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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#401

Post by kot_manul »

RankingMember wrote: post #107
RamblingCTO wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason simply is late stage capitalism, there's not enough upside anymore, so why bother do a good job? That's how I explain it. I noticed that as well with almost all employees, there was a shift. And it feels like it's got to do with misaligned incentives. Why bother working yourself stupid if you'll never own a house if you don't become a slave to the loan? There's no upwards movement/middle class anymore.

I don't want to put quite that fine a point on it, but generally I agree. I think people see that wages have been stagnant for a long time and spending power has gone down. Working harder gives them marginal, if any, life improvement. I'm reminded of the Lithuanian immigrant character Jurgis Rudkus from Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", whose response to continual setbacks was "I will work harder", only to ultimately be…

That's also the horse from Animal Farm right down to the exact quote and the situation.

Granted, the horse got shipped off to become glue, rather than ground down by life, but the effects are pretty much the same.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#402

Post by jaco6 »

clolege wrote: post #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…

[dead]

Re: The Who Cares Era

#403

Post by MSFT_Edging »

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.

That assumes the stock market is by and large logical.

In a way it is, its logically a machine that makes money. The actual business doesn't matter if it's making money.

It's a long form rug pull, where you make money until the company no longer can and you hope you're not holding the bag.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#404

Post by SirFatty »

cladopa wrote: post #81
SirFatty wrote: post #7

For me, the who cares part started with the latest election cycle and current president. The zone has been flooded, I quit reading the news and cannot be bothered to care about any of it. Additionally, AI generated content, AI pictures and deepfakes have a numbing effect. I guess I can say "who cares?"

> For me, the who cares part started with the latest election cycle and current president. I would say it started before, when the supposedly most powerful country of the world was ruled by a senile person and it was not replaced immediately. Instead half the country negated the evidence that we now know was true. I am not American so I observe those things with curiosity from outside and from inside only as a visito…

"The culprit here is the two party system that lacks healthy competition for getting into power."

Actually, no, the issue is corruption. The two party system is fine. Both parties are corrupt. Have 4 parties... still are going to be corrupt. Citizens United, meme coins, insider trading and no term limits equals a bad time for John and Jane Doe.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#405

Post by ambicapter »

layer8 wrote: post #218
WalterBright wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you’re presenting a false dichotomy, but we’re not going to solve that in this thread.

GP consistently has some of the worst takes on HN.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#406

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Who Cares Era

#407

Post by ambicapter »

SamBam wrote: post #130
0_____0 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in New Zealand a couple of months ago and today something crystallized about my experience there - I consistently encountered people who were good at their jobs there. They've got a shortage of people in the trades, but their tradies seemed highly professional and efficient, the folks at the bike shops were on point, the airport staff were quick to help and super informative (gate attendant explained visibility…

I think that observation stands in the US too -- there are certain professions where you're more likely to find someone who cares. You mentioned bike shops. At least in my area (New England) every person I've ever seen working in a bike shop was competent and cared about working in a bike shop. (They weren't necessarily the nicest and most personable people, but that's a different story.) Who works in a bike shop? Al…

GP says "consistently encountered" and you respond with "well, that's true, but only in certain places". Seems like you're contradicting what they're saying and acting like you're in agreement.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#408

Post by porridgeraisin »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #259
vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ 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 pl…

Yes.

When a group of people get together to do something, the most visible effect will be that of GCD(each person's motivations).

If you collect enough people, with sufficient heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest, everything else, while it may exist, contributes with an arbitrarily smaller intensity.

In my mind, there are various links from this to the financialization-led practice of securitizing and "cutting up" everything into an "optimal" number of pieces, without stopping to think if the objective function truly captures the desired end result. However, these links are not clear enough yet for me to expand further on.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#409

Post by ambicapter »

bigtex88 wrote: post #200
SamBam wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where you read that in the quote above. Surely the person who knows the codebase inside out, the person who "jumps on every incident," the person who is willing to put in the long hours IS the person doing the daily grunt work?

Even that person is likely being underpaid for the work they are doing. And unless they're the ONLY PERSON AT THE JOB then they're not doing all the work. Everyone is important to make things work. And I guarantee those other people aren't seeing the fruits of their labor either. Productivity gains going to the top 0.1% since the 1970's has caused the rest of us to not want to work hard, because we don't capture our…

So people are getting mad at a grunt doing work because they believe that grunt isn't getting paid enough? Seems like a stretch.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#410

Post by gilbetron »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #368
gilbetron wrote: post #347

The future is gone. I'm in my 50s, and for nearly all of that time I thought, dreamt, and worked towards a future that I read about, researched, talked to others about, and consumed media about. But over the past several years I realize it is gone. I thought maybe it was just my age, but it seems like the world is doing the same, so maybe not my age. Another thread mentions that no one talks about "life in the 22nd c…

One way to break this illusion is to remember how new things are introduced. Bitcoin didn’t seem more than an intellectual exercise when it was introduced. Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students. HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit. An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop. Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket. The point is, once you wait a decade or so and look back, you find t…

I appreciate the words, and it maybe a symptom of being in my 50s, but kind of my entire point is that I do have experience with multiple decades of change, and this one feels really different. When cellphones and smartphones and tablets and laptops and LCDs and SSDs and console after console and new graphics cards came out previously, it was really fun. Now, it isn't, and hasn't for quite a few years. Maybe the pandemic broke things!

Also, we can do some great things, but there are a lot of things that aren't great. Health care has some profound improvements, but day to day medical care is worse than 10 years ago. There isn't much of a change in the physical world either. Uber was great for a while, now it is just ok. But otherwise flying is generally worse (although the free movies are a nice change), and traveling in general.

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