Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Who Cares Era

dansinker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 765 posts

Re: The Who Cares Era

#521

Post by TFYS »

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 think it's the lack a of deeper meaning in the things we do have to do in this system. We're just cogs in a large machine that creates more and more wealth, but after you have enough to live a comfortable life that is no longer enough to make you care. There's no more purpose to it. Yet the pursuit of wealth is the only goal our economic system, and increasingly our culture as well, provides. Any other goal gets trampled under the herd of organizations seeking wealth for the purpose of making more wealth.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#522

Post by carlosjobim »

saubeidl wrote: post #330
WalterBright wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did 20 million people over the last 4 years sneak into America? How many Americans left for Yugoslavia?

How many Yugoslavs left for America?

Were they allowed to leave?

Usually the sign of the fairest and most humane systems of government and economy is when people get shot in the back by border guards if they try to escape.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#523

Post by PaulHoule »

bombcar wrote: post #194
PaulHoule wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my town they seem to have spent a decade building "luxury housing for seniors" in a project that seemed about as bungled as a building a nuclear reactor. They blame the pandemic but the project stretched on for years before the pandemic. Of course they find out when it is ready to rent that there is no market for "luxury housing for seniors" because seniors who have money either split for Florida or go to Kendal […

Once you realize the builders build for the lenders and for nobody else, everything becomes crystal clear.

Not sure how the lenders benefit by building apartment buildings that can't find renters though I can see how they might systematically fool themselves into believing in a luxury market that doesn't exist. Affordable units might be less profitable on paper but it's a choice between getting less rent than you wish you would get vs getting no rent at all.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#524

Post by Ray20 »

ausbah wrote: post #482
0_____0 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the private sector, the burden of a shirking employee is borne by owners, investors, shareholders. In the public sector, the weight is borne by our collective dollars, and shirking represents money that could have gone into a playground, better wayfinding infra, curb cuts... We necessarily have a stake in what our governments do, therefore the expectations of the public are different vs. the private sector.

people are hugely dependent on private sector companies as well. sure the financial impacts are passed onto the capital owners, but those are passed onto consumers in most cases no? i dont see a huge difference here also the wage differences between tech and a public service worker is laughable. if you underpay in a high pressure environment, of course they won’t care. we get what we pay for with publicly owned utili…

>i dont see a huge difference here

In the case of a company, you can simply refuse to pay them if you feel that the goods and services you receive are not worth the money they are asking for.

If you try to stop paying to the government, you will be robbed blind and sent to prison for life.

Quite a big of a difference, in my opinion.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#525

Post by nradov »

saubeidl wrote: post #198
WalterBright wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Yugoslavia an economic powerhouse?

It was a place where people lived good lives and had plenty of opportunities to succeed, along with free education and healthcare. I'm kind of tired of being an economic powerhouse where most people live in misery.

Yugoslavia also had severe political repression, with peace between the provinces only maintained by a (near) dictator with a cult of personality. Their economy and standard of living was mediocre at best, and only even possible within a limited geopolitical context where they sat between competing superpowers. It wouldn't be possible to create something like Yugoslavia today. Stupid to even try.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#526

Post by nostrademons »

WalterBright wrote: post #157
palmotea wrote: post #102

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…

> it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results I've heard that my whole life. If that were generally true, company stocks would be going steadily downwards.

The financial industry isn’t immune to “who cares”-ism, or folks who are bad at their jobs. Heck, the index fund is the ultimate “who cares?” product - you’re explicitly saying that you don’t care about underlying fundamental valuations and are going to piggyback off the price discovery mechanism of other active investors, and you accept average returns as a result.

In practice, financial results are driven by transactions, and so any mediocrity that doesn’t lead to the customer going elsewhere isn’t going to show up in the financial results. You need an actual competitor to risk losing money to sucking. But I’ll note that in cases where there is an actual competitor to sclerotic old industries, one that actually does care, the investors in the competitor tend to become fabulously wealthy and the investors in the old industry go broke.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#527

Post by HelloMcFly »

InvisibleUp wrote: post #269
greenavocado wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exacerba…

> They also only own 0.06% of US single-family housing stock.

This is one of those situations where averages hide the harm. Yes, when you look across everything it's not a big deal. But you can find clear instances where it is a problem, particularly in homes of certain value in growing markets (like Atlanta: https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/data-investors-now-own...).

Re: The Who Cares Era

#528

Post by nradov »

saubeidl wrote: post #519
Ray20 wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nobody's gonna live in a mud hut using a spinning wheel just because workers run companies. That exactly what will happen. In the best case, if you lacky enough, you will be live in a mud hut. The rest will envy those who can afford to live in a mud hut. Workers can start running companies at any time, no one restricts them from running their companies. The only reason they don't do this is that this will be worse f…

[flagged]

When a "problem" has no solution then it's not actually a problem, just a fact to be accepted. Like gravity. There's nothing wrong with worker owned cooperatives, but for anything that requires significant capital you have to run things the way that capital owners want. And large-scale economic central planning where governments allocate capital has been an abject failure everywhere it has been tried, so don't insult our intelligence by suggesting that we give it another shot.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#529

Post by [deleted] »

j2kun wrote: post #210
chrisco255 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I asked Reddit and TeamBlind how to best deal with this kind of situation > a lot of them, 99% of the answers go along these lines "Who the fuck cares man > So, that was my wake up call Let me get this right, you discovered your team was mediocre, you then asked the clinically cynical folks at Reddit for advice, people you don't even know and people who certainly don't know you, and the conclusion you walked away w…

+100 get advice from people in your life who care about you and can contextualize your situation.

[deleted]

Re: The Who Cares Era

#530

Post by nradov »

carlosjobim wrote: post #522
saubeidl wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many Yugoslavs left for America?

Were they allowed to leave? Usually the sign of the fairest and most humane systems of government and economy is when people get shot in the back by border guards if they try to escape.

Generally yes. Unlike Soviet occupied Eastern Europe, most regular people in Yugoslavia were able to obtain passports and travel internationally. There were some people barred from leaving or held as political prisoners.
Post reply on HN