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Nobody cares

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Re: Nobody cares

#861

Post by svnt »

bruce511 wrote: post #516
autoexec wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an "alternative" to McDonald's does exactly the same abusive thing it isn't a real alternative to McDonald's at all. If an "alternative" to McDonald's forces you to drive excessive distances to reach it, or it costs much more, or it sells Thai food instead of burgers, then it isn't a real alternative to McDonald's. A suitable alternative to McDonald's would be one similar enough to McDonald's for your purposes tha…

A suitable alternative to McDonald's is learning to cook. Or pay a bit more to go to a nicer joint. Quality does cost more. As long as you keep signaling to MD that you'll tolerate more and more crap for lower prices, they happily oblige.

I think I understand you: everyone at the bottom end of society should just have more money or more personal time, or both. I wonder how we could make that happen.

Re: Nobody cares

#862

Post by marcosdumay »

pastage wrote: post #819
marcosdumay wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons. I dunno. At the first problem, impeding cyclists that want to merge into a walkway zooming at 20mph without paying enough attention to even see their lane is ending is a quite good reason. Maybe he should be asking for some "cyclist-calming" measure instead, so they will slow down before not being able to make into the walkway.

It feels like zooming when you bicycle in those tight spaces at 9-12 km/h, which is a third of what you calld zooming. The point is that a collision at 12 km/h is pretty ok. The problem is that cyclists are always close to pedestrians so it feels unsafe even at slow speeds. The accident rate between cyclists and pedestrians are incredibly low so it is not really dangerous, but it feels like it.

The article explicitly says cyclists crash there going at ~30 km/h.

Re: Nobody cares

#863

Post by prmph »

helboi4 wrote: post #705
prmph wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But your work may contribute to a product that helps a doctor, nurse or teacher do their job. Even if it does not directly do that, maybe your fellow workers use the income they get from the company existence to raise their kid who becomes a doctor, nurse, etc.

This does not solve the problem that people are compensated based on the ability to create profit and the trendiness of the industry, not on usefulness. If I allow a kid of someone in my company to go to med school and then they drop out of being a doctor because the pay sucks and become yet another financier/dev/consultant/middle manager/entrepreneur of fairly useless business, then the system still failed.

Yes, I understand where you are coming from, and public workers should definitely be paid better, but I'm just focusing on one part of your argument which I find specious.

I'm saying you have a skewed idea of usefulness. Relative usefulness can only be properly evaluated when you look at the big picture.

The fact that you are not seeing the immediate usefulness of what you are doing does not necessarily mean much. Even a comedian can be incredibly useful if he helps stave of mental and emotional distress that could contribute to burn out or shoddy work among those doing the supposedly more "useful" work.

Re: Nobody cares

#864

Post by jrflowers »

I love looking at the About Me section of a site when I read a blog post that can be summed up as “The world would be objectively better if I were simply put in charge of it” because it’s always like “When I’m not blogging I’m working on chat with a blockchain for scooter thieves” or whatever and in this case our new overlord is “a founding engineer at Row Zero where we've built the world's fastest spreadsheet”

Re: Nobody cares

#865

Post by helboi4 »

prmph wrote: post #863
helboi4 wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not solve the problem that people are compensated based on the ability to create profit and the trendiness of the industry, not on usefulness. If I allow a kid of someone in my company to go to med school and then they drop out of being a doctor because the pay sucks and become yet another financier/dev/consultant/middle manager/entrepreneur of fairly useless business, then the system still failed.

Yes, I understand where you are coming from, and public workers should definitely be paid better, but I'm just focusing on one part of your argument which I find specious. I'm saying you have a skewed idea of usefulness. Relative usefulness can only be properly evaluated when you look at the big picture. The fact that you are not seeing the immediate usefulness of what you are doing does not necessarily mean much. Ev…

I don't have a skewed idea of usefulness, you are just trying to justify your loyalty to a system that will fuck any logical priorties over for profit in order to cope with our current reality. I'm coping by having a job that is not very useful but makes profit, but I am not fooling myself to believe this system is virtuous.

And yes I would say an artist or comedian is far, far more useful than a middle manager at a company managing devs fixing minor bugs on a website for a superfluous business. Back to my original point, I would probably give more to society as an artist than a dev. Some people would bring more to society as a dev than an artist, mind. In a world where we got paid just to be actually useful, there would be less devs and they'd all be better at their jobs.

Re: Nobody cares

#866

Post by helboi4 »

djeastm wrote: post #812
presentation wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everybody followed their hearts deepest passions, we’d all be starving.

I don't know about that. We might not have all the choices for eating we have now, but there are a lot of people (even in my own family) that like growing/ hunting for, and serving food for some reason. At this point we have all the resources and knowledge to produce the food needed to survive, but it's in human (animal) nature to always want more than nature provides.

Yeah I think a lot of people care about that stuff.

Re: Nobody cares

#867

Post by helboi4 »

bccdee wrote: post #846
presentation wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everybody followed their hearts deepest passions, we’d all be starving.

Yeah but most people aren't farmers. How much economic value gets tied up in investment schemes? How many people worked for years on crypto or the metaverse or what-have-you—projects that only existed to boost stock price, rather than because anyone needed them? Our society doesn't optimize the lifestyles of its citizens. It optimizes stock price, which leads to an economy where everyone works a lot, even on things n…

Exactly. A lot of people would be bring more value to society doing literally ANYTHING else than working on the metaverse or something but they won't get compensated the same for the actually useful stuff.

Re: Nobody cares

#868

Post by mcswell »

gizmo wrote: post #614
tqi wrote: post #425

Its ironic, because this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research to understand why any of these problems he highlights are the way they are, and lazily attributes everything to OTHER people not caring. LEDs last longer, are more energy efficient, and also reduce light pollution because they are more directional[1]. Took me 30 seconds to google. There are enormous design standards for de…

Of course there are "reasonable justifications" for the shitty status quo, but that's kind of the point. Things are shitty for reasons but not for good reasons. The author points to Japan to illustrate that you do get measurably better results when people habitually try to do good work. We're not actually doomed to have crappy furniture, flimsy and buggy appliances, byzantine legal codes, ugly architecture, and hosti…

IMO, the switch from sodium lamps to LED lamps (one of the article's gripes) was for a good reason: lower use of electricity. I also happen to think that the light from sodium lamps looked ugly--much worse than a properly working LED lamp--but maybe that's a personal opinion. (I would also question the study that "showed" white light reduced melatonin production, but that's a different issue.)

(Re "properly working LED": apparently many street lamps in the US were built by a single company, and that company's bulbs are prone to turning purple over time. But that wasn't a reason not to make the switch back when, because at the time no one knew this would happen. It's being fixed now by replacing the purple bulbs with better quality LED bulbs.)

Re: Nobody cares

#869

Post by mcswell »

bccdee wrote: post #833
ericmay wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Ugly architecture" is subjective. I think this actually illustrates the author's point and gets at the heart of the cultural malaise we are experiencing. If everything is subjective, nothing can be improved because nothing can be better than something else. But this isn't the case. The Mona Lisa is objectively better than anything I have ever painted. Architecture is no different. Some buildings quite literally ar…

> The Mona Lisa is objectively better than anything I have ever painted. No it isn't. If I saw one of your paintings and liked it better, there would be no way for you to prove me wrong. My opinion might be highly unpopular, but that wouldn't make it objectively incorrect.

Then substitute one of my drawings (or paintings, if I painted) of a person. There's no way in the world that anyone--anyone!--would think mine were better. That's because mine are truly awful.

Re: Nobody cares

#870

Post by helboi4 »

silexia wrote: post #818
helboi4 wrote: post #586

I really do not care but that is because the economy has incentivised me to get into work I don't care about. It is completely unprofitable to do things I do care about. So I don't do them. So everything I do do, I don't care about. Of course, I would hope if I was a doctor or sth where I really affected people's lives, I would care just for their sake if nothing else. But I'm a developer. It's really not that deep.…

Doctors usually only care about money, and use regulatory capture to get it. That's why the US spends 27% of GDP on doctors and hospitals even though we only see a doctor mostly an hour per year.

Sorry, I'm British so I have a totally different perspective. Healthcare is mainly public here and the salaries suck. Nobody becomes a doctor to be rich. They become one because its a decent job and they want to help people. Of course you can be a private doctor but this is seen as publicly shameful. So I think that proves that there are other reasons people become doctors. Anyway, the issue in the UK is, the salaries used to be good but just not excellent, and would become excellent with a decent specialty. They also were guaranteed an excellent pension for their service to the country. Now doctors I know make just above minimum wage and I make basically double them as a junior dev (not at FAANG and devs aren't paid 6 figures over here, I make less than £50k). This has come from years of defunding public services from people who believe in the power of capitalism to.... create more finance bros and 1x engineers?
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