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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#551

Post by bumby »

Aunche wrote: post #414
toomuchtodo wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your position is "well, it lasted this long and the organizational rot only killed a few hundred people" we may be unable to meet on this topic. How many deaths would be sufficient? I argue the decline in fatalities over time is due to commercial air traffic regulations and systems. https://news.mit.edu/2024/study-flying-keeps-getting-safer-0...

> "well, it lasted this long and the organizational rot only killed a few hundred people" It should be clear that is not what I meant. This reinforces my view that popular criticism towards Boeing is unhelpful and ironically is relevant to the posted essay. People care more about gotchas more than deep discussion. If the 737 Max incidents were due to negligence on Boeing's part, the many of the incidents in the 70s w…

>If the 737 Max incidents were due to negligence on Boeing's part, the many of the incidents in the 70s were also due to negligence.

They don’t necessarily have to be classified as the same contributing factors. The de Haviland Comet may have failed due to our lack of understanding of metal fatigue with a pressurized cabin. That was engineering ignorance. If a manufacturer did the same today, it’s negligence because those are known engineering principles.

Boeing was knowingly not following their own procedures for safety critical design. They also admitted to conspiracy to circumvent FAA oversight. Which of the above categories would you put those in?

Re: The Who Cares Era

#552

Post by const_cast »

softfalcon wrote: post #253

The hardest thing to do in life is to care. It's easy to not care, anything bad can happen and you can blissfully wash your hands of it. You don't care, so it doesn't matter. I remember being a teenager, my defense against anything bad that happened to me was, "I don't care" with a snide attitude. I was lying, I did care, but I built up a mindset that not caring about anything made me stronger. As an adult, I know th…

Not caring can be a powerful tool. Anxiety and fear are the manifestation of too much care. Life is chaotic, and at times we must learn to swim with the tide.

There's big things we should care about, and then there's little things we shouldn't. How the towels are folded, or the ring of water on the coffee table. When we give those things too much care, we transform the mundane into a battle. And then, every second of our everyday life becomes a battleground, a game of tug of war. We turn little issues into big ones that occupy our minds.

It's a line we have to toe. Not enough care and we are husks. Too much care and we are an anxious, brittle mess. We have to pick our battles, and we have to acknowledge that not all battles have a winner. Sometimes, there are only losers.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#553

Post by immibis »

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…

Ultimately all of this comes down to currency power, which is why I personally hope one of these highly alternative web-of-trust currencies takes off and starts supplanting mainstream currency. (Any currency will end up getting corrupted too, eventually, though)

The only two I remember are Circles and LedgerLoops.

In Circles, each user gets their own currency not fungible with anyone else's. Payment channels are set up between each user and their immediate friends; users also allow automatic conversion between their currency and their friends' currency. Payments are routed through the trust network through a route that has capacity at each step - this is the anti-Sybil design - you always receive coins of your immediate friends' currency. Each user's coins are minted at a certain rate, and the system does accounts for the devaluation over time of each user's currency, so it's a bit like balances can be somewhat negative, and reset towards zero from either direction with time.

That's obviously a complex system, and radically unlike ordinary currencies. There are many reasons it probably doesn't work; I hope they all turn out to be wrong.

LedgerLoops is the other one I remember. Users post things they want to buy and things they want to sell. The system finds loops where each user gives something to the next in the loop. Apparently this is surprisingly efficient. There is no currency at all. This one, by contrast, is extremely simple, and also radically unlike ordinary currencies. This doesn't have a UBI component.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#554

Post by bumby »

palmotea wrote: post #193
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.

>> 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…

>And how often are the "life cycles" really just the accumulation of bad short-term decisions catching up with the company?

I do think technical debt is a real problem, but to play devils advocate, the “life-cycle” is often a pivot from “innovation” to “maintenance”. Companies rightly begin to focus on the aspects of business that make them money and will often cannibalize R&D to focus on high-margin areas. That’s why “mature” companies often focus on innovation via acquisition.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#555

Post by nullhole »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #470
intalentive wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buybacks sacrifice long term investment for short term stock price gains.

Buybacks do not do that any more than dividends do. Buybacks merely allow publicly listed stock owners to precisely time their capital gains tax events. Surely, there is some amount of income that a business’s owner is allowed to pocket without bad intentions, which may or may not come at the cost of long term investments. Especially in stable/declining businesses.

> Buybacks do not do that any more than dividends do.

There's at least a clear relationship if the dividend is reinvested.

If the dividend is spent, though, eg by someone in retirement, then they're different. Under buybacks, the retiree would have to sell some shares to get cash, and would eventually run out. Under dividends, the retiree would be able to continuously pocket money.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#556

Post by ncruces »

bumby wrote: post #263
WalterBright wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The short term spanning multiple decades undermines the argument.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#557

Post by h2782 »

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.…

> but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and priceless an even lower energy route

I don't think AI has anything to do with cops acting as scarecrows (at best) or construction workers take 6 years to build parking.

AI wasn't even as much of a thing 6 years ago, so these things seem fundamentally unrelated. And anyway, the cops and construction workers aren't using Claude 4...

You had me up until then. It's not related to AI at all. It's more related to post-Covid than AI imo. Even before this, blame social media since 2010 people have been more and more sucked into a small screen in their hand and a virtual set of "friends" than what's actually happening in the real world right in front of them. At this level, it's just basic detachment. Their head isn't where their body is.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#558

Post by lotsofpulp »

Henchman21 wrote: post #514
lotsofpulp wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are unnecessarily emotionally charged definitions and implications of “resources” and “exploit”. I am a resource for my kids, my spouse, and the rest of my friends and family. I am also a resource to my employer and other customers. In any organization, a resource can vary from things such as land, chemicals, machines, humans, books, etc. The term Human Resources seems accurate to a refer to a group of people t…

> Those are unnecessarily emotionally charged definitions and implications of “resources” and “exploit”. One, don’t attempt to invalidate my emotions. They are both entirely valid, given the concerted push from the C-suite to dehumanize their workforce, and entirely necessary. Necessary because our parents and grandparents lived better lives because they weren’t as dehumanized . Necessary because so few people in thi…

If your parents and grandparents were able to live better lives as labor sellers, it was because the ratio of supply of labor and demand for labor was more favorable for them. Not because HR used to be known as Personnel or people were inherently “better”.

There were more slaves before MBAs, and before MBAs joked about mistreating employees, factory/plantation owners/kings did.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#559

Post by typewithrhythm »

immibis wrote: post #509
superdude12 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s different when in general the experience interacting with a government bureaucracy is poor, and government produces expensive and inefficient outcomes these days. As opposed to big tech which is creating huge profits and new technology.

Can you list several significant pieces of technology created since the iPhone?

The 3d printer The reusable rocket The driverless car

Plus a shitload more that reached enough maturity to be broadly useful. CNN's Vr Cheap Thermal cameras

You seem a bit too pessimistic to google things for yourself, but technology is genuinely moving pretty fast

Re: The Who Cares Era

#560

Post by acureau »

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…

I am the kind of person who is very inconsistent. My opinions and identity are fluid, often I learn something new or see something from a different perspective and my framework gets adjusted. So I've come to understand that I don't have a framework. I have a constantly changing state.

There are people such as yourself who live by rigid guidelines, there are people such as myself who live by morphing guidelines, and there must be people who live by nothing at all. I don't think one approach to life is strictly better than the others.

That's where I imagine the negativity you experience stems from. I don't know anyone who appreciates the imposition of rules on their lifestyle, regardless of how well you think you've profiled their framework. Especially in a casual setting, most people just want to get along.

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