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The Who Cares Era

dansinker.com

671–680 of 765 posts

Re: The Who Cares Era

#671

It's the dumbing down of society, but the worst of it is concerning the average "Joe and Jane" in America. Why is it the worst, because they are a huge voting block. I'm a high school grad who had no desire to go to college, but I've always had a love of reading and usually questioned everything. I made a living in the trades and have very little complaints. I worked with hundreds of people, both young and old, and n…

I suspect that people are reading more than you think, but instead of long form content like books, it's now short form content like tweets and Facebook posts. And of course video content from YouTube and tiktok instead of the television we had back in the day.

Sometimes I feel like the word "reading" should be reserved for reading longer-form content like articles, blog posts, books, etc.

Your mind goes into a completely different state when you are immersed in a single topic vs when you are consuming textual content that causes context switches every 10 seconds.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#672
post #599
post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in my 60s and think the future is here. I remember writing for my college admissions essay about at some point computer intelligence would overtake biological and here we are, pretty much. I guess weird and terrifying but also with possibilities for abundance and immortality. Should be interesting at any rate.

YES! I am in my mid twenties and I have only seen unimaginable technological progress from the early 2000’s to now. From the small white Panasonic television in my childhood kitchen and having to reboot my family desktop computer when zoo tycoon froze it, to playing massive multiplayer games like runescape and Roblox with real people, that was incredible!, to seeing an iPhone for the first time, the higs boson being…

If you think this all is "unimaginable technological progress", what's your take on all the things that happened in the 25 year before that - you know, when we actually got personal computers to begin with - or going back even further?

If you only look at a relatively short slice by itself, you just see the change. You need to look back at history to compare the relative pace of it. And when you do, it's hard not to get the impression that things have slowed down substantially.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#673
post #414

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…

We've learned a lot since then. Every time there's an accident, we learn from it and adjust the safety procedures. Incidents going down over time is to be expected, can't compare outcomes today with the past, after so much accummulated experience.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#674
post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ah yes, taking the last 4 years post pandemic, in the midst of massive climate change, and in a near world war and then comparing it to 60+ years ago in the height of the Cold War and US global dominance. You should change your name to Walter Dim.

That and the fact he’s taking the statistics of the last 4 years when all countries of the former Yugoslavia were capitalist, ironically.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#675

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 t…

Being principled isn't imposing your rules on someone else, though, merely acting consistently with them at all times.

And it can earn one a surprising amount of hate because you aren't willing to make exceptions.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you for clarifying, with that context rereading your original comment makes a lot more sense.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many Yugoslavs left for America?

Google says: "Between 1950 and 1989, approximately 73,000 people immigrated to the United States from Yugoslavia" I couldn't find any statistics of Americans leaving for Yugoslavia.

[deleted]

Re: The Who Cares Era

#679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> typing machines vs word That actually had substantial negative consequences that still go mostly unrecognized. MS Word was an improvement over typewriters - such a big improvement, in fact, that it allowed people to do things they previously wouldn't, including things they'd pay other people to do . This is actually a bigger deal than it sounds. In short, office productivity tools allowed people to do things they'd…

> but the work they did did not go away I'm forming an opinion that this exact problem is actually THE problem that people keep ignoring because it is compensated for by the burnout of people who care. We talk a lot about enshitiffication. But we also build tools that do the work of a human specialist at (say) 85% of the quality of a human specialist (much faster and much more cheaply, that is the point). These tools…

Yes, and I feel stupid every time I have to do a task I am not specialised in, purely because I have to educate myself all over again from the basics to get the job done. Like fixing a leaking tap. I know theoretically where the issue might lie, but by God it takes an eternity to fix because I don't have the right tools lying around and the dexterity required hasn't been built to do it correctly.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#680
Some hiring data points...

After I post a job to hire a developer or designer (freelance), I get one application every five minutes, until the job gets taken down. Say I leave the post up for a week, that means that I have 2,000 applications to sort through.

It is shocking to see the quality of inbound responses.

60% obviously don't read the job post, 10% read it but don't make an effort to do anything other than the bare minimum, 10% have a huge delta in skills vs expected salary, and the rest are a mixed bag but at least made an effort.

I think these numbers stack up pretty accurately across my day-to-day interactions with people in the world. 60% are totally checked out, 10% are doing the bare minimum, 10% show up but are maybe in the wrong role.

So 1 in 5 people can be expected to care and make some sort of impact.

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