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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#681

Post by homefree »

int_19h wrote: post #668
homefree wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Well he should be, but I wouldn't expect an anti-capitalist to have very good judgement about who is worth listening to.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#682

Post by UnreachableCode »

yifanl wrote: post #229
palmotea wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior. > You seem to miss that companies that think quarter to quarter behave just like this. Did I miss that, or was I commenting on that exact thing ? >> So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then? > You mean like the current administration that's trying to get rid of the EPA? What's your point with that…

It's not just a political derail to bring up a highly-visible example of the described behaviour. People don't care if they aren't forced to care, and in a world driven by deadlines, we're only motivated to care a certain amount. There used to be an intrinsic motivator of "well, my kids are going to suffer if I don't push for long-term relationships", but now we aren't having kids, so that carrot doesn't work, and th…

>bring up a highly-visible example

Sure, but let's be clear, we shouldn't be taking any lessons from the Trump regime on how to live in virtually any aspect in one's life. If anything they're a shining example of everything not to do.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#683

Post by tolerance »

BrenBarn wrote: post #613
tolerance wrote: post #123

Where I think that pieces like this fall short at are identifying what they think people should "care" about and why these things matter. For example, * Who cares that those newspapers ran AI-generated reading lists when the actual people who represent the newspapers wouldn't actually be the ones recommending the books anyway ? (People who make things that you read aren't reading themselves.) * Why should people care…

I think that's only part of the story. Another part is what are you caring about or doing instead. People don't have to care about those things, but what are they doing with their time instead? "Funny fails" videos and getting french fries delivered? Part of the point is that you have to do something with your time, it's just that now people spend their time doing stuff they don't care about, which is sad. You don't…

We are flailing in the middle of a long-running vacuum of meaning and purpose.

And the worst-kept secret is that people have to be told what to care about.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#684

Post by rxtexit »

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…

I just doubt all this is true though.

It all seems like the same Utopian thinking any way you cut it. It makes for good fiction books because we can't see the actual counterfactual.

The simpler explanation to me would be it wouldn't matter if you had a religious or secular society. Just different trade offs on the long march of progress.

People 80 years from now will live better lives than we do today. That is just the way it goes. Of course if you asked anyone during WW2 this 80 years ago about 2025 they would give a highly pessimistic answer about 2025.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#685

Post by gilbetron »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #368
gilbetron wrote: post #347

The future is gone. I'm in my 50s, and for nearly all of that time I thought, dreamt, and worked towards a future that I read about, researched, talked to others about, and consumed media about. But over the past several years I realize it is gone. I thought maybe it was just my age, but it seems like the world is doing the same, so maybe not my age. Another thread mentions that no one talks about "life in the 22nd c…

One way to break this illusion is to remember how new things are introduced. Bitcoin didn’t seem more than an intellectual exercise when it was introduced. Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students. HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit. An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop. Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket. The point is, once you wait a decade or so and look back, you find t…

> Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students.

I was about your age (35) when Facebook came out - it was a crazy fun experience pretty much immediately, reconnecting with all kinds of people that I hadn't talked to in years. It was really fun for almost a decade and then it became not fun. Same with the iPad/iPhone - it seemed like the future had arrived and was exciting, all the apps and funny ideas and new things you could do.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#686

Post by gilbetron »

Llamamoe wrote: post #653
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks so much for this comment. It's something I've generally felt, but it really didn't crystallize in my head until I read your comment. As a kid I just remember being enthralled by what the future would bring, and you'd see tons of writing prognosticating about things like "cities of the future" and "houses of the future". I think the fundamental change is that all of those were filled with a sort of techno-optim…

When we imagined phones, we imagined global communication and building friendship. Instead, we got skinner boxes designed to addict us to a constant stream of algorithm-served content. When we imagined computers, we imagined unbounded access to knowledge. Instead, we got an internet drowned in corporate slop, constant surveillance and unrelenting attempts to destroy privacy. When we imagined cars of the future, we im…

We imagined Star Trek, we got Cyberpunk.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#687

Post by nradov »

saubeidl wrote: post #649
nradov wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yugoslavia also had severe political repression, with peace between the provinces only maintained by a (near) dictator with a cult of personality. Their economy and standard of living was mediocre at best, and only even possible within a limited geopolitical context where they sat between competing superpowers. It wouldn't be possible to create something like Yugoslavia today. Stupid to even try.

I'd argue the repression of reactionaries was part of the secret sauce that made it work so well. We saw what happened when they were loosened in the 90s.

Repression like that is never acceptable regardless of the reasons or results.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#688

Post by MichaelZuo »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #666
MichaelZuo wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well yeah life is competitive…? exceedingly so for property within London it seems.

Even if millions of Londoners hate it that doesn’t change the fact that they are continuing to do so day after day… so something must still outweigh all the downsides combined.

So their care is very high, just focused on perhaps a very peculiar basket of things, so to speak. I can’t see any other explanation for such large scale behavior.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#689

Post by badpun »

immibis wrote: post #504
badpun wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of things did. Seems like prices much tend to rise faster than inflation.

A lot of badly managed companies (or just companies in stagnant industries) saw their stock prices stagnate or fall. Boeing and GE had large rises though (meteoric in case of GE).

Re: The Who Cares Era

#690

Post by timeforcomputer »

robotnikman wrote: post #488
thewebguyd wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wondering what the other "bike shop" jobs are now. I'd say software & tech were those jobs before more and more folks just started going into it for the money. Working as a sysadmin and sysadmin adjacent roles my whole career, I've seen it shift in real time from skilled craftspeople whom had a true curiosity and interest in computing, to folks who have zero interest in the field at all, many of whom hate their job…

It makes me wonder if there are still those "bike shop" jobs to be found in tech. I feel like I missed out on the golden years of the tech age where I would have found my curiosity and interests satisfied by my job, but maybe there might be a few niches out there somewhere...

VFX software development, repairing and modifying pipelines for artists, at a company with a large internal tool infrastructure like Weta, ILM, Pixar, is my target job
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