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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#661

Post by DavidPiper »

superultra wrote: post #459

I think a better term for it is the “we’re cooked era.” I see this phrase everywhere, in relation to AI, in relation to national politics, in relation to big problems like climate change. It’s really demoralizing because it’s a passive acquiescence to systemic change as if we have no control over anything. Which will inevitably lead to entropy. If there’s one book I could “force” everyone to read, it’d be the Dawn of…

Big +1 to the Dawn of Everything. Best book I read last year; probably in the last 5 years.

But my own "force" recommendation is Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Also a very clarifying read on how exactly we got to this Who Cares Era through the mid-late 1900s.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#662

Post by int_19h »

badpun wrote: post #454
toomuchtodo wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [1] Power Failure: The downfall of General Electric - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44102034 - May 2025 [2] Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-Standing C-Suite Greed - https://www.thenation.com/article/poli…

Boeing stock price still almost doubled in the past 10 years. Went up by hundreds of percent in the past two decades. GE stock is worth 40x what it was worth 40 years ago, when Jack Welsh took over management! These two seem like two very successful companies, led by succesful strategies.

Do stock prices even meaningfully represent anything anymore? Looking at some valuations makes me feel like it has all devolved entirely into gambling.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#663

Post by sam-cop-vimes »

mierz00 wrote: post #654
sam-cop-vimes wrote: post #120

It comes down to what is "popular" culture. When I was young, society presented mostly people with intellectual achievements as role models which spurred a generation to strive. Hard work, humility, respect for others were actively inculcated into the growing generation. Children had few external influences other than their immediate circle of family, friends, neighbours and the school community. Now we have reality…

I don’t buy into this narrative. Every generation has some form of “kids were better when I grew up” and there has been a very long history of kids not respecting others, your generation included. Things are changing as they always do, but when it comes down to it humans have not changed that much.

I must have worded this wrong because you are the second person to interpret it this way. I am not criticising the kids of today. On the contrary I'm saying that the society we've built for them is actively harming them.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#664

Post by int_19h »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #544
ryandrake wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employers behave as adversaries to their workers anyway, comparatively wealthy and powerful adversaries. So either you union-up and present yourselves as a united and somewhat formidable adversary, or you don't and remain a (relatively poor and powerless) individual, no match against your (already existing) adversary.

A good chunk of the readership here is in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_aristocracy and have their incentives firmly aligned with their employers thanks to superb pay and equity grants. Poor? Powerless? Certainly not them.

Yeah, right up until the point where you get sucked into a massive layoff right as your company is posting record profits and boasting how much code is written with AI now.

I think a lot of people in tech are realizing how helpful unions could be right now.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#665

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #629
trinix912 wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: The Who Cares Era

#666

Post by short_sells_poo »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #638
short_sells_poo wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly this is true. 150k a year is "only" about 80-85k net, good luck buying a tiny Victorian row house for >1mln quid without your parents sponsoring the down payment. Or you can buy a crappy apartment built to "UK Standards" where everything is done by people who truly don't give even a shred of effort to quality and you are in the hilarious position that you don't even own your own walls. And that is all on a very…

When the vast majority of people stop caring about working in London then wouldn’t the prices drop noticeably? It seems to be contradictory, the very fact of the price wage disparity suggest many many people care to an extremely high degree of working within that literal specific geographic area. Which demonstrates they care very very much about their economic interests at least.

I think we have crossed some wires. People care about living in and around London, that much is clear. People want to live in cities for many reasons, economic ones are just one of them. What this thread - and my posts - are about, is people caring about doing a good job, whatever that job may be.

And this is where the crux lies: you'll get paid better for your work in London, but unless you become truly rich, you'll still not earn enough to afford your own roof over your head. All your money will go on transport, rent and living expenses. The amenities afforded by a city, restaurants, cinemas, etc - these all cost money and are more expensive than outside of London. So you end up paying through the nose for the reasons why you actually moved to the city.

So you do the grind for 10 years, say you are actually quite good and have a bit of luck and you are now earning 5x the salary you could earn in some bumfuck village in the country, but you still can't afford to own anything, you are permanently feeding rent seekers on everything. Once this realisation hits, it's difficult to care about doing a good job. You realize that you could do a shit job, put the minimum effort and still get 80% of your "peak" salary, and this marginal decrease won't affect you in any material way. Perhaps you have to cut back on eating out, or maybe lease a 2 year old car instead of a brand new one. But you realize that this marginal 20% increase in salary won't get you anything that'd be worth all the extra stress coming from caring about your job.

You'd need to sacrifice all your social life, your energy and free time, put in a hardcore grind, save every last penny you can, and then after 10-15 years you can buy a tiny rowhouse on a mortgage with a postage stamp sized garden - if you are lucky. And then you realize you spent the prime years of your young adulthood but instead of a landlord you are now beholden to a bank and an interest rate. You are terminally burnt out and haven't been able to properly enjoy life in any way up till now, and the grind isn't over. Instead of paying rent, you now have to fund the mortgage payments for another 10-20 years.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#667

Post by trinix912 »

WalterBright wrote: post #628
trinix912 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The hard parts you skipped were the entire point.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#668

Post by int_19h »

homefree wrote: post #483
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.…

Cultural failure - I thought Alex Karp's recent book was pretty good and worth reading. It makes the case that our culture has failed to articulate the things that make the west great (and worth defending) and as a result it's creating a lot of political and cultural problems. https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Republic-Power-Belief-F... Religion (particularly Judeo-Christian) has a lot of issues with empirical his…

The founder of Palantir is certainly not the person I'd seek to articulate what things "made the West great".

Re: The Who Cares Era

#669

Post by int_19h »

Ray20 wrote: post #536
komali2 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 an…

Capitalism is not "designed", for starters. It is an economic formation that emerged through natural forces. And if there's anything that process optimized for, it's allowing cynical, cruel, unscrupulous and deceitful people (who, as you rightly note, existed before) to take advantage of the new technological advancements like industrialization, which the previous arrangement was not particularly good at.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#670

Post by LoudFrog »

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.…

We could make the same argument about this lazy post.
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