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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#261

Post by saulpw »

ewhanley wrote: post #220
mystifyingpoi wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my first job after graduating I've found: * programmer that worked maybe 2h/day, but was otherwise very important to one of the oursourced projects, so he got away with it and was publicly laughing about it without ever getting reprimanded * devops guy that insisted on using his magic copy-pasted shitty shell scripts instead of any popular config management tool at the time, simply to make it harder for anyone els…

It sounds like you should be able to run the table with so little competition. Why not engage, take on more responsibility, and obviously stand out to get more money and influence?

Because, as has been mentioned innumerable times in this thread, going through all that extra effort does not get you more money. It gets you more stress and a target on your back when you make a mistake.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#262

Post by amanaplanacanal »

chrisco255 wrote: post #206
jplusequalt wrote: post #43

This is late stage capitalism at work. Our economy and political systems incentivized the behavior that lead us here, and the current apathy we see is the working class realizing the rot in the bottom of society.

There's no such thing as late stage capitalism. There's ebbs and flows, businesses that were formerly great (like newspapers), fade out and go out of business. New forms of media take their place, the cream rises to the top, the train keeps going.

In our case I think late stage capitalism is what we are calling the combination of extremely low interest rates, low tax rates on the super-rich, and a lack of antitrust enforcement. The rich get richer, the middle class gets gutted, and nobody is incentivized to care any more.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#263

Post by bumby »

WalterBright wrote: post #214
layer8 wrote: 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.

Depends on the time horizon of investors.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#264

Post by fragmede »

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.

Forever is a long time, but eg Nintendo has been around in some form or another since 1889, so that doesn't seem like a given.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#265

Post by BarryMilo »

Balgair wrote: post #237
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s two things going on: 1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society 2. People a rejecting the directions they were told to prioritize (education, family, religion etc…) because none have predictable outcomes As function of both, there’s no consistent or coherent philosophical for people to align to. In the past, the percentage of the population that was forced to al…

> 1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society I saw one on twitter the other day and was struck by it's take: "in the 1900s, it was common to dream of the 21st century. when was the last time you heard talk of a 22nd century? it's like we don't believe we're going to make it anymore, but to endure, we MUST dream of futures worth suffering for. please, dare dream of a 22n…

Mostly just sounds like everyone has depression.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#266

Post by criddell »

dkarl wrote: post #104
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 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…

If you haven't already read it, you might enjoy Neil Postman's Amusing ourselves to Death. I'm about half way through it myself and it has already changed how I look at some things.

He wrote it from the point of view of television destroying our society, but as you can imagine, the internet is so much worse.

> 98% of a newspaper consists of content that journalism students consider worthless trash

In the book, Postman makes the case for the value of news being related to how actionable the information is. The weather report is valuable because I might change my plans if it's going to rain. The story about a mass stabbing attack in Germany (which I bet your journalism friends do not consider trash) has little value to me, a person living in Austin, TX.

If there were ever to be a HN Book Club, I think Amusing Ourselves to Death would be a great selection for it.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#267

Post by ryandrake »

aerostable_slug wrote: post #241
thewebguyd wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of a self-fulfilling cycle in that way. Employers have taken away any and all incentives to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired, so now that's what they get. Because that's now employees behave, now employers won't offer anything else - but without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change. I think strong unions are the only way forward

> without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change. In my lived experience, unions permanently cement the anti-employer (and often anti-customer) attitude present in some employees. Once in place, they don't produce a massive change of heart where employees are willing to rise above and beyond the exact terms of their collective bargaining agreements, but instead result in a rejection of the…

Employers behave as adversaries to their workers anyway, comparatively wealthy and powerful adversaries. So either you union-up and present yourselves as a united and somewhat formidable adversary, or you don't and remain a (relatively poor and powerless) individual, no match against your (already existing) adversary.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#268

Post by azemetre »

ewhanley wrote: post #220
mystifyingpoi wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my first job after graduating I've found: * programmer that worked maybe 2h/day, but was otherwise very important to one of the oursourced projects, so he got away with it and was publicly laughing about it without ever getting reprimanded * devops guy that insisted on using his magic copy-pasted shitty shell scripts instead of any popular config management tool at the time, simply to make it harder for anyone els…

It sounds like you should be able to run the table with so little competition. Why not engage, take on more responsibility, and obviously stand out to get more money and influence?

Because you won't be rewarded with money and influence while still having the same risks of layoffs.

At this point you're better off working on your own thing because the company is usually, always with few exceptions mind you, a dishonest actor that is openly hostile.

The elites can't blame the state of the world on workers when they've created out hellscape of treadmills to delusion and abandonment.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#269

Post by InvisibleUp »

greenavocado wrote: post #101
transcriptase wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And all the reasons why economists say inflation is necessary and a good thing seem to make assumptions that aren’t true if taken to their logical conclusion (e.g. infinite growth) and hand wave away negative consequences in order to maintain what amounts to psychologically manipulating people into not saving their money. Index all wages to inflation and we’ll see how much those holding all the assets feel a…

I agree with you. The Fed prints trillions, mortgage rates plunge, and suddenly BlackRock's buying up entire neighborhoods with cheap debt while renters get priced out. Inflation is "healthy" if you're the one holding the deeds. But tell that to the family paying 40% of their paycheck just to keep a roof over their heads while wages crawl. Or look at food prices. The USDA says inflation's "moderate," but try explaini…

It’s Blackstone that’s investing in single-family homes, not BlackRock. They also only own 0.06% of US single-family housing stock. Easy mistake to make.

Also, there was absolutely inflation before Bretton Woods, and significantly worse inflation at that. See, for example, the hyperinflation during Weimar Germany which led to WWII. Or the nearly 10% deflation in the US during the Great Depression, which just exacerbated the effects by severely discouraging investment that would have helped kickstart the economy again. Post-Bretton Woods, major currencies are generally substantially more stable and predictable.

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