then take meaningful action seems intractable. Suppose that's why the path looks like 3rd -> 1st -> 2nd -X. I'm not aware of any society or even a single city that really breaks out of it once they land in "second world".

Re: The Who Cares Era

#256

Post by bumby »

WalterBright wrote: post #180
toomuchtodo wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/poli…

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.

>It’s not about prioritizing short term results

Boeing was forced by courts bolster safety, compliance, and quality programs as well as admitting to conspiracy to thwart FAA oversight. I don’t know about you, but my experience is that when companies undermine those types of oversight, it’s almost always due to schedule and price pressure (ie short term results). (Not to mention, the whole impetus for MCAS was to rush the design to market so they wouldn’t lose out on AA as a customer).

Re: The Who Cares Era

#257

Post by amanaplanacanal »

nthingtohide wrote: post #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…

Elon was doing no such thing. They didn't even take time to try to determine whether there was any waste in the things they cut. They just cut wholesale and claimed victory.

This is, of course, on top of the administration claiming that Elon was in no way in charge of DOGE. He was evidently just one of the president's personal advisors.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#258

Post by alabastervlog »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #197
1dom wrote: post #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, i…

>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 I genuinely think this is a factor in some ways. 500 years ago, what were people worried about? Their immediate concerns, those of family, and neighbors. Realistically, there was no way to get caught up in the minute-by-minute concerns of…

I think a lot of harm has been caused by "automation" actually meaning "distributing parts of the same tasks among a bunch of people". As far as I can tell that's one of the main outcomes of "efficiencies" from computerization of offices, among other places: they mostly just made it feasible to carve up the job of e.g. secretary among everybody, adding to the number of things and processes each worker has to understand and deal with.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#259

Post by jauntywundrkind »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #176
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…

“ 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.” Exactly. Companies and wealthy people have cancelled the social contract a long time ago and have decided to go for profit at any cost. It’s hard to be excited about work when you know that you get raises below inflation rate while the comp…

I'd also say we are lost in scale.

The supermassive corporate structures that have accreted together in the modern world are beyond the scale of imagining. We are familiar with a vastly smaller % of the org chart, as the size of that chart balloons.

I tend to think there used to be a connection within and across the corporate entity, more shared purposes, shared cause/alignment, and perhaps sometimes at successful places ability for the good ideas to rise. Large companies sometimes love to preach "intrapreneurial" spirit, encourage the individual will & ownership, all while refusing to acknowledge the constraints & impositions of corporate hierarchy, the lack of freedom, that the large organizational structure imposes.

I think there's a real muting of the human will at most large companies, and that caring and trying is only permitted in very narrow scopes. That only some folks are able to maintain will and drive, while fitting themselves into the particular shapes demanded by the org chart around them. At the smaller scale we are not individually abutted by so many others to whom a concern may be charged.

(The impacts of what behaviors we see around us are also bounded by these forces, dimish our spirit collectively too. We grow up & adult in a world where everyone is buried deep in an org chart.)

Re: The Who Cares Era

#260

Post by ryandrake »

WalterBright wrote: post #209
layer8 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we need economic powerhouses to live well?

Yes. Or would you prefer working dawn to dusk picking bugs off of your crops, with the constant spectre of crop failure and famine? Do you prefer living in a mud hut to a house with air conditioning, central heat, hot and cold running water, electric lighting and flush toilets? All courtesy of economic powerhouses. Maybe you'd prefer spending your free time spinning thread with your spinning wheel, making cloth, and…

This is a false dichotomy: Either your country is an "economic powerhouse", or you're living in a mud hut, with nothing in between. A country can be a good, decent place to live, where people's basic needs are taken care of, with opportunities for modest life improvements for those who want them, without being an economic powerhouse (and all of the bad that comes with that).
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