[HN Gopher] The Who Cares Era
___________________________________________________________________
The Who Cares Era
Author : NotInOurNames
Score : 563 points
Date : 2025-05-28 13:07 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dansinker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (dansinker.com)
| Raed667 wrote:
| > the reader didn't care
|
| I would argue -in cases like this- the reader doesn't exist,
| closer to a dead internet society
| Hacktrick wrote:
| Very few read the inquirer anyways, which reflects the author's
| idea of a trend away from sitting down and just consuming
| normal media.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Sadly, this seems to be the case, but I'm not so sure that it's
| new.
|
| I think "If it's worth doing; it's worth doing half-assed." is a
| personal working philosophy that is probably thousands of years
| old.
|
| It's just that now, we have better tools for half-assing it.
| mclau157 wrote:
| We have better tools but are usually forced to stay for the
| same 8 hours it used to take
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Yeah. Despite gains in productivity, we've had the same 40
| hour work week for what seems like forever, and all the
| monetary gains have gone to capital instead of labor.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think there's something historically unusual going on in the
| US currently. We got an incredible lead when the rest of the
| world blew it self up right in the middle of industrialization.
| Things worked out by default, allowing other parts of the
| system to half-ass it. Now we have a tradition of half-assing
| it which seems likely to come back and bite us in the ass as
| the feedback loop slows down.
|
| Our whole corporate culture is based on the idea that business
| doesn't have to plan more than a quarter ahead, because
| engineering will pull a magic trick instead.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street
| signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's
| Boston).
|
| 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.
|
| 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?
| maxehmookau wrote:
| An embrace of mediocrity in one's work, specifically, though.
|
| In many countries, the UK for example, wages have become
| stagnant over the last 15 years and "getting on in life",
| "social mobility", whatever you want to call it, appears to
| have stalled entirely.
|
| Maybe "Who cares?" is the correct response for many people.
| jaccola wrote:
| Maybe (and I mean this genuinely, I don't know for certain)
| "Who cares?" is a cause of wage stagnation.
| saltwatercowboy wrote:
| UK real wages stagnated directly in line with the 2008
| financial crisis [1]. Enough has been written about 'too
| big to fail' that I don't need to rehash it, but ascribing
| guilt to the workers of a chronically underpaid and
| historically innovative nation doesn't feel right.
|
| [1] Office of National Statistics via BBC: https://ichef.bb
| ci.co.uk/ace/standard/2560/cpsprodpb/13FD8/p...
| bbarnett wrote:
| Wage stagnation always happens at the start of any
| economic downturn. However, once over and the economy
| resumes, typically the stagnation ends, and wages jump.
|
| The massive, huge cynic in me says, people make less
| because all they do is stare at their phones. Yes, I
| know, I'm overstating things a bit.
|
| But the other day I noticed the approx 20 year old
| garbage collector, was staring at his phone the whole
| time. I am _not_ joking. Truck pulls up, he glances at my
| garbage bin, back to phone as he snags it. While rolling
| it to the truck? Staring at phone. While pulling the
| lever to lift and dump it? Phone. While putting it back
| in my driveway? Phone.
|
| While hanging off the truck from one arm as it careens up
| to 100km/hr to the next rural property? Phone.
|
| He's literally not doing his job. He's supposed to be
| looking for things in the garbage (car batteries, or
| something else not for normal garbage) during the dump.
| My bin also fell into the ditch, because he didn't even
| look at where it was headed.
|
| (And I've had garbage collectors for my entire life,
| decades of them, and yes it's worse.)
|
| Another example? I had a fridge delivered. One guy was
| 40. The other 20.
|
| 40 year old talks to me, etc as the delivery proceeds. 20
| year old? Staring at phone literally every second,
| monosyllabic answers. Had to be prompted by 40 year old a
| dozen times to do basic jobs.
|
| I'm not saying it's all phones. But I've heard the cries
| of horror from people who have been told "if your phone
| is in your hand at work, you're fired".
|
| I can just imagine, when one is literally that addicted
| to something, how normal "I don't like work"
| unpleasantness skyrockets to mega-proportions of inane
| misery, from the conjoined "ARG, WORK!" and "OMG my fix
| is missing!"
|
| I envision it as "OK, now I'm working this sucks" mixed
| with "plus I have shards of glass in my shoes" or some
| such.
| greedo wrote:
| If you look at the rate of wage growth compared to
| inflation, it's pretty clear that wages have stagnated
| for a long time, with periodic bumps. The goal of most
| businesses is growth and increased productivity. The
| easiest way to have higher productivity is to constrain
| wages.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I will agree that in certain parts of the world, this is
| quite true.
|
| However it's not a universal. China has had immense wage
| growth, and the emergency of a "middle class" income
| bracket, where no such bracket existed before. Of course
| it's an economy still in the throws of massive
| transformation.
|
| Yet regardless, "staring at phone instead of doing job
| correctly" isn't going to reverse that trend. Or I guess
| it could for the few unaddicted.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >However it's not a universal. China has had immense wage
| growth
|
| Yea, showing transforming economies to established
| economies isn't really a great comparison at all. You
| have two huge things happening at once. A massive
| transfer of wealth from those 'rich' economies building
| new factories to use the cheap labor. This drops wages in
| the rich economies by shipping the jobs out. In the
| meantime the people in the rich economies have to move to
| service style jobs away from manufacturing.
|
| In a few decades the same will happen with China as it
| converts to a service economy.
| zippyman55 wrote:
| I visit my local hospital and am in the back getting
| tests, etc. and the number of employees on their personal
| phones bugs me. Supervisors could just request users to
| step out into the hall and check their phone. The amount
| of non work that occurs when people become glued to their
| phone is incredible.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Legislation often lags immensely behind change. The worst
| of this has only being going on for a little over 10
| years. Maybe 12, so 3x changes of elected legislators.
|
| Some of these issues are also safety issues. Being
| distracted is certainly obvious in a car, and massive
| fines and even criminal charges are now the result. But
| there are subtle things one must do in many jobs, just
| generically paying attention, which results in a save vs
| unsafe outcome. Boredom at work used to be filled with
| paying attention to ... work.
|
| The garbage truck example I mentioned? I can think of a
| dozen safety issues. Safety for the employee, safety for
| someone walking by. Any accident could result in criminal
| charges for negligence, surely, but workplace safety
| rules are an issue too.
|
| Soon, eventually, workplace safety rules will likely
| mandate "No phone at work, period"... at least for many
| professions. At least, that's how I see some of this
| resolving.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Another possibility is governments outlawing addictive
| social media. There are probably several ways this could
| be done, but breaking up the big advertising monopolies
| would be a good first start
| ryandrake wrote:
| I would love to see Social Media and addictive apps like
| sports betting treated like smoking. If not outlawed
| altogether, at least forbidden to children, and socially
| and legally _discouraged_ for adults. We need to start
| seriously treating these things like the terrible things
| they are.
| saltwatercowboy wrote:
| Well that's the word, isn't it: 'typically'. That hasn't
| happened. The activities that make life worthwhile have
| largely been priced out for the average person. I think
| that we can tarry about historical causes (and accomplish
| nothing, creating an ever-worsening feedback loop) or
| identify where changes could be made to incentivize
| productivity beyond what amounts to macroeconomic
| punishment.
|
| As for the garbage man... can you blame him? What reason
| does he have to maintain the appearance of vigilance?
| Their routes are long, getting longer with cuts, they're
| largely understaffed, and they deal with both the
| contempt of the public and their refuse.
|
| Conditions are actively getting worse for some; the UK's
| second largest city has proposed cutting wages by up to
| PS8,000 p/a due to a bureaucratic nightmare of their own
| making [1].
|
| It is a thankless job with no opportunity for progression
| which most people would rather put out of mind
| completely. Frankly, they deserve better.
|
| [1] BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98gv5dpr7lo
| bentley wrote:
| > The activities that make life worthwhile have largely
| been priced out for the average person.
|
| What activities make life worthwhile?
| ryandrake wrote:
| This isn't just a problem on the job. EVERYONE suddenly
| seems addicted to their phones. You walk into a coffee
| shop or restaurant. Everyone (including behind the
| counter) is staring at a phone. Look at other drivers on
| the road. Everyone is scrolling their phones while
| driving 70mph on the freeways. Even social gatherings
| among friends. I used to do movie night with friends, but
| we stopped doing it because people pull out their phones
| within 5 minutes of the movie starting, and there's no
| point. Might as well just turn off the movie and sit
| there in silence while everyone watches videos of random
| nobodies. And if I instituted a no-phones rule, nobody
| would come. My 11 year old has invited a few friends over
| to our house to play, and their parents come with, but
| they don't socialize! They just sit their awkwardly
| silent staring at their phones. I remember one parent
| didn't even hear me when I offered her some coffee.
|
| As a non phone user, when I go out into the world, I feel
| like I'm on that movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
| where I'm surrounded by these weird non-humans
| everywhere, and nobody thinks any of their behavior is
| odd but me.
| THroaway225 wrote:
| people are addicted to their phones, its true, and its
| becoming so normalized that having any interest in
| talking to people you dont already know is considered
| antisocial
| angry_moose wrote:
| It might be part of the feedback loop, but from my
| experience it always starts at the company level.
|
| I think I've been under a pay freeze for 4 of the last 6
| years, and a capped 2% raise one of the others. No matter
| how much effort I put in, my wages would have stagnated.
| jmalicki wrote:
| The effort you could put in would be to switch companies
| actionfromafar wrote:
| On a meta level in elections, maybe.
| piva00 wrote:
| What would be the basis of that though?
|
| Just thinking about every point in my life where I ended up
| in "who cares?" was due to concerns outside of my
| control/power. When I feel I have some agency, power,
| and/or recognition it just naturally follows that I will
| care (in varying degree but I will care somehow); even if
| not for the larger organisation I will care about my
| immediate peers/team.
|
| If I'm not paid enough, or I don't have agency, or I don't
| feel heard and my point is proven later (multiple times),
| or a superior is an asshole, so on and so forth, I
| naturally end up in "who cares?" after some beating.
|
| Of course, it's all personal experience/anecdotal evidence,
| but in general I don't think most people just turned the
| "who cares?" mode on and wage stagnation followed, it seems
| to be much rather the opposite, you take away safety,
| money, agency, and any other aspect that might make a job
| more fulfilling and the only natural progression is people
| disengaging from the activity.
| some_furry wrote:
| I think the arrow goes the other way.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| I was wondering if maybe this is the result of a tight
| labor market. A lot lf what I see kind of lines up with
| what happens if you have to make do with underskilled or
| otherwise sloppy staff.
|
| The throughline I think is that there's no consequence
| for being bad at one's job. Not to say I'm perfect - I am
| pretty sure I've been a mediocre employee before, but
| I've also never been sacked.
| some_furry wrote:
| I have a high work ethic but I mostly keep it to myself.
|
| That is: I don't hold strangers to my standards or expect
| them to feel the same way about their work that I do
| about mine.
|
| I've never been sacked for poor performance, but I have
| been included in mass layoffs and restructurings
| throughout my career, which always makes one wonder if
| they were secretly not meeting some metric.
| tempodox wrote:
| You must have a very strange sense of humor.
| bigtex88 wrote:
| Absolutely not.
| Spivak wrote:
| This is my read on the situation. I have been weirded out
| when I get "excellent" service at a restaurant. Like my
| friend, you literally aren't getting paid enough to give
| this much of a shit. You're doing me a favor by working
| this drive-thru job so I don't have to cook while I'm sick.
| The gratitude goes the other way.
| Permik wrote:
| From these kinds of observations in my own life I've just
| concluded that unfortunately some neurotypical got hired to do
| an autistic people's job.
| XorNot wrote:
| > The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade
| to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)
|
| This doesn't happen because nobody cares. It happens because
| the financing dries up, or labor is straight up not available.
| And that still comes back to money.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| And zoning, permitting, environmental impact reviews, etc.
| add significant extra drags onto many such projects.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Yes, and...
|
| I had my renovation stall for 6 weeks because someone at Mass
| DEP couldn't be arsed to approve an asbestos abatement work
| plan. My contractor called the guy's boss and it was approved
| the next day.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Wouldn't surprise me to find out that they are trying to do
| it with way too few people and in your case, the squeaky
| wheel got the grease, and you jumped to the front of the
| line.
| imtringued wrote:
| That's not a satisfactory explanation, because you're saying
| that the owner of the land can't make use of it and should
| have given it to someone else, but they don't actually care
| what the best use of the land is, so they take the slow way.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Or the local powers that be sink their teeth in and the
| project isn't lucrative enough for its backers to let them
| just leave with a pound of flesh so progress stalls.
| sndean wrote:
| > a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs.
|
| Is this similar to the Peter principle, though? And not that it
| is exactly that concept, but that book is from 1969. People
| have been making this observation for a while.
|
| In this context, it's more comforting to really pay attention
| to very competent people. I had a home inspector spend ~5 hours
| on my house and was amazed by every little detail he discovered
| and documented, and how knowledgeable he was, etc.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
| 0_____0 wrote:
| I was in New Zealand a couple of months ago and today
| something crystallized about my experience there - I
| consistently encountered people who were good at their jobs
| there.
|
| They've got a shortage of people in the trades, but their
| tradies seemed highly professional and efficient, the folks
| at the bike shops were on point, the airport staff were quick
| to help and super informative (gate attendant explained
| visibility 'minimums'!)
| SamBam wrote:
| I think that observation stands in the US too -- there are
| certain professions where you're more likely to find
| someone who cares.
|
| You mentioned bike shops. At least in my area (New England)
| every person I've ever seen working in a bike shop was
| competent and cared about working in a bike shop. (They
| weren't necessarily the nicest and most personable people,
| but that's a different story.)
|
| Who works in a bike shop? Almost no one "ends up" there the
| way people usually "end up" at their jobs -- following the
| easy flow of high school to college to a bunch of
| interviews at marketing-adjacent (or whatever) firms and
| finally working where ever offers them a job.
|
| You're only likely to even _consider_ working at a bike
| shop if you want to work at a bike shop.
|
| Wondering what the other "bike shop" jobs are now.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I think some of it is about getting away from big box
| stores and working with smaller shops. Now, that's not
| saying that small shops are automatically good, but
| you'll find people way better at some of them than you
| ever will at a big store. Big stores tend to care about
| pushing numbers and not expertise.
| korse wrote:
| Bike shops generally don't drug test, rarely have a dress
| code and attract a pretty select crowd.
|
| Aside from that, you're a mechanic. Motorcycle
| dealers/car dealers/random car lots hire mechanics too
| any may or may not care what you do on your own time.
|
| Plenty of maritime industries need that same skill set,
| as do mining operations, agricultural equipment dealers
| and all of the medium size shops that repair heavy
| equipment you've never heard of.
|
| Fab shops are great, if you want a bicycle shop
| experience but bigger and with 100% more yeehaw. You can
| teach yourself how to weld for a pretty low sum of money
| if you've got a couple hundred bucks, some space and
| creativity.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > 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, but stay
| in it purely for the money as very few other careers pay
| as well as what you can make in tech without advanced
| education.
|
| Oter "bike shop" jobs I think you'll find in mostly hobby
| places - photography/camera shops, outdoor gear shops,
| local/independent bookstores, and craftmanship work -
| woodworking/hand-made furniture, musical instrument
| repair, some mechanics.
| robotnikman wrote:
| 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...
| andrewblossom wrote:
| These are usually individual, passion-driven jobs. Others
| that come to mind include local outdoor outfitters,
| musical instrument makers, clock repairers, craftspeople
| (like textile artists, quilters, and jewelers), artisanal
| food producers, and coaches.
| ambicapter wrote:
| GP says "consistently encountered" and you respond with
| "well, that's true, but only in certain places". Seems
| like you're contradicting what they're saying and acting
| like you're in agreement.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Agree. But, ha ha, now explain airport staff.
| codr7 wrote:
| I worked several different SW roles in Norway last year, it
| was the opposite; I now suspect the entire country is
| simply faking it until they run out of oil.
| immibis wrote:
| I think New Zealand tends to follow the same trends of
| cultural rot as the rest of the Western world, but years
| behind, and therefore a bit weaker too.
| pm215 wrote:
| Similarly, I like it when I occasionally see little bits of
| on the job training when I'm a customer -- the barista this
| morning teaching another about pouring latte art, the senior
| dentist nudging the trainee into what the right diagnosis was
| based on the symptoms I was reporting, that kind of thing.
| It's encouraging to see people caring about what they do and
| passing their skills on to other people who care about
| getting better.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Home inspection is basically the tradesman version of how
| real-estate developers and GCs pretty much all try getting
| their realtor's license and dabbling in that at some point in
| their career and then rage quit because smiling and pushing
| papers is below them.
|
| Anyone capable of working at a higher level like that will
| quickly be up and out to somewhere they can get paid to work
| on that level. Peter principal in action.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > People have been making this observation for a while.
|
| A lot longer than that. See C. Northcote Parkinson's books.
| whobre wrote:
| > Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as
| possible.
|
| To be fair, the society decided to encourage such behavior.
| mlinhares wrote:
| A bit much to say society did that, they have forced this due
| to their very well organized and connected unions and the
| power they have to cause the population to fear for their
| safety if the "cops are on strike".
|
| The only way to end the power they have is to work towards a
| prosperous society where it doesn't make sense to be a
| violent criminal.
| bandoti wrote:
| Honestly, I hate to say it because it's become an annoying
| topic--but the problem is social media. Full stop.
|
| People are so distracted, scrolling ad-nauseam, that the only
| hope and dream they have is: to become an "influencer."
|
| They'll sell a view of their children and family life to the
| highest bidding sponsor. Then, peddling products to a fresh
| batch of spectators who think, "Ah! Wouldn't that be the life?
| I should do that too--then I will be famous and making a hell-
| of-a lot more money than I am now!"
|
| I mean the amount of scam ads on YouTube alone selling a
| lifestyle of abundance and riches--living like a rockstar--only
| perpetuates the wrong values.
|
| People should be PROUD of hard work. And they will be, when
| they become less distracted and start to see the joys of value
| creation again.
|
| Note: I just want to clarify that my intent is not to say that
| social media is inherently evil--there's lots of value-creation
| happening there--just that THIS particular issue is because
| social media has misdirected people's ambitions.
|
| https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/what-is-gen-zs-no...
|
| https://www.sostandard.com/blogs/social-media-is-changing-ge...
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/08/study-young-people-want-to-b...
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Honestly, maybe social media has accelerated the trend, but
| this has been happening for all of my life now (almost 44
| years).
|
| One Nation under God
|
| has turned into
|
| One Nation under the influence
|
| of one drug
|
| Television, the drug of the Nation
|
| Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation
|
| - TV, the drug of the nation
|
| edit: stoopid HN parser
| KronisLV wrote:
| > that the only hope and dream they have is: to become an
| "influencer."
|
| I might be too introverted for that sort of thing in the
| first place, but that sounds like hell, having to pretend in
| front of a bunch of strangers just to get clicks, all for
| clout.
|
| Then again, I did delete Facebook too because I didn't quite
| get posting bunches of vacation pics either: if there's a
| cool picture or a few I can share those in the likes of
| WhatsApp or Discord with a more narrow and closer knit group
| instead of the world.
|
| I'm guessing it's quite different for most folks and I assume
| that the few of those who also do successfully become
| influencers are swimming in money, more than I'll ever make.
| bitwize wrote:
| > I might be too introverted for that sort of thing in the
| first place, but that sounds like hell, having to pretend
| in front of a bunch of strangers just to get clicks, all
| for clout.
|
| There's an excellent movie called _Eighth Grade_. The main
| girl in it, as a pastime, records videos for YouTube or
| similar in which she delivers nostrums to her audience
| about confidence and being authentically who you are and
| that sort of thing. Meanwhile, in her real school life, she
| 's plagued by self-doubt and pressured by peers into being
| something different, something "better" than who she is.
|
| That movie hit so hard, looking back on my xennial eighth
| grade experience, and it still injected ancillary
| commentary on modern social media trends.
| XorNot wrote:
| Vacation pictures are a great use of Facebook though. If
| that's all it was (and say, cats) then it would be worth
| using.
|
| I have an uncle who takes interesting holidays and writes
| great updates on what he's seen as he travels. This is all
| A+ what Facebook should've been...but not what it became.
|
| Because that entire experience...would be equally well
| serviced by a group chat bar some interface issues. And
| that's what Signal actually provides for super short form
| stuff now - I mostly lament that it can't quite fill that
| longer update niche.
| acheong08 wrote:
| > There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity.
|
| Even worse, it's become a sort of cultural expectation. Among
| my friend group here in the UK, people think you're weird for
| even trying and classify you as a tryhard for simply doing
| well. It's very different to Asia and I'm not surprised the UK
| is falling behind.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Asia has the whole "lying flat" thing. It may be less
| widespread, but it's there too.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Friendship groups are like mini echo chambers.
|
| One or two of your friends, the influential ones, are driving
| that narrative. If you're lucky one of them will get an
| ambitious partner and the dynamic will suddenly switch.
|
| If you're not, you can get away with it in your 20s, but
| they'll drag you down in your 30s.
|
| But don't extrapolate to the whole UK from an echo chamber of
| a friendship group.
| energy123 wrote:
| For many, it's a morality, not just an expectation. You're a
| _bad person_ if you 're not mediocre. See this from a
| recently posted article 6 hours ago:
|
| > It does preclude, practically from first principles, those
| exceptional individuals many of us have encountered in our
| career who seemed to be able to hold the entire code base in
| their brains. Arguably that's a net positive. Those
| individuals were always problematic similar to those folks
| who are willing to work 80 hours a week and jump on every
| incident. At a minimum they make the rest of us look bad.
|
| Not only is working too much bad, but competence and
| intelligence itself is bad, or at least suspect. No doubt
| it's rationalized as being against anti-teamwork traits, but
| the reality is much more sinister -- jealousy, and lies to
| package up that jealousy as something that isn't jealousy.
| close04 wrote:
| > Not only is working too much bad, but competence and
| intelligence itself is bad.
|
| That could be also because of the employer's rising
| expectations. The baseline expectation goes up as soon as
| one person overdelivers. The "making us look bad" doesn't
| mean you underdeliver, just that it's all of a sudden
| proven that all of you could do more.
|
| When another employer offers higher salary you might also
| go to your current job suddenly pissed at your employer or
| boss. Not because your current salary is low but because it
| could be higher.
| bigtex88 wrote:
| Woah woah woah. Could it be that most people are just
| unhappy these days with how much of the spoils go to the
| people at the top instead of the people who do most of the
| daily grunt work?
|
| No, it must be JEALOUSY!
| SamBam wrote:
| I'm not sure where you read that in the quote above.
| Surely the person who knows the codebase inside out, the
| person who "jumps on every incident," the person who is
| willing to put in the long hours IS the person doing the
| daily grunt work?
| bigtex88 wrote:
| Even that person is likely being underpaid for the work
| they are doing. And unless they're the ONLY PERSON AT THE
| JOB then they're not doing all the work. Everyone is
| important to make things work. And I guarantee those
| other people aren't seeing the fruits of their labor
| either.
|
| Productivity gains going to the top 0.1% since the 1970's
| has caused the rest of us to not want to work hard,
| because we don't capture our own productivity gains. I'm
| not sure how this is hard to understand.
| ambicapter wrote:
| So people are getting mad at a grunt doing work because
| they believe that grunt isn't getting paid enough? Seems
| like a stretch.
| amendegree wrote:
| I don't know what the context of that quote is, but I gotta
| say the realization that I would never be the smartest
| person in the room if I want to do interesting things (bec
| I simply don't have the reasoning or memory that these
| people have naturally) was super humbling. I've spent the
| last few years coming to terms with it and in the
| meantime... I hate to say it but, I've surrounded myself
| with mediocrity as an ego boost. Only one job in the last
| decade did I feel like I wasn't the smartest person on the
| team... and I got out of there so fast, I had way too much
| imposter syndrome and too big of an ego to admit it.
|
| So I don't get to do interesting things but my ego doesn't
| feel stupid.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| In the UK at least I suspect it's at least partially a
| generational thing. When I was in school back in the 90's
| it was deeply uncool to be in to anything academic. It's
| also not a surprise it was the height of lads mags and a
| very heavy drinking culture. These days that social
| pressure is entirely different for kids.
|
| That said there are lots more ways to be good at your job
| than a narrow focus on hours worked and raw brain power.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| > In the UK at least I suspect it's at least partially a
| generational thing. When I was in school back in the 90's
| it was deeply uncool to be in to anything academic. It's
| also not a surprise it was the height of lads mags and a
| very heavy drinking culture. These days that social
| pressure is entirely different for kids.
|
| This was in the US too--there was a "Gen-X slacker" ethos
| that persisted into mid-millenial "culture". Radically
| different for people born even 5 years later, I think it
| largely reflects the relative (perceived) security back
| then.
|
| Under-explored topic perhaps.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| It feels particularly bad if these capabilities come as
| part of one's natural state.
|
| I don't think I'm an exceptional programmer or anything
| like that for example (on a whole I'd say I'm average), but
| the ability to keep a codebase in my head just kind of
| appeared after hitting a certain threshold of experience.
| It's not something I intentionally developed. To meet
| social expectations, what am I supposed to do, pretend I
| don't have that capability and handicap myself, ultimately
| making my workday harder? That doesn't make any sense.
| superdude12 wrote:
| It's different when in general the experience interacting
| with a government bureaucracy is poor, and government
| produces expensive and inefficient outcomes these days. As
| opposed to big tech which is creating huge profits and new
| technology.
| immibis wrote:
| Can you list several significant pieces of technology
| created since the iPhone?
| typewithrhythm wrote:
| The 3d printer The reusable rocket The driverless car
|
| Plus a shitload more that reached enough maturity to be
| broadly useful. CNN's Vr Cheap Thermal cameras
|
| You seem a bit too pessimistic to google things for
| yourself, but technology is genuinely moving pretty fast
| this15testingg wrote:
| to be fair we now have the knowledge and ability to begin to
| see the scale of the universe but are still burdened with the
| expectation of continuing the industrial age factory worker
| schedule of 40 hours a week coupled a constant barrage of
| information that it's actually doing more harm than good. How
| can you really blame anyone when the society is just working
| for the sake of it.
| MisterTea wrote:
| This is happening all over and I think a lot of it has to do
| with society moving from communities to larger societies where
| they increasingly feel less significant. They work for a large
| bureaucratic systems that don't give two shits about them. The
| small mom and pop businesses are all consolidated into cold
| soulless corporations who's only goal is numbers go up. So you
| do just enough to fulfill that goal and use the rest of your
| mental and physical energy on things that make you feel better
| about being a insignificant cog.
|
| My work was a kind-of dysfunctional mom and pop shop. Then the
| owner decided to get in bed with VC to boost his business. It
| became a numbers go up game headed by a CEO who lives 800 miles
| away. We lost benefits, worse insurance, less flexibility in
| work hours and loss of work from home for certain roles. That
| totally incentivizes people, right? Then the moron president VC
| installed uses AI like a crutch and talks about a future with
| more robots and less people. Again, totally incentivizes people
| to work more, right? Yet these detached morons wonder why
| people are apathetic. Then add on the state of the world being
| delivered via 24/7 fast news and meme cycles. People are
| literally being mentally beaten into submission. So it becomes
| "fuck em, I'm doing the minimum."
| voidhorse wrote:
| Yeah I think this is spot on. It's just a side effect of
| widespread, pervasive alienation, in the Marxist sense. With
| LLMs we're at the point where the last enclave of relatively
| alienation free work is disappearing.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Yes, precisely this. I understand that if I died tomorrow,
| some services would clean up the body and that's it. Nobody
| cares about me, I don't care about anyone. My goal is to
| maximize the amount of resources I own while minimizing the
| amount of time and energy I spend. Being shit at my job is an
| essential part of it. That's just how modern society works.
|
| To be fair though, I don't think there's ever been an era
| better for people like me. I've always been an outcast, I've
| always been a little different, so living in times that allow
| me to just pretend to do bare minimum and fuck off is a huge
| blessing. Imagine living in middle ages when your existence
| depends on your village but you don't like them.
|
| Recently a memory popped up in my mind. My uncle used to grow
| beans. The thing is, beans grow in peels, but they can only
| be sold without the peel, so you need people to peel the
| beans. So we'd sit in the barn and peel the beans while
| talking and listening to music and whatnot. This is what
| industrialization took from us.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| It's also way more in your face that you are a sucker now
| that you can see the rich, carefree lives of people online.
| While it might not be your boss, it's people in the same
| circle living the same lifestyle.
|
| Before it wasn't shoved in people's faces the difference in
| quality of life/reward/return.
| safety1st wrote:
| I think it's inflation. And I don't just mean Covid era
| inflation. Inflation has been an on-again, off-again problem
| since the collapse of Bretton Woods.
|
| It's because of inflation that slowly and subtly, everything
| gets shittier all the time. It encourages businesses to cut
| corners, shave costs, and find cheap labor overseas. It
| encourages you to not give a fuck about your job because you
| haven't had a raise in 5 years and the price of gas just keeps
| on climbing.
|
| Inflation destroys everyone's belief in the future. Why work
| hard when everything is always getting a little bit worse
| anyway?
|
| We've staved off a lot of the worst material effects with tech
| and productivity increases, but half the time the benefits from
| those just go to shareholders (indeed, even if all you did was
| hold the S&P 500 in recent decades, your portfolio is one of
| the bright spots in all this).
|
| But I think the spiritual effects can't be staved off once you
| internalize the idea that it'll continually cost you more to
| keep on getting the same results. The bar of soap you buy will
| be a little thinner, there'll be a little less meat in your
| burger. You're always fighting the current. There's never a
| rest. If you feel this way then why would you care about what
| you're doing?
|
| Historically I don't think there are a lot of societies that
| find an easy solution to this, the solutions usually involve
| defaults and wars.
|
| Maybe this is part of why the crypto cult is so rabid, Bitcoin
| has deflationary properties, it's the opposite of the inflation
| trend.
| ambicapter wrote:
| I'm doubtful because things always got a little worse all the
| time even before money existed. It's the natural state of
| nature; erosion. Cleaning up after yourself and maintaining
| your space is a virtue for that very reason. Seems like that
| virtue is, itself, is in a state of disrepair (which implies
| an obvious course of action).
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| It really didn't always get worse for a while (at least in
| the US). McDonalds went from just a burger/rare treat to
| affordable, to so affordable we had to pass laws to limit
| how much food they gave out. Homes grew in size, stopped
| having shared bedrooms/bathrooms. Everyone started having
| dishwashers/microwaves in their kitchens. Clothes purchases
| moved from planned to spur of the moment. 27 inch TVs
| stopped being the norm. (I know this one is cliche, we'd
| rather decent lives than fancier circuses to distract, but
| at the time it was a 'wow the future is here' moment, big
| TVs only existed in rich friends homes, and they were
| HORRIBLE because they upscaled content designed for 27 inch
| TVs). Exercise clubs went from only for the rich tennis
| clubs to affordable gyms. Kids got their OWN computers.
| Meanwhile, quality was improving everywhere. Shoes, oh my
| god did shoes get better. Clothing quality got better to
| the point people in the 80s routinely just started wearing
| silk (SILK!!! can you believe it?) shirts. Sheet thread
| counts actually became a thing, holy moley the luxury.
| Computers went from Commodore 64s to modern wonders. Foods
| people ate at home/out got fancier, with all kinds of new
| discoveries.
|
| My entire life up until 2008, almost everything around was
| getting better/cheaper. Yesterday at the store I wanted ice
| cream. I walked the aisle. Half the brands can no longer
| call themselves 'ice cream' legally. None of it felt like
| food to me. There is boutiques super expensive 'ice cream',
| but there used to be buckets of family friends priced 'ice
| cream' not whatever slop they sell now for the masses.
| Every single 'old school' brand I'm familiar with was a
| hollowed out corpse living off the name but selling trash
| that I don't consider fit (and remember, this is the junk
| food, already not really fit, segment).
| transcriptase wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| And all the reasons why economists say inflation is necessary
| and a good thing seem to make assumptions that aren't true if
| taken to their logical conclusion (e.g. infinite growth) and
| hand wave away negative consequences in order to maintain
| what amounts to psychologically manipulating people into not
| saving their money.
|
| Index all wages to inflation and we'll see how much those
| holding all the assets feel about it.
| greenavocado wrote:
| I agree with you. The Fed prints trillions, mortgage rates
| plunge, and suddenly BlackRock's buying up entire
| neighborhoods with cheap debt while renters get priced out.
| Inflation is "healthy" if you're the one holding the deeds.
| But tell that to the family paying 40% of their paycheck
| just to keep a roof over their heads while wages crawl.
|
| Or look at food prices. The USDA says inflation's
| "moderate," but try explaining that to the diner owner
| who's paying double for eggs and bacon while his customers
| stiff on tips on tips because their paychecks buy less.
| Meanwhile, Tyson Foods posts record profits, not because
| they're more efficient, but because they've got pricing
| power and a Fed that's terrified of "deflationary shocks"
| (corporate margins shrinking).
|
| And don't even get me started on healthcare. Hospitals jack
| up bills 8% a year, insurers shrug and pass it on, and the
| economists call it "normal." But when a nurse asks for a
| raise to keep up? Suddenly it's "wage-price spiral" panic.
| Funny how inflation's a "tool" when it's squeezing workers,
| but a "crisis" when it threatens profits.
|
| The game's rigged. Inflation's just the cover story.
| They'll print to save banks, but let Main Street eat the
| inflation tax. They'll cheer "record GDP" while your real
| paycheck buys less. And if you dare demand wages indexed to
| inflation? You're "unrealistic", but God forbid the bond
| market misses its 2% target.
|
| So yeah, inflation's not the problem. The problem is who
| gets the upside (asset owners) and who gets the shaft
| (everyone else). And until that changes, all this talk
| about "necessary inflation" is just a con.
| InvisibleUp wrote:
| It's Blackstone that's investing in single-family homes,
| not BlackRock. They also only own 0.06% of US single-
| family housing stock. Easy mistake to make.
|
| Also, there was absolutely inflation before Bretton
| Woods, and significantly worse inflation at that. See,
| for example, the hyperinflation during Weimar Germany
| which led to WWII. Or the nearly 10% deflation in the US
| during the Great Depression, which just exacerbated the
| effects by severely discouraging investment that would
| have helped kickstart the economy again. Post-Bretton
| Woods, major currencies are generally substantially more
| stable and predictable.
| greenavocado wrote:
| The Weimar hyperinflation wasn't caused by gold's
| limitations - it was the inevitable result of political
| cowardice and monetary arson. After WWI, Germany made the
| fatal decision to abandon gold convertibility and fund
| reparations through the printing press, transforming the
| mark from 4.2 to $1 in 1914 to 4.2 trillion to $1 by
| 1923. This wasn't some unavoidable monetary phenomenon
| but a deliberate policy choice to avoid fiscal
| responsibility. The Great Depression tells a similar
| story of government malpractice rather than gold standard
| failure. During the Roaring Twenties, the Federal Reserve
| artificially suppressed interest rates, creating massive
| distortions in credit markets and fueling the stock
| bubble. When the inevitable correction came, instead of
| allowing the market to clear, Hoover's administration
| compounded the crisis through disastrous interventions -
| hiking interest rates during a liquidity crunch, imposing
| Smoot-Hawley tariffs that strangled global trade, and
| strong-arming businesses into maintaining unsustainably
| high wages. The resulting deflationary spiral wasn't
| gold's fault but the direct consequence of central
| planning arrogance. The Bretton Woods system's collapse
| in 1971 followed the same pattern of political expediency
| overriding monetary integrity. The U.S. promised dollar
| convertibility at $35/oz gold but only to foreign
| governments while banning domestic ownership. When LBJ's
| simultaneous Vietnam War and Great Society spending spree
| drained U.S. gold reserves, Nixon simply severed the
| dollar's last tether to reality rather than confront
| fiscal discipline. The post-Bretton Woods era of pure
| fiat has created the illusion of stability while
| systematically eroding purchasing power - the dollar has
| lost 87% of its value since 1971, with the Fed responding
| to every crisis by printing trillions to bail out
| financial elites while main street struggles under
| crushing inflation. Weimar, the Depression, and Bretton
| Woods all share the same root cause: governments refusing
| to accept that money must be anchored to something beyond
| political whims. Gold doesn't cause collapses. It reveals
| them. Fiat doesn't prevent crises , it merely delays them
| while making the eventual reckoning worse. The historical
| record is clear: when governments treat money as a policy
| tool rather than a sacred trust, the result is always
| catastrophe dressed in different eras' clothing. Today's
| $35 trillion debt and monetary debasement suggest we've
| learned nothing from these lessons.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Can't remember the last time I agreed with every sentence
| in an HN comment.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| > They also only own 0.06% of US single-family housing
| stock.
|
| This is one of those situations where averages hide the
| harm. Yes, when you look across everything it's not a big
| deal. But you can find clear instances where it is a
| problem, particularly in homes of certain value in
| growing markets (like Atlanta:
| https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/data-investors-now-
| own...).
| immibis wrote:
| Ultimately all of this comes down to currency power,
| which is why I personally hope one of these highly
| alternative web-of-trust currencies takes off and starts
| supplanting mainstream currency. (Any currency will end
| up getting corrupted too, eventually, though)
|
| The only two I remember are Circles and LedgerLoops.
|
| In Circles, each user gets their own currency not
| fungible with anyone else's. Payment channels are set up
| between each user and their immediate friends; users also
| allow automatic conversion between their currency and
| their friends' currency. Payments are routed through the
| trust network through a route that has capacity at each
| step - this is the anti-Sybil design - you always receive
| coins of your immediate friends' currency. Each user's
| coins are minted at a certain rate, and the system does
| accounts for the devaluation over time of each user's
| currency, so it's a bit like balances can be somewhat
| negative, and reset towards zero from either direction
| with time.
|
| That's obviously a complex system, and radically unlike
| ordinary currencies. There are many reasons it probably
| doesn't work; I hope they all turn out to be wrong.
|
| LedgerLoops is the other one I remember. Users post
| things they want to buy and things they want to sell. The
| system finds loops where each user gives something to the
| next in the loop. Apparently this is surprisingly
| efficient. There is no currency at all. This one, by
| contrast, is extremely simple, and also radically unlike
| ordinary currencies. This doesn't have a UBI component.
| greenavocado wrote:
| The problem isn't just laziness or corporate greed, though
| those play a role. It's the result of a financial system that
| has spent years prioritizing short-term profits over lasting
| value. When success is measured by clicks, quarterly
| earnings, and engagement metrics rather than quality or
| truth, the natural outcome is a flood of cheap, disposable
| content. The AI-generated newspaper supplement isn't an
| exception, it's exactly what the system was designed to
| produce. Think about the ripple effects: as money flows
| toward fast, scalable content instead of deep, meaningful
| work, the people who actually care, journalists, editors,
| even readers, are left with fewer resources and less reason
| to invest effort. Local news shrivels, media gets bought up
| by profit-driven investors, and algorithms push whatever
| keeps people scrolling. When the financial incentives don't
| support real journalism, why would anyone bother?
|
| The deeper damage is harder to see. A society fed on
| algorithmically generated mediocrity starts to lose its
| ability to recognize, or even expect, better. It's not that
| people suddenly stopped caring; it's that the system has made
| caring unrewarding. Underpaid workers cut corners, audiences
| grow numb to low standards, and the cycle keeps spinning. The
| "Who Cares Era" isn't about moral failure, it's what happens
| when the economy no longer values quality. The irony is this
| same system depends on trust to function. But when readers
| doubt what they read, workers take no pride in their jobs,
| and institutions lose credibility, the foundation starts to
| crack.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| The reason simply is late stage capitalism, there's not enough
| upside anymore, so why bother do a good job? That's how I
| explain it. I noticed that as well with almost all employees,
| there was a shift. And it feels like it's got to do with
| misaligned incentives. Why bother working yourself stupid if
| you'll never own a house if you don't become a slave to the
| loan? There's no upwards movement/middle class anymore.
| RankingMember wrote:
| I don't want to put quite that fine a point on it, but
| generally I agree. I think people see that wages have been
| stagnant for a long time and spending power has gone down.
| Working harder gives them marginal, if any, life improvement.
| I'm reminded of the Lithuanian immigrant character Jurgis
| Rudkus from Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", whose response to
| continual setbacks was "I will work harder", only to
| ultimately be ground down and devoured by a job and life
| circumstances that could never be sated no matter how hard he
| worked.
| kot_manul wrote:
| That's also the horse from Animal Farm right down to the
| exact quote and the situation.
|
| Granted, the horse got shipped off to become glue, rather
| than ground down by life, but the effects are pretty much
| the same.
| doctor_lollipop wrote:
| This, very much.
|
| My employer has no bonus system whatsoever for regular
| employees so even if I did put in extra effort and the
| company made more profits, all of that would go into
| management's pockets.
|
| And as you said, even if I miraculously made 20% more, I
| still wouldn't be able to afford a house.
|
| So why bother? Of all the things I can do with my energy,
| making management richer is very much not a priority.
| weweersdfsd wrote:
| This is it. It's rational not to give a damn in this
| environment, at least for anyone who isn't an entrepreneur or
| very well paid.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| Yup, and even that is way harder nowadays. I feel like the
| VC backed startup thing is dead and there are no big
| moonshots anymore from underdogs having a big idea.
|
| Everything capitalism, especially of the American
| variation, promised us isn't being delivered anymore. The
| numbers are pretty clear, so I don't understand how anyone
| in their right mind can argue against that.
| sp0rk wrote:
| > 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 work done for an employee that you
| aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
| adamc wrote:
| Agree that part of it is the increasingly toxic work
| circumstances. Many people get no health care, poor wages,
| and zero job security, so... they are pretty demoralized much
| of the time. And many work multiple gigs, so they are also
| tired all the time.
| tomslick wrote:
| > And many work multiple gigs
|
| I don't think this is much different now than in the past,
| arguably less so.
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Grey beard here, it's much different than in the past. In
| the past people worked a second jobs for XYZ, like a
| vacation fund, a fancier new car than they could normally
| afford, or home remodels. Today people work a second just
| so that they can afford their 1/3 of rent with their
| roommates.
| palmotea wrote:
| >> 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 work done for an employee
| that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
|
| Also don't discount the pressure exerted by _employers_ to
| _explicitly encourage mediocrity_. So often, there 's a huge
| amount of pressure to implement a half-working kludge and
| never pursue a more appropriate/complete fix. IMHO, it's all
| due to the focus on short-term financial results and ever
| present budget pressures that encourage kicking the can down
| the road.
|
| If your employer is explicitly discouraging you from doing a
| good job, what are you supposed to do? Some people will
| resist, but they're definitely swimming against the current.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Unfortunately it's becoming more obvious that "short-term"
| is all we really have in this world. There is _no_ long
| term.
|
| So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term
| wins until you finally die. Same with companies. Things
| change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year
| and going out of business the next. It's not like old days
| where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have
| business for generations.
|
| Results _now_ are way better than results later.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Unfortunately it's becoming more obvious that "short-
| term" is all we really have in this world. There is no
| long term.
|
| That's definitely not true. It sounds like a
| rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior.
|
| > So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-
| term wins until you finally die.
|
| So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then?
|
| > Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you
| could be crushing it one year and going out of business
| the next. It's not like old days where you could setup a
| blacksmithing shop and have business for generations.
|
| Maybe if you're in some startup, but that's not the usual
| case.
|
| > Results now are way better than results later.
|
| So be "very proud [for taking] home a salary for about
| two hours of work per day following up with contractors,
| then heading to the gym and making social plans."?
| pixl97 wrote:
| >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.
|
| >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?
| palmotea wrote:
| >> 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 political derail? It's
| honestly baffling.
| yifanl wrote:
| 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 that attitude is bubbling up
| into the corporate world.
| squigz wrote:
| > Unfortunately it's becoming more obvious that "short-
| term" is all we really have in this world. There is no
| long term.
|
| The opposite seems far more obvious to me. Short-term
| results aren't going to last. Planning for the long-term
| - whether that's a career, family, or whatever - is
| critical to a fulfilling and healthy life.
|
| > Results now are way better than results later.
|
| I don't see why you can't have both.
| adjfasn47573 wrote:
| I think your comment comes from a very specific point of
| view. Like software/tech jobs. (Even there you have long
| term stuff that we all would definitely benefit from).
|
| There are so many things where short-term only thinking
| is counter-productive. It swallows money, creates
| frustration and leaves an overall net-negative to society
| and the world.
|
| Just one example would be city planning. Repairing a
| road? What else is there like fiber cables, maybe some
| tram tracks, and so on, long term planning would be to
| acquire a holistic picture and to plan one timespan where
| everything is done fast but with quality. It's a few
| months construction, after that everything is fine for
| years or even a few decades to come. But what you see
| instead is one part of the state that manages fiber
| cables doing there own thing, another part that manages
| street quality do their own thing. So the street has a
| construction site for a year (for just improving one
| part) then a few months nothing then another year of
| construction again, nothing, construction and soon you
| have over a decade of constant on and off construction
| work on this one street. Something that could've been
| done in 6-12 months once and be done, if planned
| correctly and with long term and holistic picture in
| mind.
|
| And this is just one example. The world is full of stuff
| like this. Short term might be a good thing for very
| specific types of projects, but I hard disagree that
| short term is overall better in any way.
|
| In my opinion this shortterm thinking is a huge negative
| factor of modern societies. Because not everything is a
| tech startup where things change super fast.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Blessed are those who plant trees under whose shade they
| will never sit
| pmg101 wrote:
| Not sure why you get down voted for this.
|
| Seems self evident that increasing pace of change of
| society tilts the rational strategy towards short-term
| over long-term gain.
|
| Do people disagree that the pace of change is increasing?
| Do people disagree that short termism is rationally
| appropriate in a highly changeable situation? Long term
| planning requires a stable backdrop. I agree with you.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results
|
| I've heard that my whole life. If that were generally true,
| company stocks would be going steadily downwards.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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/politics/boeing-
| corporate-... - April 9th, 2024
|
| [3] _HN Search: Boeing_ - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRan
| ge=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| WalterBright wrote:
| Boeing consistently went up for many decades prior to the
| MAX crisis. So did GE.
|
| Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become
| unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go
| down.
|
| It's not about prioritizing short term results.
| palmotea wrote:
| >> 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.
|
| > Boeing consistently went up for many decades prior to
| the MAX crisis. So did GE.
|
| The point is they could have probably _kept going up_ if
| they hadn 't done that.
|
| It's like how if you choose to eat your seed corn, you'll
| be fat and happy for a season, then you and your family
| will certainly starve to death next year. You'd most
| likely had lived if you hadn't made that short-term
| decision.
|
| > Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become
| unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go
| down.
|
| And how often are the "life cycles" really just the
| accumulation of bad short-term decisions catching up with
| the company?
|
| You can kludge and kludge and kludge, but eventually that
| makes the app unmaintainable. Then you're in "total
| rewrite" or go under territory.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > The point is they could have probably kept going up if
| they hadn't done that.
|
| No company goes up forever. They all eventually strangle
| themselves with bureaucratic inefficiency.
| palmotea wrote:
| > No company goes up forever. They all eventually
| strangle themselves with bureaucratic inefficiency.
|
| So they should act to strangle themselves faster? It
| feels like your reasoning is equivalent to, "Eventually
| you'll die, so there's no point taking care of your
| health. Go save money by avoiding the doctor, take up
| smoking, and eat junk food all the time."
| WalterBright wrote:
| > So they should act to strangle themselves faster?
|
| Come on.
| palmotea wrote:
| Being relentlessly focused on the short term will do
| that, eventually.
|
| You seem to think the assumption "all companies die"
| means you can simplify away their journey, but it matters
| if they get there faster or slower (at least to society,
| if not the decision-makers to maximize their personal
| profit while hoping to not being the ones left holding
| the bag).
| nradov wrote:
| Old companies die and new ones take their place. This is
| not a problem for society. In most cases creative
| destruction is a net positive.
| fragmede wrote:
| Forever is a long time, but eg Nintendo has been around
| in some form or another since _1889_ , so that doesn't
| seem like a given.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > in some form or another
|
| I.e. they've been reinventing the business. They were
| probably burned to the ground in WW2 and had to rebuild
| the business from scratch.
| komali2 wrote:
| Perhaps that's the trick to longevity then, not seeking
| endless growth. All the oldest companies on earth seem to
| small, geographically contained entities (e.g., hotels,
| restaurants)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
| jimbokun wrote:
| But there's a lot of variance in how long it takes for a
| company to reach that point.
|
| Some fight it off longer than others.
| bumby wrote:
| > _And how often are the "life cycles" really just the
| accumulation of bad short-term decisions catching up with
| the company?_
|
| I do think technical debt is a real problem, but to play
| devils advocate, the "life-cycle" is often a pivot from
| "innovation" to "maintenance". Companies rightly begin to
| focus on the aspects of business that make them money and
| will often cannibalize R&D to focus on high-margin areas.
| That's why "mature" companies often focus on innovation
| via acquisition.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _It 's like how if you choose to eat your seed corn,
| you'll be fat and happy for a season, then you and your
| family will certainly starve to death next year. You'd
| most likely had lived if you hadn't made that short-term
| decision._
|
| Part of that is probably embedded in the environment. The
| market favors risk-taking. _Everyone_ is dipping into
| their seed corn, hoping they can use the extra energy
| they have now to secure some new corn and cover for the
| surplus. Sometimes they can 't, and they starve. More
| importantly though, anyone who _didn 't_ dip into their
| seed corn _is no longer there_ - risking a bit gives you
| a competitive advantage over those who risk less.
|
| This dynamics plays at multiple levels in large
| companies, and arguably is deeply embedded in the overall
| business culture.
|
| It's not totally irrational either - "eating your seed
| corn" sounds stupid in isolation, but the calculus
| changes when every village around you is at war with you
| and everyone else, all while the whole region gets
| hammered by natural disasters. Saving the seed corn to
| survive the next year may end up killing you next week.
| grumpy_coder wrote:
| Boeing has consistently underperformed the market
| massively since the MD merger. Making maybe 3% after
| inflation
| WalterBright wrote:
| The vast bulk of Boeing's history was before that.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Right, and isn't that everyone's point? When their focus
| was on the product, they excelled.
| bumby wrote:
| > _It's not about prioritizing short term results_
|
| Boeing was forced by courts bolster safety, compliance,
| and quality programs as well as admitting to conspiracy
| to thwart FAA oversight. I don't know about you, but my
| experience is that when companies undermine those types
| of oversight, it's almost always due to schedule and
| price pressure (ie short term results). (Not to mention,
| the whole impetus for MCAS was to rush the design to
| market so they wouldn't lose out on AA as a customer).
| WalterBright wrote:
| Again, the vast bulk of Boeing's history was before that.
|
| > the whole impetus for MCAS was to rush the design to
| market so they wouldn't lose out on AA as a customer
|
| The impetus for MCAS was to make the MAX behave like the
| previous 737 model to reduce the expense of retraining
| the pilots.
|
| In general, flying is safer when pilots do not need to
| "code switch" when switching airplane models. Many
| crashes result from a pilot reflexively doing the right
| thing for the previous airplane they flew, rather than
| the one they are flying at the moment.
| bumby wrote:
| > _Again, the vast bulk of Boeing 's history was before
| that._
|
| I'm not sure what you intend to convey with this
| statement. If price reflects reality, the current price
| should reflect the current reality, no? Whether the White
| Sox were the best team 100 years ago has little bearing
| on my prediction about their chances this year. I fail to
| see how Boeing's prior culture prevents them from
| succumbing to short term incentives. I know your point is
| the downfall is a bureaucratic one, but the evidence does
| not point to that (they actually cut corners on
| bureaucratic requirements).
|
| > _The impetus for MCAS was to make the MAX behave like
| the previous 737 model to reduce the expense of
| retraining the pilots._
|
| Go deeper. Why was this considered necessary?
|
| (Hint: it's because they wanted to rush the design to
| market with a less expensive (and lower quality) product.
| Ie cost and schedule pressure. You stopped at the
| proximate cause.)
| triceratops wrote:
| > They grow until they become unable to function
| efficiently anymore, then they go down
|
| But why?
| dsr_ wrote:
| The book on GE is specifically about how they lied,
| cheated, and committed fraud -- er, accounting
| irregularities -- for decades, in order to maintain the
| illusion of number goes up predictably.
|
| In retrospect, it was exactly as unlikely as Madoff's
| numbers.
| saghm wrote:
| > Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become
| unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go
| down.
|
| > It's not about prioritizing short term results.
|
| Why did they need to grow in the first place though? If a
| company is already profitable, and growing will end up
| making them less functional and eventually erode profits,
| that sounds like it's due to prioritizing short-term
| results over long-term stable profits.
| Aunche wrote:
| > Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-
| Standing C-Suite Greed
|
| I suspect this is true to a certain extent, but IMO this
| narrative has been exaggerated to the point where it is
| completely useless. If Boeing execs were only focused on
| "short term profits," how did commercial aviation deaths
| decrease despite there being significantly more flights?
|
| https://www.statista.com/chart/4854/commercial-aviation-
| deat...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > Works until it doesn't.
|
| _Boeing 737 Max: The troubled history of fatal crashes
| and 346 deaths in 7 years_ - https://economictimes.indiat
| imes.com/news/international/busi... - July 8th, 2024
|
| _As Boeing looks to buy a key 737 supplier [Spirit
| AeroSystems], a whistleblower says the problems run deep_
| - https://www.npr.org/2024/06/16/nx-s1-4998520/boeing-737
| -spir... - June 16th, 2024
|
| _Boeing's Decline Traced to Decades of Catering to
| Shareholders Above All Others_ -
| https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/quick-take/boeings-decline-
| traced-... - April 8th, 2024
|
| _Boeing's long fall, and how it might recover_ -
| https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-
| aerospace/boein... - April 7th, 2024
| Aunche wrote:
| Are there actually more issues or are people just more
| aware of them? Like I said, commercial airline flights
| are significantly safer than they were in Boeing's
| supposed golden era despite these publicized scandals.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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...
| Aunche wrote:
| > "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 were
| also due to negligence. You can't have it both ways.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It's not meant as a gotcha. It's meant to illustrate that
| the effects of financialization, stripping an enterprise
| of its value, and the culture that enables this (of which
| short termism is a component) can take some time for the
| symptoms to surface. Boeing cared more about profits than
| safety, this is what the evidence shows. If you disagree,
| of course, you're entitled to your opinion. I believe
| I've supported my thesis adequately with citations. It
| was a long corporate journey to the crash sites, but the
| journey is well documented.
|
| (GE also took substantial time to fall apart, but with no
| deaths to my knowledge)
| bumby wrote:
| > _If the 737 Max incidents were due to negligence on
| Boeing 's part, the many of the incidents in the 70s were
| also due to negligence._
|
| They don't necessarily have to be classified as the same
| contributing factors. The de Haviland Comet may have
| failed due to our lack of understanding of metal fatigue
| with a pressurized cabin. That was engineering ignorance.
| If a manufacturer did the same today, it's negligence
| because those are known engineering principles.
|
| Boeing was knowingly not following their own procedures
| for safety critical design. They also admitted to
| conspiracy to circumvent FAA oversight. Which of the
| above categories would you put those in?
| badpun wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| A lot of things did. Seems like prices much tend to rise
| faster than inflation.
| layer8 wrote:
| There is no contradiction between stocks going up and
| things being mediocre due to focus on short-term profits.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Looks like a contradiction to me. If you're sacrificing
| the long term for the short term, your stock isn't going
| up.
| layer8 wrote:
| Why not? You're still profitable, just with mediocre
| stuff.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Your competitors will eat your lunch.
| layer8 wrote:
| I don't see that happening in practice, because the
| competitors are focusing on the short term as well.
| Another reason is that it is easy to deceive customers
| about the relative qualities of a product as long as it
| is cheaper than the competition. So it's rather the
| short-termists that are driving a race to the bottom (or
| at least to mediocrity).
| warkdarrior wrote:
| When you have a market for lemons and all competitors aim
| for "good enough", then it is no longer a business
| threat.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The most successful companies, in my experience, are not
| successful because they're so much more awesome than
| everyone else. They are successful primarily because of
| luck... the luck of having competitors that suck total
| ass.
|
| Microsoft, for instance... or in more modern times,
| Tesla.
|
| I wouldn't put Boeing into that category, though -- it
| took more than just a lack of good competition to
| accomplish what they did, back in the day.
| bumby wrote:
| Depends on the time horizon of investors.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The value of a stock is based on long term results. If
| the investors catch wind of the company sacrificing the
| long term for the short term, the stock price will go
| down accordingly.
| bumby wrote:
| Not really. It's based on expected future results.
| Sometimes that's based in reality, sometimes it's hopes
| and dreams. How else do you explain companies that have
| never made money being having any positive stock price?
| There are no "results" just projections.
|
| We probably agree that the stock will eventually reflect
| value. I think we'd quibble about how long that takes. As
| the saying goes, the market can remain irrational longer
| than you can remain solvent. In other words, don't bet on
| the market always reflecting reality.
| lesuorac wrote:
| I dunno, stock prices seem pretty volatile despite no
| material change in the company.
|
| The value of a stock is all pure speculation about how
| much you can sell it for later.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| So what is your thesis on GME? Long term play? It is
| literally a brick and mortar selling physical video games
| in an era where consoles are increasingly shipping
| without the ability to play physical media. And yet...
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| why do the companies with the shortest planning horizons
| have the highest P/E ratios then?
| const_cast wrote:
| Stock price is pretty much completely unrelated to the
| performance of a company because the vast majority of
| investors have no idea what the fuck is going on in the
| company.
|
| Look at Tesla. They're doing extremely poorly right now
| and have been for about a year, and if you look at their
| stock price you wouldn't think that. They're valued more
| than, like, every other auto manufacturer combined.
| Looking at that you'd expect them to hold 50% of the
| market in all markets they're in. But they don't get
| anywhere close to that.
|
| The stock market is just gambling. You can't see the
| other person's hand.
| ncruces wrote:
| The short term spanning multiple decades undermines the
| argument.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| stock markets are indices of successful companies; you
| need to look at the composition. The metric I would look
| at is the age of the companies in the S&P 500 or similar,
| and that IS increasingly skewing young, which shows both
| a focus on the short term and increasing markets
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| That assumes the stock market is by and large logical.
|
| In a way it is, its logically a machine that makes money.
| The actual business doesn't matter if it's making money.
|
| It's a long form rug pull, where you make money until the
| company no longer can and you hope you're not holding the
| bag.
| intalentive wrote:
| Buybacks sacrifice long term investment for short term
| stock price gains.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Buybacks do not do that any more than dividends do.
| Buybacks merely allow publicly listed stock owners to
| precisely time their capital gains tax events.
|
| Surely, there is some amount of income that a business's
| owner is allowed to pocket without bad intentions, which
| may or may not come at the cost of long term investments.
| Especially in stable/declining businesses.
| azemetre wrote:
| No, buy packs are pure market manipulation. There is a
| reason why they were banned prior to 1982. It's a SEC
| rule that can easily be reversed too but the rich love
| their ability to manipulate markets for their benefit.
| nullhole wrote:
| > Buybacks do not do that any more than dividends do.
|
| There's at least a clear relationship if the dividend is
| reinvested.
|
| If the dividend is spent, though, eg by someone in
| retirement, then they're different. Under buybacks, the
| retiree would have to sell some shares to get cash, and
| would eventually run out. Under dividends, the retiree
| would be able to continuously pocket money.
| bumby wrote:
| Or...PE ratios bloat to provide price support. See:CAPE-
| adjusted PE ratio.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| are you discounting the supply of new companies that
| continually replace the decliners? What's happening to
| those the previously existed for 50+years? Will we ever
| see a new company last 100+ years?
| seadan83 wrote:
| The focus on short term results could generally be true.
| Perhaps... generally nothing is true though of course.
|
| (1) consider how many stocks are delisted and/or go out
| of business. We might be thinking with survivorship bias.
| A cook google gave this headline "America has lost 43% of
| listed companies since 1996" (though, more research would
| be needed to really be sure that's accurate and to
| determine any more nuances that might be important).
|
| (2) If there are an ever-present amount of short term
| rewards/results, then we would get growth. A series of
| short term growth would be hard to distinguish from long
| term growth.
|
| (3) Long term and short term growth can be mixed, and the
| strategy does not have to be static. A company could hop
| back and forth between them. This point contradicts the
| premise a bit, at the same time we can't discount long
| term from the noise that we see (it could be signal).
|
| (4) Stock price is not necessarily always tied to
| financial results. It's supposed to be the sum of all
| future revenue divided by the number of shares (or
| something like that), thus, stock price is in part also
| the expectation of revenue and not actual revenue. Tesla
| is a notable example, the price of their stock is still
| very high, with anticipation of amazing revenue gains,
| but recently their revenue has not been growing by a ton.
| lamename wrote:
| Have you ever noticed that stocks can go up as
| enshittification also goes up?
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Red Lobster
| nostrademons wrote:
| The financial industry isn't immune to "who cares"-ism,
| or folks who are bad at their jobs. Heck, the index fund
| is the ultimate "who cares?" product - you're explicitly
| saying that you don't care about underlying fundamental
| valuations and are going to piggyback off the price
| discovery mechanism of other active investors, and you
| accept average returns as a result.
|
| In practice, financial results are driven by
| _transactions_ , and so any mediocrity that doesn't lead
| to the customer going elsewhere isn't going to show up in
| the financial results. You need an actual competitor to
| risk losing money to sucking. But I'll note that in cases
| where there _is_ an actual competitor to sclerotic old
| industries, one that actually does care, the investors in
| the competitor tend to become fabulously wealthy and the
| investors in the old industry go broke.
| const_cast wrote:
| Most workers have learned that going above and beyond
| almost always backfires. Employers don't value long-term
| employment relationships, so working hard just results in
| you raising the bar for yourself, with no benefit.
|
| A lot of these people were once starry-eyed highschoolers
| and college students who got burned too many times. They
| put in the time, the effort, the blood, sweat and tears,
| and what did they get? No thank you, just more work.
| Eventually they can't live up to the standard they
| themselves set, and they're let go. Meanwhile, bozos show
| up late and half-ass everything and then that becomes their
| expectation.
|
| Nobody wants to be Atlas.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Acting their wage is reasonable. Can't ask for a smile and
| pride in work from those forced to participate in the torment
| nexus. 60 percent of Americans can't afford to meet their
| basic needs, for example.
|
| If we want better outcomes, employers must provide the
| necessary comp, benefits, and work life balance to arrive at
| those outcomes. Otherwise, we get slop because that's what is
| paid for.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, I was also going to trot out the "act your wage"
| phrase. As a worker, you can't buy groceries with "pride".
| And as an employer, you're not going to get a craftsman who
| cares by paying them bottom of the barrel wages. The labor
| market is completely broken.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It is broken, but complaining is free. Everything else
| mentioned (wages, benefits, quality of life) has a cost.
| We can either pay up, stop complaining, or treat the
| complaining as performance art when we know the solution
| but choose not to implement it. If we want people to
| care, we have to pay them enough to care.
| parpfish wrote:
| there's also the fact that you can't really show pride in
| work if you're being forced to follow a script or the
| demands of some piece of bureaucratic paperwork.
|
| i think a prerequisite for being proud of your work is
| that you have enough autonomy so that the final product
| is truly the result of your decisions and mastery.
| edc117 wrote:
| Completely broken on multiple levels. In a lot of
| industries now, as an employer you can't win even if you
| buck the trend and lead out your competitors on wages and
| benefits. The highest paid warehouse worker, waitress,
| etc. will still barely make ends meet, never be able to
| afford a house, so on. Decades of devaluation of labor
| (automation, venture capital, bad laws & regulations,
| etc.) has really done a number, and I don't see a way to
| easily reverse the damage. IMO, the top end of the
| economy needs to be brought back closer to the bottom
| end, but I just don't see it happening.
| XorNot wrote:
| Which is of course an argument for the idea that workers
| rights, civil liberties and welfare might just have
| outsized effects on productivity and economic growth
| compared to their sticker price.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| All roads lead to unionization and strong worker rights,
| which HN is allergic to (broadly speaking). "Americans
| can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all
| other possibilities have been exhausted." Churchill
| supposedly said. Wages must go up, worker power must go
| up, there is no other legal path to success (broad
| improvements in economic security) in this context. If
| you can show me an alternate path derived from first
| principles, I'm all ears.
| eyesofgod wrote:
| Can't be asked to take pride in my work when I'm not
| allowed do, because we just need to ship ship ship without
| any thought or coordination.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > because so many large employers have shown that they aren't
| even willing to pretend to care about their employees
|
| There's nothing new about that. It's always been true.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| That may be, but it's possible it has become more employer-
| adversarial; that the employer/employee "contract" has
| become increasingly one-sided.
| saubeidl wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Was Yugoslavia an economic powerhouse?
| layer8 wrote:
| Do we need economic powerhouses to live well?
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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 sewing
| all your clothes? (The first industrial target was
| textiles.)
| layer8 wrote:
| I think you're presenting a false dichotomy, but we're
| not going to solve that in this thread.
| ambicapter wrote:
| GP consistently has some of the worst takes on HN.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Do you think that was the lifestyle in Yugoslavia? And
| their heyday was half a century ago at this point. You're
| presenting a false dichotomy. Nobody's gonna live in a
| mud hut using a spinning wheel just because workers run
| companies.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Why did 20 million people over the last 4 years sneak
| into America? How many Americans left for Yugoslavia?
| saubeidl wrote:
| How many Yugoslavs left for America?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Were they allowed to leave?
|
| Usually the sign of the fairest and most humane systems
| of government and economy is when people get shot in the
| back by border guards if they try to escape.
| nradov wrote:
| Generally yes. Unlike Soviet occupied Eastern Europe,
| most regular people in Yugoslavia were able to obtain
| passports and travel internationally. There were some
| people barred from leaving or held as political
| prisoners.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Yes. The Yugoslav passport was the strongest in the world
| at the time - the only one you could freely travel both
| West and East with.
| Ray20 wrote:
| >Nobody's gonna live in a mud hut using a spinning wheel
| just because workers run companies.
|
| That exactly what will happen. In the best case, if you
| lacky enough, you will be live in a mud hut. The rest
| will envy those who can afford to live in a mud hut.
|
| Workers can start running companies at any time, no one
| restricts them from running their companies. The only
| reason they don't do this is that this will be worse for
| workers.
|
| So you are being hypocritical. You don't want workers to
| run companies (they can do that now), you want workers to
| have no alternative.
| saubeidl wrote:
| What are you even talking about? Nobody lived in mud huts
| in Yugoslavia, that is verifiable fact.
|
| And no, workers can't start running companies because
| they lack the capital and thus the means of production.
| That's the problem with a capitalist system, the power is
| with the entrenched capitalists.
| nradov wrote:
| When a "problem" has no solution then it's not actually a
| problem, just a fact to be accepted. Like gravity.
| There's nothing wrong with worker owned cooperatives, but
| for anything that requires significant capital you have
| to run things the way that capital owners want. And
| large-scale economic central planning where governments
| allocate capital has been an abject failure everywhere it
| has been tried, so don't insult our intelligence by
| suggesting that we give it another shot.
| Ray20 wrote:
| >they lack the capital
|
| This is absolutely not true. In absolute numbers, the
| cost of starting a business is quite low, and workers
| have a lot of money, much more than their employers. And
| if workers collectively stop spending their salaries on
| unnecessary things, and instead organize a fund - on
| average, in 2 years they will have enough money to buy
| out the entire company they work for, or organize a
| comparable one.
|
| There are no problems with capitalism, capitalism just
| allows you not to do all of this, not to suffer 2 years
| of poverty for the sake of living in a mud hut (if you're
| lucky enough).
| trinix912 wrote:
| You're roughly describing the whole point of Yugoslavia's
| workers' self-management. This is in contrast to what the
| Eastern Bloc had with the government establishing and
| running the factories directly. Also in contrast to the
| capitalist system where someone with enough capital
| establishes and runs the factory themselves while
| employing the workers.
|
| And no, you didn't have to live in a mud hut for it. In
| fact, it was more affordable for the regular worker to
| build a house than it is now. Those houses were/are
| comparable to what you see in Germany today. Go check out
| the real estate market in Slovenia if you don't believe
| me, look for houses built 1950-1990.
| ryandrake wrote:
| This is a false dichotomy: Either your country is an
| "economic powerhouse", or you're living in a mud hut,
| with nothing in between. A country can be a good, decent
| place to live, where people's basic needs are taken care
| of, with opportunities for modest life improvements for
| those who want them, without being an economic powerhouse
| (and all of the bad that comes with that).
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yugoslavia's economy doesn't sound so successful:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Fe
| der...
|
| High unemployment, billions in US foreign aid, etc.
| saubeidl wrote:
| > Despite facing numerous challenges, including political
| instability and external pressures, the Yugoslav economy
| achieved significant growth and modernization during its
| existence, with a particularly strong emphasis on
| education, health care, and social welfare
|
| I'm not sure we're reading the same article then.
|
| Here's some archive footage from 60's Yugoslavia for your
| reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXr5aKZ8mps
|
| Sure doesn't look like people living in squalor in their
| mud huts.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I didn't see any mud huts in that article.
| skeaker wrote:
| You responded to a rhetorical question with the wrong
| answer (you can obviously live well on only modest means
| as arguably the majority of people do, even in the US),
| and then proceeded to lay out maybe the most egregious
| false dichotomy I've ever seen right after. I'll try to
| give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you
| hold a definition of "economic powerhouse" that aligns
| more with "a first world country" rather than "a
| shareholder-maximized corporatocracy".
| trinix912 wrote:
| 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_system
| s_from_...
| saubeidl wrote:
| It was a place where people lived good lives and had
| plenty of opportunities to succeed, along with free
| education and healthcare.
|
| I'm kind of tired of being an economic powerhouse where
| most people live in misery.
| robotnikman wrote:
| >I'm kind of tired of being an economic powerhouse where
| most people live in misery.
|
| This. What's the point of being an economic powerhouse
| when most people end up living poor quality lives?
| Ray20 wrote:
| >people live in misery.
|
| People live in unimaginable luxury compared with what
| people had in Yugoslavia.
| saubeidl wrote:
| As somebody who's from there, no, they don't.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| Being an economic powerhouse or not isn't required for
| the idea to be a reasonable and workable one.
|
| But given the high levels of dysfunction/conflict that
| led to the breakup of the country, I doubt they'd meet
| whatever bar you set for "economic powerhouse".
| WalterBright wrote:
| > the high levels of dysfunction/conflict
|
| Doesn't sound like Yugoslavia had a successful model.
| trinix912 wrote:
| 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 was a
| perfect system, btw.
| antisthenes wrote:
| What % of easy carbohydrate energy was Yugoslavia
| consuming at the time, compared to, say, USSR or USA or
| China?
| nradov wrote:
| Are you asking about diets? During most of the Cold War
| period, average people in Yugoslavia generally had more
| and better food than the USSR or China but less than the
| USA. They ate a lot of bread and potatoes. You probably
| won't find detailed records with percentages.
| antisthenes wrote:
| No, actual energy. Coal/Oil/Gasoline/Kerosene.
|
| What made 99% of things run in the 20th century. Things
| like plants, foundries and what have you.
| nradov wrote:
| In terms of fossil fuels they had significant domestic
| coal production but most oil and natural gas was
| imported.
| II2II wrote:
| I'm not trying to absolve employers here, since they are
| almost certainly the ones who initiated this trend, but there
| are very few incentives to care about employees when
| employees take advantage of it. The end result is they make
| life more difficult not just for the employer, but for their
| fellow employees.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| It's kind of a self-fulfilling cycle in that way. Employers
| have taken away any and all incentives to do anything but
| the absolute bare minimum to not get fired, so now that's
| what they get.
|
| Because that's now employees behave, now employers won't
| offer anything else - but without offering anything else,
| employee attitudes aren't going to change.
|
| I think strong unions are the only way forward
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| > without offering anything else, employee attitudes
| aren't going to change.
|
| In my lived experience, unions permanently cement the
| anti-employer (and often anti-customer) attitude present
| in some employees. Once in place, they don't produce a
| massive change of heart where employees are willing to
| rise above and beyond the exact terms of their collective
| bargaining agreements, but instead result in a rejection
| of the traditional work ethic and the embrace of minimal
| output and often malicious compliance across the board.
|
| It's one reason many of us have had such bad experience
| working with unions in the past. The customer suffers
| along with the employer, and worse the customer often
| pays a higher price for this privilege.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| 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.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > 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 work done for an employee
| that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
|
| I agree that I think this is a big chunk of it. There's no
| loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is.
| Doing good work is only rewarded with more work without the
| extra pay or benefits.
|
| A ton of large employers have removed any and all incentive
| to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get
| fired.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| " There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded
| if there is"
|
| Loyalty actually gets punished. The only way to get a
| decent raise is to change companies. Your car insurance
| will keep going up until you change companies. With cable
| the best deals are available only for new customers and
| existing customers see their cost go up.
|
| It seems companies hate their employees and customers
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > It seems companies hate their employees and customers
|
| They do! Imagine the profits if they could keep making
| the same money without the customers or employees! Those
| pesky humans really get in the way of maximizing the
| profit
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| " 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."
|
| Exactly. Companies and wealthy people have cancelled the
| social contract a long time ago and have decided to go for
| profit at any cost. It's hard to be excited about work when
| you know that you get raises below inflation rate while the
| company makes record profits. And the CEO may do a town hall
| claiming how great business is and then lay off people two
| weeks later. Or DOGE. In theory this is a good idea but
| instead of improving processes so government workers can do a
| good job they just laid off people and let the people who are
| left deal with the mess.
|
| No wonder people become cynical.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I'd also say we are lost in scale.
|
| The supermassive corporate structures that have accreted
| together in the modern world are beyond the scale of
| imagining. We are familiar with a vastly smaller % of the
| org chart, as the size of that chart balloons.
|
| I tend to think there used to be a connection within and
| across the corporate entity, more shared purposes, shared
| cause/alignment, and perhaps sometimes at successful places
| ability for the good ideas to rise. Large companies
| sometimes love to preach "intrapreneurial" spirit,
| encourage the individual will & ownership, all while
| refusing to acknowledge the constraints & impositions of
| corporate hierarchy, the lack of freedom, that the large
| organizational structure imposes.
|
| I think there's a real muting of the human will at most
| large companies, and that caring and trying is only
| permitted in very narrow scopes. That only some folks are
| able to maintain will and drive, while fitting themselves
| into the particular shapes demanded by the org chart around
| them. At the smaller scale we are not individually abutted
| by so many others to whom a concern may be charged.
|
| (The impacts of what behaviors we see around us are also
| bounded by these forces, dimish our spirit collectively
| too. We grow up & adult in a world where everyone is buried
| deep in an org chart.)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://ilsr.org/
| warkdarrior wrote:
| What does this Institute for Local Self-Reliance do?
| Their primary photo on the main page is showing a
| network/LAN testing device.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Yes.
|
| When a group of people get together to do something, the
| most visible effect will be that of GCD(each person's
| motivations).
|
| If you collect enough people, with sufficient
| heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always
| financial self-interest, everything else, while it may
| exist, contributes with an arbitrarily smaller intensity.
|
| In my mind, there are various links from this to the
| financialization-led practice of securitizing and
| "cutting up" everything into an "optimal" number of
| pieces, without stopping to think if the objective
| function truly captures the desired end result. However,
| these links are not clear enough yet for me to expand
| further on.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| " you will find that the GCD is always financial self-
| interest"
|
| I think most people want to have security and some
| predictability for their lives. One way to achieve this
| is by having money but there are other ways too. Reducing
| humans to purely economical beings who always want to
| maximize profit is a gross simplification that appeals to
| economists and bankers but it doesn't reflect reality.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| > reduce to purely economical
|
| I didn't. Please read the multiple qualifiers I added to
| that phrase.
|
| >> If you collect enough people, with sufficient
| heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always
| financial self-interest.
|
| What that means is that if you scale groups of people too
| much, the only common interest you'll find among _all_ of
| them will be financial self interest. Hence GCD -
| "greatest common divisor". Of course people do things
| without monetary incentives. But these interests don't
| overlap within a sufficiently large and diverse group of
| people, _as much as_ financial self-interest does.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| "But these interests don't overlap within a sufficiently
| large and diverse group of people, as much as financial
| self-interest does."
|
| I honestly don't think this is true. Finances are a tool
| to get security and comfort in our society but it's still
| just a tool to achieve the real goal. I bet if we had
| viable UBI that gives people their basic needs, most
| people wouldn't worry about finances.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| In software specifically, we're now at year two+ where the
| entirety of investment and innovation is in literally
| replacing people.
|
| We have CEOs and prominent figureheads making openly
| hostile statements about replacing their software workforce
| with LLMs, and coming out with bold proclamations about
| whatever models are going to be better than whatever title
| of developer in $TIME.
|
| How there can be any loyalty or long-term thinking from
| employees at all in such circumstances is beyond me.
|
| I can't even think of an analogous scenario at any time in
| my life. Open worker hostility.
| munificent wrote:
| I think you're right, but it's not just work. It's all
| organizations and social institutions.
|
| We have relationships with other individuals, but we also
| have relationships with groups as a whole. And the way we
| tend to those relationships depends on how we believe the
| other party tends to us.
|
| If you have a relationship with someone who treats you with
| trust, kindness, conscientiousness, and care, you will
| naturally reciprocate and feel good about doing so. But if
| the partner is thoughtless, callous, or cruel, only a fool
| would put effort into that relationship.
|
| So it is with our relationships with all of the various
| organizations that make up society. If the company I work for
| is giving me the fewest possible benefits and is happy to
| fire me if they get the chance, why should I do anything but
| the bare minimum? If my government is being used as a tool
| for enrichment by cronies and oligarchs, why shouldn't I do
| everything I can to skirt paying taxes? If the giant store
| chain I buy my groceries from keeps jacking up prices and
| shrinkflating products, why shouldn't I slip a few extra
| apples in the bag without paying?
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| On the gripping hand, if you _do_ put in the hard work, you
| are likely to be exploited. I can think of several examples
| of excellent workers: they come in, do great work, do not
| play politics, are known for being dependable, etc.
| Management ignores them and promotes the mouth breather who
| does nothing but cheerlead themselves at every opportunity
| for accomplishing the most basic of tasks.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Be careful that's not selective memory kicking in. I've
| thought that too but have had to point out to myself that
| some very deserving people were in fact promoted.
|
| Your point more generally, that squeaky wheels get the
| grease, does seem to be typical.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Obviously deserving people do find career advancement.
| Yet it is incredibly frustrating that I can think of two
| load bearing individuals who were the most dependable
| people in the company, yet received no recognition for
| this fact. They would just constantly roll up their
| sleeves and do the vital, non flashy work that kept the
| business functioning.
| simonsarris wrote:
| Blaming employers seems incomplete at best, since many of the
| _worst_ abuses are employees practically bilking the very
| cosy employee-employer relationship, eg the MTA in NYC. Huge
| budgets, lots of dysfunction, very little done. Even the
| grandparent mentions a city worker.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| The goal is the same as it's always been: get the most
| resources for the least amount of effort. This is true whether
| you're a squirrel, a person, a company, or a government.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| For the past five decade, we have lived in a society where the
| dominant ideology was about how "egoism lead to the greater
| good thanks to the magical forces of the free market".
|
| It turns out the greater good in fact came from people caring
| about what they where doing.
|
| Too bad we only realize it now, when the destructive ideology
| has eventually trickled down from the profiteers class to the
| working class.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| I wonder if this is how it felt in Rome or Byzantium or various
| other places in the years leading up to collapse.
| bee_rider wrote:
| IIRC the Romans had a cultural meme of mythologizing their
| past. So they probably did feel like this on the way down.
| But also on the way up.
| zwnow wrote:
| Pay shit get shit work simple as that
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Labor rates where I am are among the highest in the nation.
| People in the trades largely live in the outlying suburbs and
| pick up the lucrative work in the urban core.
|
| A lot of the companies I deal with will jerk you around, not
| return your calls, not show up to do the work etc.
| etc..they're busy and can ask a lot of money, and there's no
| fear of being out of work. I think that affects the work
| product quality more than anything else right now right here.
|
| You are probably right somewhere else.
| bwfan123 wrote:
| > 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?
|
| Our natural state tends to laziness - both mentally and
| physically. There are exceptions of-course. What AI now
| promises is that we sip cocktails on a beach in equilibrium
| state while social media+AI provide narratives we want to hear,
| sort of the dystopia portrayed in Matrix.
| danans wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It's easy to pick on a public sector worker, but if they were a
| tech worker, we'd probably praise them to high heaven for
| "working smarter, not harder", but we have a different standard
| for public sector workers (and blue collar laborers).
| 0_____0 wrote:
| In the private sector, the burden of a shirking employee is
| borne by owners, investors, shareholders. In the public
| sector, the weight is borne by our collective dollars, and
| shirking represents money that could have gone into a
| playground, better wayfinding infra, curb cuts... We
| necessarily have a stake in what our governments do,
| therefore the expectations of the public are different vs.
| the private sector.
| ausbah wrote:
| people are hugely dependent on private sector companies as
| well. sure the financial impacts are passed onto the
| capital owners, but those are passed onto consumers in most
| cases no? i dont see a huge difference here
|
| also the wage differences between tech and a public service
| worker is laughable. if you underpay in a high pressure
| environment, of course they won't care. _we_ get what we
| pay for with publicly owned utilities
| Ray20 wrote:
| >i dont see a huge difference here
|
| In the case of a company, you can simply refuse to pay
| them if you feel that the goods and services you receive
| are not worth the money they are asking for.
|
| If you try to stop paying to the government, you will be
| robbed blind and sent to prison for life.
|
| Quite a big of a difference, in my opinion.
| dkarl wrote:
| > a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs
|
| A lot of this derives from people not respecting what they do.
| We're too elitist as a society to care about the quality of
| what most people consume and experience on a daily basis.
|
| I've never worked at a newspaper, but I went to college with
| journalism majors for four years, and I know that 98% of a
| newspaper consists of content that journalism students consider
| worthless trash. Knowing that it's trash was a measure of
| everything important about them: their intelligence, their
| knowledge, their taste, and their moral character. Seeing the
| lesser parts of a newspaper as worthy of effort and attention
| would call every single one of those desirable personal
| qualities into question. Given that, they all aimed to put
| themselves in a position to write the 2% that isn't
| embarrassing to write, but most of them, perhaps all of them,
| ended up writing the other bits of the newspaper, most likely
| embarrassed about it, most likely putting as little of their
| life energy into it as possible, while hanging their sense of
| self-worth on hobbies or a novel that they'll never publish.
|
| I can see this in the personal arc of virtually everyone I
| know. The happiest people I know are the ones who have escaped
| this and still manage to respect the importance of their work,
| but the vast majority have given up on their jobs as a way of
| expressing who they are in a positive way.
|
| You can see some regret about this, some desire for a different
| approach, in the fascination with physical craftsmanship, which
| can be made compatible with our elitism. There's cultural
| cachet in being a fanatically obsessed craftsman who makes
| highly priced boutique goods desired by all the Ivy League
| grads in Brooklyn or the Stanford grads in San Francisco. From
| another angle, we see it in the fascination with people in
| other societies who dedicate their lives to a craft, like in
| "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." But again, we can't imagine doing that
| and being second best, because we don't live in a society that
| values doing your best, only being the best. Dedicating
| yourself to something and being okay at it, serving not the
| elite but the dumb gross masses who don't know any better, is
| humiliating. The high school instinct to distance oneself from
| stigma, the primal instinct that it's best to be as far away
| from a social target as possible, has been elevated to a
| sophisticated vocabulary of complicity, where everybody is
| guilty of not fixing a problem, and the most guilty of all are
| those closest to it. If you're producing listicles for a
| newspaper, you are guilty of perpetuating the intellectual
| laziness of all of humankind, guilty of electing Donald Trump,
| unless you can distance yourself with disdain and cynicism, and
| plead economic necessity for taking a shit job.
|
| In a society like this, how can we expect someone to care? It's
| shit, so it might as well be botshit.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Most people would probably like to contribute something good
| to the world, and make it a better place in some way or
| another. A lot of folks are forced to produce things they
| hate because otherwise they have no health care and may not
| eat. All so somebody else can take most of the profit and
| leave them with a pittance.
| dkarl wrote:
| People would like to do their best to make their impact on
| the world as positive as possible, but they also care about
| showing they have the critical ability to notice everything
| wrong about the system they exist in, and we don't give
| them permission to do both. Wouldn't it be nice if we did?
| pixl97 wrote:
| >We're too elitist as a society to care about the quality of
| what most people consume and experience on a daily basis.
|
| Eh, I disagree with elitist...
|
| We're too capitalist. Lines must go up, that is all that
| matters. Well, lines for the capital holders, paying the
| workers less to the point they don't care is fine.
| criddell wrote:
| If you haven't already read it, you might enjoy Neil
| Postman's _Amusing ourselves to Death_. I 'm about half way
| through it myself and it has already changed how I look at
| some things.
|
| He wrote it from the point of view of television destroying
| our society, but as you can imagine, the internet is so much
| worse.
|
| > 98% of a newspaper consists of content that journalism
| students consider worthless trash
|
| In the book, Postman makes the case for the value of news
| being related to how actionable the information is. The
| weather report is valuable because I might change my plans if
| it's going to rain. The story about a mass stabbing attack in
| Germany (which I bet your journalism friends do _not_
| consider trash) has little value to me, a person living in
| Austin, TX.
|
| If there were ever to be a HN Book Club, I think _Amusing
| Ourselves to Death_ would be a great selection for it.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| I think it is a lasting effect of the pandemic. It'd the same
| outside the US.
|
| I would also add other contributors: inflation along with
| salaries not increasing, and housing crisis in many cities
| around the world
| dayvid wrote:
| Part of it is COVID and also the destruction of pension and job
| security. Companies want to pay employees as little as possible
| and employees want to do as little work as possible.
| justin66 wrote:
| > The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade
| to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)
|
| I occasionally point out to my neighbors that a new seven-story
| apartment building down the street took as long to build as the
| Empire State Building. Denial and/or a lack of understanding
| that this might represent a problem are common.
|
| (if you don't adjust for inflation it cost about the same in
| USD to build, but that's a separate topic)
| bigtex88 wrote:
| I'm fairly certain this is how things have always been.
| 0x000xca0xfe wrote:
| I'm fairly certain we had multiple big cultural shifts over
| the past decade and things are completely different now.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| In my town they seem to have spent a decade building "luxury
| housing for seniors" in a project that seemed about as bungled
| as a building a nuclear reactor. They blame the pandemic but
| the project stretched on for years before the pandemic.
|
| Of course they find out when it is ready to rent that there is
| no market for "luxury housing for seniors" because seniors who
| have money either split for Florida or go to Kendal [1], and
| the remainder are on a fixed income and looking for "affordable
| housing".
|
| [1] https://kai.kendal.org/
| bombcar wrote:
| Once you realize the builders build for the lenders and for
| nobody else, everything becomes crystal clear.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Not sure how the lenders benefit by building apartment
| buildings that can't find renters though I can see how they
| might systematically fool themselves into believing in a
| luxury market that doesn't exist. Affordable units might be
| less profitable on paper but it's a choice between getting
| less rent than you wish you would get vs getting no rent at
| all.
| 0x000xca0xfe wrote:
| They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work. Not a new
| principle. Turns out that extreme capitalism results in extreme
| inequality results in similar outcomes as socialism.
| constantcrying wrote:
| The person in question was literally paid by the government,
| which is notoriously and world wide chronically inept,
| "despite" being complete isolated from any capitalist motive.
| WalterBright wrote:
| it's Boston
|
| When I drove around Boston in the 80s, I discovered that each
| street had 3 names:
|
| 1. the name on the map
|
| 2. the name on the street signs
|
| 3. the name given by the person giving you directions
|
| I learned to navigate by counting intersections.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I did some business with the a city department at one time. I
| discovered that from Thanksgiving to New Years, no work was
| done at that department. Everyone was "out of the office" or
| will "be back later".
| ewhanley wrote:
| This is only an example of people being bad at their jobs or
| not caring if you are referring to the
| management/administration responsible for staffing and
| scheduling over that time period. The people who are actually
| out of the office are presumably using approved PTO.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Sure. LOL.
| ewhanley wrote:
| Nah, but for real - why wouldn't they take PTO?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Because they already used up their PTO?
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Google works this way too. We don't include Q4 in our plans.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| My partner and I ended up sleeping on an air mattress while
| we waited for the one person at the building department who
| could sign off on our project to come back from vacation.
| They were in fact completely unresponsive between
| thanksgiving and two weeks after new years.
| michaelrpeskin wrote:
| This parallels an article that someone I follow wrote a couple
| of weeks ago. His way of describing this is the "second world
| effect". The article is better than I could write (link below).
| But basically, the "third world" is a low-trust society and
| everyone understands that and behaves in a defensive way. The
| "first world" is a high-trust society where things work. There
| is a discontinuous jump from third to first world once the
| culture has enough high-trust built in. But if the first world
| devolves back to low-trust, it doesn't go back to third world,
| it transitions to "second world" where things look like the
| first world, but nothing works any more because it's low-trust,
| but the society hasn't really recognized that.
|
| https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-second-world
| qwerpy wrote:
| Thanks for the link, I thought it was a good read. I assumed
| it would dance around the causes but he was pretty direct
| with it. Getting society to recognize what's happening and
| then take meaningful action seems intractable. Suppose that's
| why the path looks like 3rd -> 1st -> 2nd -X. I'm not aware
| of any society or even a single city that really breaks out
| of it once they land in "second world".
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| I think that's a good way to describe the 15,000 years of
| stagnation we see in the Star Wars universe.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Maybe people are bad at their jobs. Maybe they have poor
| management who is always increasing the scope of their job, in
| an attempt to maximize their profits at a cost to customer
| satisfaction.
|
| In my experience, there's certainly a mix of both, but the
| latter is much more common.
| almosthere wrote:
| Society standards have been dropping since 2010, COVID
| accelerated it. Most of it is people mad that they are barely
| making it, and often they are in service of people that don't
| even realize prices have risen.
|
| I've been saying this for years and people are still
| dumbfounded.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| There's two things going on:
|
| 1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible
| objective direction for society
|
| 2. People a rejecting the directions they were told to
| prioritize (education, family, religion etc...) because none
| have predictable outcomes
|
| As function of both, there's no consistent or coherent
| philosophical for people to align to.
|
| In the past, the percentage of the population that was forced
| to align with a local philosophy was basically 100%. Most
| people had no options to defect from the ritual and social
| structure they were born into, so they adapted and adopted them
| even if they didn't want to.
|
| Now, humans have infinite mobility - which means anyone can
| defect. That also means you have to either find a new affinity
| group that fits your vectors or make your own.
|
| That's new in the last 500 years for humanity.
|
| "God is dead" was meant as a lament, because it
| epistemologically fractured society - and even if that
| epistemically was "more correct" or "less wrong" it shows how
| all ritual and culture is built on effectively nothing but non-
| testable hallucinated stories.
|
| So how do you align society to coherent action when the core
| epistemology is constantly changing and being overrun?
|
| You don't.
| Balgair wrote:
| > 1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible
| objective direction for society
|
| I saw one on twitter the other day and was struck by it's
| take:
|
| "in the 1900s, it was common to dream of the 21st century.
| when was the last time you heard talk of a 22nd century? it's
| like we don't believe we're going to make it anymore, but to
| endure, we MUST dream of futures worth suffering for. please,
| dare dream of a 22nd century."
|
| https://xcancel.com/DavidSHolz/status/1926775363801088191#m
|
| Like, yeah, I'm not really thinking about the year 2125 and
| what that will be like. I just kinda assume it's beyond some
| tech singularoty or something that I can't imagine.
|
| Part of it too is that the world seems 'solved' in a lot of
| ways. Like, we're not worried about the great economic debate
| of capitalism or communism. We know which works better. We
| don't care for climate change right now but are worried about
| it a lot, yet we all kinda know that we just have to get our
| act together to solve it and that's not going to happen until
| things get really bad. The gender and color barriers are
| broken. The trans barriers are like, something I guess. Sure
| light speed, but all the physicists say that impossible.
| Mars, yeah, I guess, but that's a lot harder than we thought
| it would be. SpaceX is doing cool stuff, I guess, sorta, when
| things don't blow up in the sky or with their boss. The AIs
| are here and they kinda just took our jobs and all the fun
| out of the world. Video games are cool, but we all know it's
| just coasting through time. You can order a pizza now at the
| south pole, it's hot when it gets to you. That dude fell out
| of a balloon for Red Bull, I guess. All the rivers are
| mapped, it's just people speed swimming them now. Poverty
| isn't a question of if, but which asshat to get out of the
| way.
|
| I mean, this is usual with humans. Same goes for corruption
| and politics. It's all just muddling along without a lot of
| 'zazz' to it. We're just stuck waiting for enough bad to
| occur to get over that activation energy and get moving. Like
| a frat bro piling more garbage onto the already overflowing
| can, eventually it will get taken out, by someone, maybe me,
| but not right now.
|
| Like, what could the future hold that is worth actual
| suffering for, per the tweet? It's all just oatmeal beige.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| Mostly just sounds like everyone has depression.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| A collective spiritual (for lack of a better term)
| depression is a good way to describe it.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Every year, the 22nd century looks more and more like the
| movie Elysium: With a small, ultra rich segment of society
| living in luxury, physically isolated from the remaining N
| billion living basically peasant/subsistence lives, working
| for the ultra rich if they are lucky. That's how things are
| trending, anyway. I don't think anyone _wants_ to think
| about the year 2125. They see themselves as increasingly
| economically irrelevant cast offs.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Frankly, the younger I was the longer my prospective time
| horizon was.
|
| E.g. in 2000 I might have cared about what's going to
| happen in 2100.
|
| Now, in 2025, as I got older, my time horizon has shrunk
| down to maybe 10 years at most, but typically ~3 years,
| as my life experience has taught me that life is often
| unpredictable, sometimes too short, and age has that
| ability to temper our expectations through health issues
| and other things.
|
| I also don't have the executive function anymore to think
| about long-term abstract things, since it is primarily
| occupied with my shorter-term responsibilities.
|
| So yeah, I really don't give a shit what 2125 will look
| like. I don't have the arrogance in me to even make an
| educated guess, because 99.9% chance it will look
| different than what I imagine.
| komali2 wrote:
| > Like, we're not worried about the great economic debate
| of capitalism or communism. We know which works better.
|
| Do we? https://www.nokidhungry.org/who-we-are/hunger-facts
| "According to the latest estimates, as many as nearly 14
| million children in the United States live in "food
| insecure" homes."
|
| > The gender and color barriers are broken.
|
| Are they? https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/ab
| ortion/roe-...
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/report-black-people-
| are-...
|
| > All the rivers are mapped
|
| Not really, plenty of unmapped rivers in jungles, also the
| ocean, and also, you could always FOSS map it:
| https://www.mapillary.com/app
|
| > Like, what could the future hold that is worth actual
| suffering for, per the tweet?
|
| Maybe a world like this?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkaway_(Doctorow_novel)
|
| Or this?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Like_the_Lightning
|
| Or this?
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41637112-a-half-built-
| ga...
|
| Maybe?
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13651.The_Dispossessed
|
| This? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41824495-fall-or-
| dodge-i...
| babyent wrote:
| Why not just filter out those kinds of people?
|
| I filter out people like that because
|
| A. They're not on the same level
|
| B. I won't hire them and I wouldn't work with them
|
| C. They serve no purpose to me in my life because I don't even
| want to hang out with them
| testing22321 wrote:
| Because you have to deal with them anytime you want to get
| anything done - planning and approval offices, tax
| departments, construction crews, contractors and on and on.
|
| Life in the outside world means relying on a ton of people
| doing their jobs decently.
| babyent wrote:
| True, and oh man I can relate so much to that.
|
| Ugh..
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| Take a look at the poor construction quality of new build homes
| too--there's an entire subgenre of social media where home
| inspectors find all sorts of horrifying and "hilarious" issues
| with newly assembled McMansions. This runs the gamut from beer
| bottles overturned in insulation to doors that don't fit in
| frames, fire hazards, etc.
|
| I've seen the same in apartments I'd rented over the last few
| years. The owners (management co's in many cases) will perform
| the most quarter-assed repairs and the poorest paint jobs
| imaginable before renting the place to the next schlub, while
| charging you for "wear" on the cheapest model dishwasher on the
| market.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Hah! When we renovated we found century old liquor bottles in
| the walls. Some things don't change.
| bumby wrote:
| > _really? A parking garage takes six years?_
|
| I tend to agree with your overall point, but I'm not sure this
| supports it. To me, the difficulty in building things like
| parking structures isn't indifference but the opposite: we care
| too much.
|
| We care about the environmental impact. We care about the
| safety of workers. We care about the impact on local residents.
| We care about property values. All of those things create a
| layer of risk management, and the administrative overhead is
| what slows many of those projects down. If we were less risk
| adverse, we could get things done more quickly but we care
| about those things enough to manage them.
|
| (To be clear, I'm not saying any of those are bad, just
| pointing out the natural consequence of caring about things and
| how it runs counter to the OPs point.)
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people
| are just kind of shit at their jobs.
|
| I do not think that's it. I think that many people are very
| capable of delivering decent work, but they choose not to.
|
| This begs two questions, why are people not interesting in
| delivering high quality work and why are people accepting low
| standards of work quality?
|
| >There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity.
|
| Let's not be too kind here. This is not mediocrity. A mediocre
| worker would be someone who performs his work satisfactorily,
| but does not ever go beyond his duties. The person you
| described certainly is not that, corrupt, lazy and lecherous
| would describe her behavior.
| komali2 wrote:
| > 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
| try to extract the most labor value for the least cost
| (maximizing profit margin) while the worker tries to retain the
| highest labor profit margin possible for the least labor cost
| (wear and tear on mind and body, time, etc). Since it's not
| possible to retain / change total capture of labor profit
| margin on the employee side, since compensation for labor isn't
| attached to value but rather to "market conditions" (geography,
| whether or not another employer in the industry recently laid
| people off, the phase of the moon), the employee's only option
| is to reduce personal labor cost: work as little as possible,
| as lazily as possible.
|
| One of the genius strokes of this arrangement is that humans
| aren't purely economic rational actors: we generally take pride
| in our work, and also want to be a part of something greater,
| and even if we don't have either of those things, we suffer
| social pressure to do good at our jobs or not leave our
| teammates hanging. So, in reality, the employer has an
| advantage, because it's basically immune to these human traits.
| Therefore the corporation can extract even _more_ value for
| less cost (people will work harder than necessary per their
| compensation because e.g. they take pride in their work).
|
| As the overall system destabilizes further and normalization
| deepens and people feel the inherent contradictions more
| strongly, I believe cynicism will increase and these human
| traits will hold less influence over the employer / worker
| dynamic, and people will operate more like rational capitalist
| actors.
|
| Annoyingly this will probably lead to more articles about how
| "people just don't want to work anymore."
| Ray20 wrote:
| >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 and deceitfulness of people are
| simply ignored, giving people with such qualities huge
| advantages within the system and ruining the lives of
| everyone else.
| ryoshoe wrote:
| The reason these qualities aren't rewarded isn't because of
| capitalism itself, it's due to the enforcement of laws and
| regulations against them. The profit motive incentives
| owners to adopt practices like employing children because
| they will work for less than an adult, or suppressing
| research harmful to their core business like how tobacco
| companies were aware of the harm of smoking long before
| they publicly acknowledged them
| h2zizzle wrote:
| >Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street
| signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's
| Boston).
|
| I've noticed that this is a New England thing. Driving up for
| the first time, I got lost repeatedly. Signs were placed too
| close to exits, hidden behind trees, etc. I came to the
| conclusion that there must be some local aversion to proper
| signage, probably based in the area's age and relative
| insularity. "Keep things the way they are and have been for
| hundreds of years," and, "If you're supposed to be here, you'll
| know where you are," attitudes, respectively. Boston,
| Providence, etc. are cosmopolitan, but I'd wager that the
| people who control public works iniatives are decidedly not.
| kittikitti wrote:
| Can you explain the meaning of kvetching and where it comes
| from?
| deathanatos wrote:
| Just Google it? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kvetch
|
| > _To whine or complain, often needlessly and incessantly._
|
| I'm not sure the parent is _quite_ using it correctly: either
| they 're just using it to mean "complain" (which I'd disagree
| with; the word to me definitely carries the "needless"
| connotation.) or they're engaging in a bit of self-
| deprecating humor that just isn't really coming across fully.
|
| It's a bit of a regional word, in the US. (Regional to PA,
| IME.)
| mieubrisse wrote:
| I wonder if this is actually true, or if it's an instance of
| selection bias - the instances of things not working draw our
| attention more than the instances of things working. "This
| thing is working just fine" doesn't draw eyeballs.
| miiiiiike wrote:
| Hahaha! I spent the morning explaining to a network installer
| who bought the wrong jacks and tools for the project that I
| wasn't going to keep the incorrect jacks and pay for the
| correct ones just so he wouldn't have to accept the return of
| "products that no one wants." Correct, no one wants them, me
| especially.
|
| Don't work with incompetent people. Even if you set a low bar
| for success they'll just go and find a way to trip over it.
| fossuser wrote:
| 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 historical / scientific claims, but one thing it
| was good at is it's culturally adaptive. A lot of the cultural
| tooling and support it provided both with community and with
| some of the core cultural ideas around family and children -
| life purpose and direction are probably good things for most
| people. Secularism does this pretty poorly for the average
| person and what people substitute for what's missing is often
| much worse.
| dividefuel wrote:
| I've shared this before. In a lot of modern jobs, how hard you
| turn the crank of effort is almost completely disconnected from
| the outcomes that you see.
|
| Beyond a small minimum requirement, turning the crank more only
| leads to the expectation that you will continue to turn that
| crank that much. Rewards for going beyond -- money, security,
| autonomy -- are rarely present and almost never in proportion
| to how much you turn the crank. Plus, one day the company will
| decide it no longer needs you to turn the crank anymore, and
| without so much as a "thank you" you're on your own.
|
| People only have a finite amount of 'caring' to give out. Why
| invest a lot into something when you feel you won't see any
| difference for your effort?
| alphazard wrote:
| This is largely a consequence of the economic opportunities
| presented to people at work. There is basically no organization
| that will pay you more as a direct consequence of being better
| at your job. Compensation is almost never tied to performance,
| and is in practice most closely tied to age. Compensation isn't
| adjusted quickly enough for people to associate it with the
| quality of their work. A yearly meeting where your wage is
| adjusted to keep up with inflation or reflect your time in the
| workforce isn't something you can control.
|
| This leads to a lot of doing the bare minimum, since any effort
| beyond what is necessary to keep the job is wasted effort. You
| will get paid more just for existing longer, so just hang on.
| The only real way to get more money is to switch jobs, which is
| more about negotiation and politics than being good at the
| previous or next job. Most people aren't ambitious enough to
| repeatedly job hop, but would be ambitious enough to chase more
| money at their current job, were the opportunity presented.
|
| The only way to fix this is to encourage larger variations in
| salary between high and low performers and get the union (I've
| done my time) mentality out of these organizations. It will
| never happen for the government.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > There is basically no organization that will pay you more
| as a direct consequence of being better at your job.
|
| Sure there is, that organization is called having your own
| business, or consulting.
| immibis wrote:
| This quote from The Expanse summarizes our society right now:
|
| > Prax: They're using distilled water in the hydroponic supply
| instead of the proper mineral solutions needed for long-term
| stability.
|
| > Amos: That sounds bad.
|
| > Prax: They'll only be able to get away with it for another
| week, maybe two. After that, the air, the scrubbing plants,
| what's left of them, will die off. When that happens, they
| won't be able to stop the cascade.
| TFYS wrote:
| I think it's the lack a of deeper meaning in the things we do
| have to do in this system. We're just cogs in a large machine
| that creates more and more wealth, but after you have enough to
| live a comfortable life that is no longer enough to make you
| care. There's no more purpose to it. Yet the pursuit of wealth
| is the only goal our economic system, and increasingly our
| culture as well, provides. Any other goal gets trampled under
| the herd of organizations seeking wealth for the purpose of
| making more wealth.
| h2782 wrote:
| > but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and priceless an
| even lower energy route
|
| I don't think AI has anything to do with cops acting as
| scarecrows (at best) or construction workers take 6 years to
| build parking.
|
| AI wasn't even as much of a thing 6 years ago, so these things
| seem fundamentally unrelated. And anyway, the cops and
| construction workers aren't using Claude 4...
|
| You had me up until then. It's not related to AI at all. It's
| more related to post-Covid than AI imo. Even before this, blame
| social media since 2010 people have been more and more sucked
| into a small screen in their hand and a virtual set of
| "friends" than what's actually happening in the real world
| right in front of them. At this level, it's just basic
| detachment. Their head isn't where their body is.
| THroaway225 wrote:
| I just travelled to a province to pay for some private
| healthcare i cant get at home. Its a simple procedure, but a
| specific one. I sent the treatment plan to the customer service
| liason I was dealing with and triple checked that the doctor i
| was seeing was familiar with it.
|
| Then I get there and the doctor's never looked at the document
| I sent. No one even told him about it.
|
| The customer service liason is "very sorry for the
| miscommunication and will be looking internally to see how this
| occurred!"
| sznio wrote:
| >Until I read an application written entirely by a person. And
| then another. And another. They glowed with delight and joy and
| sadness and with the unexpected at every turn.
|
| These are the people who had their applications rejected
| elsewhere since the AI didn't like them. I use ChatGPT to create
| my resume since it gives me at least a chance I'll get a
| response. Manually written resumes get ignored.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| genuine question: can anyone expand on this?
|
| This is the first I've heard of this and I'd love to know more.
| What is it about AI generated resumes that get paste AI resume
| filters that manually-written resumes don't have?
| tines wrote:
| Sounds like people coping about their lack of responses.
| "It's not me, it must be AI's fault!"
| SirFatty wrote:
| For me, the who cares part started with the latest election cycle
| and current president. The zone has been flooded, I quit reading
| the news and cannot be bothered to care about any of it.
|
| Additionally, AI generated content, AI pictures and deepfakes
| have a numbing effect. I guess I can say "who cares?"
| account42 wrote:
| This obsession is not healthy.
| cladopa wrote:
| > For me, the who cares part started with the latest election
| cycle and current president.
|
| I would say it started before, when the supposedly most
| powerful country of the world was ruled by a senile person and
| it was not replaced immediately. Instead half the country
| negated the evidence that we now know was true.
|
| I am not American so I observe those things with curiosity from
| outside and from inside only as a visitor.
|
| But I don't know: the weapons of mass destruction, the too big
| to fail. Most people didn't care them unless it affected them
| personally, like savings.
|
| My theory is the opposite, that people care too much. Company
| owners wanted free money so if the country gets destroyed in
| the process, they will "not care" as much for the people that
| printing money throws under the bus as the "care" about them
| and their personal proffit.
|
| In a two-party system the same thing happens. They do "not
| care" about having a senile president as much as they "care"
| about not losing the power for "their" party. Now the same
| thing happens with Ukraine and Trump.
|
| The culprit here is the two party system that lacks healthy
| competition for getting into power.
| SirFatty wrote:
| "The culprit here is the two party system that lacks healthy
| competition for getting into power."
|
| Actually, no, the issue is corruption. The two party system
| is fine. Both parties are corrupt. Have 4 parties... still
| are going to be corrupt. Citizens United, meme coins, insider
| trading and no term limits equals a bad time for John and
| Jane Doe.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| When there was little to read, people read what was there,
| sometimes several times. When there is too much to read, people
| skim at most. You simply can't engage with it all; you can't
| even _try_ to engage with it all. There 's too much.
|
| When someone lies to you enough times (or, if you prefer,
| speaks with total disregard of the truth enough times), you
| stop listening. It's not worth your time to sort out the truth
| from the not-truth. Worse, it's unhealthy to listen to lies in
| volume. (Think in bayesian terms: If you update your priors _at
| all_ , then if the lies come in great enough volume, they will
| eventually become accepted as truth.)
|
| I care some. I care about where the country is going. I'm
| concerned. But I can't care about every post and every back-
| and-forth and every he-said-she-said. There's too much.
|
| AI... I can't be bothered to care about _anything_ written by
| an AI, for the exact same reasons.
| zingababba wrote:
| Thankfully I'm a contrarian so for the first time in my life I'm
| actually caring.
| dmje wrote:
| On the one hand I'm nodding along and have a bunch of links
| bookmarked about the - for want of a better phrase - "trend to
| mediocrity". It's true that the median is where everything goes
| if you feed the beast the most average stuff you can find,
| there's no doubt about it.
|
| On the other, there are many, many examples of artists and
| musicians and museums and galleries and others who are - still,
| always have been, always will be - making extraordinary,
| brilliant, unique, beautiful things. There's not a day goes by on
| HN that I don't see stuff that fits this mold.
|
| I think there's actually extraordinary opportunity here, to
| continue making things that are great and unique and rough around
| the edges and cared for. The author sums it up well: but I'm not
| sure the scene is quite as dire as he's making out at the
| beginning of the article.
| Barbing wrote:
| >There's not a day goes by on HN that I don't see stuff that
| fits this mold.
|
| Surprised this didn't smack me in the face when I first read
| the post. This very site does indeed serve as a bit of a
| counterpoint.
|
| How could we compare and contrast effort and apathy across
| time, apples to apples? Maybe comparing farmhands or authors...
| e.g. the average reception of authors' works vs. length of
| writing time
|
| (bad example, maybe someone has a better one)
| joshstrange wrote:
| I've got bad news, people didn't care far before AI, this is not
| new at all.
|
| Even when work is 100% done by people I regularly see output that
| shows no one cared.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Well it's just news news. More like, survival. I think that's
| kind of what it boils down to.
|
| Humans can only mentally handle so much. In this era of
| humanity, we are overloaded on many dimensions. Therefore we
| should expect the byproduct and blow back from being
| overloaded.
|
| It's like trying to teach a toddler how to manage a non-profit
| organization of 100 people. Is not going to go well.
| jaoane wrote:
| Yes, nobody cares about what a special supplement says. No one
| reads those and if they do it's just to pass time. What happened
| here is that having used AI to write the supplement made the
| obvious more evident. The rest of the article is just crying
| about AI and Trump and _yawn_ wow this is even less interesting
| than a Chicago Sun Times special supplement!
| bytepoet wrote:
| Such a well-written and thoughtful blog post. Loved it!
| naming_the_user wrote:
| People tend to care when they feel that they are being given a
| good deal.
|
| In my experience (UK), people are usually more pleasant in
| smaller towns, and I ascribe that to, well, the cost of living is
| lower relative to their wage, they probably have a decent flat or
| a small house at least, maybe a car, etc.
|
| In London if you work in a coffee shop then you either have a
| well off partner or you are in some shoebox counting your pennies
| to make the bus fare, your life is just stressful and you don't
| feel like an equal to the person on the other side of the
| counter.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| There's also no real future to look forward to. Take London.
| Outside of finance, technology and law, even manager level
| positions won't earn you enough to ever own the roof over your
| head. The median salary is just under 50k pounds. Once you pay
| out of your ass for the myriad of taxes, you are left with say
| 30k. That's enough to rent yourself a really shitty apartment
| from an absentee landlord living either abroad or somewhere in
| a large house in Surrey. Anywhere within commute distance to
| London, living is so expensive that a large portion (probably
| the majority) of the population has the beautiful outlook that
| they'll never own anything and will work until the day they
| drop dead. Why bother? What is the point of making an effort?
|
| The cost of living a good life has completely run away from the
| vast majority of the population.
| curiousgal wrote:
| Yeah even if you had one of those fancy job and make over
| 150k, owning a decent flat in London is still out of reach
| nowadays.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| 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-very good salary in the UK (90th
| %ile is 60k).
|
| Moving out to the suburbs or to satellite town is not a
| solution either. If you want to be on a main train line,
| the prices will be just as bad as in the city. If you
| compromise on the transport, prepare for your life to
| become an unmitigated misery as the terrible,
| dysfunctional, unreliable and at the same time extremely
| expensive UK train system bends you over the barrel.
|
| There are a few lucky people who manage to pull off a
| London level salary and work remotely from a LCOL area, but
| this is not possible if your job physically requires your
| presence (e.g. you are a dental hygienist).
| mettamage wrote:
| > People tend to care when they feel that they are being given
| a good deal.
|
| You
|
| hit the nail
|
| on the head.
|
| Such a simple thought. How did I miss it? Haha. Thanks for
| mentioning. A bad deal is my siren seducing me to check out at
| work.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| _" In the current, digitized world, trivial information is
| accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never
| fading, always accessible. Rumors about petty issues,
| misinterpretations, slander. All this junk data preserved in an
| unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate."_
| bananapub wrote:
| this is the thing that bothers me most about it all (well, second
| most after the entire ruling class deciding to replace humans
| with the Mostly OK Machine without caring about the harm it does
| to employee and customers and society in the long term) - that
| people just don't want to take responsibility.
|
| if you want to use an LLM to produce code, OK! have it produce a
| PR, then review it carefully yourself with your human brain, then
| send it along. if it fucking sucks, that's on you, and you should
| feel bad and bear the social consequences of it. if you're not
| skilled enough to review the PR, then why are you sending it?
| ditto bug reports. ditto emails.
|
| you, the human, are the one sending it. _you_ , the human, need
| to take responsibility, instead of pretending it it is someone
| else's fault, or no one's fault. you, the human, need to use your
| judgment to decide if sending an LLM-edited or LLM-generated PR
| or email is a waste of time or not.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| I've always thought that caring is the most precious resource in
| software development. You can pay people to show up to an office,
| you can pay people to write code, but you simply cannot pay
| people to care. It takes some special confluence of factors that
| money can't buy. And great software is _only_ made by people that
| care. This is the real "10x" factor that most people and
| organizations don't have.
| weweersdfsd wrote:
| Perhaps you can't pay people enough to make them care, but you
| sure can make them not care by paying too little.
| nemomarx wrote:
| necessary but insufficient, I think. if your salary doubled
| tomorrow but without a change in responsibilities or agency
| at work, would that move the needle? I think you need other
| things in addition to the pay, like recognition for efforts
| and outcomes
| GenZ_RiseUp wrote:
| I think this is what is meant by 'slop', especially Dan's mention
| of Hanif Abdurraqib's subject matter on content meant to be
| consumed while doing something else. Its purpose is consumption
| for consumption's sake.
|
| That's not necessarily a negative, a lot of entertainment has
| been predicated on non-thought (Seinfeld was great in part
| because of no hugs, no learning) consumption. However, when it
| leaks into how we access and shape the world, there is an
| increase in 'slop'pily made, low quality structures and products.
| I feel like its ushering in an era of 'Chabuduo' [1] across the
| globe that's going to be very difficult to come out of.
|
| [1] https://www.chinaexpatsociety.com/culture/the-chabuduo-
| minds...
| biophysboy wrote:
| I think people right now are way too willing to surrender their
| own judgment. AI is an example of this, but there are many
| others: restaurant ratings, movie metascores, political polls,
| college rankings, engagement metrics, etc. These kinds of data
| should be a part of decision making, but not all of it.
| Otherwise, you get this passive, "who cares" mentality that the
| author describes.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| With that judgment they are surrendering responsibility.
|
| "don't blame me I'm just following what the professionals said"
| is an attitude that has pervaded damn near every organization
| in the western world.
| biophysboy wrote:
| Yes, absolutely - Dan Davies' "The Unaccountability Machine"
| is a good overview of this problem
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > "don't blame me I'm just following what the professionals
| said" is an attitude that has pervaded damn near every
| organization in the western world.
|
| Same thing as "Nobody got fired for buying IBM." They aren't
| just surrendering responsibility, but accountability as well.
| wiseowise wrote:
| What do you base your decision on if not data?
| biophysboy wrote:
| I have no problem with people using data per se; I dislike
| people using data blindly, without thinking about the
| collection/analysis methods, personal preferences, etc.
| elric wrote:
| When I do things for myself, I cut every corner until everything
| is spherical. But when I do things for others, I get joy from
| doing good work. Half-arsing something makes me feel ashamed. Not
| everything I do is done well, motivation waxes and wanes,
| sometimes I'm ill or tired or stressed. But then I try to do
| things as well as possible given the circumstances. I would hope
| that most people try to do the same.
| fhennig wrote:
| People do care, about their own self interest and making money.
| Homo economicus, here we are! A critique of this attitude must
| look at its origins, and I think the reason we see this so much,
| is because the narrative of the last 40 years or so has been
| that: If we all look out for our own self interest, the market
| will balance everything out, and things will be great! Turns out,
| doing the bare minimum in an almost maliciously compliant way
| doesn't yield great results, who could've seen it coming?
| chii wrote:
| > doing the bare minimum in an almost maliciously compliant way
| doesn't yield great results
|
| this happens when the person paying the money and the person
| judging the work quality, and the person "punishing" are
| different entities.
|
| Classic example is gov't work - taxpayers pay money, and has no
| say. Politicians spend, department beaurocracy spends, and
| hires, etc. The workers get hired, get paid, but their
| performance is not judged. The final recipient of the work -
| specific citizens - get poor service for the taxes paid.
| nosianu wrote:
| > Classic example is gov't work - taxpayers pay money, and
| has no say.
|
| I would claim this is not a good example at all.
|
| A lot of the specific requirements of public jobs, all the
| documentation and endless rules, comes from the public
| reacting very negatively to any reports of waste, perceived
| misspending., etc. So now everybody is covering their asses
| by being overly bureaucratic, doing exactly what's written,
| following the many many rules to the letter. Just like many
| especially lower-level jobs in large corporations, you just
| follow the book and please don't show any initiative.
|
| If the public had nothing to say, you really think the
| bureaucracy would have developed with all those restrictions
| and checks and counter-checks and rules? I don't think so.
| That has to come from pressure from somewhere, and when you
| follow news, every time there is a news report about
| something going wrong in government, politicians do get
| pressure.
|
| All the rules don't make the problem go away of course, but
| everybody in the chain can point to the rules and say "I
| followed them to the letter!" and be fine.
|
| Example, rules like the ones in the EU that even local
| projects have to be announced in the whole of the EU and
| accept bids from everywhere, combined with lots of
| documentation rules and rules for selecting the winning bids.
|
| Sure, there's more or less subtle ways around those rules
| (just like in large corporations), but the point is that they
| exist.
|
| I would claim a lot of the idiosyncrasies of government
| bureaucracy exists exactly _because_ of the public.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| We got into this situation because everything is so
| consolidated and filled with bureaucracy and metrics and
| statistical analysis that whether any individual does or
| doesn't try won't actually come back to benefit them, or at
| least not enough to be worth the squeeze in the end.
| pixl97 wrote:
| But if you understand the problem, you'll also understand why
| the bureaucracy exist...
|
| The problem is complexity of our systems, of modern society,
| has grown beyond the capacity for people in view of the
| problems to understand them.
|
| I've seen systems with incompatible configurations cause
| issues like this. An application needs a security related
| setting turned on to ensure it doesn't pass bad data to an
| upstream server. This security related setting causes another
| problem with a necessary application on the server causing
| connection problems with it.
|
| The upstream application put the bad data issue as a low
| priority issue because there is a workaround. The vendor
| application also has it as low priority with about a 5 month
| lead time because they also have a workaround. Both teams see
| the issue as fixed for now in their eyes because they cannot
| grasp the use of the tools in a system that interacts with an
| immense number of other applications. All of these issues get
| bundled up to management groups that argue back and forth
| about priorities because they have 100 other fires burning
| to, many of them serious issues like exploits in software and
| such.
|
| And this is just software, something that is inherently
| flexible. Now imagine things like infrastructure where you
| have all kinds of critical systems stacked on top of each
| other, for example beside a new building or a new road. You
| can set schedules on working on the stuff in order, but these
| schedules break all the time because when you start digging
| you find even more issues. Suddenly projects are being pushed
| back months while drivers are screaming in frustration
| because the road is down to one lane forever.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| This is late stage capitalism at work. Our economy and political
| systems incentivized the behavior that lead us here, and the
| current apathy we see is the working class realizing the rot in
| the bottom of society.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| There's no such thing as late stage capitalism. There's ebbs
| and flows, businesses that were formerly great (like
| newspapers), fade out and go out of business. New forms of
| media take their place, the cream rises to the top, the train
| keeps going.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| In our case I think late stage capitalism is what we are
| calling the combination of extremely low interest rates, low
| tax rates on the super-rich, and a lack of antitrust
| enforcement. The rich get richer, the middle class gets
| gutted, and nobody is incentivized to care any more.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| > extremely low interest rates
|
| Citation needed. The current mortgage rate is 6.8% for 30
| years.
|
| > a lack of antitrust enforcement
|
| Citation needed. Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple are all in
| court for antitrust cases.
| saubeidl wrote:
| There definitely is. The contradictions inherent to
| capitalism are becoming harder and harder to ignore, to the
| point where we're all in a state of hypernormalisation.
| Everyone knows the system is broken, yet we pretend it isn't,
| because to think of an alternative is too scary.
| jplusequalt wrote:
| >There's no such thing late stage capitalism
|
| I'd wager you'd argue there was such a thing as late stage
| socialism, no? You're inability to imagine anything else than
| capitalism is a fallacy. Google Capitalist Realism.
|
| >the cream rises to the top
|
| No it doesn't. Success is largely determined by who had
| access to the most capital, or who was able to build a moat
| around themselves fast enough. The meritocracy people love to
| imagine they live in, is nothing more than a myth for a
| majority of people.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The people who control institutions seem to care more about
| fiscal solvenceny of their institutions above all else. Thus, if
| AI chatbot generated content in media results in more visits to
| the site and more ad revenue, that's 'good' - the content doesn't
| need to be accurate or truthful, it just needs to bring in more
| eyeballs which translates to more ad views which translates to
| more revenue, which is the metric that the leaders of the
| institution care most about.
|
| In a more authoritarian state bent on information control, the
| leaders of the institution might have a different metric,
| especially if they were a state-funded institution - namely,
| ensuring that their content didn't offend the heads of the
| authoritarian state, resulting in either a removal of state
| funding or a visit from the thought police.
|
| Of course there is some intersectionality here - if the ad
| revenue is controlled by a few monopolistic corporations, then
| they might respond to critical investigative reporting on their
| industry with the removal of their advertising revenue from the
| media institution. In a monopolistic situation, this might not
| hurt their own revenue that much as consumers have nowhere else
| to buy products, but in a competitive market situation, refusing
| to advertise is likely to result in lower revenue.
|
| For the media institution, generating fluff from a chatbot
| instructed not to offend either the state or the corporate
| conglomerate is the safe route when it comes to fiscal solvency
| (and staying out of prison).
|
| Fundamentally, if the economic system is so corrupt and soul-
| crushing that the vast majority of people dream of acquiring
| enough capital to escape the system ('f-u money'), then something
| is very wrong with that system.
| sharadov wrote:
| I think 90% of people did not ever care, this is not new.
|
| They pretended to care because it looked bad if they did not.
|
| But when you started talking seriously about effecting change (
| in context to workplace situations), they would diplomatically
| excuse themselves.
|
| That's why I avoid big corporations where this behavior is
| endemic.
|
| I mostly worked at smaller companies and left when they got too
| big.
| agentultra wrote:
| It's the _bullshit_ era.
|
| The truth doesn't even matter. It's not factored in. Even liars
| care about the truth enough to deceive you. Bullshit is _worse_
| than lying.
|
| We disagree? Ok. You believe your facts, I'll believe mine. We
| can scream into the void with our respective audiences.
|
| It's hard to maintain the energy to seek the truth because there
| is _so much_ bullshit. The peddlers of it are filling every
| single form of media with it. Every text box on every webpage and
| in every app is an invitation to add more of it to the world.
|
| I think people get overwhelmed by it. And you have to have the
| bullshit cop on your shoulder exhorting you to care. It takes
| time and energy to care. Most people are too tired. So we let
| things slide. We stop listening to the bullshit cop. We become
| more selective. We care about the truth in some contexts but not
| others. It's survival.
| hypeatei wrote:
| Bullshit asymmetry principle: it takes less energy to produce
| bullshit than it does to refute it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
| ferguess_k wrote:
| It is just the same mindset dripping down from the top.
|
| For decades after the Cold War, politicians and financiers are
| gradually moving to the "apres moi le deluge" mindset. Now it
| drips down to ordinary people because the Cold War generation is
| dying.
|
| That's it.
| buangakun wrote:
| Oh man, I gotta write a comment here. I'm gonna leave out a few
| details in case this guy or my tech lead/manager read HN.
|
| So, I am senior software engineer, got hired into this company. I
| was tasked by my manager/tech lead to work with another senior
| software engineer.
|
| Overtime I realized that this engineer did not have the proper
| background in this field. I asked him and I asked my tech lead,
| and confirmed he did not have background in this field. This guy
| just roped into this project and stayed.
|
| I sent him articles, tutorials, and even documentations that say
| so and so is so and so, but he refused to believe it and said it
| was just my opinion. I even offered to work on these problems
| instead of him. But we ended up getting into heated arguments. I
| talked to my tech lead and my VP and they just brushed me off. It
| got so bad that I asked to be transferred to a different team.
|
| I also realized later that my tech lead was not as technically
| competent as I hoped to be, so that's why he couldn't make a
| decision.
|
| Anyway, I asked Reddit and TeamBlind how to best deal with this
| kind of situation. (In those forums I actually described exactly
| what were the problems)
|
| To my surprise, a lot of them, 99% of the answers go along these
| lines "Who the fuck cares man, just get your paycheck and go
| home, what an idiot". These are highly paid FAANG engineers.
|
| So, that was my wake up call. They were right. Who the fuck
| cares. Just get my paycheck and go home, and work on other
| stuffs, work on side projects, side hustle, and go Leetcode.
|
| I was 8 years too late into the industry to know that this should
| be my default attitude when working.
|
| Now I am in "Who The Fuck Cares" club.
| bwfan123 wrote:
| I would describe it differently - "another day, another dollar"
| - where work is done as required - no more no less. Corps know
| this, and try to incentivize employees to bring some passion to
| work - via equity ownership - so, incentives are aligned.
| Another way is to pretend to have a mission statement like
| "organize world's info" which can fool employees to align
| without any monetary reward.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| In my first job after graduating I've found:
|
| * programmer that worked maybe 2h/day, but was otherwise very
| important to one of the oursourced projects, so he got away
| with it and was publicly laughing about it without ever getting
| reprimanded
|
| * devops guy that insisted on using his magic copy-pasted
| shitty shell scripts instead of any popular config management
| tool at the time, simply to make it harder for anyone else to
| take his duties, also no monitoring, just call him when
| something breaks
|
| * junior dev, that routinely spent 2-3 days on a simple bugfix,
| that later had to be reassigned to a senior that fixed it in 15
| minutes without any context from the junior dev, that situation
| was apparently okay for the company, because a clueless client
| paid by hour and had no idea it keeps happening all the time
|
| * tester, who after half a year figured out that his manual
| testing isn't quantifiable at all, as long as he claims that
| everything is working to make management happy, so he found a
| second job
|
| So, I'm in the WTFC camp since, I guess, a month of working in
| IT.
| ewhanley wrote:
| It sounds like you should be able to run the table with so
| little competition. Why not engage, take on more
| responsibility, and obviously stand out to get more money and
| influence?
| saulpw wrote:
| Because, as has been mentioned innumerable times in this
| thread, going through all that extra effort does not get
| you more money. It gets you more stress and a target on
| your back when you make a mistake.
| ewhanley wrote:
| Bingo - sorry, this was a mostly rhetorical question.
| azemetre wrote:
| Because you won't be rewarded with money and influence
| while still having the same risks of layoffs.
|
| At this point you're better off working on your own thing
| because the company is usually, always with few exceptions
| mind you, a dishonest actor that is openly hostile.
|
| The elites can't blame the state of the world on workers
| when they've created out hellscape of treadmills to
| delusion and abandonment.
| whstl wrote:
| Yep. The only reward in a place that doesn't care is
| time.
|
| I am in a proper place now, but I regret not getting a
| second job in my previous fintech job.
| azemetre wrote:
| Why do you feel the need to work a second job, why would
| that be better? Wouldn't you rather be a part of your
| local community and put effort there rather than a
| private enterprise?
| Henchman21 wrote:
| When you perform well at work and you do NOT get a share of
| the profits then all you shall be rewarded with is _more
| work_. Why? WTFC???
| mettamage wrote:
| Allow me to give you a different viewpoint. And this is coming
| from someone that has an _amazing instinct_ to be in the "Who
| The Fuck Cares" club. I use that instinct to protect my mental
| health but nothing more than that.
|
| What I noticed when I checked out at work is that it also makes
| me check out in my personal life (PL). It bleeds in. Generally,
| in my personal life I'm not checked out. That bleeds into work.
|
| So work bleeds into PL and PL into work. I found that it was
| painful for work to bleed into my PL like that since I'm
| switched on and I just had this hint of "ah... whatever who
| gives a fuck."
|
| I give a fuck.
|
| I give a fuck because it's my life. I do it for myself. I don't
| do it for my boss or my colleagues. I do it for me.
|
| I've found that this attitude is way more helpful to me as two
| things happen:
|
| 1. I'm more productive at work so I don't have to cover my ass
| at all. When I was in the "Who The Fuck Cares" club, I needed
| to cover my ass once per month (read: I didn't do anything for
| like 3 days and people were expecting results on day 4).
|
| 2. Since it's in service for my personal life, I don't go too
| far. The moment I notice that work encroaches too much upon
| personal life, my instinct comes back immediately and I pay my
| visit to the "Who The Fuck Cares" club, and party as long as I
| want to.
|
| That's the balance I'm currently taking.
| whyowhy3484939 wrote:
| I think this is reasonable. Came to the same conclusion. I
| need to at least pretend to myself that I care, but I will
| not allow it to bleed into my PL. If it does I check out and
| chill for a bit.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > I asked Reddit and TeamBlind how to best deal with this kind
| of situation > a lot of them, 99% of the answers go along these
| lines "Who the fuck cares man > So, that was my wake up call
|
| Let me get this right, you discovered your team was mediocre,
| you then asked the clinically cynical folks at Reddit for
| advice, people you don't even know and people who certainly
| don't know you, and the conclusion you walked away with was
| that it wasn't worth caring because there's cynics on the
| internet?
|
| If you're adopting a "Who the Fuck Cares" attitude, the highest
| form of it you can reach is not giving a flying fuck about what
| anons on the internet say.
|
| Now, as an anon, I won't bother to give you advice, but I'll
| tell you what works for me. I found a team that is intelligent
| and passionate and enjoys their work, and a startup with
| talented founders that I respect, and I am far happier than I
| would ever be working at a mediocre company or team. I feel
| better as a person, I learn better, challenge myself more, and
| feel more accomplished by surrounding myself with other highly
| competent people.
| j2kun wrote:
| +100 get advice from people in your life who care about you
| and can contextualize your situation.
| XorNot wrote:
| But that's the same answer? Like, the answer you're giving is
| still a WTFC answer - it's just "leave".
|
| The things that are broken at that company, which are the
| things people keep reacting to in this thread as "why is
| service X so bad?"... they're going to stay broken. It's
| still not caring.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| That's not WTFC. The WTFC peeps were telling them to
| collect a check and not bother caring.
|
| If you care enough to leave, you actually do care about the
| quality of your work. No, you can't fix other people, but
| you can change your environment.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| In the tradeoff between [rest and vest] vs [leave for
| higher standards], I think the second option is better, and
| "more care-y". At the very least, it shows the company that
| there is a problem, and doesn't squander talent. You're
| right that there are even more care-y paths though --
| potentially op could continue to escalate the issue, train
| all his coworkers, or work crazy hours to fix the problem
| themself. There is a limit to what an individual can do
| though, so I don't feel anyone is obligated to take the
| most care-y paths
| strgcmc wrote:
| But this thread here has either misinterpreted or
| willingly ballooned the problem up, into this strawman of
| an unfixable culture or a terrible company which no one
| engineer could possibly fix...
|
| The OP here, basically has a simple (and common!) 3-way
| collaboration/communication problem:
|
| - OP did not get along with 1 single fellow coworker that
| he was assigned to work with; this coworker reportedly
| does not listen to reason, does not read the research or
| background info that OP shared, etc.
|
| - OP tried to seek help from a manager/lead type person,
| but that person was also not useful (i.e. not able to
| force a course-correction towards better collaboration).
|
| Note: OP did not actually indict his entire team, or the
| entire eng organization, as all being hopelessly useless.
| OP said he had a problem with 2 specific people, and
| asked for tips to deal with that (small!) scenario. But
| instead of giving "small" advice for a "small" (and
| again, common and usually fixable/at-least-improvable)
| problem, both the toxic hive-mind as well as the HN
| commentators here have completely avoided trying to solve
| the actual root issue (which isn't nearly the impossibly-
| large-turnaround effort that everyone's making it out to
| be)... What we have here, is fundamentally an XY problem
| (https://xyproblem.info/), in that OP asked for help with
| X, but got advice about Y.
|
| EDIT: Okay so I guess I should offer some concrete advice
| to OP for what I'm calling his "small" original problem
| -- usually there are 2 categories of options from this
| point: either escalate again, or try to resolve
| interpersonally without escalation.
|
| - Escalation route: OP tried the 1st manager/tech-lead,
| who couldn't bring a resolution... that's... pretty
| common actually! So escalate 1 more level, calmly and
| professionally. Whether it's a skip-level director/VP, or
| a project manager, or whichever stakeholder is
| appropriate in OP's context -- explain politely what
| steps you have tried to solve the problem so far, why the
| counter-proposal / alternative is bad or won't work, and
| emphasize that you are still happy to collaborate
| further, but you are currently at an impasse and need a
| more senior person to weigh in. Then, OP needs to be
| prepared to "disagree and commit", if the decision
| doesn't go his way. NOTE: if the decision doesn't go his
| way, it could mean 1 of 2 things: a more senior person
| brought in extra context or expertise that OP did not
| know about and hence made a better decision that OP can
| learn to appreciate, OR it could mean everyone is an
| idiot and OP is the only sane person in the company...
| there's no reason to jump to the most negative conclusion
| as the only one, but certainly I acknowledge it's
| possible (I just don't think it's good advice to assume
| the worst, without even trying a simple +1 extra round of
| escalation... OP could at least try 1 more time).
|
| - Non-escalation interpersonal route: OP can find a
| professional way to say to the problematic coworker,
| "frankly, I still disagree with your approach, and it's
| my job to document my disagreement with our manager(s),
| but at the end of the day, if you insist on doing it your
| way, then go ahead". Sometimes, the only/best way to
| learn, is to let someone else try and fail. This isn't
| callousness or retribution, this is actually a common
| lesson for mentors who might otherwise struggle to try
| and protect their mentees from ever possibly making a
| mistake or being wrong about something... an
| overbearing/overprotective mentor would need to learn
| how/when to take a step back, to let a mentee try and
| fail and learn-how-to-learn from their failures. Of
| course, OP is not this coworker's mentor, and does not
| need to feel obligated to assume that role, but I am
| simply pointing out that letting someone go off and do
| something you disagree with, can actually be an act of
| caring (rather than a form of not-giving-a-fuck).
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Ya, I agree with you. I don't want to malign op without
| context, but I also worry that they might be
| overconfident, or over indexing on an unimportant detail.
| I think it's hard to give detailed advice without more
| info
| 93po wrote:
| i think most people are gonna follow advice that they tend to
| agree with - if the reddit advice was "drive off a bridge"
| i'm sure he wouldn't. he probably read the opinions, realized
| he had the same opinion, and adopted it
| const_cast wrote:
| The problem is that if you start caring too much when other
| people don't you become a target. People blend in because it
| works. You can't fix a fucked culture, you just can't. So
| either leave or become one of the pact.
|
| Companies, for the past 50 years at least, have greatly
| incentivized little worker bees over revolutionaries. They
| don't want someone to fix things or tell them they're wrong.
| They don't want superstars, they want drones, they want yes
| men, they want useful idiots. And, well, they got it.
| rkozik1989 wrote:
| There's more than just technical ability at play when comes to
| what to do with a bad performer. Because if you hired them, or
| pushed for their promotion, or whatever and it doesn't work it
| makes you look bad too. Hence its actually problematic for
| someone to complain about poor performers because it makes them
| look difficult and possibly as though they're not people-
| oriented enough to manage relationships.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| I think the 3rd or so time that all the work I'd been doing for
| months or years just got thrown in the garbage, having never
| provided more benefit than it cost, or even without ever
| providing any benefit whatsoever due to never having been
| released, through no fault of my own, was when I decided giving
| a shit was for suckers.
|
| We're just human parts of some weird business-metaphysical
| Plinko board--and we ain't the ones dropping the chip or
| winning the prizes. Truly, who could possibly maintain any
| amount of giving-a-shit after years and years of that? All
| that's left is pretending, which is, transparently, the same
| thing "leadership" does.
| neilv wrote:
| > _and go Leetcode._
|
| I wonder whether, by refusing to Leetcode as an IC, if you
| weed-out proportionally more companies of careerist people just
| going through the motions.
|
| (Compared to companies of people who care about what they're
| doing, not just about jumping through hoops and receiving
| money.)
| jmb99 wrote:
| I recently switched jobs, and this time I decided that during
| the first phase of any interview cycle I would ask if there
| were going to be leetcode-style questions at any point in the
| cycle. If yes, I ended the interviews there. If no, continue
| on. I was of course happy to explain my logic and that I was
| happy to demonstrate technical prowess in a way more useful
| to the proposed role.
|
| One company lied, I completed the leetcode-style portion of
| the technical interview, and politely declined their offer
| (with an explanation that I don't like being lied to, and
| beyond that, I don't want to work for a company that believes
| leetcode is a useful skill indicator for regular development
| work).
|
| So far every company that I've worked for doesn't do leetcode
| bs, and end up being great companies to work for (genuinely
| caring about employees, good salary/benefits, actual CoL
| adjustments in addition to merit-based raises, equity, etc).
| Small sample size, I know. I also know that every one of my
| tech friends who has worked at a leetcode-interview company
| has had some kind of issue with colleagues, management,
| company structure, or something along those lines (not
| necessarily at every company, but each person has encountered
| those sorts of things at at least one company).
|
| To me, avoiding leetcode is a very good way to select for
| "actual good" companies to work for.
| creer wrote:
| It's possible to do both: you can collect your paycheck WHILE
| looking for a better job (because this one is toxic). And now
| you know to interview more seriously the people at that
| potential new employer.
|
| An essential part of "the job" is to get done what the company
| wants you to do. Even when that's stupid. Fair. But toxic jobs
| are still toxic to us, and staying is still our decision.
| Pending finding another better job - but sometimes even before
| having found the better job because sanity matters.
| whyowhy3484939 wrote:
| I find there is middle ground between "who the fuck cares" and
| "I got to fight for what is righteous". Do the job best you
| can. Accept resources, including skilled human beings, are what
| they are and unless you own the place there is very little you
| can do about it. Try to do the best work you can with the
| resources you are given is all I can say. It does give pleasure
| to at least try to do a good job.
|
| Yes, I am saying you should be cleaning the decks of the
| Titanic with all the care you can muster but without being
| obsessive or neurotic about it. Don't do it for the Titanic,
| don't do it for all the people who are about to die. Just do it
| for you.
| EasyMark wrote:
| The only way I worry about a coworker is if it directly impacts
| me. I'm not a tattle tale, it's up to the company to have in
| place a system of determining the quality of someone's work. I
| will not take blame for a person and I'll call it out as a
| member of the team if I get blamed for something the less
| skilled person did. That should be enough to limit bad people,
| the onus is on the company and management.
| ironman1478 wrote:
| I think it's less that nobody cares, it's that more people who
| don't care think they can get into these jobs and they slip
| through due to sheer volume. There have always been this many
| people that don't care, but never had opportunities to enter
| certain jobs or those fields weren't as appealing at the time.
| Many in software engineering don't care about the actual field,
| but because it's become such a high paying job, we see many
| people who enter purely for the money.
| lapcat wrote:
| The author talks about the phenomenon like it's just an
| individual failing and exhorts people to "be human". But I think
| that "who cares?" is in fact a natural human reaction to the
| incentives. We need to look at how our society is structured and
| how the incentives are set up. I would highlight two factors that
| I think are consequential in the current economy: corporate
| consolidation and job insecurity.
|
| Increasingly, we have larger corporations eating everything,
| including other companies, leaving consumers with fewer choices.
| In recent years there has finally been some pushback from the
| government--antitrust was more or less nonexistent ever since
| Microsoft got a slap on the wrist in 2001--but it remains to be
| seen whether this will end with more than just another wrist
| slap, and whether the new administration will roll back even the
| small progress made. When we have more competition, more economic
| choices, more companies, indeed more smaller companies owned by
| individuals rather than by collectives of fund managers
| (effectively a tragedy of the commons), we're more likely to have
| people in power who do care, and the people who don't care have
| to compete against the people who do, which incentivizes caring.
| On the other hand, corporate consolidation leads to a small
| number of people controlling everything, who care about nothing
| but profit.
|
| At the lower levels, below the C-suite (with their golden
| parachutes rewarded regardless of success or failure), job
| insecurity has become a fact of life for everyone. The epitome of
| this situation is the so-called "gig economy", in which millions
| of people don't even have permanent employment or hours (or
| health insurance, for that matter) but are forced to live day-to-
| day with tenuous connections to giant corporations and the odd
| jobs those corporations may throw their way. Even people who do
| have full-time jobs can be tossed away unceremoniously like so
| much trash at any time in mass layoffs, for any reason or no
| reason. The question is, in the face of such job insecurity, why
| _should_ employees care are their jobs? Their employers clearly
| don 't care about them. There was a time, many decades ago, when
| companies were more like families, felt some community
| responsibility, and an individual could work for the same company
| their entire career and retire there. The incentives were more
| aligned to caring about your job; it was similar to caring about
| your own family.
|
| The way that humans behave depends crucially on the environment:
| place them in a healthy, supportive situation, and they'll tend
| to behave well; place them in a hostile situation, a war of all
| against all, and they'll tend to behave badly. We need to arrange
| our society intentionally so that the incentives are aligned for
| mutual benefit and caring. We primates are inherently imitative.
| Loughla wrote:
| You're not supposed to take work personally. That is a lesson
| that I've been taught many, many, many times over the years.
| I've been told that within the last 24 hours.
|
| So why is it a surprise that, when employees are not supposed
| to take work personally, they stop taking work personally?
|
| I do not understand anyone's confusion about this. We are a
| resource to be used in companies now; replaced, shunted, and
| changed as they see fit. We are not an asset. Why would I give
| a flying fuck about my employer, other than the baseline
| expectation of what I was hired for?
|
| This "Who Cares Era" sort of nonsense just absolutely reeks of
| the pearl clutching that occurred with "Quiet Quitting"
| (otherwise known as doing the expectations of your own job and
| no more).
| lapcat wrote:
| > So why is it a surprise that, when employees are not
| supposed to take work personally, they stop taking work
| personally?
|
| I'm a bit puzzled about how this reply is supposed to relate
| to or add to my comment. For example, I already said, "The
| question is, in the face of such job insecurity, why _should_
| employees care are their jobs? Their employers clearly don 't
| care about them."
|
| What I don't see in the reply is any kind of contextual or
| critical analysis. You speak as if this is simply an
| immutable law of nature rather than a product of our
| contemporary economy. "You're not supposed to take work
| personally." Where do you think this "principle" comes from?
| I agree that a lot of people say it, and indeed that it's a
| rational reaction to the economic circumstances. But must it
| be this way, and why? And if so, what do you expect to be the
| outcome, aside from animus and anomie? Is it a good way for
| us to live together, forever?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| One example that comes to my mind: I had my first job in
| 1974. The expectation back then was that if you wanted to
| leave your job, you always gave at least two weeks notice.
|
| I'm slow so it took me a very long time to realize how
| ridiculous this was. If the company was going to lay you
| off, they _never_ gave you any notice at all. You were just
| told not to come to work the next day.
|
| So this is not just about current economic circumstances.
| It's about an imbalance of power that has been going on a
| long time.
| lapcat wrote:
| > I had my first job in 1974. The expectation back then
| was that if you wanted to leave your job, you always gave
| at least two weeks notice.
|
| Why do you think that was? Expectations don't just arise
| out of nothing. In 1974, there was more job security and
| less frequent layoffs.
|
| > I'm slow so it took me a very long time to realize how
| ridiculous this was.
|
| Alternatively, it wasn't originally ridiculous, but the
| economic conditions slowly changed to make it ridiculous.
|
| > It's about an imbalance of power that has been going on
| a long time.
|
| Of course things didn't change overnight. I never said
| they did.
| alexjplant wrote:
| > Why would I give a flying fuck about my employer, other
| than the baseline expectation of what I was hired for?
|
| You should care about the people whose lives are affected by
| the result of your work at the _very_ least.
|
| If you work in property management, for instance, you
| shouldn't repeatedly bill your tenants after charges are due
| then accuse them of late payment. Ditto for double-billing
| them for a month and doing the same anyway... if these bogus
| "late payments" end up on one's rental history then it's a
| lot of work to fix even for a completely honest person that's
| never paid a bill late in their life.
|
| Or, if you're a doctor, you should probably read a patient's
| blood test results correctly so that you don't prescribe them
| the wrong medicine or tell them to take an incorrect
| supplement. If you have somebody take the wrong chemicals
| because you can't read a piece of paper then bad things could
| happen to them.
|
| I could go on and on and on but the bottom line is that you
| need to give at least an iota of a shit when your fellow
| people are at the mercy of the quality of your work. Missing
| a topping on a sandwich is whatever but messing with
| somebody's finances, shelter, or health out of lazy defiance
| is outright sociopathy. The fact that you don't like your
| boss is your problem; stick it to your employer on your own
| time.
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| If people were paid to _not_ show up to 'work' then they
| wouldn't be in a position to over-produce garbage. We wouldn't be
| generating as much waste and we would have more higher quality
| 'things'.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| 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 noticed something most had in common. Most cared very little
| for learning anything outside of just getting by. I saw very few
| with a book in their hands and was questioned many times as to
| why I was reading! I was even told I would never need to know
| that, when reading about technology.
|
| I'm trying not to be overly critical, but I still don't
| understand why knowledge to them wasn't valued. I'm also afraid
| it's being reflected in society today based on the blatant
| refusal to read today's happenings and the lack of wisdom to
| interpret the possible outcomes, or to even care.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| 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.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| My mother is 70 years old and has never bothered to learn how
| to change the volume of the tv using a controller. My father
| was recently in the hospital and she had to learn how to put
| gas in her car.
|
| I love her, but it's truly mind boggling how little she cares
| about learning stuff.
| 827a wrote:
| This is the entirely predictable and avoidable impact of
| hyperscale bureaucracy. Its not because people aren't paid enough
| (though, most aren't). Its because people in these systems aren't
| given enough agency. Humans crave authority, agency, and
| creativity.
|
| Here's something I implore tech business leaders to think about:
| If you believe AI to be the world-changing technology you say it
| will be: It follows that you _must_ believe that intelligence
| will become commoditized. What is going to differentiate your
| business from every other business as thought workflows become a
| commodity? I 'm not sure I know the answer, but while most
| business leaders seem to believe the answer to live in "how much
| AI can we shove down our employees and customers throats", I
| suspect the real answer is the opposite. If AI is an omnipresent,
| powerful substrate of business delivery, like computers are
| today, available in-kind to every business, what will
| differentiate your business is how you handle the gaps between
| what AI is capable of. What is your human element? Are the humans
| just glue between AI agents or are they actually a
| differentiating factor?
|
| All this is why I tend to believe AI is going to mean slow but
| complete death for hyperscale companies, and there's nothing they
| can do about it. The only survivors will be the ones providing AI
| services, and they'll be the next generation's IBM. The winners
| are going to be small companies, teams of ten that can now
| operate like a team of a hundred. These small teams will have
| access to the exact same thought workflow automations that the
| hyperscalers have access to, but they also have something that
| the hyperscalers don't: human agency and agility.
| pixl97 wrote:
| You say bureaucracy, but what I think you mean is complexity.
|
| Bureaucracy is a type of complexity that occurs once systems
| become to big for a small well trained group of people to
| manage.
|
| AI/humans managing the system will work for a while, we'll be
| able to manage the current complexity better, but it won't
| last. We'll make even more complex systems that become
| unmanageable.
| 827a wrote:
| No. I said bureaucracy and I meant bureaucracy. Complexity is
| not what causes the problem of low agency in organizations.
| Bureaucracy is. There are many ways you can choose to build
| organizations to respond to complexity; Bureaucracy is one of
| them, and Bureaucracy is the one that takes agency away from
| your people and drives apathy.
| czhu12 wrote:
| " Looking back, it feels like a little microcosm of everything
| right now: Over the course of two months, we went from something
| smart that would demand a listener's attention in a way that was
| challenging and new to something that sounded like every other
| thing: some dude talking to some other dude about apps that some
| third dude would half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a
| fourth dude about plans for later."
|
| In the Dark was a podcast I came across recently that struck me
| as being in the former camp. The reporters cared, the
| organization supported them, and they created content that was
| gripping and demanded the listener to pay attention.
|
| I'm sure this is the wrong place for a podcast recommendation but
| I wanted to play my small part in surfacing the work of people
| who do care
| sam-cop-vimes wrote:
| 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 TV stars parading their frankenstein bodies
| and the hype generated by social media as major influences for
| children growing up today.
|
| Spelling a word correctly is harder than letting our apps auto-
| correct it for us. Playing a video game takes less physical
| effort than venturing out to a playground. Heating and eating a
| ready-meal takes less effort than cooking something.
|
| I read somewhere that every augmentation is also an amputation.
| Progress in tech means we are constantly lobotomising a majority
| of the population. We in the tech community are partly
| responsible for this.
|
| I don't know what the solution is - but I guess what the author
| suggests is a good start. Start caring.
| squigz wrote:
| > Hard work, humility, respect for others were actively
| inculcated into the growing generation.
|
| Sure, and then, after we started getting more "external
| influences", we all realized that "hard work" isn't going to
| get us anywhere.
|
| It's really easy to blame this on some kind of change in
| individual values - kids these days don't respect hard work,
| etc. It's harder to come to terms with the idea that maybe
| those values were a lie - or, perhaps a better way of putting
| it, a coping mechanism - in order to keep us placated with the
| status quo. Now we're really starting to wake up to the fact
| that employers do not reward things like hard work or loyalty.
| So why keep up the pretense?
|
| Unfortunately this does indeed result in this issue - a lack of
| caring. But I don't think we're going to get people to care
| again by appealing to those older values.
| sam-cop-vimes wrote:
| Not sure how you got the impression that I'm blaming the kids
| - that wasn't what I was trying to say at all. I'm blaming
| the society we have created for kids who are growing up
| today.
| e-topy wrote:
| > I read somewhere that every augmentation is also an
| amputation. Progress in tech means we are constantly
| lobotomising a majority of the population.
|
| Just thought about something:
|
| There are a few sides to this. There is innovation that just
| makes things easier but doesn't amputate, like typing machines
| vs word (took me a while to come up with an example,
| essentially just evolution). Then there are things that are so
| old it's useless to know them. Like making butter, sure you can
| do it if you want to, might be fun, but in the grand scheme of
| things irrelevant. Then there's stuff that is in decline but
| needed anyway. Like being able to _read a book_.
|
| Maybe you could express this as a 2D graph, where X is how much
| people know it and Y is how much people need to know it.
| sam-cop-vimes wrote:
| Interesting point, I'll try and plot such a graph!
| tolerance wrote:
| 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 to fund or listen to audio deep-dives
| into the Multiverse or a middle-aged man 's memoir about when he
| was 12 and he heard songs?
|
| * Why _shouldn 't_ people submit boilerplate responses to
| boilerplate questions that are an artificial barrier between them
| and what is contemporarily accepted as a socioeconomic exchange?
|
| I wonder if there's anything that the author can draw from their
| experiences in punk culture to round out the answers the
| questions like this.
|
| We are flailing in the middle of a long-running vacuum of meaning
| and purpose.
|
| I worry about the sort of people who are set at ease by the vague
| quasi-institutional appeals that conclude this post.
| strgcmc wrote:
| Your comment somehow reminded me of this quote: "In a society
| that profits from your self doubt, liking yourself is a
| rebellious act." (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9371890-in-
| a-society-that-p...)
|
| That's not a direct response to your concern, but I think this
| quote applies in a parallel manner -- I've seen this quote
| applied as a statement about what it means to be "punk", and
| how simply being content with yourself (meaning you don't fall
| victim to all the ways society attacks/preys on insecurities or
| tries to sell you drugs or makeup or clothes or surgery or
| whatever to change yourself), is actually incredibly "punk".
| You don't have to dress up weird, or go out and do graffiti, or
| get into fights... just being content with yourself is "punk",
| within a capitalist/post-capitalist world.
|
| So, in a similar vein, I think this author is saying that,
| "caring" is also a form of being "punk", in a world where
| seemingly not-caring is mainstream now. The thing is, being
| "punk" doesn't need an external "why" reason to justify it...
| the whole point of "punk" culture is about authenticity, that
| just being yourself is what's important, that you don't need a
| special reason to reject capitalist consumerism or mainstream
| opiate-of-the-masses media or to dress how you feel instead of
| how society thinks you should look. In that way, being "punk"
| is quite Buddhism-aligned actually, to center on existence and
| enlightenment through self-realization, instead of pursuit of
| external "why" reasons for doing X or Y.
|
| Caring is the punk thing to do, because it is who you actually
| are. You don't need a special reason to care, if you subscribe
| to any kind of "punk" mindset/philosophy about life. Don't care
| because it will yield better material rewards, get you laid, or
| whatever. Care, just because.
|
| At least, that's the argument... up to you if you buy it or
| not.
| joshcsimmons wrote:
| Dan - the article strikes right at the core of the problem. I
| enjoyed your writing style so I decided to have a look around
| your site and found myself saving a bunch of other articles to
| read later.
|
| I see that you're an artist. The concept your writing about here
| is obvious to most artists but not so to technologists (generally
| speaking). What do you make of that?
| zzzeek wrote:
| doesnt mention anything political until the 11th paragraph, where
| he digs in.
|
| HN "flagged for politics!" enforcer mob caught unawares. good
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think of the crypto scammers who prove they don't care when
| they flack stupendously ugly NFTs -- and it seems to be the point
| that they don't care.
| bmartin13 wrote:
| It's emblematic of the post-modern mindset. When feelings are the
| diver for truth then there is no moral compass. This kind of
| mindset redefines "excellence" as anything that helps you feel
| "good". Is it any wonder that character traits like diligence and
| sacrifice are diminishing?
|
| Oh, and I'm sure this comment will get voted down by the masses
| because it doesn't "feel" good!
| lapcat wrote:
| > Oh, and I'm sure this comment will get voted down by the
| masses because it doesn't "feel" good!
|
| This is a self-fulfilling prophesy that violates the HN
| guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments.
| It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
| nthingtohide wrote:
| The Who Cares Inception.
|
| > As Elon Musk's DOGE rats gnaw their way through federal
| agencies, not caring is their guiding light.
|
| He wouldn't have used this wording if he had actually spent
| sometime on understanding how wasteful the previous governments
| have been. So in a sense, Elon was correcting the previous Who
| Cares mistakes and not actually committing new Who Cares
| mistakes. This shows that even Dan doesn't care enough to ground
| his opinions in facts.
| strawhatguy wrote:
| yeah, cutting waste is caring. And totally right, turns out Dan
| himself does not care.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Elon was doing no such thing. They didn't even take time to try
| to determine whether there was any waste in the things they
| cut. They just cut wholesale and claimed victory.
|
| This is, of course, on top of the administration claiming that
| Elon was in no way in charge of DOGE. He was evidently just one
| of the president's personal advisors.
| 1dom wrote:
| I read the title and it triggered something I've been thinking a
| lot lately: there's too much for everyone to care about right
| now. Article didn't really touch on it directly, but:
|
| > something that sounded like every other thing: some dude
| talking to some other dude about apps that some third dude would
| half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a fourth dude about
| plans for later.
|
| It's not that the dudes don't care, it's that the dudes have 15
| other things expected of them, which weren't expected 15 years
| ago and caring capacity feels like a biological limit. There
| isn't the required amount of caring available in the average
| human any more, and caring is needed for standards to be
| maintained.
|
| 15 years ago, the world was in awe that stuxnet, a cyber attack,
| had impacted the real world. I was in cyber at the time, and the
| idea that day to day lives of normal people would be impacted in
| the real world was like Hollywood fiction: unthinkable.
|
| A few weeks ago, I didn't even notice the reason my local big
| brand store shelves were empty was because of a cyberattack. It
| was a week later I saw the article explaining it on BBC:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg4zrpk5p7o
|
| I feel like a cynical old man, but I'm sure most here will relate
| - the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us
| thought we were working to create.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Yep, as often said these days - people are out of fucks to
| give.
|
| As an example of out-of-fucks, a regular engineer literally
| couldn't be convinced to care about customers when a
| corporatized management creates 10,000 hoops for them to jump
| over - such as scrum.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| Or they offshored the project and fired people, and are
| bringing it back, and now you have to deal with that mess
|
| Your potential reward for fixing all of it and reminding them
| to not do it again? Nothing!
| malfist wrote:
| The reward for putting out a fire is more fires to put out.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Sadly many of us in tech get a rush from the 'superman'
| feeling that gives us. Our sheer force of effort/genius
| saves the day yet again. Until it burns us out, or we get
| dropped and realize we weren't actually valued.
| blooalien wrote:
| > The reward for putting out a fire is more fires to put
| out.
|
| And the reward for working tirelessly and successfully to
| ensure those fires never start in the first place is
| being "downsized" / laid-off because the job you do is
| apparently pointless, as "we've never had any problems in
| that department..." Damned if you do, damned if you
| don't... and double-damned if you do...
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| >It's not that the dudes don't care, it's that the dudes have
| 15 other things expected of them, which weren't expected 15
| years ago and caring capacity feels like a biological limit
|
| I genuinely think this is a factor in some ways. 500 years ago,
| what were people worried about? Their immediate concerns, those
| of family, and neighbors. Realistically, there was no way to
| get caught up in the minute-by-minute concerns of people in
| other cities, other states, other countries, other continents.
| Things changed more slowly and the only time you heard about
| about a tragedy was if it was truly enormous - or very local.
|
| Now, there is this constant vying for
| attention/support/outrage/etc. It's exhausting. People
| genuinely expect you to care about the back-and-forth between
| two celebrities you've never met, or some event halfway across
| the world, or some new thing that released _now_ like literally
| _now_.
|
| I think that a lot of people have subconsciously hit their
| limit. They can't muster the energy needed to genuinely think
| about or care about a lot of this stuff because they're
| bombarded with so much of it. And over time, I think that
| shifts thinking. "Why did I not care when X happened?" leads to
| "Those people don't matter/are less than human" instead of the
| real "Because I'm completely exhausted from so much happening".
| fragmede wrote:
| > People genuinely expect you to care about the back-and-
| forth between two celebrities you've never met
|
| Maybe this is some unknown privilege of mine or some bubble I
| live in, but I only know about celebrity gossip when people
| ask me if I've heard about it and I say no, or not really.
| You get to choose what to give your attention to, and you
| don't have to just because other people expect you to. I
| still have friends and acquaintances, we just talk about
| other stuff.
| kmacdough wrote:
| I similarly don't have those specific expectations, but
| plenty of others. I'm expected to understand the most
| recent updates in Gaza, and the latest DOGE cuts. People
| act smug when I don't have a good understanding of current
| medical theory on cholesterol. I'm expected to have a
| nuanced opinion on trans kids in sports despite having no
| kids, and knowing exactly zero trans people. I mean I
| generally believe in letting people be who they are, but
| beyond that I really have no business talking about it.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| I think a lot of harm has been caused by "automation"
| actually meaning "distributing parts of the same tasks among
| a bunch of people". As far as I can tell that's one of the
| _main_ outcomes of "efficiencies" from computerization of
| offices, among other places: they mostly just made it
| feasible to carve up the job of e.g. secretary among
| _everybody_ , adding to the number of things and processes
| each worker has to understand and deal with.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> they mostly just made it feasible to carve up the job of
| e.g. secretary among everybody, adding to the number of
| things and processes each worker has to understand and deal
| with.
|
| A previous generations old guy told me about this. He
| worked in the defense industry 50 years ago. You know, they
| had secretaries or admins that would handle all sorts of
| things for the engineers. Then the government changed the
| way they did contracts and companies couldn't bill for
| "overhead" any more. So the engineers (who bill to the
| project) had to start handling all those other things
| themselves and most of the support staff went away.
|
| It's not that hard to handle any one thing, but if you do
| get the chance to work somewhere with a person that can
| "just handle that for you" it's really kind of amazing how
| much mental energy that frees up for your main tasks.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| You're describing the change from _personnel_ to _human
| resources_. Its this little linguistic trick the C-suite
| foisted on the rest of us. You dehumanize then exploit.
| Resources, after all, are _meant to be exploited_.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Those are unnecessarily emotionally charged definitions
| and implications of "resources" and "exploit".
|
| I am a resource for my kids, my spouse, and the rest of
| my friends and family. I am also a resource to my
| employer and other customers.
|
| In any organization, a resource can vary from things such
| as land, chemicals, machines, humans, books, etc.
|
| The term Human Resources seems accurate to a refer to a
| group of people that deal with the humans in the
| organization.
|
| I do not see why "resources" is seen as having a negative
| connotation in this context. Of course, just like a
| family can mistreat a resourceful family member, so can
| any organization mistreat a human resource.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| > Those are unnecessarily emotionally charged definitions
| and implications of "resources" and "exploit".
|
| One, don't attempt to invalidate my emotions. They are
| both entirely valid, given the concerted push from the
| C-suite to dehumanize their workforce, and entirely
| necessary. Necessary because _our parents and
| grandparents lived better lives because they weren't as
| dehumanized_. Necessary because so few people in _this
| community specifically_ see it that way and it *needs to
| be pointed out repeatedly*.
|
| Perhaps it would resonate more if you, too, had heard a
| couple of C-suites & their chosen MBAs joking about this
| exact topic. Perhaps dehumanizing people would make your
| blood boil if you experienced it as casually and often as
| I have.
|
| But perhaps not. One of the great things about the WTFC-
| era is that I can disregard your opinion utterly.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| If your parents and grandparents were able to live better
| lives as labor sellers, it was because the ratio of
| supply of labor and demand for labor was more favorable
| for them. Not because HR used to be known as Personnel or
| people were inherently "better".
|
| There were more slaves before MBAs, and before MBAs joked
| about mistreating employees, factory/plantation
| owners/kings did.
| ranprieur wrote:
| "Efficiency" is selfishness. It's a word for when people in
| power want to give less and get more.
| erikerikson wrote:
| Zero sum claims do not a positive sum reduce
| icelancer wrote:
| People are expected to care about things they have zero
| control over and have ~zero impact on their lives or their
| family's lives.
|
| It's ridiculous. I get a ton of crap for not reading the news
| or caring about stuff happening 3500 miles away that I can't
| do anything about.
| cafard wrote:
| An archduke shot in Bosnia, or an incident near a bridge in
| northern China?
| numb7rs wrote:
| This is a good point, but the average person is unlikely
| to hear about a skirmish on a different continent, and
| then know they should start stocking up on tinned food
| and bottled water. The problem is with the volume of
| information. It's impossible to take all of it in, so you
| need to pick and choose, and stay within your own limits.
| Some people might have the capacity read a whole
| newspaper's worth a day, others can only manage the local
| headlines.
| dsego wrote:
| There is a great netflix documentary made in 2018 called
| "the long road to war". By the time the shooting happened
| a lot of other pieces had fallen into place. Basically,
| there were people in military circles and in the
| government that dictated the geoplitics game based on
| which country has leverage, who has the train tracks or a
| port to handle the logistics of war, and there was a
| certain zeitgeist, an egregore if you will, and things
| were ripe for conflict.
| mieubrisse wrote:
| I think the problem is signal-to-noise. For every thing
| that actually turns out to matter, there are hundreds of
| thousands of things that you're told are Important but
| turn out not to be. It's basically impossible to filter
| "Which remote events are actually important vs just
| ragebait?" until after the fact.
| icelancer wrote:
| Both things I can do nothing about.
| david-gpu wrote:
| Yeah, it's not that we don't care, or that it doesn't
| affect us directly, it's the complete lack of agency that
| makes us disinterested. Why focus our attention on the
| million things that we can do nothing about, when we could
| focus instead on the very few things where we can make a
| difference?
|
| There are plenty of people out there who live their lives
| rarely watching the news, or browsing social media, and it
| is _really_ hard to make an argument that their lives are
| any worse.
| lolinder wrote:
| The argument is rarely that their lives are worse, it's
| that they're somehow making other people's lives worse by
| not paying attention to X, Y, or Z injustice. But even
| that argument doesn't really hold water.
|
| I know people who are so incapacitated by their anger,
| frustration, and sadness about the Gaza war that they
| spiral into depression and are incapable of making any
| impact on the world directly around them. In their own
| words, they say that they have a hard time seeing how
| anything they do locally really matters when such
| terrible things are happening elsewhere. Their excessive
| amount of care about things outside of their control has
| actively hampered their ability to care about things that
| they actually can influence.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| Since you touched the topic. The protests in the US did
| have an impact, which now triggered a second impact on
| Harvard international students.
|
| I think the concern in Gaza tickled some group the wrong
| way and there will be more awareness.
|
| Additionally, there should be more awareness that
| protests are less tolerated by the government, which
| seems a bad thing.
| david-gpu wrote:
| How does "awareness" of any problem help anything? As
| people have been saying in this thread, we lack agency to
| do anything about the million problems that we are
| already "aware" of. That awareness is neither helping us
| nor the million causes we are bombarded with.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| On top of the things that we have zero control over, that
| _do_ have an impact on our lives. DEI outrage killed a
| Girls in Tech summer program at our local children 's
| museum. Similar cuts killed a lot of kids summer programs
| at our local library. Fewer summer programs at the public
| library and other institutions means thousands of extra
| dollars in extra camps we have to find and pay for over the
| summer so that we can sort of work during the day, between
| drop-offs and pick-ups.
| zh3 wrote:
| But you can. Out of the (limited) choices, vote for whoever
| you think is most in tune with how you'd like the world to
| be.
|
| If almost no-one votes because they think it won't change
| anything, the few people who _do_ care enough to vote get
| to say who 's elected.
| icelancer wrote:
| Sure, I vote. I do the things I can do, but I mostly
| focus on hyperlocal things (Little Free
| Pantries/Libraries) and my friends/family. Impacting
| their lives and the lives of the people in my community
| are my top priorities.
| smokel wrote:
| _> 500 years ago, what were people worried about?_
|
| It wasn't so much different from our time. Read "Don Quixote"
| [1] and be amazed.
|
| Whether the updates you read are actually playing out live,
| or happening in a book doesn't make much of a difference,
| unless you are actually influencing events.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I think there is a difference in the shear density and
| speed of information. With modern news and social media
| apps, information can be pushed into someone in a way that
| just wasn't possible that long ago.
| 1dom wrote:
| I agree, I think it relates to the number of channels
| we're exposed to at any one time. Think about the rate at
| which that has changed over the past 20, 200 and 20,000
| years. Now think how our biology has changed to handle
| that. And then think how our social structures and work
| time expectations have changed over the same time
| periods.
| hadlock wrote:
| Another way to look at this is, "millenials have kids/lives
| now and don't have the bandwidth to be rage-baited near-
| constantly" and also "Gen Z grew up in the rage baiting era,
| they're immune by default". There's no policy outcome for
| this particular piece of rage bait so very few people are
| going to suit up and white knight about supplemental ai slop.
| If it were a fake front page news article people might care
| more. Getting mad about people not getting mad is also very
| low tier rage-bait.
| jasminebelmont wrote:
| This hits harder than I expected. There's a bleak kind of irony
| in how tech gave us infinite visibility but shredded our
| ability to process any of it. Stuxnet was a wake-up call. Now
| it's just another push alert we swipe past while ordering oat
| milk.
|
| The caring bandwidth's not just saturated--it's been monetized,
| splintered, and stuffed with things designed to trigger micro-
| concern at scale. You're not a cynical old man. You're just
| sober in a system that treats numbness like adaptation.
|
| The worst part? I'm not even surprised the BBC article didn't
| trend.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| Yes, and also there's no sense of proportion as we are being
| asked to care about every single possible thing. There's only
| one volume setting for everything: 11.
|
| It's exhausting.
| jmye wrote:
| So... turn it off. Social media is 99% of the firehose, and
| people adamantly refuse to do anything about it.
|
| There's no reason anyone needs the minute-by-minute Twitter-
| esque "information" feed, just like 24-hour news stations are
| a laughably idiotic waste of time and attention. There's no
| reason "you" need to spend hours refreshing and obsessing
| about where your 6th-degree 'friend' is on vacation, or their
| promotion, or their new car or whatever.
|
| Turn shit off.
|
| Or drown, I guess.
| testing22321 wrote:
| 100% this.
|
| Turn off all notifications. Don't listen to radio, don't
| have a TV, don't buy newspapers or magazines. Talk to your
| neighbours, friends and family. Join the community garden,
| go on toddler led walks, go
| hiking/fishing/swimming/camping.
|
| Live in the real world and fill your life with things from
| the real world. The rest is pure noise designed for the
| specific purpose of grabbing and holding your attention and
| keeping you in a state of panic or concern.
|
| You wouldn't put toxic items in your pantry to eat, don't
| put this toxic crap into your awareness.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| This is why Institutions are important. They should be truthful
| and unbiased and undogmatic. But given intentional pollution of
| information environment. The same lessons being learnt again
| and again. New generations growing up and trying to navigate
| this new polluted environment, all of this is taking a toll.
| Hence delulu is the solulu.
| zdragnar wrote:
| You're asking for more from the institution than we can ever
| expect from the individuals within the institution. Humans
| are fallible.
|
| Rather, we should expect that institutions are never so
| powerful that we have no recourse when we have been wronged
| by one, and that we have options when one lets us down.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| The problem isn't being wrong one time. But being wrong
| time and again and that too intentionally. When your job
| depends on not understanding...you won't understand.
| nyarlathotep_ wrote:
| > the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us
| thought we were working to create
|
| The emergence of the smartphone and The Internet (as a cultural
| phenomenon) was such an exciting time.
|
| I came of age during the dawn of the smartphone (graduated
| right as the iPhone was released) and watched all of these
| nascent markets emerge, connecting people in exciting and novel
| ways.
|
| Seemed like it went downhill so fast.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >It's not that the dudes don't care
|
| Nope, I don't care.
|
| Everything is garbage filler vying to buy my attention for some
| purpose or another and I expect bullshit from everyone. I am
| generally outraged, but for specific instances of bullshit? Not
| at all, those are expected. It's not desensitization, you just
| can't have less than 0 trust in an entity and once you get
| there specific instances of outrage no longer happen.
|
| The major reason I think tiktok is so successful is it is the
| platform for punishing BS. You've got 3 seconds to get to the
| point and if you don't, you don't have attention. People
| complain about modern tech ruining attention span but I think
| it's the opposite, traditional content sold out to become ever
| less worthy of people's attention so people used tech to
| circumvent it.
| mieubrisse wrote:
| I'm not sure if I'm convinced, but I find this perspective
| very interesting to think about - that Tiktok might actually
| be about finding signal in the noise. My objection is around
| whether "getting the point" really means "getting to the most
| dopamine-producing thing" (which can still be bullshit).
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| My initial reaction was to be rather dismissive as to AI being
| the thing to care about, but rather the rise of fascism and
| authoritarianism across the West - rather clearly proving your
| point. I do truly believe that AI will be bad for some people
| (myself included to a degree), but it is far less dangerous
| than the political shift we are feeling.
|
| But it is true that we are supposed to feel strongly about a
| myriad things. And possibly more damaging, we are supposed to
| be a dozen things as well - rich, career-minded, pretty,
| athletic, spiritually centered, vegan, environmentally-
| conscious, politically educated, a model partner, there-for-
| our-children, well-travelled, financially responsible, and so
| much more... Each of these points is individually good, but
| social pressure mainly enforced through social media is turning
| _the good life_ into a sort of whack-a-mole challenge people
| get burnt out on.
| chasd00 wrote:
| A clever trick by BigOutrage was labeling people choosing not
| to engage as part of the enemy de jour. now, not having
| enough information and choosing to not participate in the
| debate puts you firmly in their bad guy territory.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us
| thought we were working to create
|
| "No one would have _designed_ it this way, " is the refrain
| that comes to my mind so often. Raising kids and realizing the
| amount of "institutional knowledge" you need just to have a
| bank account (for example) underscores this thought (and
| refrain) frequently.
| oooyay wrote:
| I agree with you to some degree. When I got to the bottom of
| the article I read this:
|
| > Be yourself.
|
| > Be imperfect.
|
| > Be human.
|
| > Care.
|
| It sounds like a simple message but the 2010's were rife with
| "care about everything" and "inaction is action" type slogans.
| Should _someone_ at that paper or the products being
| represented care? Yes, because it 's their job. To blame the
| reader or anyone beyond that point I think is very 2010's era
| that yielded some portion of this societal apathy and burnout.
|
| What we need is the people who have a duty to care to care. In
| reality there are very few people who are on paper duty bound
| to care. The people that are duty bound are rarely held
| accountable when they don't. It's a sort of cyclical problem.
| 1dom wrote:
| I guess it comes down to world view, since we can never know
| the answer: when a human has everything they need, including
| enough bandwidth, how many will care by default vs being
| apathetic by default.
|
| If they care by default, all we need to do is give them
| everything they need and they'll do what is wanted. If not,
| then giving them everything they need will result in them
| doing nothing more.
| leptons wrote:
| >15 years ago, the world was in awe that stuxnet, a cyber
| attack, had impacted the real world. I was in cyber at the
| time, and the idea that day to day lives of normal people would
| be impacted in the real world was like Hollywood fiction:
| unthinkable.
|
| Stuxnet did not impact any "normal people" at all. It was very
| explicitly targeted at the Iran nuclear program. I'd bet that
| _most_ "normal people" have never even heard of "stuxnet" or
| know if it had any impact at all in their lives. I know plenty
| of "normal" people and I'd be hard pressed to find a single one
| of them that even know what stuxnet was. Outside of people very
| interested in computers and cyber attacks, very few people
| could tell you what stuxnet was.
|
| Maybe if Iran had been able to create a nuclear bomb, and maybe
| if they had actually tried to use it (which would be extremely
| foolish and would destroy Iran) then maybe the hypothetical
| non-existence of stuxnet would have impacted some lives, but
| that's a big IF. Most people have no clue at all.
| groby_b wrote:
| Let's be clear, it's not just the age of tech.
|
| It's been normalized to offload things to the recipients,
| because it reduces cost. Be it self-checkout, be it governments
| and large corporate entities doing the absolute minimum and
| asking you to jump through endless hoops to achieve something.
|
| We're shaving off costs everywhere, without eliminating the
| need to do that work. And so it travels down to the leaf nodes,
| to individuals. Who cares, quarterly results are up, OpEx is
| down, good times.
|
| Tech has _enabled_ some of these things, but ultimately it 's
| the fetishization of Taylorism that got us here. If you can't
| measure it, it's not worth doing, and not doing it saves money,
| which you can measure.
|
| This has now spread all the ways to individuals. The commons,
| always a resource in a precarious position, is now the place
| for everybody to proudly defecate on. Throwing away litter,
| listening to music without headphones, rudely shouldering
| people away - all of it is accepted, because heaven forbid the
| individual sacrifices for the group. It is, after all, not a
| thing that has positive impact for themselves.
|
| I don't know what will break us out of it, but yes, caring is
| missing because we've eliminated non-egocentric things from the
| rewards function we think we should apply.
| bowsamic wrote:
| > caring capacity feels like a biological limit
|
| I agree with that. At some point you just give up because
| there's literally nothing left for you to give. I've learnt to
| be very selective with what I choose to care about
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| In my opinion, "who cares" era is the consequence of "care about
| this!" era that preceded it
|
| if all loudspeakers scream "care about this", but don't give a
| thing (or worse) about something /you/ care - you stop caring in
| response
| wiseowise wrote:
| I would argue that "who cares" era is the consequence of
| post-"care about this" era (90s-2000s). It was going downhill
| after dotcom boom and took nearly vertical nosedive around
| 2012-2015 when mass of content generation happened.
| theptip wrote:
| "Who cares" is one way to frame it, perhaps a bit blame-y.
|
| I view this as more epistemically significant, it's the Post-
| Truth era. Politics and national discourse has been heading this
| way for some time, but now AI may mean that nobody can
| distinguish truth from falsehood, at least for online content.
|
| We need new methods for attesting and chaining trust.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| that means that caring is a competitive advantage.
|
| (always has been)
| clolege wrote:
| I agree with many of the comments here, but also feel part of
| this is caused by the declination of our collective physical and
| spiritual health.
|
| It's easier to care about your job when you're capable of doing a
| good job. But the average person nowadays is more likely to be
| dealing with obesity, hormonal imbalances or a variety of other
| modern ailments/vices that make it harder to think clearly or
| perform consistently.
|
| And then social media gives us post after post about how your
| coworkers are _not_ your family and how dumb you have to be to
| give 100% to your work. A lot of people seem to mindlessly
| prescribe to this train of thought that would otherwise have
| questioned it if they went to a church or had some belief system
| that emphasized the inherent importance of doing good work.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Yes. And in my view the concept of expectation plays I think a
| vital role in how an individual relates to society.
|
| If the individual expects that society doesn't care about the
| individual than the individual has no / less reason to take
| care of oneself for the benefit of society.
|
| A solution to this is to be more conscious of one's own values.
| What do you value for how strangers who are nearby you should
| be treated? Kindly? Aggressively? If those values are being met
| and are shared by your immediate society, then it's a chance
| that you might also feel like you are being taken care of.
| Which then might meet your sense of stress and satisfaction
| which might then allow you to feel comfortable interacting with
| society in a playful manner more comfortably bringing up your
| own needs in the group, and having a shoulder to cry on when
| when you need to, and having a group just help step in and take
| care of some of your needs because they have the bandwidth to
| do so. And they also care because they share your values.
|
| Values are, I think, an underappreciated concept, these days,
| partly because of all sides shaming, but also because the
| algorithm as they call it is what is supplanting our values.
| The algorithm is pushing views on us. And you know the old
| saying, you are what you eat, that also applies to you are what
| you read.. we're undergoing conditioning by reading all this
| stuff about all these different ideas about all these different
| things which we were supposed to care about. So our values are
| becoming a little soft and squishy, about what it is that we
| want or need. We are trying to get what we need from a
| environment which is being driven by the algorithm and its
| values.
|
| So anyhow, pay attention to your values... And shape your
| interactions with the world including social media based on
| those values. And you'll be happier.
| LastTrain wrote:
| Our leaders have forced a third our population to accept, defend
| and repeat bald face lies and deception on a daily basis, how can
| things like this compete? It is the point of all that deception
| to make us apathetic.
| wiseowise wrote:
| People don't have any goal. It's not surprising at all.
|
| 110 years ago it was WW1, then it was WW2, then postwar euphoria.
| Then it was Democracy vs Commies, golden age, space race, rise of
| Hollywood, disco, fast cars, cheap housing, economy booming.
|
| What is there now? Everybody is scared shitless of war (and for a
| good reason), economy is not doing good a small guy (only for
| trillion dollar behemoths), space race is dead. Mindless
| scrolling, degradation and grinding are the only things left.
| dangus wrote:
| What this article gets wrong about this situation is that it's
| not really about caring versus not caring, it's about desperation
| moves from struggling, declining businesses versus thriving,
| growing ones ones.
|
| You won't find AI writing at The New York Times because their
| leadership has a sustainable business model. They have adapted
| well to the digital media upheaval, using their gaming, cooking,
| and product review businesses to drive up subscriptions to a
| point where subscriptions are contributing a larger share of
| revenue than they did in the print era.
|
| The Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Enquirer are papers that
| have struggled financially in ways that better-managed media
| companies have not.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| What the author is describing is an inevitable consequence that
| happens when the cost of producing something falls dramatically.
|
| It long ago happened with manufactured goods. We like to say
| "they don't make 'em like that used to", and we're right. Quality
| clothes (think "Sunday best") from, say, the early 1900s were
| incredibly well made because they were so expensive - they had to
| last for years, and people cared about the quality. A few years
| ago SNL had a skit about using Joseph A Banks suits as paper
| towels because they're so cheap as to be disposable.
|
| With journalism, while producing journalism has been (until
| recently) still pretty expensive, the distribution became so
| cheap with the Internet that you saw a flood of low quality, "who
| cares"-type content. Now, with LLMs, even the production of
| stories is getting much cheaper, so you'll see this flood of "eh,
| good enough"-quality content.
|
| The same thing is happening with software, which is why I'm glad
| to be leaving the profession. Before the Internet, it was so
| expensive to fix a bug in shipped software, so you really had to
| care about the details and making sure things were correct. With
| Internet distribution, fixing a big is super cheap, so shipping
| fast became the most important metric. Now, despite your view on
| LLMs, they should reduce the cost of making software, so you'll
| see a ton of "vibe coding, 'works well enough'" low -quality,
| "who cares" software.
| strawhatguy wrote:
| Ugh, he had a point until he brought in cutting the government as
| a _bad_ thing.
|
| Seriously, DOGE is sweating the small stuff, trying to get cuts
| where they can, and that does NOT happen from people who don't
| care. There's a lot of care there. As an analogy, when I program,
| I'm always on the lookout for performance improvements, and that
| involves cutting non-performant code and _doing less_. It 's the
| bro-coders that slap together dependencies to cobble together a
| monstrosity that don't care. Not the cutters. Cutting waste _is_
| caring.
|
| The more accurate "Who Cares?" moment is the fact Congress
| refuses to codify any cuts and in fact spends more. Just paying
| off friends, the impeding doom of our debt, when _seriously_ deep
| cuts of _everything_ will be forced, is just _shrug_.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Seriously, DOGE is sweating the small stuff, trying to get
| cuts where they can, and that does NOT happen from people who
| don't care.
|
| DOGE is a propaganda exercise (in part to provide false
| justification for policies undertaken with other motives, and
| in part as a distraction), and the appearance of energy is
| important for that.
|
| They care, but not about the thing that it is the public
| rationale.
| paidsearchguy wrote:
| Nice to know that we've got dragonwriter here, who is capable
| of reading hearts and minds
| eyesofgod wrote:
| > , who is capable of reading hearts and minds
|
| Clearly more so than yourself. Don't feel bad though, there
| are plenty of jobs for drooling retards
| asdf6969 wrote:
| It's the "Why should I care?" era
| chrisco255 wrote:
| The decline of newspaper journalism has long been observed.
| Readership has declined and along with it, salaries and talent.
| AI looks to be the final nail in the coffin. Nobody cares about
| fake articles in Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer
| because nobody reads them at all. You've got a skeleton crew
| managing the decline of a barely profitable institution with
| shrinking staff and declining YOY revenues for going on two
| decades.
|
| It used to be a staple of society to read the paper. Everyone
| read the paper. We read the feed now, and it's been that way for
| some time.
| Lichtso wrote:
| I think caring and competence do correlate.
|
| If you do not care about something you are not going to become
| competent. And once you are competent you are also more likely to
| care:
|
| E.g. once you learn a music instrument, or a craft, or the arts,
| you suddenly see all the flaws in other peoples work as well, not
| just your own. Sometimes it can even be hard to enjoy these
| things like you did back when you were ignorant.
|
| Unfortunately, if you have neither you are stuck.
| softfalcon wrote:
| The hardest thing to do in life is to care.
|
| It's easy to not care, anything bad can happen and you can
| blissfully wash your hands of it. You don't care, so it doesn't
| matter.
|
| I remember being a teenager, my defense against anything bad that
| happened to me was, "I don't care" with a snide attitude. I was
| lying, I did care, but I built up a mindset that not caring about
| anything made me stronger.
|
| As an adult, I know this is wrong. Caring requires strength.
| Caring is hard. That's why we need to do it.
|
| I recently had a conversation with a friend who is now no longer
| my friend. He said, "so, what you're saying is, you go out of
| your way to try and deeply understand as much of everything as
| you can?"
|
| I answered, "Yes. Being curious about others, issues outside of
| myself, and the world around me, is in my opinion, a moral good."
|
| His only response was, "that's not for me, that sounds
| exhausting."
|
| We started the conversation because he was openly making fun of
| other people who were not like him. He thought it was okay to
| laugh at other people for being different. To mock others if
| their differences were amusing to him.
|
| His lack of curiosity, his lack of caring for others made him a
| repulsive person. Be careful what you choose to "not care" about.
| rexpop wrote:
| Thucydides of Athens quotes Pericles as having used a specific
| term for citizens who were not interested in public affairs,
| the community, or issues beyond their own private lives:
| _idiotes_ (idiotes).
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Did the Ancients ever figure out what to do when it's near-
| impossible to be interested enough in public affairs to gain
| an accurate understanding of things, and even if one manages
| that, it's pretty much impossible to meaningfully act on that
| understanding?
|
| It's one thing when "public affairs" and affairs of your
| local community are one and the same. But modern democracies
| seem to be actively preventing citizens from being actually
| informed about anything, and the granularity of elections
| ensures people's opinions (ill-informed or otherwise) are
| uncorrelated with end results.
| Jorchime wrote:
| I wonder, how do you decide to care about something?
| whyowhy3484939 wrote:
| By experiencing the sheer existential horror that Nietzsche
| and others spoke of and coming out of it knowing the only way
| out is through. There is nothing to lean on. You decide you
| start caring and it will happen.
| const_cast wrote:
| Not caring can be a powerful tool. Anxiety and fear are the
| manifestation of too much care. Life is chaotic, and at times
| we must learn to swim with the tide.
|
| There's big things we should care about, and then there's
| little things we shouldn't. How the towels are folded, or the
| ring of water on the coffee table. When we give those things
| too much care, we transform the mundane into a battle. And
| then, every second of our everyday life becomes a battleground,
| a game of tug of war. We turn little issues into big ones that
| occupy our minds.
|
| It's a line we have to toe. Not enough care and we are husks.
| Too much care and we are an anxious, brittle mess. We have to
| pick our battles, and we have to acknowledge that not all
| battles have a winner. Sometimes, there are only losers.
| sceptic123 wrote:
| > Hanif marveled at the budget, time, and effort that went into
| crafting the two-part 90 minute podcast and how, today, there's
| no way it would have happened
|
| Meanwhile, from Pineapple Street Studios in 2024:
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-wonder-of-stevie/i...
| lesuorac wrote:
| This is seems largely expected from Dunning and Kruger's paper.
|
| The true Dunning-Kruger effect is not that low-skill individuals
| believe they're better than high-skill individuals but that low-
| skill individuals do not know what skill looks like. (Hence the
| title "Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in
| recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-
| assessments").
|
| When you cannot evaluate the output of something then _any_
| output looks good.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I think that the problem may be that people no longer believe in
| a future worth having.
|
| If society is going to fall apart _anyway_ , because of nuclear
| war/climate change/Trump/demographic collapse/soil
| depletion/microplastics/forever chemicals/peak oil/whatever, why
| should I care about trying to build a future? It won't come
| anyway. Why should I care about the quality of my work? Why
| should I care about having kids? Marriage, even? Why should I
| care about _anything_? "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we
| die" (bad advice in any era, but seductive to those fighting
| against apathy).
| bad_username wrote:
| I like to remind my colleagues at work that our most important
| commercial offering must be "Giving a Shit as a Service".
| try_the_bass wrote:
| 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 framework. I care less about
| the specifics of that framework; everyone's is slightly
| different, and I think that's a good thing overall. However, I do
| care that people apply their own frameworks consistently, and
| when they don't, I call them out on it.
|
| Still mostly just ends up with me on the receiving end of a lot
| of hate.
|
| Which is ironic, given that in my experience, the worst of it had
| come from people whose moral framework is presumably incompatible
| with hate!
|
| I care deeply about that, too, and it's really not healthy for
| me.
| ncr100 wrote:
| As a person who has dabbled in that that perspective olive,
| saying the sky is falling, and who has other people who
| actively engage in that, in his life, I think it's important to
| be aware of your own motivations. Deeply.
|
| Because, relationships are a two-way thing. If you notice
| people are being mad at you .. then know that's one of the
| "two-ways". You are doing something which triggers them. Now I
| need to be careful of course about victim blaming here, but
| assume I'm you know a fair and kind person just giving some
| orthogonal advice :-). I am.
|
| And it's not The World is just against change. It's More often
| the message, and how it is delivered.
|
| Specifically, it's the emotional weight behind the message.
| This is where it gets difficult because we're not like trained
| emotionally, by many of the western cultures.
|
| Briefly, analyze Like, why do you care? Why do you care about
| the subject that you are saying needs to be changed. And then
| you can start to think well maybe the way that I care comes out
| in terms of intonation. Or brevity. Or the way that I cut
| people off. Or the way that I force the conversation to be
| focused on my concern. Note here I am transposing me and you.
|
| And of course all of this is just my two cents based upon
| speculation, so feel free to ignore it :-)
| try_the_bass wrote:
| This isn't the first time I've received this advice, and it
| certainly won't be the last.
|
| The trouble I have with this advice is that every specific
| example or suggestion on how to change my message has
| ultimately boiled down to "soften the message enough that the
| recipient can feel okay with ignoring it."
|
| But that defeats the whole purpose! If someone is actively
| entertaining a cognitive dissonance of some kind, "softening"
| the message merely gives them the "out" they need to
| _continue to hold the dissonance_!
|
| Unfortunately, because I've been given this advice so
| frequently, and because it always ends up being "just don't
| challenge people", it comes across as rather condescending.
| I'm sure that's not your intent, but next time, please
| consider that maybe I've already done that analysis a hundred
| times over, and still reach the same conclusion.
|
| Perhaps I'm just stubbornly wrong! But I really don't think
| the issue is that; I think the issue is that we've made it
| socially unacceptable to call people out for being
| inconsistent. Just look at what the typical responses to such
| a thing are: whataboutism, radical generalization, ad
| hominems, retreat to an echo chamber, the classic gish gallop
| of tangentially-related things, etc.
|
| Perhaps what we've really made socially unacceptable is the
| admission of fault?
| acureau wrote:
| 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 there must be people who live by nothing at
| all. I don't think one approach to life is strictly better than
| the others.
|
| That's where I imagine the negativity you experience stems
| from. I don't know anyone who appreciates the imposition of
| rules on their lifestyle, regardless of how well you think
| you've profiled their framework. Especially in a casual
| setting, most people just want to get along.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| A lot of the comments complaining about working at companies with
| coworkers or leadership that don't care about hard work never
| seem to take the time to think about why that may be.
|
| In short: the problem is the customer/consumer. All of us.
|
| Who really doesn't care? The person paying. Or at least the
| median person paying. For most industries the customer does not
| care about hard work or whatever. It's always something else.
| Ongoing operations cost money. Growing costs money. In the end
| you need revenue to pay for on going work and justify investment
| or loans to help make more money. But the customer who will
| provide that needed revenue DOES NOT CARE about all these things
| we want.
|
| This happens with citizens and infrastructure. This happens with
| businesses and their internal dev teams. It happens inside FAANNG
| all the time.
|
| I don't know how to fix it, but certainly demanding change
| against an uncontrollable reality is not a sustainable solution.
| In the face of such a reality you can certainly understand how
| and why "not caring" is the only rational response.
|
| Probably the only way to escape it is to work at companies that
| are pre-revenue and have enough external investment to fund their
| operations. Oh hey...
| rglover wrote:
| I'd argue this is a byproduct of what's shown in the chart where
| productivity has continued to increase since the 1970s, but wages
| have remained flat [1]. And _that_ is a side-effect of the money
| itself being screwed up (e.g., the U.S. is nearly $37T in debt
| and though they 'll wax poetic about it...nobody really cares--
| the number just keeps goin' up).
|
| Why care when--if you're the average bear--you can work
| incessantly and never really get anywhere close to what past
| generations enjoyed? I'd prefer to live in a world where people
| cared more, but if the incentives aren't there, we can expect to
| see the amount of "care" continue to decline.
|
| This is why the "fix the money, fix the world" ethos of Bitcoin
| should be given more attention by detractors.
|
| [1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap
| gilbetron wrote:
| 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 century". People are focused
| on what's in front of them in the present. Even companies don't
| really talk about the future anymore, just vague AI thoughts (and
| often crazy negative ones, witness the CEOs talking about the
| white collar bloodbath coming).
|
| Things aren't really changing in many ways, but changing crazy
| fast in other ways, but not toward anything in particular. Maybe
| it is some sort of singularity-type thing approaching that I'm
| feeling. All I know is that my life hasn't changed much in the
| past decade. Smartphones, awesome computers, instead streams of
| videos, a sea of video games and books and music, but nothing new
| and remarkable. AI is here, probably, but that is just weird and
| terrifying, and this coming from someone that has watched and
| participated in it's development the entirety of my adult life.
|
| Instead of new categories being created, we're just optimizing
| the hell out of everything.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| > Even companies don't really talk about the future anymore,
| just vague AI thoughts (and often crazy negative ones, witness
| the CEOs talking about the white collar bloodbath coming).
|
| The currently-ascendant business and political leaders pushing
| some mix of millenarian wankery and a conspiratorial mindset
| with all the finesse of 3rd-rate carnival barkers while
| stealing everything in sight definitely has me pretty down on,
| like, anything mattering.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > Things aren't really changing in many ways, but changing
| crazy fast in other ways, but not toward anything in
| particular. Maybe it is some sort of singularity-type thing
| approaching that I'm feeling. All I know is that my life hasn't
| changed much in the past decade. Smartphones, awesome
| computers, instead streams of videos, a sea of video games and
| books and music, but nothing new and remarkable.
|
| Late 30's here, and I feel/noticed the same thing.
|
| It feels like a state of purgatory. Things are changing, I
| suppose stuff is coming out, but nothing is really new.
| Remakes, rehashes, the same trends over and over, the same
| tropes in media. The world feels "stuck" in a way that's hard
| to describe.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| 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 that we did in fact get a lot of newness. It just takes
| awhile to see what makes them distinct from mere optimizations
| of previous work. AI is no different, and we're certainly not
| approaching some singularity moment. Not anytime soon anyway.
|
| Be optimistic. Life is good. I'm 37 and keenly aware that as I
| age, I'm likely to fall into bitterness and disillusionment.
| But It's natural for everyone to go through periods like that.
| It's not your age, it's your outlook.
|
| We live in an era of almost literal magic. Being able to cure
| plagues that would have dealt so much misery that it's hard to
| imagine; having fruit at grocery stores in winter; being able
| to get from point A to point B almost effortlessly as long as
| you have the money for it; that half our children no longer die
| during child birth, along with our wives. It's easy to get
| caught up in tech-focused miracles, but the physical ones are
| often way more impactful. And we're at the beginning of tech
| miracles anyway. It's only been less than a century since
| computers became available, let alone practical. Charles
| Babbage would think he'd died and was in heaven.
|
| Be optimistic. Life is good.
| gilbetron wrote:
| I appreciate the words, and it maybe a symptom of being in my
| 50s, but kind of my entire point is that I do have experience
| with multiple decades of change, and this one feels really
| different. When cellphones and smartphones and tablets and
| laptops and LCDs and SSDs and console after console and new
| graphics cards came out previously, it was really fun. Now,
| it isn't, and hasn't for quite a few years. Maybe the
| pandemic broke things!
|
| Also, we can do some great things, but there are a lot of
| things that aren't great. Health care has some profound
| improvements, but day to day medical care is worse than 10
| years ago. There isn't much of a change in the physical world
| either. Uber was great for a while, now it is just ok. But
| otherwise flying is generally worse (although the free movies
| are a nice change), and traveling in general.
| chaosbolt wrote:
| >Bitcoin didn't seem more than an intellectual exercise when
| it was introduced.
|
| I don't know sure it's a little more than that but barely, it
| does solve a problem (the banks being centralized and
| censorship prone etc.) but another way ti solve that problem
| would've been to change the financial system.
|
| >Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students.
|
| It's not even that, people are more lonely than ever despite
| Facebook.
|
| >HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit.
|
| It's not?
|
| >An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop.
|
| An iPad is literally a dumbed down laptop, has the same chip
| as a macbook, but a totally different dumbed down OS to not
| affect macbook sales.
|
| >Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket.
|
| They're less than that in most ways except for select use
| cases.
|
| I mean sure be optimistic but those examples aren't the best.
| tines wrote:
| Your list of examples is telling; all those things do indeed
| make life easy. But is easy equivalent to good? I don't think
| so. People have more capabilities to connect, and have more
| "friends" than ever before, and people are more disconnected
| and lonely than ever before. Life is not good for a lot of
| people, despite being easier than ever for a lot of people.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Oh there is very much a future being planned. Project 2025 is
| an example. When the future was flying cars and a robot maid
| for every household, then of course it was broadcast in every
| possible medium. The planned future now is replacing the poor
| with robots and slavery for anyone still alive. Funnily enough
| they don't talk about it, and pretend it's not real if you hear
| about it.
|
| I think your point is that a vibrant future vision is
| _necessary_ to inform the present. It gives us a measure for
| peoples and corporations behavior. Don't be fooled that this is
| an accident. "Who cares" is propaganda for a very different
| future.
| delusional wrote:
| I'm in my 30s but feel pretty much the same way. It's an odd
| sort standstill where we're spinning our wheels real fast, yet
| we don't seem to move anywhere. Everything is constantly
| "changing" yet the few things i actually care about see no
| meaningful change. It's impossible to argue that we haven't
| seen big technological breakthroughs in the past decade, but
| what _real_ and _tangible_ difference have they made.
|
| My mom has a smartphone. She hates the thing. It confuses and
| scares her, but she uses it, begrudgingly, to browse Facebook.
| What does she do on Facebook? Text her friends and
| acquaintances. Nothing she couldn't do without it. It is wild
| that Facebook, the start of a cultural revolution, a trillion
| dollar company, and a technological cornerstone of the new
| internet order, is of that little utility to the user. Yet she
| still has her smartphone, pays her phone bill, and visits
| facebook for that tiny sliver of utility. She's part of the
| "modern revolution" even though it informs nothing in her life,
| which is primarily occupied by tasks in the real world.
|
| This story, in my opinion, repeats itself all over. It's
| impressive how much weight we lend to technological
| developments that don't end up materially effecting us.
| Vrondi wrote:
| Nobody talks about "life in the 22nd century" in the way they
| talked about "life in the 21st century" in recent decades,
| because for the past 24 years we've been at the _beginning_ of
| a century. Once we get halfway through the 21st century, the
| talk about "life in the 22nd century" will really ramp up.
| gilbetron wrote:
| Except people in the first quarter of the 20th century did
| talk about the 21st century.
|
| https://www.upworthy.com/11-ridiculous-future-predictions-
| fr...
| asadotzler wrote:
| You apparently never learned about the 1939 New York World's
| Fair's "The World of Tomorrow" expo. That didn't wait for the
| century half way point. How about the 1900 Paris Expo and the
| 1933 Chicago World's Fair, which both also featured
| predictions and prototypes of future technologies that got
| everyone from workers to sci-fi writers focused on flying
| cars and moving sidewalks.
|
| Hardly anyone on this site has any sense of history and
| people just make shit up about the past. How sad to see a
| once intellectual forum turn into another Reddit or Twitter.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I've heard of those - and while I never really dug into
| details of what was presented or why, I believe I got the
| overall _vibe_ of those expos - and that vibe is, sadly,
| missing today.
| tim333 wrote:
| 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.
| dividefuel wrote:
| Among average people, it seems there's widespread understanding
| that things are collectively getting worse. The next 50 years
| are more likely to bring turmoil than prosperity, with climate
| change, AI, and political instability all getting worse every
| year.
|
| Meanwhile, day-to-day improvements don't seem that beneficial.
| Sure the Internet is all around us and it is a powerful tool,
| but it's also led to a lot of social unhappiness. Even the
| tools that have been part of society for a long time feel
| cheaper and more fragile than ever.
| whyowhy3484939 wrote:
| I'm nearing forty and I have a sneaky suspicion it's a weird
| cultural thing. A bit like the Romans lamenting the fall of
| their culture right at the start of their golden age and they
| never stopped doing that. Always looking back saying shit sucks
| now and how in the old days everything centered on competence
| and morality. Men were actual men back then. That sort of
| thing. Some parts of it might have made a tad kind of sense,
| but a lot of it was baloney.
|
| I suspect we're becoming more realistic now about the nature of
| our civilization. There won't be any riding of laser-shooting
| cybernetic unicorns and we have to come to terms with that.
| There's adulting to do now. We have some climate issues and we
| have to deal with wealth inequality and finding and maintaining
| proper forms of government (worldwide). The laser-shooting
| unicorns have become the "maybe we can sort of survive as a
| species" and we need that. We always needed that, but we were
| too busy watching Terminator and playing GTA.
|
| I'm not convinced it's all bad. Maybe some societal existential
| depression is called for and perhaps we'll awaken from our funk
| with some fresh ideas.
| mdavid626 wrote:
| Brace yourself -- it'll get only worse. The geene is out of the
| bottle and not possible to put it back. Software engineering will
| become everything, but engineering.
|
| I consider myself as someone who cares and takes pride in
| creating software. I barely can take working in the industry
| anymore... It's time to become a goose farmer.
| ncr100 wrote:
| In my opinion:
|
| It comes down to values, of the people that you are working
| with, and of the market in which your groups people is
| operating.
|
| If you can dial those things in to match your own proclivities
| about how you like to be treated, then you're golden.
| mdavid626 wrote:
| The problem is, most of the people, including me, can't.
| clolege wrote:
| What's stopping you?
| cloudpushers wrote:
| Totally. This isn't just an AI issue, it's a reflection of a
| larger shift where speed and cost-efficiency matter more than
| accuracy or intent. AI just amplifies the effects. When every
| step of the process is driven by "good enough," you end up with
| work that no one really stands behind beyond a seed round.
| ncr100 wrote:
| This is also called the Accountability Gap.
| MinimalAction wrote:
| I entirely resonate with this article. It is true that most
| people don't care these days; empathy is a resource that is
| hardly spent/utilized on others. It is also true that there is
| just way too much to care. There are two different kinds of being
| overwhelmed going on here.
| quantadev wrote:
| I think the "Who Cares Era" (great name btw) is able to continue
| down this path because really the entire business purpose
| nowadays for any online content is simply AD Delivery.
|
| If the website can successfully prove to the advertisers that
| some human likely did indeed view the ADs then it's "mission
| accomplished". It matters very little what the content contains,
| as long as the AD revenue stream (the only revenue stream for
| most online sites) keeps rolling in. So really the only text to
| get right is the "Clickbait Titles" and "Clickbait Imagery".
|
| So the longer canonical form of our Era is "Who Cares, We Made
| Some Money...Era"
| Animats wrote:
| > Hanif Abdurraqib, in one of his excellent Instagram mini-essays
| the other week, wrote about the rise of content that's designed
| to be consumed while doing something else. In Hanif's case, he
| was writing about Time Machine, his incredible 90 minute deep
| dive into The Fugees' seminal album The Score. Released in 2021,
| Hanif marveled at the budget, time, and effort that went into
| crafting the two-part 90 minute podcast and how, today, there's
| no way it would have happened.
|
| Expecting people to pay full-time attention to 90 minutes of
| talking about some hip-hop group from the 1990s is a big ask.
| pchristensen wrote:
| On the flip side, most people shouldn't pay attention to it,
| but for those that care, it's an incredible gift of creation.
| flkiwi wrote:
| I keep experiencing absolutely mediocre middle manager types
| challenge my feedback in my area of professional certification
| and expertise by citing, with great confidence, "I asked ChatGPT
| and..." The outsourcing of the most basic thinking by people who
| would rather do anything other than think is, paradoxically,
| creating a bonanza for people like me who end up having to do the
| thinking for them (and clean up their messes). And yet they
| continue to fail upward.
|
| I'm not even anti-AI. I use these tools all the time to make
| "zeroth draft" documents that I can build on. It actually saves
| me a lot of time! But everything is in service of me delivering
| products I care very, very much about getting right, and I don't
| assume their output is anything other than very sophisticated
| text autocompletion.
| neilv wrote:
| > _challenge my feedback in my area of professional
| certification and expertise by citing, with great confidence,
| "I asked ChatGPT and..."_
|
| This might be a variation on one I've seen a few times: I'm an
| expert on something, and advising someone who wants to instead
| go with advice from their friend who isn't even involved.
|
| (And who usually has little-to-no experience in the thing. But
| it's like calling up your nephew at Google to ask why your
| computer is slow. After the knowledgeable neighbor who looked
| at it already told them it's because they have very little RAM,
| and they're pushed into swap by this one program they
| installed. But the Google nephew hears "home PC slow", says
| they probably picked up a bunch of malware, and to reinstall
| Windows, and please stop calling during work hours.)
|
| I think this can be a psychological quirk, or social dynamics
| pressure, or an inability to assess competence due to a lack of
| understanding of the field/subfield.
|
| If I had to guess, I'd say the last one is probably the factor
| in being overruled by ChatGPT.
|
| One end-run around that is to have some validation of your
| expertise in the decision-maker's mind, and it might be stupid.
| For example, in the minds of some decision-makers, if the
| person has some credential they value ("They went to MIT!",
| "They worked at Google!", "I'm paying out the nose for their
| consulting fee!") the decision-maker will put a lot more weight
| on that person. Maybe even more weight than they give the
| ChatGPT superintelligence they imagine. It's nice to be
| listened to, even if it's for the wrong reasons.
| flkiwi wrote:
| That's the funny part: decision-makers never cause this issue
| for me. They, generally speaking, are deeply aware of what
| they don't know and welcome my input.
|
| It's always the climbers, the middling intellect crowd that
| play the petty dominance and status games in a large
| organization, believe that their advancement is enabled by
| unwavering confidence. I say they keep rising but there's a
| limit--they generally end up at the top of the peon pyramid
| but never ascend to the very highest leadership roles. But,
| unfortunately, I still have to deal with them.
| neilv wrote:
| If you have the misfortune to deal with that category of
| corporate specimen, additional reasons for why they might
| disregard good advice:
|
| * Option A (bad choice for company) has some angle upside
| for them, such as something they can credit to themselves
| or that increases their status, but option B (the best
| choice for the company) would be owned by one of their
| rivals.
|
| * Loss of face, such the best option for the company would
| too clearly expose and reverse a mistake they made (when
| they and/or the org doesn't believe in acknowledging
| mistakes).
|
| * (Speculating about some weirder ones) They are all about
| confidence projection, as you say, and further, they've
| come to believe their own BS. (Maybe this falls under the
| psych quirks I mentioned earlier.)
|
| So the confidence in ChatGPT, or in anything else, might
| not be irrational or misinformed, but merely part of their
| internal sales act for selfish advantage.
|
| Fortunately, I haven't run into any of these problems a
| lot, but have enough experience to know they can happen.
| Today, I would recognize some BS quickly, and move to
| confirm and correct it, and probably leave if there was too
| much uncorrected BS.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Dude it is exhausting. Just existing - working, exercising,
| maintaining the house - is enough to make me tired at the end of
| the day (and I don't even have kids). It's frankly just overload.
| The capitalist machine is in its end game.
| gecko6 wrote:
| CS Lewis on the dangers of caring too much:
|
| "It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the
| sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each
| village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it
| can help, and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to
| fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become
| an escape from the works of charity we really can do for those we
| know.) A great many people now seem to think that the mere state
| of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don't think it is.
| We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others; but even
| while we're doing it, I think we're meant to enjoy our Lord and,
| in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, your jokes, and the
| birdsong and the frosty sunrise."
| didgetmaster wrote:
| Devious people used to try and hide unpleasant or harmful
| information. Now they obfuscate it by surrounding it with a
| boatload of irrelevant information.
|
| Important contract terms are buried in a 100 page mortgage
| contract. Wasteful government spending on someone's pork project
| is on page 980 of a 2000 page spending bill that no one reads
| before voting on it.
| Evenjos wrote:
| The who cares era is just a symptom of the unaccountability
| machinery of our era.
|
| It's hard to care or be passionate when you are certain that
| anything you produce which is worthwhile or original will be
| crushed, lost in the ocean of slop.
| broabprobe wrote:
| there's a lot to unpack here. Makes me think of the This Is Fine
| meme. People know the room is burning around them but they just
| don't have enough bandwidth to address it.
| mobileturdfctry wrote:
| I'm simply pulling from my personal experience / interactions
| I've had with AI chatbots when I say this, but from my
| perspective anyone who considers AI a "mediocrity machine" is
| doing it wrong.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Mussolini's motto was "me ne frego", literally "I don't care".
| Seems fitting.
| devnull2 wrote:
| Actually, it meant something else:
|
| From: https://overland.org.au/2018/06/a-brief-fascist-history-
| of-i...
|
| The meaning of 'Me ne frego'
|
| The proud Black-Shirt motto 'I don't care' written on the
| bandages that cover a wound isn't just an act of stoic
| philosophy or the summary of a political doctrine. It's an
| education to fighting, and the acceptance of the risks it
| implies. It's a new Italian lifestyle. This is how the Fascist
| welcomes and loves life, while rejecting and regarding suicide
| as an act of cowardice; this is how the Fascist understands
| life as duty, exaltation, conquest. A life that must be lived
| highly and fully, both for oneself but especially for others,
| near and far, present and future.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Yes but it also translated into a form of carelessness. And
| definitely mediocrity.
| superultra wrote:
| 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 Everything. The David's (Graeber and Wingrow) describe
| how the fundamentally most interesting attribute of humans is how
| much we tinker.
|
| I love this article because it shares those same values. It's so
| crucial for us to reject abject passivity and even when things
| seem impossible, to tinker and play and never assume that
| everything is as it will be.
| crawsome wrote:
| Caring takes time, so it's a currency.
|
| Triage your caring like you handle high or low priority requests
| in any other job you would. Being mindful of what is consuming
| your time and your brain's free cycles is so imporant.
|
| Some people have become burned-out of caring, and it's dangerous.
| Burned-out by the internet pulling at their attention all the
| time, their phone notifications blasting to them telling them
| something is important but it isn't. Breaking news, but it's
| about a celebrity's dramatic encounter at a rewards event, and
| not about our politicians stealing from us.
|
| The era of smartphones have made us emotionally stunted and and
| opposite of mindful.
| tim333 wrote:
| I care about what I consider important stuff, say the war in
| Ukraine and will it be WW3 or not. I really see no reason why I
| should care whether some mediocre supplement or podcast I've not
| heard of was done with AI or not. Is there some reason I should
| care about that?
| rossant wrote:
| Some people may also feel that nothing matters, since they're
| convinced we'll all end up dead in a nuclear or climate
| apocalypse anyway.
| tuckerpo wrote:
| The canonical life vectors people used to align themselves to,
| largely school -> university -> job -> marriage -> house in the
| suburbs, are long dead. They don't work anymore. They don't even
| exist for most people. And the worst part is that for a huge
| swath of the population, life outcomes are no longer a function
| of personal agency. Not entirely.
|
| I grew up poor. Trailer park, unemployed father, chronically ill
| mother. I did the "right" things, got degrees, worked my ass off
| in tech, climbed the ladder. And now, at 30, with a high
| household income, I still can't afford a single-family home near
| my job. The American Dream has been geographically priced out of
| existence. It's a tautology: you need to be near economic
| opportunity, but that proximity makes the spoils of that
| opportunity unattainable.
|
| And let's say I could buy a house without draining my savings and
| becoming house-poor, what would I be buying? New builds are
| laughably bad. Developers optimize for speed and cost-cutting,
| not longevity or quality. Even the "luxury" apartment I rent,
| which was built in 2018 in a fairly affluent area, is $3k/month
| for water leaks, a cracked foundation, bargain-bin appliances,
| and slanted floors. It's a high-cost, low-trust ecosystem.
| Everywhere.
|
| What's replaced those dead pathways is a schizophrenically
| fragmented collective ethos. A thousand micro-cultures screaming
| past each other about what actually matters. For some, it's
| hustle and the entrepreneurial grindset. For others, political
| purity. Or aesthetic curation. Or spiritual awakening. Or
| personal brand optimization. Some chase passive income, others
| clout, others raw dopamine. One group preaches family values and
| self-reliance; another insists that simply surviving is
| oppression unless all conditions are ideal.
|
| There's no coherent worldview to plug into anymore. Just a buffet
| of ideologies, all half-digested and shilled beyond recognition.
| Each individual has to construct their own belief system out of
| whatever cultural detritus they happen to trip over. And the
| result is a populace with no shared reference point, just
| competing, incompatible theories of meaning, each as brittle and
| anxious as the next. A non-stop race to the bottom.
|
| And when nobody can agree on what matters, nobody bothers to
| care. A Boeing tech doesn't torque the bolt on a 787 properly
| because, why would he? No one else seems to care. Drivers treat
| public roads like a demolition derby because enforcement is a
| joke. People skip car insurance entirely because the odds of
| meaningful consequences are laughably low. If you're in a fender
| bender, just drive away! Nothing will happen to you. Steal stuff
| from the supermarket, nothing will happen. Why pay taxes for your
| small business? You're never getting audited! See an old lady
| getting mugged in an alley? Meh, not my problem. Nothing compels
| people to act in the collective interest anymore... not law, not
| shame, not pride.
|
| The U.S. increasingly feels less like a country and more like a
| clown-show economic zone designed not to nurture citizens, but to
| extract from them, manufacturing wealth from thin air for a
| rentier class while selling everyone else the illusion of
| mobility. Unless you were born into money, got absurdly lucky
| with crypto, or won a scam lawsuit, the system is rigged to keep
| you running in place, and spare me the cope about "the best time
| in history," when modern medicine is a privatized racket pushing
| pills over care and our "peacetime" economy is bankrolled by an
| endless carousel of proxy wars and every tech "innovation" in the
| last 15 years is just a new medium to drill ads into people's
| lives.
|
| As Jon Blow once said, we live in a profoundly unserious country.
| And the logical endpoint of that unseriousness is a culture of
| nihilism, malaise, and quiet surrender. How do you fix it, or is
| it simply too far gone?
| mobileturdfctry wrote:
| One thing I learned about my career in tech. Small companies tend
| to operate a little more so as meritocracies than large
| corporations.
|
| The real incentive in large corporations / organizations seems to
| be about "building strong relationships / trust with people in
| power". Not about "becoming good at what you do".
|
| This incentive structure was probably fine in a "post-industrial
| age", but is very wrong for the "information age". Eventually I
| think this way of thinking / organizing will go away via natural
| selection , but probably (sadly) not until most of us are dead.
| Because there are so many entrenched interests who espouse this
| kind of hierarchy.
| mobileturdfctry wrote:
| The part about "caring" that I think requires nuance to get to
| the heart of the issue:
|
| I used to seek out tough challenges that had tight deadlines.
| Early in my career. This helped me gain a lot of knowledge about
| my craft. However, now that I've acquired a lot of knowledge I
| don't go actively seeking work I'm not being asked to do. It's
| not because I don't care, but it's because I value my life
| outside of work.
|
| The other part of this is that there were never tangible rewards,
| such as a raise or promotion (besides the experience I acquired)
| so at this stage in my career by asking to do extra work and
| spend more stressful hours in a salaried job environment for
| nothing in return would ultimately be a bad decision on my part.
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