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The Who Cares Era

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Re: The Who Cares Era

#721

Post by MichaelZuo »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #705
MichaelZuo wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 behav…

Right. I'll try one more time: this thread is about caring to do a good job. People move to London, try to do a good job, find that they'll never be properly rewarded for going the extra mile, give up, and do a shit job going forward. They still feel better off than doing a shit job in the countryside, otherwise they'd move there. But the question we are discussing is: "Why don't people care about doing a good job?"

Yes someone could care very much about securing a job making all sorts of promises, and then start phoning it in after securing it.

I don’t see how one relates to the other, I wasn’t questioning the latter point? It’s undoubtedly the case for many.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#722

Post by bumby »

WalterBright wrote: post #161
saubeidl wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to this is worker's self-management, an economic model that was pioneered by Yugoslavia, but has mostly disappeared with its dismantlement. Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market. This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.

Was Yugoslavia an economic powerhouse?

Should the economy serve the people or the people serve the economy?

Re: The Who Cares Era

#723

Post by QuantumGood »

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.…

If you don't build motivation for competence by navigating difficulties in everyday life (fetching water, building a fire), where do you find that motivation? Putting humans in boxes with a screen in front of them and everything they need to survive around them without requiring much effort produces a different human.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#724

Post by bumby »

WalterBright wrote: post #209
layer8 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we need economic powerhouses to live well?

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…

There seems to be a false narrative here that increased economic production will always lead to higher quality of life. I would venture to guess you only have to look into your own life to disprove that narrative.

I doubt you work 20+ hours a day. You probably realize there are diminishing or outright negative returns on quality of life for trying to maximize productive output. I would say we should apply the same logic to the economy as a whole; focus production on the things that actually improve society instead of operating on the assumption that “more production is always better.”

Re: The Who Cares Era

#725

Post by nec4b »

saubeidl wrote: post #515
Ray20 wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>people live in misery. People live in unimaginable luxury compared with what people had in Yugoslavia.

As somebody who's from there, no, they don't.

In Yugoslavia you couldn't even get bananas or coffee or jeans. People had to go to Italy or Austria to buy it. You had to wait more than a year to get a car. Of course then there was no gas for it. Inflation ate your paycheck before you could spend it.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#726

Post by nec4b »

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…

If you had lived in then you should know the standard of living was poor. More then a million people left to work in Germany as Gastarbeiters to send money home. Gas was limited. Common goods had to be brought through the border with Austria or Italy. Inflation was crazy, everybody bought German Marks the same day they got their paychecks, otherwise the money was worthless by the next day. What happened to you if you were caught as a political opposition in Yugoslavia is a story on its own.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#727

Post by nec4b »

saubeidl wrote: post #155
sp0rk wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The solution to this is worker's self-management, an economic model that was pioneered by Yugoslavia, but has mostly disappeared with its dismantlement. Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market. This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.

That is such a big lie. There was no worker self-management in practice. All the companies had leadership structure like most companies have today. Those leading them, were loyal members of the communist party and were politically appointed. They were the betters, the avant-garde and had access to things a normal worker couldn't dream of, like special stores which had western goods. No worker had any say how a company will work and had no share of the profits besides a paycheck.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#728

Post by nec4b »

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.

Thank you comrade to alleviate us peasants of having to think too much on our own.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#729

Post by nec4b »

saubeidl wrote: post #648
WalterBright wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you leave?

Because it was destroyed by right-wing extremists in the 90s, funded by Western capitalists that were scared it would show the world a viable alternative on how to run an economy

I really like what you wrote, because it demonstrates what kids in Yugoslavia were thought from a young age. There was this idea of a foreign enemy that it there to get them and any economic and political fault in the country was because of the sabotage of this invisible foreign enemy.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#730

Post by saubeidl »

nec4b wrote: post #729
saubeidl wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it was destroyed by right-wing extremists in the 90s, funded by Western capitalists that were scared it would show the world a viable alternative on how to run an economy

I really like what you wrote, because it demonstrates what kids in Yugoslavia were thought from a young age. There was this idea of a foreign enemy that it there to get them and any economic and political fault in the country was because of the sabotage of this invisible foreign enemy.

And they were right :-)
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