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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#531

Post by mobileturdfctry »

The part about "caring" that I think requires nuance to get to the heart of the issue:

I used to seek out tough challenges that had tight deadlines. Early in my career. This helped me gain a lot of knowledge about my craft. However, now that I've acquired a lot of knowledge I don't go actively seeking work I'm not being asked to do. It's not because I don't care, but it's because I value my life outside of work.

The other part of this is that there were never tangible rewards, such as a raise or promotion (besides the experience I acquired) so at this stage in my career by asking to do extra work and spend more stressful hours in a salaried job environment for nothing in return would ultimately be a bad decision on my part.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#532

Post by rossant »

tim333 wrote: post #466

I care about what I consider important stuff, say the war in Ukraine and will it be WW3 or not. I really see no reason why I should care whether some mediocre supplement or podcast I've not heard of was done with AI or not. Is there some reason I should care about that?

Some people may also feel that nothing matters, since they're convinced we’ll all end up dead in a nuclear or climate apocalypse anyway.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#533

Post by nradov »

antisthenes wrote: post #411
WalterBright wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Yugoslavia an economic powerhouse?

What % of easy carbohydrate energy was Yugoslavia consuming at the time, compared to, say, USSR or USA or China?

Are you asking about diets? During most of the Cold War period, average people in Yugoslavia generally had more and better food than the USSR or China but less than the USA. They ate a lot of bread and potatoes. You probably won't find detailed records with percentages.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#534

Post by try_the_bass »

ncr100 wrote: post #370
try_the_bass wrote: post #339

I don't think I agree with this. As someone who has cared deeply about sometimes esoteric things, I've found that caring is actually the shortest path to being _hated_, mostly by other people who care about the same things but for different reasons. The best thing I did for my own sanity was to stop caring so much. But this is still the case. One of the things I care the most about is having a consistent moral framew…

As a person who has dabbled in that that perspective olive, saying the sky is falling, and who has other people who actively engage in that, in his life, I think it's important to be aware of your own motivations. Deeply. Because, relationships are a two-way thing. If you notice people are being mad at you .. then know that's one of the "two-ways". You are doing something which triggers them. Now I need to be careful…

This isn't the first time I've received this advice, and it certainly won't be the last.

The trouble I have with this advice is that every specific example or suggestion on how to change my message has ultimately boiled down to "soften the message enough that the recipient can feel okay with ignoring it."

But that defeats the whole purpose! If someone is actively entertaining a cognitive dissonance of some kind, "softening" the message merely gives them the "out" they need to continue to hold the dissonance!

Unfortunately, because I've been given this advice so frequently, and because it always ends up being "just don't challenge people", it comes across as rather condescending. I'm sure that's not your intent, but next time, please consider that maybe I've already done that analysis a hundred times over, and still reach the same conclusion.

Perhaps I'm just stubbornly wrong! But I really don't think the issue is that; I think the issue is that we've made it socially unacceptable to call people out for being inconsistent. Just look at what the typical responses to such a thing are: whataboutism, radical generalization, ad hominems, retreat to an echo chamber, the classic gish gallop of tangentially-related things, etc.

Perhaps what we've really made socially unacceptable is the admission of fault?

Re: The Who Cares Era

#535

Post by carlosjobim »

alphazard wrote: post #491
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 is largely a consequence of the economic opportunities presented to people at work. There is basically no organization that will pay you more as a direct consequence of being better at your job. Compensation is almost never tied to performance, and is in practice most closely tied to age. Compensation isn't adjusted quickly enough for people to associate it with the quality of their work. A yearly meeting where…

> There is basically no organization that will pay you more as a direct consequence of being better at your job.

Sure there is, that organization is called having your own business, or consulting.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#536

Post by Ray20 »

komali2 wrote: post #295
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 tr…

>she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism.

It is not entirely clear why you call these the values of capitalism. These are universal human values that do not depend on the economic formation.

If anything, capitalism makes people less cynical, simply because it is designed to function independently of such qualities in people. While in many other systems, cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness and deceitfulness of people are simply ignored, giving people with such qualities huge advantages within the system and ruining the lives of everyone else.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#537

Post by trinix912 »

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…

You know Yugoslavia was heavily industrialized right? To the point they even made their own computers [1][2][3][4][5].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskra_Delta

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskradata_1680

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ei_Ni%C5%A1

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorenje_Dialog

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_systems_from_...

Re: The Who Cares Era

#538

Post by Ray20 »

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]

>they lack the capital

This is absolutely not true. In absolute numbers, the cost of starting a business is quite low, and workers have a lot of money, much more than their employers. And if workers collectively stop spending their salaries on unnecessary things, and instead organize a fund - on average, in 2 years they will have enough money to buy out the entire company they work for, or organize a comparable one.

There are no problems with capitalism, capitalism just allows you not to do all of this, not to suffer 2 years of poverty for the sake of living in a mud hut (if you're lucky enough).

Re: The Who Cares Era

#539

Post by const_cast »

palmotea wrote: post #102
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…

>> 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…

Most workers have learned that going above and beyond almost always backfires. Employers don't value long-term employment relationships, so working hard just results in you raising the bar for yourself, with no benefit.

A lot of these people were once starry-eyed highschoolers and college students who got burned too many times. They put in the time, the effort, the blood, sweat and tears, and what did they get? No thank you, just more work. Eventually they can't live up to the standard they themselves set, and they're let go. Meanwhile, bozos show up late and half-ass everything and then that becomes their expectation.

Nobody wants to be Atlas.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#540

Post by trinix912 »

WalterBright wrote: post #211
lelandbatey wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being an economic powerhouse or not isn't required for the idea to be a reasonable and workable one. But given the high levels of dysfunction/conflict that led to the breakup of the country, I doubt they'd meet whatever bar you set for "economic powerhouse".

> the high levels of dysfunction/conflict Doesn't sound like Yugoslavia had a successful model.

The conflict was due to it being a federation of several culturally quite different nations. When Tito died, the politicians that replaced him started heavily pushing nationalist ideologies amidst the 1980s economic crisis (which was not limited to Yugoslavia).

PS. You're arguing with people who lived there. How can you be so certain you know better than those of us who saw it first hand? And I'm in no way saying it was a perfect system, btw.

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