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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#621

Post by deanishe »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #316
meheleventyone wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK at least I suspect it's at least partially a generational thing. When I was in school back in the 90's it was deeply uncool to be in to anything academic. It's also not a surprise it was the height of lads mags and a very heavy drinking culture. These days that social pressure is entirely different for kids. That said there are lots more ways to be good at your job than a narrow focus on hours worked and ra…

> In the UK at least I suspect it's at least partially a generational thing. When I was in school back in the 90's it was deeply uncool to be in to anything academic. It's also not a surprise it was the height of lads mags and a very heavy drinking culture. These days that social pressure is entirely different for kids. This was in the US too--there was a "Gen-X slacker" ethos that persisted into mid-millenial "cultu…

> Under-explored topic perhaps.

Gen-X in a nutshell, isn't it? People rarely seem. To remember that that generation even exists.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#622

Post by WalterBright »

saubeidl wrote: post #318
WalterBright wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yugoslavia's economy doesn't sound so successful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Feder... High unemployment, billions in US foreign aid, etc.

> Despite facing numerous challenges, including political instability and external pressures, the Yugoslav economy achieved significant growth and modernization during its existence, with a particularly strong emphasis on education, health care, and social welfare I'm not sure we're reading the same article then. Here's some archive footage from 60's Yugoslavia for your reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXr5…

You need bricks to make a house. Where are you going to get the bricks from? You need lumber to build a stick frame house. How are you going to saw the lumber? Where are you getting the steel for the saws? Where are you getting the nails from?

Those all come from economic powerhouses.

The steps from mud huts to modern buildings came from economic powerhouses.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#623

Post by trinsic2 »

dividefuel wrote: post #487
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've shared this before. In a lot of modern jobs, how hard you turn the crank of effort is almost completely disconnected from the outcomes that you see. Beyond a small minimum requirement, turning the crank more only leads to the expectation that you will continue to turn that crank that much. Rewards for going beyond -- money, security, autonomy -- are rarely present and almost never in proportion to how much you t…

I don't know if this helps, and I am pretty out of touch with the work culture because I run my own business (boy am I glad I stuck with this in the 2000's because now its so crazy in the job market) but you know where working hard really matters? its with the people you come into contact with that value your hard work that counts. I don't necessarily work hard expecting a return (but I understand fiances are soo tight for people right now that it maters a lot), I work hard because I enjoy what do and I want people to have a good experience. I'm not sure if that is available for everyone in this day and age, but I would strongly encourage everyone that is finding this situation untenable to find something you love a start doing it. The people that values this work will come, it takes awhile to build it, but it does happen eventually.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#624

Post by paulddraper »

sp0rk wrote: post #66
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.…

> 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…

When do you think large employers were pretending to care? And when did people stop caring?

Last 5 years? 10 years? Longer?

Re: The Who Cares Era

#625

Post by WalterBright »

ryandrake wrote: post #323
WalterBright wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yugoslavia's economy doesn't sound so successful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Feder... High unemployment, billions in US foreign aid, etc.

I didn't see any mud huts in that article.

Yugoslavia was getting substantial foreign aid money. That means their economy could not sustain their standard of living.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#626

Post by paulddraper »

mycall wrote: post #594
greenavocado wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't just laziness or corporate greed, though those play a role. It's the result of a financial system that has spent years prioritizing short-term profits over lasting value. When success is measured by clicks, quarterly earnings, and engagement metrics rather than quality or truth, the natural outcome is a flood of cheap, disposable content. The AI-generated newspaper supplement isn't an exception, it'…

In a nutshell, money is the root of our evil. I bet there are some 19th century books about this.

Maybe even some 1st century ones…

Re: The Who Cares Era

#627

Post by paulddraper »

energy123 wrote: post #96
_lvbh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. Even worse, it's become a sort of cultural expectation. Among my friend group here in the UK, people think you're weird for even trying and classify you as a tryhard for simply doing well. It's very different to Asia and I'm not surprised the UK is falling behind.

For many, it's a morality, not just an expectation. You're a bad person if you're not mediocre. See this from a recently posted article 6 hours ago: > It does preclude, practically from first principles, those exceptional individuals many of us have encountered in our career who seemed to be able to hold the entire code base in their brains. Arguably that’s a net positive. Those individuals were always problematic si…

Few are willing to say to out loud, but many are willing to think it.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#628

Post by WalterBright »

trinix912 wrote: post #537
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…

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_...

I built my own 6802 computer in those days, too. I bought the chips and parts and drew schematics and put it all together.

I skipped all the hard parts, like designing the chips and building a chip fab plant.

Building a computer from parts out of a catalog is commonplace.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#629

Post by WalterBright »

trinix912 wrote: post #540
WalterBright wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You're arguing with people who lived there.

You're using the past tense. Is that intended?

Re: The Who Cares Era

#630

Post by abenga »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #285
deadbabe wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term. So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die. Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for gener…

Blessed are those who plant trees under whose shade they will never sit

I think they mean (to stretch the analogy), we are razing trees to build rapidly changing highways so much now that the tree you plant today may be chopped down in a couple of years through no fault of your own.
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