Somehow the sexual revolution of the 60s/70s running out of steam, and a correction taking place. A growing influence of American culture as well as Muslim immigrants, both more conservative. And perhaps feminism changing course.
The status quo is so bizarre. Human life has no inherent value unless it makes continuous contributions to "the economy". It would be economically most efficient to drop dead on the day you retire. Thanks, human!
All of this to keep a machine running that wrecks the planet and everything living on it, including ourselves. Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy.
At some point we lost the plot. The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.
> Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy.
You mean that 50% of the economy is bullshit that you think nobody should ask for. You and I may agree that developer at an online gambling company is economically useless, but the their boss certainly doesn't and the gamblers probably don't either.
Even if we accept your premise, you can't just assume that tanking the economy will only cut out the useless jobs instead of the useful ones. Useful jobs are perhaps more likely to survive, but that's not always going to be the case. During the next recession, people will more likely give up on a solar roof than give up gambling.
> The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.
People's lives are objectively improving. It mostly just happening in Asia though. It requires a lot of money to build power plants, hospitals, and water towers, and much of that was financed by selling "useless" trinkets from the West.
Sometimes people fail to recognize that the oldest super powerful artificial intelligence is several hundred years old. It’s our economic system.
It’s the software running on all our “wet ware” that convinces us to value productivity and money over human life, the environment, or happiness. It is the paper clip maximizer and it’s happily churning away.
But we’re not maximizing paper clips we’re maximizing profits .
What does it mean to value human life? I would argue that the economic engine has given us ALL of the improvements in quality of life, and the fact that we live so much longer than we used to, IS valuing human life. There is no other way we could have given ourselves all of the amazing things (tech-wise) we have today.
Why would we value the environment over human lives? That just seems like nature-worship.
> The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.
If trees could just all agree to remain short, they wouldn't need to waste resources to outgrow each other to reach sunlight.
> Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy.
Obviously this cannot be true. "The economy" isn't some magical object somewhere, but the emergent behavior from all our needs, desires and faults. If something is truly not wanted by anyone, nobody will pay for the work to get done. That's the magic of the invisible hand of capitalism. Doing stuff that truly nobody wants and getting paid for it is usually more of a feature of socialism and bureaucracies.
There are cases where individual motive leads to macro behavior that's not desirable by any individual, those are the cases where we need to tax negative externalities or regulate, depending on the problem. These issues usually don't emerge though because nobody wants something but because too many wanting a thing creates side effects that nobody likes. The book Micromotived and Macro behavior by Thomas Schelling covers that nicely.
Just look at the huge amount of money being invested into advertising, PR, and marketing. That industry is mostly focused on finding psychological tricks to manipulate us into wanting things we just don't need, in various ways.
One of the best known examples is the PR-manufactured tradition of diamonds in engagement rings, which sky-rocketed the demand for diamonds in the general population.
Another great example is the huge industry of "supplements" which is legalized fraud on a massive scale, selling useless pills to people with a promise of making them better in some way, and relying solely on the fact that it's hard to prove that they don't actually do anything since their claims are so vague.
These are prime examples of entirely artificial demand created out of whole cloth through manipulation. There are numerous other cases of more subtle effects, where marketing is significantly inflating a demand which would exist but be much smaller otherwise (toys, smartphone upgrades, new cars every few years, beauty products, fashion etc).
>but that want is itself manufactured by the economy.
Is that an issue? There's not much demand for 8k ohm SMD resistors from people, but people do want smartphones that require 8k ohm SMD resistors to manufacture. The same applies for stuff like managers and other "bullshit jobs". Nobody wants them, but they're nonetheless required to keep the company/economy humming along. And if they're actually not required, then the economy that supposedly cares what's "economically most efficient" should have eliminated them.
I think the previous poster may be thinking more along the lines of a Mickey Mouse shaped bar of soap, rather than an important component of something useful, like resistors.
There is a mountain of trash end-products out there, which marketing is creating the want for. These products may not otherwise exist without the manufactured want, and could be removed entirely without much detriment to the very small amount of people that conscientiously decided of their own free will they wanted that product.
Marketing is what makes something like a Peloton a viable business, rather than those customers just taking a regular static bike and adding a tablet mount to the handlebars.
In some senses, I think the economy isn't always looking for the most efficient methods. I believe there is some political input involved to keep everybody's heads down under a quagmire of pointless work, so those people (even in a democracy) don't start asking too many questions. Some people could easily be automated out of work, yet they aren't, despite the efficiency it would bring.
To each their own, but I'd be fine with a huge amount of (what I deem) useless products and jobs being removed from the market. Most serve very little real purpose and as somebody else stated, are destroying our planet and wasting away the best years of our lives to attain them.
I would frame it with a different emphasis. Want is inherent to living organisms, humans and others alike. The economy discovers, amplifies, and satisfies our wants. But it is also important to remember that economies emergent, not some external object imposed on humans.
Don't confuse the metrics with the thing itself. The economy is not metrics in the human mind. The economy is me liking Envy apples more than disgusting Red Delicious apples and buying Envy instead. The economy is an employee getting a good offer to fill a need a company has and going back to their current employer to find out who will pay them more / gets more value from them and it's willing to thus pay more. Things like the GDP just try to approximate the sum of all these actions and exchanges.
It most certainly is and I have not encountered anything to indicate otherwise. Individual transactions are no more relevant than GDP is. These are individual metrics or acts that influence those metrics, which try to quantify aspects of an aggregate concept.
You’re comparing decades of productivity going to capital to debt incurred within the last half decade (“Here's where the money went”).
The US does have a lot of sovereign debt, no doubt, but that’s not why Labor isn’t seeing a greater share of the productivity gains since the 70s. A loss of collective labor power and 10% of the country owning 89% of public equities gets us here.
To arrived at an improved end state, one would need more unions and labor organizing, as well as perhaps ratcheting down the work week to 4 days.
I presented a chart going back to 1970. It covers the time period in question. It shows an enormous increase in government per-person spending. Why do you think that has nothing to do with where did the money from the productivity increase go?
> why Labor isn’t seeing a greater share of the productivity gains since the 70s
Globalization seems like a major factor that's often ignored for that. We had productivity gains. We didn't benefit from them as much as expected because people in Asia had bigger productivity gains. Joe six pack now competes with people in China working 996 instead of just his neighbors like in the 70s.
The other political sports team cuts taxes for the rich too. For instance they recently removed the cap on the SALT tax deduction which primarily benefits rich people, largely in coastal cities, i.e. those most likely to vote for and donate to them.
This isn’t true - the cap on SALT tax deduction hasn’t changed since it was put in place in 2017.
Some members of congress, apparently from both major parties, are proposing legislation to raise the cap from $10,000 to $100,000 or otherwise raise or remove the cap. But these proposals are not certain to go anywhere.
Ha ha ha. If you taxed 100% of the wealth of the wealthiest (Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, John Kerry, et al - everyone worth say over $100 million) amongst us, you wouldn't even make a dent in the national debt. And I mean take every nickel they have, the national debt will still be out of control. The old saw that tax cuts for the wealthiest increases the national debt is an argument that simply cannot stand up to scrutiny.
The French are sometimes ridiculed for their "unrealistic" worker demands but as a Dutch person, I greatly admire their unity.
Here in the Netherlands, we pride ourselves on our "polder model", a trinity of government, employers and unions that come to a consensus, hence no need to strike. That system worked well for some decades hence society runs on auto pilot.
Trouble is, due to globalization and ever more temp contracts (fire at will), the power of unions have been decimated and the combination government/employers are calling the shots, slowly eating away at worker rights.
Our "holy" retirement age used to be 65, unchanged for a huge amount of time. It was declared as unsustainable to keep it that way, instead it should become a rolling number, coupled with life expectancy. My pension fund predicts my retirement age at about 70.5.
This change was pushed through because keeping it at 65 would cost 5B per year for the foreseeable future. Absolutely unaffordable for our tiny country.
40B in support to keep businesses open during COVID though...just pulled from a hat. 25B in energy compensation so that households don't freeze to death...arranged in mere weeks.
Just saying...unaffordable means no political will.
Anyway, regardless of the money mechanics, retiring at 70+ is absurd. It effectively means no retirement at all. I know a huge amount of boomers, many were able to retire at 58-62, especially blue collar. Most by then already were in poor health but managed to pull off a decent decade of rest and joy with still some activity like going on holidays.
By 70 it's over. Some dead, the others depleted. Their partner may have died. They have severe health issues. No energy or will power left to truly have one more adventurous run. Hobbies abandoned. Health and quality of life declines exponentially. 60-70 and 70-80 are not the same thing.
Further, nobody actually wants these old people at work. Blue collar people are broken by then and white collar is either obsolete and outdated or strongly discriminated. I'm in my 40s and struggling to stay relevant.
The point of my rant is that there's always an economic reason to make workers' lives shittier. Always. Every time there's a rational reason to do so that seems to make sense. And that's how you end up working as a couple for 50 years straight. It's never going to be enough.
Only with unity as seen in France can you call out their bluff.
The age should actually be 60 and we should be having ever shorter worker weeks. A concept I call "time for wealth". In the future we probably have to do with less stuff. But it's not a vision for the future to say to people that their wealth is under pressure whilst still needing to work themselves to death.
Hence, we trade that wealth for time. You learn to live with less material goods which increases your appreciation of them. More durable/reparable products. Higher prices because externalities are included. Doesn't have to be bad at all, restoring some sanity here. In return for this material "poverty", you get more economic security, more free time, retire earlier. Also fits in well with our AI future that will disrupt work.
I think that's a vision people can get behind, and we'll still leave the door open for the super achievers that want more stuff.
My take on this is that bizarre as it is, most companies do not seem to care much about productivity in the first place.
If you look at the typical knowledge worker (non-manager) today, they're drowning in meetings, chat and email. Leaving tiny snippets of time to do actual work, perhaps as little as 2 hours per day.
I find it absolutely baffling how there doesn't seem to be any serious effort to address most of your productive base being spent on communication. Basically, people spent most of their time figuring out what they're even supposed to do, and when, and precious little time actually doing that.
This is why the 4 day work week works. I'll repeat it again as this is a key insight: This is why the 4 day work week works.
It's not because of a better "work life balance", as much as I love to believe that. It's because a 5 day work week has overhead as high as 50-75% where no actual work gets done. So to cut back from 5 days to 4 days, you just scrap the least useful meetings/chats/email whilst you continue to do the 25% we used to call actual work.
In other words, when your employees work a day less and still are just as productive, you should be embarrassed and have a serious issue in your organization. And sadly, this issue seems to be the norm, and somehow gets no attention at all.
Collaboration is not the solution, it's the fucking problem. In a utopian work state, you'd give me a work package that is clearly specified and I'll get to work. I wouldn't need 17 meetings to understand what you even mean, report status 3 times per day to 50 people, call 3 vendors to resolve dependencies, get a sign-off from 5 internal institutes or be pulled into 20 directions at once regarding 7 other projects.
We should spend less time on the crazy outcomes of these institutes and more time on why they can even exist in the first place. They are somehow funded yet not accountable to anyone.
Nobody asked for this, it doesn't help anyone, and it cannot survive the most basic scrutiny of the public or market. And yet it exists and even grows. Rather than playing whack-a-mole with outcomes, the underlying mechanism should be explored.
My unscientific take on it is that it is not a matter of real belief, instead a matter of fear. Case in point, businesses do not really care about things like DEI, but a series of impactful lawsuits has scared them senseless. Hence they dress up the optics of DEI to stay out of trouble.
Similarly, universities are under pressure to appear "on the right side of history" by aggressive student activists, fueled by the flames of BLM, MeToo, whichever other social justice outrage. Hence, they dress up an extensive administration and force it upon all staff as part of their performance review: demonstrate the 3 ways in which you contributed to the cause this year. It doesn't matter if you believe in any of it, just do it regardless. Since none is equipped to do anything actually useful (livable wages, accessible healthcare and housing, etc) the next best thing is some imagined micro aggression.
Not to mention, the amount of violence committed by members of these outrage groups against whoever stands in their way - primarily towards the "offending" group or class they're prejudiced against, particularly whites, males, and straight sexual orientation.
Worse, this violence often goes unaccounted for with impunity, without penalty, because people are terrified of the consequences of criticizing these groups, whether that's losing friends, family, or jobs that are too closely attached to these justice movements, while quite blatantly refusing to acknowledge that these movements have grifted the crap out of our world, as we find that their leaders and spokespeople are everything from: disingenuous scammers using donation money entirely for self-serving purposes that do not advance their cause, all the way to being convicted child sex traffickers (Fox: BLM, reports from 2020).
But to condemn these movements for these reasons is nearly suicide in a society obsessed with staying in line with the "current thing", without scrutiny.
I don't think it makes sense to argue against the logic of identity politics by actively identifying as a victim, that only reproduces the very logic you are critiquing, since it is they who also view themselves as victims and who seek retribution for perceived violence against them as an identity group. This is the logic of Nazism at its core, and when you use it to defend traditional values it becomes even more blatantly obvious.
The horror (for you) is realizing that now this very same logic has been adopted by neo-liberal forces who seek to use radical politics not for freedom but to impose an even stricter, more terrible form of security, where it's not that people aren't allowed to speak their minds but rather that they police themselves first, they are unconsciously compelled to limit the range of acceptable discourse. Anybody who criticizes this regime is prevented by Corporate America from finding employment, effectively starving and killing them. Its fortunate that we have protected freedom of speech (at least in the US), but freedom of speech is not in the interest of our corporate masters and this regime of power limits it to the utmost degree for nobody in particular (since nobody benefits from this, in truth), but simply to serve a vast architecture of domination that most individuals in power are not even aware of, or aware they are being subjected too.
What most people fail to see is how neoliberal politics are WORSE than fascism--its almost like an advanced form of fascism, where the organized chaos of the market is utilized to rapidly generate victimhood and individual identities which rapidly alienate and atomize each and every person in society, who then believes their struggles are theirs alone, that resistance to power is futile because everyone fights their own battles, and that its not worth it to talk to anyone who isn't a member of your "identity", the numbers of which are so vast that it becomes impossible for anyone to talk to anyone else who has a difference of opinion, staying inside their little social bubbles which only interact through the means the very same technology and infrastructure employed in that domination.
I guess you could say that, it leaves room for resistance. And its become so intolerable to the vast majority of people that almost nobody seriously considers adopting it as a political system. Meanwhile, childhood suicide rates might be sky-rocketing, there might be vast sexual dissatisfaction and income inequality, not to mention the degradation of the natural world itself, but people will still say its the "best system we have", sounding like a prisoner who has given up on getting out. I don't think the future is some authoritarian system that they have in China, its basically the same over there (if not worse), but why have we given up on building a better society? The spread of Nihlism disgusts me.
I will admit aging population might be contributing to these problems, but at least the US is not projected to lose any population in the next 30 years because of immigration. For the nation states in the world, however...well, there isn't going to be much "nation" left in them if they want to survive the next few decades.
As I said, I don't think fascism is really even possible today, what people call "fascist" doesn't at all resemble the regimes of the 30s and 40s. Its as if people think that the far-right is perpetuating violence at a scale different from the center. It doesn't matter who is "in charge", the state has become invested primarily in creating a vast architecture of surveillance and control which cannot be legally challenged because the state, whether or not they claim it, acts with sovereign immunity, since we only ever got rid of the king, not the apparatus which supports him.
It would be better to say that our current form of government (around the world) is a like a more advanced form of fascism, its worse than fascism and its a more severe form of domination that is so subtle that most people can't see it, and if they were shown how they were being kept under control, they would try to forget as soon as possible. The fact that so many on the far-right are coming to power is predictable: one form of identity politics begets another. But it does not actually indicate a change to the status quo to me. Remember, the capitol rioters only wanted to keep things the same.
Unfortunately I don't spend my days bookmarking videos on Twitter to share with people who are interested just enough to criticize these claims with strawmen / other fallacies, but too disinterested to seek the evidence readily available to them from news sources they've written off entirely.
I can't help you there. Now, I don't mean to assume you fall within the category I described above, but that's usually the case when people ask for examples, when they already know where to look, but don't wish to.
Not every online discussion has to be a formal debate with months of preparation. Sorry I didn't "have my papers" handy.
If you're interested, you'll go looking on Twitter, Telegram, etc. on your own accord. If you're not, you'll resort to gaslighting and smug nonsense. Simple.
I'm just asking for a simple link of things you've seen. Nothing more. Not a paper, or anything else, or research. Just a simple news article to prove you didn't just make it up. But I guess that's too much to ask.
I keep up to date on the news and don't see this violence you speak of, I've done my due diligence.
>Similarly, universities are under pressure to appear "on the right side of >history" by aggressive student activists, fueled by the flames of BLM, MeToo, >whichever other social justice outrage.
Oh is Turning Point USA not a social justice group
They're legally required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its consequences. Let me explain:
The act prohibits discrimination on several protected characteristics, and the Supreme Court has expanded that to cover even things that merely correlate with those characteristics, unless an employer can convincingly show those characteristics are required [1].
But how can employers shield themselves from the legal risk of a discrimination lawsuit, when "discriminating" is so vaguely defined? By showing they engaged in "best effort" not to discriminate, which means mouthing all the right platitudes, employing ever-evolving "best practices", and having departments devoted to the cause (first HR, now DEI).
It's a red queen's race to be the most progressive and anti-racist, plus positive-reinforcement as the alumni of these institutions take up influential positions in society, and these are the results after 60 years of it. Any corporation, school, or university that goes against it, that merely tries to stay neutral, will fall behind and be made a legal and PR example of [2].
Very few companies have DEI programs. DEI isn't a trend because it's a defense against specious discrimination suits. It's a trend because it's fashionable. The argument in your last paragraph is thus easily falsified.
A message board strategic tip: if you're going to try to make an argument about how antiracism is overreaching in our society --- which should be a layup! --- try to do it without citing an overt racist to support your argument.
Though I'm sure if you look at all companies, including every corner store, hair salon, and taco shop, the proportion of DEI initiatives and HR departments falls.
> It's a trend because it's fashionable.
And it's fashionable in part because any company where it's not encouraged is in legal peril.
That's obviously false. There are over 1.7MM corporations in the US and over 7MM partnerships and sole proprietorships, and you've attempted to characterize all of them by a sample of the 100 hugest of them. There are all sorts of things the F100 has that the median company doesn't, almost none of them owing to legal peril.
Hold on, that sample is a sample of the biggest ones! That’s a fair sample! Amazon having a DEI program and mom and pop hardware store not having one do not weigh equally on the scale!
Why do I need to do that to defend the specific, factual point that DEI efforts are common in American workplaces? It’s not a value judgement, it’s just a fact.
I never said anything about whether "companies have DEI programs out of legal necessity". The parent poster made a claim about "every Fortune 100 company" and you said that claim was unrepresentative.
That is not true, and that is what I said and all I am saying now.
They're not sued for not having a DEI program, but for vaguely and broadly defined "discrimination". Having a DEI program is a defense against such accusations.
It's highly likely. Much likelier than the idea that having anti-discrimination so broadly enforced that a mere IQ test is illegal would not cause corporations to take steps to reduce legal risks.
But you are correct, my evidence is circumstantial, and if you really want to disbelieve such basic inference, you can. I'm sure you apply this degree of skepticism evenly.
Your argument is that every single company with a DEI program is doing so out of concern for a legal threat so amorphous that we can't come up with a single instance of it happening --- or, for that matter, even circumstantial evidence, such as a correlation between the deployment of DEI programs and the number of discrimination lawsuits. By implication, you are also arguing that all the companies running these programs don't believe the things they're saying, but rather have been coerced into saying them. These are extraordinary claims, for which you have offered no evidence.
IQ tests, for what it's worth, are not in fact illegal in employment situations. I can name large software companies that were using them as recently as a few years ago. Of course, they're a cringeworthy affectation and a strong signal of a shop you'd never want to work in, but being off-putting isn't illegal, as over 10 years of my own activity on Hacker News should amply establish.
For my part: I am not a fan of institutional DEI programs. But I'm even less a fan of the rhetorical frame that suggests that literally everything and everybody involved in them is operating in bad faith.
> By implication, you are also arguing that all the companies running these programs don't believe the things they're saying, but rather have been coerced into saying them
I'm arguing no such thing. Hiring of people that espouse and practice DEI has been legally incentivized. Whether they believe in them or not doesn't matter, and after the law got the ball rolling (and made sure it stays rolling even in companies that otherwise wouldn't cooperate), it's perfectly likely lots of true believers would also join.
In fact, I implied the opposite in my root comment ("plus positive-reinforcement as the alumni of these institutions take up influential positions in society"), which you would have known if you weren't busy coming up with the most bad-faith interpretation of my words that you could find.
> a legal threat so amorphous that we can't come up with a single instance of it happening
I literally linked to a legal case of it happening in my root comment. Unless you want a lawsuit specifically about a missing DEI program, something which I never claimed, and already explained so.
> a correlation between the deployment of DEI programs and the number of discrimination lawsuits.
Notice how both trend upwards, therefore are correlated. Unfortunately I don't think there's a graph like that specifically for DEI programs, as "equity" itself is a word that only recently became fashionable. And I couldn't find a graph showing the proportion of companies with generic diversity programs either. A crucial weakness in my argument, that will allow a motivated reader such as yourself to dismiss it entirely.
DEI programs don't help guard vs. litigation, therefore that can't ever have been a cause for their or their antecedents' inception!
> discrimination suits are decreasing
If the problem DEI programs are intended to address was shrinking, then DEI programs would have shrunk with it! No different than how you shrink police forces after crime significantly drops.
Ah yes, the myth of rejecting nihilism. Just like my last restaurant visit where I ordered stale bread and water. Enough for survival, the rest is pure vanity.
The chronically online character overconsumes news, which is almost always bad news, as that grabs the attention. Complemented by hysterical, pessimistic social media grifters.
When you almost exclusively consume the above, your world view will be deeply corrupted.
Wasn't even considered sexual content, and in no way shielded from kids either. The context isn't sexual, and it's a perfectly normal body part.
The sexualization of the human body is nothing but a cultural invention.