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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#291

Post by ryandrake »

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…

Every year, the 22nd century looks more and more like the movie Elysium: With a small, ultra rich segment of society living in luxury, physically isolated from the remaining N billion living basically peasant/subsistence lives, working for the ultra rich if they are lucky. That's how things are trending, anyway. I don't think anyone wants to think about the year 2125. They see themselves as increasingly economically irrelevant cast offs.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#292

Post by Nifty3929 »

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…

Yes, and also there's no sense of proportion as we are being asked to care about every single possible thing. There's only one volume setting for everything: 11.

It's exhausting.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#293

Post by constantcrying »

0x000xca0xfe wrote: post #143
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.…

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.

The person in question was literally paid by the government, which is notoriously and world wide chronically inept, "despite" being complete isolated from any capitalist motive.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#294

Post by e-topy »

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…

> I read somewhere that every augmentation is also an amputation. Progress in tech means we are constantly lobotomising a majority of the population.

Just thought about something:

There are a few sides to this. There is innovation that just makes things easier but doesn't amputate, like typing machines vs word (took me a while to come up with an example, essentially just evolution). Then there are things that are so old it's useless to know them. Like making butter, sure you can do it if you want to, might be fun, but in the grand scheme of things irrelevant. Then there's stuff that is in decline but needed anyway. Like being able to read a book.

Maybe you could express this as a 2D graph, where X is how much people know it and Y is how much people need to know it.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#295

Post by komali2 »

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.…

> I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.

If she's able to do this without risk of being fired, she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism. The worker / employer dynamic under capitalism is: employers try to extract the most labor value for the least cost (maximizing profit margin) while the worker tries to retain the highest labor profit margin possible for the least labor cost (wear and tear on mind and body, time, etc). Since it's not possible to retain / change total capture of labor profit margin on the employee side, since compensation for labor isn't attached to value but rather to "market conditions" (geography, whether or not another employer in the industry recently laid people off, the phase of the moon), the employee's only option is to reduce personal labor cost: work as little as possible, as lazily as possible.

One of the genius strokes of this arrangement is that humans aren't purely economic rational actors: we generally take pride in our work, and also want to be a part of something greater, and even if we don't have either of those things, we suffer social pressure to do good at our jobs or not leave our teammates hanging. So, in reality, the employer has an advantage, because it's basically immune to these human traits. Therefore the corporation can extract even more value for less cost (people will work harder than necessary per their compensation because e.g. they take pride in their work).

As the overall system destabilizes further and normalization deepens and people feel the inherent contradictions more strongly, I believe cynicism will increase and these human traits will hold less influence over the employer / worker dynamic, and people will operate more like rational capitalist actors.

Annoyingly this will probably lead to more articles about how "people just don't want to work anymore."

Re: The Who Cares Era

#296

Post by WalterBright »

bumby wrote: post #256
WalterBright wrote: post #180

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.

> 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 rus…

Again, the vast bulk of Boeing's history was before that.

> the whole impetus for MCAS was to rush the design to market so they wouldn’t lose out on AA as a customer

The impetus for MCAS was to make the MAX behave like the previous 737 model to reduce the expense of retraining the pilots.

In general, flying is safer when pilots do not need to "code switch" when switching airplane models. Many crashes result from a pilot reflexively doing the right thing for the previous airplane they flew, rather than the one they are flying at the moment.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#297

Post by kridsdale1 »

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…

I think that’s a good way to describe the 15,000 years of stagnation we see in the Star Wars universe.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#298

Post by _DeadFred_ »

tomslick wrote: post #201
adamc wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree that part of it is the increasingly toxic work circumstances. Many people get no health care, poor wages, and zero job security, so... they are pretty demoralized much of the time. And many work multiple gigs, so they are also tired all the time.

> And many work multiple gigs I don’t think this is much different now than in the past, arguably less so. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620

Grey beard here, it's much different than in the past. In the past people worked a second jobs for XYZ, like a vacation fund, a fancier new car than they could normally afford, or home remodels. Today people work a second just so that they can afford their 1/3 of rent with their roommates.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#299

Post by WalterBright »

palmotea wrote: post #254
WalterBright wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

> So they should act to strangle themselves faster?

Come on.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#300

Post by nthingtohide »

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…

This is why Institutions are important. They should be truthful and unbiased and undogmatic. But given intentional pollution of information environment. The same lessons being learnt again and again. New generations growing up and trying to navigate this new polluted environment, all of this is taking a toll. Hence delulu is the solulu.
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