So basically, communal ownership of the means of production? Where have I heard about that before...
Not that I disagree with it. I just think that it fits so perfectly into socialist thought (as originally intended, not any of the statist revisions) that it really seems like nothing more but market socialism without the red.
In fact, reading more about it, distributivism is just market socialism without a strong theoretical backing, without philosophical study and without any real praxis, as well as much less developped.
We should aim to have distributed systems because they are more resilient. Everyone knows the story about Gorbachev and the US supermarket but we conveniently forget it when it comes to forging our own monopoly.
Unfortunately, a lot of people have been told that "socialism" means "state power over the economy" and refuse to engage with enough socialist/communist theory to see what it actually is. Which gets you strange projects like the above.
For that audience, and over-simplifying greatly: all communists are trying to create a decentralized system that evenly spreads power, and the main split among them is how to actually do that. Anarchists think we should build decentralized power structures until they've replaced our current centralized ones. Marxist-Leninists think we should replace the state with one that promises to implement communism later.
Distributism reads a lot like somebody heard of Marxism-Leninism, thought it was dumb, reinvented anarcho-communism in response, and then described the result as opposed to communism, even though it's largely the same idea as one of the main branches of communist theory.
> create a decentralized system that evenly spreads power
That's simply not feasible, because many centralized systems are a lot more effective than decentralized ones. And centralized systems can't be run via a committee or via direct democracy either, so you will always have some people with outsized decision-making power. At least when you reward these actors with wealth (as opposed to raw political influence, as in socialist countries) they can then go and deploy that wealth on pro-social things, like many of wealthiest businesspeople do in the US. Distributism has the right idea, it's just not universally applicable.
There is no socialist philosophy that objects to centralization of power as long as it is kept in check and limited to it's usefulness
Even Anarchism doesn't say that no one should have outsized decision-making power. Just that it shouldn't be the same people every time, that there should be a good reason for it and that it should be kept in check. The old anarchist example was that of the pirate ship :)
Also, decentralized systems are not always less efficient than centralized systems. Sometimes they are much more efficient, it depends on what you are optimizing for exactly.
Indeed, centralized decision-making, while viable sometimes, need not be pluripotent, and it can be limited enough that it doesn't actually create a power imbalance. Many human societies actually operated in such a way.
If you actually wish to read up a bit more on that, I'd suggest in the extreme of reading up on anarchism. If you use debian, you should be able to apt-get install anarchism :)
> Just that it shouldn't be the same people every time, that there should be a good reason for it and that it should be kept in check. The old anarchist example was that of the pirate ship
Peter Leeson has written extensively on the way actual pirate ships were run. He sometimes calls himself an anarchist, but he makes it clear in his work that these ships were relying on carefully-tuned institutional designs that were not all that far from what we would now call liberal, representative government.
I don't see how that conflicts at all with what I said.
Even in the most extreme of situations, such as a pirate ship, there would be less hierarchy than in our society (this is due to analysis of economic hierarchy).
A lot of Christian democratic ideals basically fits into the description "market socialism without the red", usually sprinkled with socially conservative views.
It's notable that in a lot of Europe, the welfare systems we have today, for example, while they happened under pressure or fear of socialism, were pushed through with the help of Christian democrats.
E.g. Bismarcks pension and healthcare bills that effectively formed the first large-scale welfare system were blatant attempts at stemming the growing support for what he saw as dangerous socialist parties becoming a threat to the established order - while stealing some of their social policies he proceeded to ban dozens of groups and newspapers and arrest their leaders. But he passed those bills with the help of the conservative Christian "Zentrum", the forerunner of Merkel's CDU, by appealing to Christian values.
Their is great irony in the most hierarchical religious intuition in the history of the world arguing in favour of economical decentralisation after having forcefully resisted protestantism for centuries
I chuckle sometimes when I see things like your fridge (or a smart kitchen) will order items for you by predicting things for you need. In future, it seems tech will do transactions with other tech with lesser human involvement, all in the name of efficiency. And then this will trigger another recursive cycle of optimizations.
The rate at which tech is changing and along with it our society is way faster than rate at which humans can find a coping mechanism. We do not know what we are sleepwalking into.
I feel like I need to plug Zvi Mowshowitz's "Immoral Mazes" series of blogposts here, as it goes pretty in-depth into the whole matter of efficiency, slack, and "how hard should we work".
Meditations on Moloch made such an impact on me, that I routinely say aloud "Moloch" when I spot circumstances of competition leading to otherwise irrationally bad outcomes. Sort of in a religious way. :)
I went to comments exactly to see if anyone mentioned it already.
BTW. The efficiency (specialization) vs redundancy (genericity) is a kind of jing-jang, fractal thing and is part of how the universe ... dances... I'd say (inspired by Alan Watts lectures). Systems have cycles where they build specilization up until it becomes so fragile and unstable that it blows up and genericity takes over again. I don't know if that's like some law of cybernetics or something.
Similar to how stability on one level of analysis leads to instability in the one above it (well described in Taleb's book).
This shouldn't bother me but it really does. For a community striving to be less wrong, how does someone write a 47-minute long post about Moloch but not know Moloch?
It doesn't really matter since it's about the metaphor not the actual Moloch, but I guess it's because of where it's posted. Not sure if there's a name for it but there's a phenomena where if you say you care about something, you'll get a lot of flak for it compared to if you never mention it. Kind of like how Google always gets a lot of bad press since they claim to care about X when VCs for example have a much worse record but don't really get mentioned. With lesswrong's reputation, I can't help but be really put off by the inaccuracy.
I guess a big part of it is that Scott just took the name from the Ginsberg poem and probably only did a quick lookup on who Moloch actually was (as he was more interested in Ginsberg's Moloch than in the Canaanite Moloch)?
Considering Scott's interest in things kabbalistic (e.g. Unsong), and his general erudition, I suspect he knows more about the origins of Moloch than you give him credit for.
I think that's a stretch. I don't think the ancient Canaanites viewed Moloch as evil. Even Milton and Flaubert consider him a god. I think such definitions only make sense within the context of the religion. I could argue that Yaweh is a demon because he is evil (has also asked for child sacrifice among other things), but that is an absurd claim within the religion where by definition he is good and the source of morality.
So by calling Moloch a demon, you are participating in perpetuating a potentially false history of Moloch that is heavily biased and Judeocentric. Sure you can call him an evil pagan god, but to call him a demon requires fitting that into a prior belief system of evil supernatural entities which is inconsistent with the very belief system he came from.
Molok is the name used in the Bible for a Canaanite deity that the Israelites were forbidden to "suffer their seed to pass through the fire to". Details are scarce, but this is usually taken to refer to human sacrifice. It later became syncretized with reports of child sacrifice at Carthage, where the popular imagery associated with Molok (the idol with outstretched hands, the drums) is taken from.
Carthage and Canaan did share many cultural traits, and the Carthaginians also called themselves Canaanites. It's quite plausible that the Carthaginians would indeed worship Moloch and make sacrifices to that god, and that the mentions of child sacrifice in classical sources about Carthage are based on such.
I think it's still inaccurate to refer to Moloch as Carthaginian rather than Canaanite. The latter is obviously correct, though a bit vague. The former is contested and not as clear.
Wikipedia probably has a better answer, but basically the name Moloch is from the Bible. One of the ways genocide of the inhabitants of Canaan (the promised land) is justified is by describing Canaanites as immoral people who sacrifice their own children to idols. Moloch is supposed to be one of the idols, but the actual history of Moloch is very sparse. Probably was one of the main local gods way back in the day like Baal. Probably not even an "evil" god at all (like Baal) since the Bible is heavily biased against the competing local gods in the region.
So basically, a god of Canaanites we only know about from the people that wanted to wipe them out and wrote very influential texts.
We should ask a German, they put a noun to everything.
I was thinking the same thing recently, reading a New York Times review panel on Hamilton. Someone said they didn't focus enough on slavery, and that the casual mentioning of Sally Hemings was tasteless. I posed the same thought: If Sally hadn't been mentioned at all, they wouldn't have commented on the lack of focus on her. If they didn't make a point of being a multiracial cast, or had lyrics condemning slavery, would there have been so much criticism for the magnitude of their condemnation?
This phenomenon of "talking about something, then being attacked for not caring/knowing enough" seems to be happening more and more online.
Seems related to the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics:
"The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster."
Slightly - and that's an interesting article to be sure. The difference between that article and the Hamilton or "you don't know enough about Moloch" examples is that the article shows conditional assistance to a problem, where the two above examples have no quid pro quo. Hamilton sheds some light on something, and someone was inaccurate in a literary analysis.
I think people like to see the poor helped unconditionally, or with conditions that help them. In the PETA example, it seems to outsiders that a political agenda is being forced on them. PETA may counter they are improving lives by showing the benefits of veganism.
In the wifi example, it looks like exploitation of the desperate, though it isn't any more debasing than swinging a sign around for a furniture store.
And in the Uber example, that just looks shitty because they're a hugely wealthy company... though I don't know how much of the surge pricing goes to the driver.
> The end-game · Efficiency, taken to the max, can get very dark.
This is the main point behind most of the works of Jacques Ellul, we're re-discovering it at our own expense decades later.
> The Ellulian concept of technique is briefly defined within the "Notes to Reader" section of The Technological Society (1964). It is "the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.
Huh. Interesting. I think it’s the other way around. Efficiency leads to more convenience and better prices. Thus, I have more time and money to spend on things that really matter to me. The most basic “item” is for example a dish washer. How many hours and water was wasted before doing this work by hand?
This is exactly the point he addresses in his final paragraph. Efficiency is great, but up to a point, and we've passed it.
Most of today's innovations are not freeing up people's time on the scale that the washing machine or dishwasher did. On the contrary, many of them are using up time without any productivity gains. Smartphones and Facebook have not improved any other part of the economy besides their own.
There's a point where more automation does not mean things become easier.
Let's take the same dishwasher example. Of course it saves a lot of time for a family of four, for example. Pop it in and you're done.
But for example, for a single person, this makes much less sense. Because the time it takes for putting it in the dishwasher, waiting to fill the machine and running the cycle is longer than just washing the damn dishes.
No automation is "free". And overautomation causes problems as well.
Well, the wall-clock time may be longer, but the human time is much shorter. As long as you have one meal's worth of slack in the amount of crockery you have, the dishwasher wins by a country mile in the amount of effort expended.
Yes, because the time and effort spent on the creation of the dishwasher is less than the total time and effort required to hand wash dishes, which means there's now a savings in resources when using the dishwasher, and that savings could be used for more productivity elsewhere (and perhaps producing an even more labour/resource saving device). This eventually avalanches into a state where the absolute minimum resources required are spent for a task, thus allowing more tasks to be done with the finite resources available. This translates to more wealth and quality of life.
Does he? It doesn't seem like he's arguing they're really doing anything "wrong", other than being caught up in a larger societal process and doing what society is saying is good and rewarding:
> It’s important to realize that Amazon isn’t violating any rules, nor even (on the surface) societal norms. Waste is bad, efficiency is good, right? They’re doing what’s taught in every business school; maximizing efficiency is one of the greatest gifts of the free market. Amazon is really extremely good at it.
This idea that capitalist efficiency is not something to blame the capitalist for, but is an effect of the mode of production of society overall is really very much a Marxist idea, and yet like your assumption that Bray is berating Amazon, people tend to similarly believe Marx hated capitalists.
But like Marx praised capitalism into the skies for its efficiency yet criticised its bad sides, Bray is also pointing out that this efficiency has good sides. It's just that it also has bad sides, and we should worry that we blindly keep accepting the bad sides even as the toll it takes rises:
> It’s hard to think of a position more radical than being “against efficiency”. And I’m not. Efficiency is a good, and like most good things, has to be bought somehow, and paid for. There is a point where the price is too high, and we’ve passed it.
One way I heard efficiency described is the idea of a race car falling apart at the end of a race, doing its job in the most efficient manner as possible.
Of course, this is pretty much inadvisable in every day life. We need some 'inefficiency' to ensure that our stuff won't break apart at the wrong time.
there's a time horizon attached to efficiency that needs to be considered. Sometimes this time horizon is not explicitly examined, but is just assumed.
For the case of a racing car, if the engineers were told to design it with maximum efficiency possible, and it only has to last the race, then yes, why not have it break and fall apart at the end, if doing so means it runs at a very high efficiency?
F1 engines used to last only one race, 2 hours max. Now there is a rule that max 4 engines can be used per season, resulting in engine life of 20 hours or so.
But otoh, this kind of efficiency is probably the reason why washing machines and other household items are now breaking sooner than before ("planned" obsolescence)
But even if I want to spend more, how will I know I am no spending more on inefficient stuff like a touchscreen on my fridge? Spending more money is sadly not equal to better quality, but I don't know what designates it.
Is there? How strong? Out of that $100 how much of extra weeks of usage will I get and with what confidence level?
Also - Is it affected by the level of hardness in the local water and my patterns of usage ajd types of detergent I use? Does additional reliability affect any other parameters like energy and water usage?
In a multi-variable comparison like this it is impossible to say much about future past 5 years with much certainty, while the price is single biggest objective metric.
In my experience, getting a couple of years old used premium item (which used to be like double the price) for the same price of a new consumer item is always a good idea for example for Notebooks.
Compared to new plastic consumer class crap, older premium dell notebooks have excellent usability, they last forever and you can even throw them around without worrying about their metal outer layer breaking.
The downside is that they might look ugly for some people.
Also most people I recommended this, dismissed the idea, because buying stuff used were somehow unthinkable for them?
Well, in some ways it a rational choice by consumers: often times the newer product is does the job better, is quieter, using less resources.
Supposedly it's one of the reasons why homes (but not land) tend to depreciate in Japan: newer structures meet newer, higher safety standards. When you live in an active earthquake zone (also: typhoons), why wouldn't you want one that takes in account the seismic developments of the previous thirty years (generally how often rebuilds are done)?
It's all very well to say to it'd be nice for appliances to last longer, which isn't a 'wrong' statement, but looking at the efficiency gains over the last 20-30 years is quite remarkable.
We may now be hitting diminishing returns, so perhaps should turn to durability more, but it's not like buying new didn't get you anything in recent years.
Efficiency goes dark when the measure is myopic. If the system took in account the quality of food rather than the price tag .. the efficiency wouldn't be a problem. Quantity over quality in a way.
Big enterprises are (too) great at improving efficiency for their low-level workers. On the other hand they utterly fail to do so with the middle management.
The alternative theory would be that middle management does its job efficiently but it is a different one than the job description says.
Low-level work can often be measured in some way, and that's the kind of "efficiency" one can improve most easily. Whereas the whole point of having middle management in a firm is to deal with the many things that can't be measured easily,
I'm currently reading The Divide by Jason Hickel, a book that explores the origin and causes of global inequality. This article reminded me of the book's chapter about the enclosure movement in Britain: Families used to just farm and live off the land. The enclosure movement made most of this land the property of the aristocracy, who would then lease it back out to farmers - but they would keep increasing the price of the lease, so the farmers now had to work themselves to death and use every means to increase yield, in order to keep up, and not get replaced by someone else. It was much more efficient than the previous subsistence farming. (And left many thousands without a home or the means to support themselves)
"But, wealth! If we all work less, we’ll be poorer, right? Because the total cash output of the economy is a (weird, nonlinear) function of the amount of work that gets put in."
In the previous sentence or so, there was talk about margins of healthcare, which have disappeared. These margins don't exist without more work.
Maybe it is rather that we are working with more things with less effort, rather than doing few things well.
Also cash and work have some correlation, but I think there is higher more profound correlation with work and total amount of products such as roads and buildings. Cash rarely stays in bank accounts but circulates and randomly spawns service and concrete products.
Everyone should work, all the time, to leave this a better place than we found it. And there is still much work to do.
"The theoretical basis of alienation within the capitalist mode of production is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of said actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists." -- that's Wikipedia on Marx' theory of alienation.
This is an old complaint going back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution at least. The US once had an 8-hour day and a 40-hour week. Now those are only memories.
One of my neighbors mentioned that they were offering triple time to work the 4th of July at the factory he works at. He didn't want to work, and thankfully there were enough people interested in the offer that he could have the day off.
Rewards like burnout, lower quality of life, worsening relationships with friends and family...?
The problem is actually a vicious circle. People work more to be valued more, which causes others to work also more so that they can compete. The company benefits from this and takes it as the new normal: deadlines shorten, workload increases, and it stops being optional to become "optional", as in "you can opt out of more work, but get ready to find another job soon". Now you have a whole group of workers burning themselves out for marginally more money and status, while the company they work for makes more money.
And no, it doesn't just happen at Amazon. This happens to software engineers everywhere.
Of course, it's not by far the same situation as factory workers, but there's a serious problem with the work culture in software, specially in the US.
> Rewards like burnout, lower quality of life, worsening relationships with friends and family...?
But what are those things worth to you? As they have different values to everyone.
A friend of mine is currently working on his software project at work (and this is for a massive non tech company, so it is not as if it is a startup). It is 6AM on a Sunday and that is what he is doing. And he is doing it out of boredom as he is in many ways the stereotypical software guy.
Another good friend is in Seattle. He logged in to work at midnight today while chatting with me. Why? He has nothing else to do.
I spend 100+ hours at my computer a week and have since high school. Spending a greater percentage of that time coding for work does not meaningfully impact my quality of life other than taking away from commenting on forums or my hobby of solving innovation challenges. Whether I am unemployed or facing a major deadline, I am going to be online anyway.
I get why long hours would be terrible for people with families requiring attention or girlfriends or those who like hiking, but a lot of software engineers (like me or the aforementioned friends) have none of those, making more work very cheap for us.
> And he is doing it out of boredom as he is in many ways the stereotypical software guy.
I don't know any software person who works at 6AM on a Sunday.
>He logged in to work at midnight today while chatting with me. Why? He has nothing else to do.
Does he have time to find anything else to do?
> Spending a greater percentage of that time coding for work does not meaningfully impact my quality of life other than taking away from commenting on forums or my hobby of solving innovation challenges.
Being online and working is not the same at all. Maybe for you, for not most people.
> but a lot of software engineers (like me or the aforementioned friends) have none of those
Several things:
1. Not having anything other than your job is bad. Full stop. Maybe a handful of persons can work in that situation, but having such a messed up work-life balance is bad for your health, there are plenty of studies on this.
2. Have you asked why this happens? Maybe it's not just people who like that, but people who have no other options due to companies "forcing" those hours.
3. Is this beneficial? How much productivity can someone get out of the last 2 hours of a 12-hour work day? How much is that extra work worth?
4. Are you and your friends ready to take on those workloads for your whole life? Because it's hard to get out of that dynamic.
5. Burnout is a serious issue. Burnout can lead to depression, can lead to losing your job, to having serious health problems... It's not a joke. It's a serious risk.
>1. Not having anything other than your job is bad. Full stop. Maybe a handful of persons can work in that situation, but having such a messed up work-life balance is bad for your health, there are plenty of studies on this.
It's not for you to decide where anyone derives their meaning and happiness in life or how many hours they should work. You can only decide this for yourself.
>2. Have you asked why this happens? Maybe it's not just people who like that, but people who have no other options due to companies "forcing" those hours.
There are always options. It's up to you to find the niche that works for you.
>3. Is this beneficial? How much productivity can someone get out of the last 2 hours of a 12-hour work day? How much is that extra work worth?
Depends on the individual.
>4. Are you and your friends ready to take on those workloads for your whole life? Because it's hard to get out of that dynamic.
Their decision.
>5. Burnout is a serious issue. Burnout can lead to depression, can lead to losing your job, to having serious health problems... It's not a joke. It's a serious risk.
It's each individual's risk to take. If someone wants to work 12 hours a day, it is their decision. "Full stop"
It’s not just their decision, that’s the thing. Crazy work hours are generally harmful, even people who “find meaning in it” can get burned out. And if companies allow and encourage staying more hours, it creates an environment where people can’t choose to work sane hours. And it’s not even an issue of giving more value or anything, because most time the extra hours don’t bring in additional productivity.
Most importantly, it’s not an isolated thing. It’s not just one or two persons doing it: if it were that it wouldn’t be a problem. It’s a generalized culture issue that should be taken seriously and not only viewed in terms of individuals.
I have seen many people work much longer than 8 hours a day without issue or burnout if it's what they like doing. Hell, I do so as well. Burnout is not simply a function of hours worked, it's a function of perceived ROI on those hours. Obviously people shouldn't be working 20 hours a day as that's not sustainable and work product will be low quality, but 8 is not the upper bound for a lot of people.
> And if companies allow and encourage staying more hours, it creates an environment where people can’t choose to work sane hours.
Yes they can, they just have to accept that they will get compensated and rewarded less than people who generate additional high quality work. That should be fine and is fair; those people working 8 hours are deriving value from other activities. It's not reasonable to say "I demand everyone works 8 hours because I want to work 8 hours and I don't want any ramifications for making that decision".
> I have seen many people work much longer than 8 hours a day without issue or burnout if it's what they like doing
For how much time? There is a clear association between more working hours and more burnout [1] and health problems [2] that can be delayed for decades.
> Yes they can, they just have to accept that they will get compensated and rewarded less than people who generate additional high quality work.
Sorry, but in most places this doesn't happen. I'm lucky to be out of those environments, but the expectation tends to be that everybody works those hours or they're out, even if they're producing the same high quality work (also, I highly doubt that more hours equals more high quality work: productivity decreases after a certain point, specially in software, that's why 6-hour work days are being discussed so much). I still remember a friend being glad that he convinced his manager to "only" work 10 hours a day, because he was literally losing hair due to the extra work. This guy liked what he was doing and at the beginning said "it doesn't matter, I'm happy working these hours.
> It's not reasonable to say "I demand everyone works 8 hours because I want to work 8 hours and I don't want any ramifications for making that decision".
Well, this is the law in most countries in Europe. Overtime is heavily regulated (enforcement is another matter, unfortunately) precisely because business pressure can be disguised as "individual decisions". When a lot of people start working more hours, it puts pressure on people who fulfill their contracted hours, and who might not want or be able to put those extra hours.
In the end, it's a balancing act between giving some people the freedom to work the hours they want and helping the company put pressure on others to do more hours than they were contracted for (in other words, changing their work conditions without negotiation) or give others the freedom to do the job they were hired and paid for without pressure to do more than what was negotiated. Me, I prefer to err on the side of caution and choose the action that doesn't harm the health and well-being of the employees.
Some people may want to work more than 8 hours a day, but a separate question is what maximizes personal and corporate productivity.
I've seen research suggesting that workers can get increased productivity working over 40 hours a week for several weeks, but after that, productivity actually goes negative relative to a 40 hour week, because more mistakes are being made that will require rework.
> It's not for you to decide where anyone derives their meaning and happiness in life or how many hours they should work. You can only decide this for yourself.
Everyone decides these things for themselves indeed, but that shouldn't stop others from having opinions regarding those decisions, or giving unsolicited advice to help others stop hurting themselves. I for sure hope my friends will step in and try to stop me if I go down the path of self-destruction.
And also, anyone is free to ignore the advice given by others. Which is a good thing, for much of it is bad advice.
> It's not for you to decide where anyone derives their meaning and happiness in life or how many hours they should work.
The quote you reply to says nothing about meaning and happiness, just health.
And no matter how much meaning and happiness you believe you are getting, when your body and mind give out, that choice will be taken away from you and you will be taking time off from working, just not in a very pleasant way.
By "not having anything", I assume the OP is referring to things that give meaning.
>And no matter how much meaning and happiness you believe you are getting
This is awfully presumptuous and condescending.
>when your body and mind give out, that choice will be taken away from you and you will be taking time off from working, just not in a very pleasant way.
You mean when I'm not able to sustain long hours anymore? I'll have enough money saved to simply cut back on work. No spiraling health crisis necessary.
You need to find something else to do and encourage your friends to do the same. This is incredibly unhealthy in so many ways. This is the gateway to anxiety, depression and physical disability. The human body is not meant to sit in front of a computer that many hours.
You will pay a price. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but you don't stay young forever.
> You can have a career as a software engineer with a 40 hour week if you want. It just won't be at Amazon.
Even if you are a software engineer you can make top-tier, simply insane amounts of money at most big companies with a sub-40 hour workweek.
It is simply a matter of finding the right team and having a good manager. The former is something you can affect and the latter can be luck. But you can definitely make some of the best compensation in CS and have cushy working hours if you play your cards right.
> Professionals get to opt in and get commensurate rewards.
More like professionals are forced in, but get commensurate rewards. Employment isn't flexible enough for people to really choose extra work for extra rewards. The "typical" (average, median, raced-to-the-bottom, whatever) amount people are willing to work and the typical amount they're willing to work for dictates what jobs are even out there. When you need roughly replaceable workers, you give them all roughly the same deal, so professionals aren't just competing on wages vs skill, but on the whole necessarily-mostly-homogeneous package.
I'm happy to have these extra benefits well above a living wage, but I'd take a fraction of my comp for a fraction of my hours in a heartbeat, but we're in a world where a FAANG wage/hour means basically FAANG hours.
And yet, it seems to be working out fine for the actors and writers guilds... Unions are about dealing with the power asymmetry between a large organization and individual workers, which has nothing to do with the kind of work being done.
It works out well for the IT people as well, they're making much more than the average employee. Most could cut back on the hours by taking a hit in the salary. People value getting more money though.
Marx wasn't inspired by poor worker conditions: he wasn't an idealist and his writings aren't normative.
To claim that Marx isn't relevant for worker conditions today is to either misunderstand him or misrepresent him. The contradictions arising from social conflict can't be solved by air condition because they are bound to our mode of production.
[At risk of veering OT here], it seems to me that Marx clearly was inspired by poor worker conditions; a good 1/3 of Capital is empirical discourse on worker conditions. I feel that there might be something more to your argument, so please elaborate if you feel the need.
I think this is a case of language being context-dependent and how the exact meaning of `inspired' depends on its use. I'll elaborate a bit but ultimately I'll say this:
Marx was inspired by the world around him, which consisted of poor worker conditions [0]. We can say this confidently because recent evolution in the study of ideology tells us exactly this: We are a product of our social and material environment, something we can't escape [1].
Anyway, my point is that the way CamperBob2 discusses the topic of Marx's inspiration makes it sound like a fundamental axiom of Marxism is the poor conditions of the working class and specifically their conditions during working hours. If this was true, we'd be able to conclude that the predictions of Marx [2] would be disproved by the gradual removal of these (poor) worker conditions.
We can show this isn't true by appealing to our shared knowledge about the world, where global inequality is increasing and where worker conflict was at the center of an (almost) successful presidential campaign. We can also show this with empirical data, where our shared knowledge may fail us. For instance, Marx predicted that the global rate of profit would continue to fall, the reasons for which are beyond the scope of HN. This has been demonstrated to be true by many Marxists along the years, of whom the most prominent since the rise of the IT-worker is the economist Andrew Kliman [3].
[0]: See Marx's theory of alienation and the concept of reification, for instances of this.
[1]: In particular, see Anthoni Gramsci through Louis Althusser and Slavoj Zizek.
[2]: Ranging from social conflict theory to capital accumulation, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the value-form and social conflict theory.
[3]: “The Persistent Fall in Profitability Underlying the Current Crisis: New Temporalist Evidence” by Andrew Kliman
A good 1/3 of Kapital is a discourse on why workers conditions are so bad, and that fits into an analysis of capitalism.
Marxism isn't a normative ideology. You could be a despotic monopoly leader and still be a Marxist. Whether worker conditions are good or bad at any instant in any place has no bearing on Marxist analysis.
Marx eventually settled on the position that it is not the conditions per se but the mechanisms that lead to them that are the issue, as they will always lead to the same fundamental problems. Which is the case - an IT worker has the same fundamental conflicts as a factory worker. At a certain level, losing these conflicts despite nominally better conditions doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes.
If Marx was still alive today, I think that he would answer the question about how modern workers have such better conditions than those in early capitalism the exact same way as when people in his time said that proletarian had better conditions than the peasants before them, which was nominally true.
In any case, the prescriptions of how a 19th century proletarian could improve their life are essentially the same. The idea is that the interests of your employer will always he opposite yours, as a result you will only be able to improve your conditions by organizing with your fellow workers in order to tip the balance of power, and eventually it is in your interests to change the conditions that lead to this conflict to begin with.
Pretty much anything that falls under "essential jobs" during the pandemic fits the "in demand" label, and the vast majority of those pay low wages.
And no matter how easy it is for a company to replace a given worker in their job, no job should ever pay so little that the person in it cannot live on what they make from it.
Any business that cannot survive while paying its employees a true living wage does not deserve to exist, because it is offloading its costs onto the rest of us through the various social programs its employees depend upon to survive.
>Any business that cannot survive while paying its employees a true living wage does not deserve to exist, because it is offloading its costs onto the rest of us through the various social programs its employees depend upon to survive.
That's not true. The rest of us would have to pay those costs anyway. It's not like the person wouldn't exist, if they didn't have a job.
a) Business pays employee a living wage; taxpayers pay nothing for that person's survival
b) Business pays employee a less-than-living wage; taxpayers pay partially for that person's survival
c) Person has no job; taxpayers pay fully for that person's survival
(Note, of course, that this leaves off choice d) Person has no job, or does not make enough from their job to survive; for whatever reason, they also cannot obtain welfare, and they die.)
...I think that most people would agree that the best of these three is (a). In that situation "the rest of us" most certainly do not have to pay those costs.
Furthermore, I think the more important point than "the person would still exist if they didn't have a job" is "other, better jobs would still exist if that company folded due to unprofitability, or was never created in the first place".
People have an inherent right to life, liberty, and property.
Businesses are not some sacred abstract; they exist purely to support people. Any privileges they have (down to and including their existence), we grant them, and we can revoke from them if they are not fulfilling their fundamental purposes.
Depends on if B leads (via lower wages) to more of B to compete.
For example the government may say that to clean their facility, cleaning companies need to be able to do a, b, c and after that it all comes down to the price. Almost all of them can do a,b,c so they compete on price, on cleaning company is not paying taxes though so can offer lower prices and wins all deals, forcing all other companies to stop paying taxes to survive, and makes the whole trade in that area morally bankrupt.
If type b companies are not allowed to exist, the market will then be able to support more type a companies and may ultimately have less type c individuals. It may result in a net decrease of social services used.
It's a completely backwards way of thinking. A "business" or "entity" can afford to pay x for service y. If x is too low for you, don't take the job. That's it.
It's pure fantasy to assume every employer could pay a living wage. For example, take house cleaning. What if some pensioner can spare 30$/week to have their house cleaned. How are they supposed to pay a living wage? If somebody steps forward and says OK, I'll clean the house for 30$, fine. If not, tough luck. But to demand the pensioner should pay a living wage (like what, 2000$ or more to have their house cleaned), or call them evil for not paying enough, is backwards and absurd.
Very few people can afford to pay other people a living wage. What's your point?
You only exhibit the socialist magic thinking again As if there are infinite resources, and the only problem is to redistribute them. That's not how the real work works. If you want to eat, somebody (possibly you) has to hunt or farm, gather resources, and so on. It's not a given that any number of people can simply earn a "living wage" or even have a job. Somebody has to create such jobs, that are productive enough to feed somebody.
Instead of complain about stinginess of businesses, prove your theories by creating jobs that pay better.
I didn't say anything about resource distribution, I was refuting your idea of "if you don't like the pay then don't take the job". It's a simple fact that this isn't a realistic way of seeing most people's choices.
However, yes, I would agree with previous commenters that if you can't afford to pay people enough to live on then you don't have a business that society should deem viable. If everyone in society was scrabbling around for resources then you might have a point, but in actual fact, the dominant situation is that there is a tiny group of people who are extraordinarily wealthy, a larger-but-still-not-massive group of people who are comfortable, and a great deal of people who get what's left, often not very much at all. Resources are so unfairly distributed I just don't find your argument at all persuasive.
Socialist thought doesn't assume infinite resources, it just says that democracy should be extended much further than it is right now, particularly to the workplace. We could "create" jobs collectively and not leave the decision of how much to pay to a small group of people who have all the power simply because they have the money to start with.
Just because somebody is rich, doesn't imply there are many resources. It's just a debt owed by society, which can also go bankrupt. Jeff Bezos earning another Billion does not imply more houses have been created or more plants have been reared and so on. It just means people bought stuff from him, in return for a promise to pay them back in the future (money is a promise of future goods). If Bezos decided today to buy loads of grain with his Billions, to feed the poor somehwere, that grain would be missing somewhere else.
The talk about "businesses that society should consider viable" is nonsense, as the example of the pensioner wanting someone to clean their apartment shows. What should they do if society doesn't consider them "viable", commit suicide?
If society doesn't deem some business "viable", they can simply refuse to work for that business.
If you want to create jobs "collectively", sorry to say, you are in full blown socialist territory, and you will fail, for the same reasons that socialism always fail (because planning economies can't assign resources efficiently enough).
I would call yours the completely backwards way of thinking. Again, my thinking puts people at the center, not "businesses" or "entities", nor "money".
I don't call them evil for not paying enough.
I say they don't make enough to employ a cleaner as that cleaner's full-time job.
i say that "living wage" nonsense is hate speech. You are not just saying "oh those businesses can't afford to pay a living wage", you are saying they are greedy and make people poor and so on.
And the full-time job is not a valid argument. So if some company were to split their jobs into part time jobs, it would make it OK for you? I rather doubt that.
Thanks for the info. Article doesn't mention the reasoning behind Ford's move, though.
I still think the whole demand is completely backwards.
Article also mentions the info workers who work 12 hours and more - well they do it because they make good money that way. They'll retire by 40 and have the last laugh.
Most people working 12 hour days in tech and finance won't retire by 40. The factory workers the article mentions in the very next sentence won't either.
They can afford to take a long holiday at the very least. Compared to other workers, certainly. Or maybe they prefer to live in expensive housing instead of paying for spare time. Why shouldn't it be their choice?
As for factory workers, are you sure the issue is factories not paying enough? Or what exactly is going on in the US economy? What is so expensive? Why is there so much competition for jobs?
Or at least guilds with 'base' contracts / conditions for employments.
Actors all get the same basic level of protection with regards to working conditions, pensions, health care (?), but that does not stop them from negotiating different salaries (with a floor?) for the "100x" performers.
I have personally benefited from rights that unions have fought for. I am grateful to them for this. What I see them fight for now is worker retention. The most common fight is for the worst union members, because you have to represent your worst member, otherwise what is a union worth?
The other common union fight is whether the members are going to be screwed by management or by the competition, where the competition may be in a different country or a state with fewer protections on workers' rights.
I think there are still marginal conflicts where the Union can secure benefits for their members, but I'm not sure how much more they can help society overall.
Unions are just a framework. If you dig a bit you’ll find there are factions in almost every union fighting for more democracy and benefits for the members, and many of them are winning. Two off the cuff examples are Teamsters for a Democratic Union and CORE from the Chicago Teachers Union.
EDIT: it would also be remiss not to add that much of the power of unions has been stripped away by union busting and bad legislation
Worker democracy is the characteristic that's most useful. Regarding that, imo there's a good case to be made even to the conservative side of the aisle in favour of unions, as at its best they can drastically reduce the need for strong top-down regulatory legislation in favour of much more specific, granular agreements between workers and employers made from the bottom up. But the power to be able to do that has been crippled (for good reason in some cases! But not all).
Notably, looking up graphs of GDP per capita of France and the UK and putting them next to each other, I'd challenge anyone to see when the change happened.
One thing that comparing GDP per capita growth tends to show is that global and regional overall development totally swamps even seemingly large changes like the 35 hour week.
What the change also tends to gloss over is that the number of hours worked per worker in France is not particularly low. According to OECD, for 2019 it stood at 1505 vs. 1538 for the UK or 1386 for Germany. The reduction in France, to the extent it changed anything, may have distributed work a bit more but it did not suddenly drastically reduce the hours worked.
The average number of hours worked per worker dropped somewhat over the few years after the reform, but it dropped across all the major OECD countries, and by similar rates.
This is also true for software production: we have made writing and deploying software so easy to do that the rate at which training of software developers to produce PRs has outpaced the ability for systems either human or automated to handle managing the introduction of risk in all this new code.
This talk [1] by by Mark Sherman of the Software Engineering Institute at CMU is about as dark as the summary of injuries Tim presents in his post. He mentions there are on the order of hundreds of thousands of CVE reports that there are neither time nor money to triage.
As a society, "injury" (defined broadly to include software bugs as well as knee damage) has always been accepted for certain benefits. At some point we decide that the injuries are worth the cost of progress.
We send astronauts to space knowing that we will kill about 1 in 30 of them. We let thousands die on roads so we can move around cities quickly.
Everything we enjoy about modern society has a certain amount of injury risk.
We are constantly saying skew the bugs, let's see what happens.
I feel like the idea that society has accepted software bugs for some other benefit is questionable, given that software has only had an impact on most people's lives for a relatively small period of time in relation to the amount of time humans have studied philosophy and ethics.
Edit: also I'm discussing security bugs where there are asymmetries in the risk profiles and threat models of actors and agents.
People conflate risk (likelihood of the event) and hazard (amount of harm if the event happens) and I think it degrades our conversations. The issue with software is that hazard has quite a large range, due to class attack (hitting all instances of something at once, like a software update poisoned with malware) and I don't think even software developers understand the scale of a worst case scenario, let alone most politicians.
The part about Amazon reminded me of one of the best quotes from Frank Herbert's Dune:
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
There is a broader point here: maximizing local efficiency in systems leads to greater fragility overall. The current COVID crisis highlights this very well with shortages due to global supply chains.
The article start with the example of to cleaners that takes a break at their job and that is seen as inefficient in today's society. But I say this is most a misuse of the word and understanding of efficiency. Taking a break is a stop in productivity short term(cleaning in this example). Efficiency can actually be better by a break, by boosting productivity long term and thus reaching the goal (clean streets) with higher quality.
Most management try to think scenarios in closed simplified systems with in- and outputs at a certain time, but by doing this the bigger picture is missed. For example: By neglecting the cleaners wellbeing (physically and mentally) the output may be good cleaning for a while but as times go with no break the wellbeing decrease and so the output.
The problem with this argument is that it's less important than the one in the article but easier to undermine. What if a soulless bureaucrat read it and thought, "OK then, I'll try it out and see if it increases productivity" and find that, even in the long term, it doesn't. Is that enough justification to remove breaks? If course not. The truth is, it's irrelevant whether it increases efficiency.
It reminds me of someone who believes that all torture is morally wrong, but then adds "and it doesn't work anyway". Now if someone can find a situation where it does work then they can undermine that position with addressing the core argument.
>The truth is, it's irrelevant whether it increases efficiency.
Exactly that's what I want to point out. The talking in the article is not about efficiency or productivity, but that there is a moral compass we have to uphold whatever path we chose to take.
> reminds me of someone who believes that all torture is morally wrong, but then adds "and it doesn't work anyway".
This is not really the way the argument goes though. Person A says “torture is repugnant and should be banned”; person B responds “well how will we ever get a prisoner to answer the questions we need”.
And then person A points out that trained interrogators who build some kind of trust or at least mutual respect with those they are interrogating literally always get better results than the adversarial tough guys who jump to inflicting pain, and that if you ask effective experienced interrogators even from repressive horrible regimes, they’ll tell you “nah, skip the torture, because you’ll waste a lot of trouble getting completely worthless results. When you torture someone they’ll tell you whatever you want to hear to make you stop, and the garbage they spew under torture is never actionable. It takes a lot of hard work to undo the damage and regain enough trust to get useful information, if it’s even possible at all”.
This is not to say that torture would be fine if only it were effective, but rather that the people who torture are lying when they cite its effectiveness or potential. The people who turn to torture (or instruct others to do so) are not actually doing it because they get valuable information out of it; that’s just a rationalization. They’re really doing it for (a) the sadistic psychopathic pleasure in the act, or (b) to terrorize and degrade as an end in itself.
The folks who defend torture based on some hypothetical efficacy (always without evidence, or sometimes with “evidence” that falls apart like wet toilet paper once exposed to the most cursory examination) reveal themselves to be not only morally repugnant but also dishonest and disingenuous. Unless they are extremely naïve (e.g. schoolchildren) it is not worth having this or any other debate with them, because they are not arguing in good faith.
I was in two minds about mentioning that analogy in case someone attempted to address the content directly, which is what you've done. It really misses the point of what I was saying. The point was, if you can imagine a person that did make an argument like I said - however unlikely it is that you think it is that anyone actually would - then hopefully you could see that it does not communicate their point of view well. As it's an analogy, the idea is that this lesson would carry over to what the parent comment was saying.
Yes, I understand the point you’re trying to make, and this analogy is fine insofar as it refers to some kind of fictional/hypothetical conversation about torture.
But this characterization of anti-torture arguments is a straw man, not reflective of how the discussion goes in practice, and itself missing the point of converations about torture’s essential ineffectiveness.
I work in an environment where everything can be measured: emails sent, calls answered, CRM cases resolved, SMS sent and so on. I can even see if anyone went to the toilet at a particular time. And I simply ignore half of it. The jobs that are being monitored are already bad enough: monotonous, repetitive,and etc. And tbh, by ignoring half of all these metrics,I somehow have almost issue free workforce, as opposed to the other department that follows it by letter. Let's be efficient but let's not go completely crazy either.
One can't lament about maximized efficiency in societies and corporations while ignoring competition. If Amazon doesn't optimize, Alibaba will take over and nothing will change for the better. If we put more "humanity" in our food production, our food will become more expensive and most people will opt for cheaper, imported food. There are always dependencies, consequences, prerequisites for interventions in the natural order of things and far too many articles get written in total ignorance of these. And far too often, bad examples of modern consumer products (like the grocery-ordering fridge or Facebook) are used to argue against efficiency.
> When we say that one kind of work is overpaid and another underpaid, what are we really saying? In a free market, prices are determined by what buyers want. People like baseball more than poetry, so baseball players make more than poets. To say that a certain kind of work is underpaid is thus identical with saying that people want the wrong things.
> Well, of course people want the wrong things. It seems odd to be surprised by that. And it seems even odder to say that it's unjust that certain kinds of work are underpaid. Then you're saying that it's unjust that people want the wrong things. It's lamentable that people prefer reality TV and corndogs to Shakespeare and steamed vegetables, but unjust? That seems like saying that blue is heavy, or that up is circular.
In the same way, it’s “lamentable” that people buy mass-produced products that are slightly inferior and cheaper, but not surprising.
You can fool some of the people all of the time; therefore you should rationally invest all your efforts in maximizing resource extraction from those people. That means the less foolish aren't provided with good choices, so how can society evolve to choose good stuff?
One important example of this is pensions. Some people argue that we should settle for less consumption and economic growth. However, our concept of retirement is predicated on these. If you want to change the workings of the economy, you have to reinvent retirement first, or you'll end up with the elderly starving.
Food's a fun example, because there's currently too much of it. At least in my part of the world, the price of various foods is moderated by the government buying or selling huge stocks of it.
My bigger concern about that is all of the fossil fuels getting wasted doing the haber-process for food nobody's going to use.
The word missing from the post is "headroom". In critical systems it's more often called safety margin.
If you let the beancounters squeeze out headroom in the name of greater efficiency, you sacrifice resilience and reliability. In other news, water is wet.
Funnily enough - margin of safety is also exactly what works best in capital(ist) markets. See Graham&Dodd, or Buffett&Munger.
This reminds me that capitalism will probably be just fine once people are reminded (yet again) about what risk is, and that they should treat all their counterparties well, to get those long term win-win situations.
> It’s important to realize that Amazon isn’t violating any rules, nor even (on the surface) societal norms.
Not taking orders from robots, or having your agenda defined by robots/automatic scripts, should in fact be a societal norm. One can argue with a human boss, however bad or mean or stupid they are. You can't argue with a robot and that's what makes people's lives miserable.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism
Not that I disagree with it. I just think that it fits so perfectly into socialist thought (as originally intended, not any of the statist revisions) that it really seems like nothing more but market socialism without the red.
In fact, reading more about it, distributivism is just market socialism without a strong theoretical backing, without philosophical study and without any real praxis, as well as much less developped.
For that audience, and over-simplifying greatly: all communists are trying to create a decentralized system that evenly spreads power, and the main split among them is how to actually do that. Anarchists think we should build decentralized power structures until they've replaced our current centralized ones. Marxist-Leninists think we should replace the state with one that promises to implement communism later.
Distributism reads a lot like somebody heard of Marxism-Leninism, thought it was dumb, reinvented anarcho-communism in response, and then described the result as opposed to communism, even though it's largely the same idea as one of the main branches of communist theory.
That's simply not feasible, because many centralized systems are a lot more effective than decentralized ones. And centralized systems can't be run via a committee or via direct democracy either, so you will always have some people with outsized decision-making power. At least when you reward these actors with wealth (as opposed to raw political influence, as in socialist countries) they can then go and deploy that wealth on pro-social things, like many of wealthiest businesspeople do in the US. Distributism has the right idea, it's just not universally applicable.
Even Anarchism doesn't say that no one should have outsized decision-making power. Just that it shouldn't be the same people every time, that there should be a good reason for it and that it should be kept in check. The old anarchist example was that of the pirate ship :)
Also, decentralized systems are not always less efficient than centralized systems. Sometimes they are much more efficient, it depends on what you are optimizing for exactly.
Indeed, centralized decision-making, while viable sometimes, need not be pluripotent, and it can be limited enough that it doesn't actually create a power imbalance. Many human societies actually operated in such a way.
If you actually wish to read up a bit more on that, I'd suggest in the extreme of reading up on anarchism. If you use debian, you should be able to apt-get install anarchism :)
Peter Leeson has written extensively on the way actual pirate ships were run. He sometimes calls himself an anarchist, but he makes it clear in his work that these ships were relying on carefully-tuned institutional designs that were not all that far from what we would now call liberal, representative government.
Even in the most extreme of situations, such as a pirate ship, there would be less hierarchy than in our society (this is due to analysis of economic hierarchy).
That is exagtly what I said.
It's notable that in a lot of Europe, the welfare systems we have today, for example, while they happened under pressure or fear of socialism, were pushed through with the help of Christian democrats.
E.g. Bismarcks pension and healthcare bills that effectively formed the first large-scale welfare system were blatant attempts at stemming the growing support for what he saw as dangerous socialist parties becoming a threat to the established order - while stealing some of their social policies he proceeded to ban dozens of groups and newspapers and arrest their leaders. But he passed those bills with the help of the conservative Christian "Zentrum", the forerunner of Merkel's CDU, by appealing to Christian values.
I chuckle sometimes when I see things like your fridge (or a smart kitchen) will order items for you by predicting things for you need. In future, it seems tech will do transactions with other tech with lesser human involvement, all in the name of efficiency. And then this will trigger another recursive cycle of optimizations.
The rate at which tech is changing and along with it our society is way faster than rate at which humans can find a coping mechanism. We do not know what we are sleepwalking into.
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/kNANcHLNtJt5qeuSS ?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...
Longer series, but the first post does a good job of summarizing Meditations on Moloch.
Somewhat offtopic, try listenig to the original poem on youtube. It's a treat.
I went to comments exactly to see if anyone mentioned it already.
BTW. The efficiency (specialization) vs redundancy (genericity) is a kind of jing-jang, fractal thing and is part of how the universe ... dances... I'd say (inspired by Alan Watts lectures). Systems have cycles where they build specilization up until it becomes so fragile and unstable that it blows up and genericity takes over again. I don't know if that's like some law of cybernetics or something.
Similar to how stability on one level of analysis leads to instability in the one above it (well described in Taleb's book).
This shouldn't bother me but it really does. For a community striving to be less wrong, how does someone write a 47-minute long post about Moloch but not know Moloch?
It doesn't really matter since it's about the metaphor not the actual Moloch, but I guess it's because of where it's posted. Not sure if there's a name for it but there's a phenomena where if you say you care about something, you'll get a lot of flak for it compared to if you never mention it. Kind of like how Google always gets a lot of bad press since they claim to care about X when VCs for example have a much worse record but don't really get mentioned. With lesswrong's reputation, I can't help but be really put off by the inaccuracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch#Carthaginian_Cronus
So by calling Moloch a demon, you are participating in perpetuating a potentially false history of Moloch that is heavily biased and Judeocentric. Sure you can call him an evil pagan god, but to call him a demon requires fitting that into a prior belief system of evil supernatural entities which is inconsistent with the very belief system he came from.
So basically, a god of Canaanites we only know about from the people that wanted to wipe them out and wrote very influential texts.
I was thinking the same thing recently, reading a New York Times review panel on Hamilton. Someone said they didn't focus enough on slavery, and that the casual mentioning of Sally Hemings was tasteless. I posed the same thought: If Sally hadn't been mentioned at all, they wouldn't have commented on the lack of focus on her. If they didn't make a point of being a multiracial cast, or had lyrics condemning slavery, would there have been so much criticism for the magnitude of their condemnation?
This phenomenon of "talking about something, then being attacked for not caring/knowing enough" seems to be happening more and more online.
"The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster."
https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
I think people like to see the poor helped unconditionally, or with conditions that help them. In the PETA example, it seems to outsiders that a political agenda is being forced on them. PETA may counter they are improving lives by showing the benefits of veganism.
In the wifi example, it looks like exploitation of the desperate, though it isn't any more debasing than swinging a sign around for a furniture store.
And in the Uber example, that just looks shitty because they're a hugely wealthy company... though I don't know how much of the surge pricing goes to the driver.
Yes, people like to see the poor helped...they do not particularly like helping the poor themselves.
This is the main point behind most of the works of Jacques Ellul, we're re-discovering it at our own expense decades later.
> The Ellulian concept of technique is briefly defined within the "Notes to Reader" section of The Technological Society (1964). It is "the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul
Huh. Interesting. I think it’s the other way around. Efficiency leads to more convenience and better prices. Thus, I have more time and money to spend on things that really matter to me. The most basic “item” is for example a dish washer. How many hours and water was wasted before doing this work by hand?
Most of today's innovations are not freeing up people's time on the scale that the washing machine or dishwasher did. On the contrary, many of them are using up time without any productivity gains. Smartphones and Facebook have not improved any other part of the economy besides their own.
Edit: See this interview which makes the point very well https://www.vox.com/a/new-economy-future/robert-gordon-inter...
There's a point where more automation does not mean things become easier.
Let's take the same dishwasher example. Of course it saves a lot of time for a family of four, for example. Pop it in and you're done.
But for example, for a single person, this makes much less sense. Because the time it takes for putting it in the dishwasher, waiting to fill the machine and running the cycle is longer than just washing the damn dishes.
No automation is "free". And overautomation causes problems as well.
Automate dishwashing for a 10 party dinner: no brainer
Automate dishwashing for one plate, one fork and one knife. Not advantageous
Automate generating a manual report that takes 30min and needs to run everyday: no brainer also
Automate a report that needs one piece of data that's easy to get and needs to run once a month: does it really matter?
However, I love having the option to just start the dish washer and do other stuff instead.
People working like robots in warehouses and factories are certainly not winning. They have neither more time, nor more money.
> It’s important to realize that Amazon isn’t violating any rules, nor even (on the surface) societal norms. Waste is bad, efficiency is good, right? They’re doing what’s taught in every business school; maximizing efficiency is one of the greatest gifts of the free market. Amazon is really extremely good at it.
This idea that capitalist efficiency is not something to blame the capitalist for, but is an effect of the mode of production of society overall is really very much a Marxist idea, and yet like your assumption that Bray is berating Amazon, people tend to similarly believe Marx hated capitalists.
But like Marx praised capitalism into the skies for its efficiency yet criticised its bad sides, Bray is also pointing out that this efficiency has good sides. It's just that it also has bad sides, and we should worry that we blindly keep accepting the bad sides even as the toll it takes rises:
> It’s hard to think of a position more radical than being “against efficiency”. And I’m not. Efficiency is a good, and like most good things, has to be bought somehow, and paid for. There is a point where the price is too high, and we’ve passed it.
Of course, this is pretty much inadvisable in every day life. We need some 'inefficiency' to ensure that our stuff won't break apart at the wrong time.
For the case of a racing car, if the engineers were told to design it with maximum efficiency possible, and it only has to last the race, then yes, why not have it break and fall apart at the end, if doing so means it runs at a very high efficiency?
Also - Is it affected by the level of hardness in the local water and my patterns of usage ajd types of detergent I use? Does additional reliability affect any other parameters like energy and water usage?
In a multi-variable comparison like this it is impossible to say much about future past 5 years with much certainty, while the price is single biggest objective metric.
Compared to new plastic consumer class crap, older premium dell notebooks have excellent usability, they last forever and you can even throw them around without worrying about their metal outer layer breaking.
The downside is that they might look ugly for some people.
Also most people I recommended this, dismissed the idea, because buying stuff used were somehow unthinkable for them?
I just don’t get it.
Supposedly it's one of the reasons why homes (but not land) tend to depreciate in Japan: newer structures meet newer, higher safety standards. When you live in an active earthquake zone (also: typhoons), why wouldn't you want one that takes in account the seismic developments of the previous thirty years (generally how often rebuilds are done)?
It's all very well to say to it'd be nice for appliances to last longer, which isn't a 'wrong' statement, but looking at the efficiency gains over the last 20-30 years is quite remarkable.
We may now be hitting diminishing returns, so perhaps should turn to durability more, but it's not like buying new didn't get you anything in recent years.
I don't believe we would even know what we ate if there wasn't laws in place.
The alternative theory would be that middle management does its job efficiently but it is a different one than the job description says.
In the previous sentence or so, there was talk about margins of healthcare, which have disappeared. These margins don't exist without more work.
Maybe it is rather that we are working with more things with less effort, rather than doing few things well.
Also cash and work have some correlation, but I think there is higher more profound correlation with work and total amount of products such as roads and buildings. Cash rarely stays in bank accounts but circulates and randomly spawns service and concrete products.
Everyone should work, all the time, to leave this a better place than we found it. And there is still much work to do.
Sounds weirdly similar and weirdly appropriate.
This is an old complaint going back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution at least. The US once had an 8-hour day and a 40-hour week. Now those are only memories.
Unions. The people who brought you the weekend.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-w...
You can have a career as a software engineer with a 40 hour week if you want. It just won't be at Amazon.
You can have a career as a lawyer, just not at big law.
Professionals get to opt in and get commensurate rewards. The factory workers didn't get anything extra for their extra efforts.
Now I’m a software dev working in an office, the base pay is much better, but there is no overtime.
Rewards like burnout, lower quality of life, worsening relationships with friends and family...?
The problem is actually a vicious circle. People work more to be valued more, which causes others to work also more so that they can compete. The company benefits from this and takes it as the new normal: deadlines shorten, workload increases, and it stops being optional to become "optional", as in "you can opt out of more work, but get ready to find another job soon". Now you have a whole group of workers burning themselves out for marginally more money and status, while the company they work for makes more money.
And no, it doesn't just happen at Amazon. This happens to software engineers everywhere.
Of course, it's not by far the same situation as factory workers, but there's a serious problem with the work culture in software, specially in the US.
But what are those things worth to you? As they have different values to everyone.
A friend of mine is currently working on his software project at work (and this is for a massive non tech company, so it is not as if it is a startup). It is 6AM on a Sunday and that is what he is doing. And he is doing it out of boredom as he is in many ways the stereotypical software guy.
Another good friend is in Seattle. He logged in to work at midnight today while chatting with me. Why? He has nothing else to do.
I spend 100+ hours at my computer a week and have since high school. Spending a greater percentage of that time coding for work does not meaningfully impact my quality of life other than taking away from commenting on forums or my hobby of solving innovation challenges. Whether I am unemployed or facing a major deadline, I am going to be online anyway.
I get why long hours would be terrible for people with families requiring attention or girlfriends or those who like hiking, but a lot of software engineers (like me or the aforementioned friends) have none of those, making more work very cheap for us.
I don't know any software person who works at 6AM on a Sunday.
>He logged in to work at midnight today while chatting with me. Why? He has nothing else to do.
Does he have time to find anything else to do?
> Spending a greater percentage of that time coding for work does not meaningfully impact my quality of life other than taking away from commenting on forums or my hobby of solving innovation challenges.
Being online and working is not the same at all. Maybe for you, for not most people.
> but a lot of software engineers (like me or the aforementioned friends) have none of those
Several things:
1. Not having anything other than your job is bad. Full stop. Maybe a handful of persons can work in that situation, but having such a messed up work-life balance is bad for your health, there are plenty of studies on this.
2. Have you asked why this happens? Maybe it's not just people who like that, but people who have no other options due to companies "forcing" those hours.
3. Is this beneficial? How much productivity can someone get out of the last 2 hours of a 12-hour work day? How much is that extra work worth?
4. Are you and your friends ready to take on those workloads for your whole life? Because it's hard to get out of that dynamic.
5. Burnout is a serious issue. Burnout can lead to depression, can lead to losing your job, to having serious health problems... It's not a joke. It's a serious risk.
It's not for you to decide where anyone derives their meaning and happiness in life or how many hours they should work. You can only decide this for yourself.
>2. Have you asked why this happens? Maybe it's not just people who like that, but people who have no other options due to companies "forcing" those hours.
There are always options. It's up to you to find the niche that works for you.
>3. Is this beneficial? How much productivity can someone get out of the last 2 hours of a 12-hour work day? How much is that extra work worth?
Depends on the individual.
>4. Are you and your friends ready to take on those workloads for your whole life? Because it's hard to get out of that dynamic.
Their decision.
>5. Burnout is a serious issue. Burnout can lead to depression, can lead to losing your job, to having serious health problems... It's not a joke. It's a serious risk.
It's each individual's risk to take. If someone wants to work 12 hours a day, it is their decision. "Full stop"
Most importantly, it’s not an isolated thing. It’s not just one or two persons doing it: if it were that it wouldn’t be a problem. It’s a generalized culture issue that should be taken seriously and not only viewed in terms of individuals.
> And if companies allow and encourage staying more hours, it creates an environment where people can’t choose to work sane hours.
Yes they can, they just have to accept that they will get compensated and rewarded less than people who generate additional high quality work. That should be fine and is fair; those people working 8 hours are deriving value from other activities. It's not reasonable to say "I demand everyone works 8 hours because I want to work 8 hours and I don't want any ramifications for making that decision".
For how much time? There is a clear association between more working hours and more burnout [1] and health problems [2] that can be delayed for decades.
> Yes they can, they just have to accept that they will get compensated and rewarded less than people who generate additional high quality work.
Sorry, but in most places this doesn't happen. I'm lucky to be out of those environments, but the expectation tends to be that everybody works those hours or they're out, even if they're producing the same high quality work (also, I highly doubt that more hours equals more high quality work: productivity decreases after a certain point, specially in software, that's why 6-hour work days are being discussed so much). I still remember a friend being glad that he convinced his manager to "only" work 10 hours a day, because he was literally losing hair due to the extra work. This guy liked what he was doing and at the beginning said "it doesn't matter, I'm happy working these hours.
> It's not reasonable to say "I demand everyone works 8 hours because I want to work 8 hours and I don't want any ramifications for making that decision".
Well, this is the law in most countries in Europe. Overtime is heavily regulated (enforcement is another matter, unfortunately) precisely because business pressure can be disguised as "individual decisions". When a lot of people start working more hours, it puts pressure on people who fulfill their contracted hours, and who might not want or be able to put those extra hours.
In the end, it's a balancing act between giving some people the freedom to work the hours they want and helping the company put pressure on others to do more hours than they were contracted for (in other words, changing their work conditions without negotiation) or give others the freedom to do the job they were hired and paid for without pressure to do more than what was negotiated. Me, I prefer to err on the side of caution and choose the action that doesn't harm the health and well-being of the employees.
1: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302591873_The_Assoc... 2: https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/24/3/422/477763
I've seen research suggesting that workers can get increased productivity working over 40 hours a week for several weeks, but after that, productivity actually goes negative relative to a 40 hour week, because more mistakes are being made that will require rework.
Everyone decides these things for themselves indeed, but that shouldn't stop others from having opinions regarding those decisions, or giving unsolicited advice to help others stop hurting themselves. I for sure hope my friends will step in and try to stop me if I go down the path of self-destruction.
And also, anyone is free to ignore the advice given by others. Which is a good thing, for much of it is bad advice.
The quote you reply to says nothing about meaning and happiness, just health.
And no matter how much meaning and happiness you believe you are getting, when your body and mind give out, that choice will be taken away from you and you will be taking time off from working, just not in a very pleasant way.
By "not having anything", I assume the OP is referring to things that give meaning.
>And no matter how much meaning and happiness you believe you are getting
This is awfully presumptuous and condescending.
>when your body and mind give out, that choice will be taken away from you and you will be taking time off from working, just not in a very pleasant way.
You mean when I'm not able to sustain long hours anymore? I'll have enough money saved to simply cut back on work. No spiraling health crisis necessary.
That part is the key. Otherwise it is just self imposed indentured servant-hood.
Many studies have shown that extra work has negative value, particularly in intellectual disciplines.
You will pay a price. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but you don't stay young forever.
Please help yourself before it's too late.
Even if you are a software engineer you can make top-tier, simply insane amounts of money at most big companies with a sub-40 hour workweek.
It is simply a matter of finding the right team and having a good manager. The former is something you can affect and the latter can be luck. But you can definitely make some of the best compensation in CS and have cushy working hours if you play your cards right.
More like professionals are forced in, but get commensurate rewards. Employment isn't flexible enough for people to really choose extra work for extra rewards. The "typical" (average, median, raced-to-the-bottom, whatever) amount people are willing to work and the typical amount they're willing to work for dictates what jobs are even out there. When you need roughly replaceable workers, you give them all roughly the same deal, so professionals aren't just competing on wages vs skill, but on the whole necessarily-mostly-homogeneous package.
I'm happy to have these extra benefits well above a living wage, but I'd take a fraction of my comp for a fraction of my hours in a heartbeat, but we're in a world where a FAANG wage/hour means basically FAANG hours.
To claim that Marx isn't relevant for worker conditions today is to either misunderstand him or misrepresent him. The contradictions arising from social conflict can't be solved by air condition because they are bound to our mode of production.
Marx was inspired by the world around him, which consisted of poor worker conditions [0]. We can say this confidently because recent evolution in the study of ideology tells us exactly this: We are a product of our social and material environment, something we can't escape [1].
Anyway, my point is that the way CamperBob2 discusses the topic of Marx's inspiration makes it sound like a fundamental axiom of Marxism is the poor conditions of the working class and specifically their conditions during working hours. If this was true, we'd be able to conclude that the predictions of Marx [2] would be disproved by the gradual removal of these (poor) worker conditions.
We can show this isn't true by appealing to our shared knowledge about the world, where global inequality is increasing and where worker conflict was at the center of an (almost) successful presidential campaign. We can also show this with empirical data, where our shared knowledge may fail us. For instance, Marx predicted that the global rate of profit would continue to fall, the reasons for which are beyond the scope of HN. This has been demonstrated to be true by many Marxists along the years, of whom the most prominent since the rise of the IT-worker is the economist Andrew Kliman [3].
[0]: See Marx's theory of alienation and the concept of reification, for instances of this.
[1]: In particular, see Anthoni Gramsci through Louis Althusser and Slavoj Zizek.
[2]: Ranging from social conflict theory to capital accumulation, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the value-form and social conflict theory.
[3]: “The Persistent Fall in Profitability Underlying the Current Crisis: New Temporalist Evidence” by Andrew Kliman
Marxism isn't a normative ideology. You could be a despotic monopoly leader and still be a Marxist. Whether worker conditions are good or bad at any instant in any place has no bearing on Marxist analysis.
If Marx was still alive today, I think that he would answer the question about how modern workers have such better conditions than those in early capitalism the exact same way as when people in his time said that proletarian had better conditions than the peasants before them, which was nominally true.
In any case, the prescriptions of how a 19th century proletarian could improve their life are essentially the same. The idea is that the interests of your employer will always he opposite yours, as a result you will only be able to improve your conditions by organizing with your fellow workers in order to tip the balance of power, and eventually it is in your interests to change the conditions that lead to this conflict to begin with.
And the 8 hour work day was supposedly introduced by Ford, not by Unions.
Unions are a way of making HR listen.
Retail clerk?
Pretty much anything that falls under "essential jobs" during the pandemic fits the "in demand" label, and the vast majority of those pay low wages.
And no matter how easy it is for a company to replace a given worker in their job, no job should ever pay so little that the person in it cannot live on what they make from it.
Any business that cannot survive while paying its employees a true living wage does not deserve to exist, because it is offloading its costs onto the rest of us through the various social programs its employees depend upon to survive.
That's not true. The rest of us would have to pay those costs anyway. It's not like the person wouldn't exist, if they didn't have a job.
Given the choices
a) Business pays employee a living wage; taxpayers pay nothing for that person's survival
b) Business pays employee a less-than-living wage; taxpayers pay partially for that person's survival
c) Person has no job; taxpayers pay fully for that person's survival
(Note, of course, that this leaves off choice d) Person has no job, or does not make enough from their job to survive; for whatever reason, they also cannot obtain welfare, and they die.)
...I think that most people would agree that the best of these three is (a). In that situation "the rest of us" most certainly do not have to pay those costs.
Furthermore, I think the more important point than "the person would still exist if they didn't have a job" is "other, better jobs would still exist if that company folded due to unprofitability, or was never created in the first place".
People have an inherent right to life, liberty, and property.
Businesses are not some sacred abstract; they exist purely to support people. Any privileges they have (down to and including their existence), we grant them, and we can revoke from them if they are not fulfilling their fundamental purposes.
Given that we're talking about such businesses, the choice is between b and c, and b is clearly preferable.
For example the government may say that to clean their facility, cleaning companies need to be able to do a, b, c and after that it all comes down to the price. Almost all of them can do a,b,c so they compete on price, on cleaning company is not paying taxes though so can offer lower prices and wins all deals, forcing all other companies to stop paying taxes to survive, and makes the whole trade in that area morally bankrupt.
See also: construction business & tipping.
It's pure fantasy to assume every employer could pay a living wage. For example, take house cleaning. What if some pensioner can spare 30$/week to have their house cleaned. How are they supposed to pay a living wage? If somebody steps forward and says OK, I'll clean the house for 30$, fine. If not, tough luck. But to demand the pensioner should pay a living wage (like what, 2000$ or more to have their house cleaned), or call them evil for not paying enough, is backwards and absurd.
You only exhibit the socialist magic thinking again As if there are infinite resources, and the only problem is to redistribute them. That's not how the real work works. If you want to eat, somebody (possibly you) has to hunt or farm, gather resources, and so on. It's not a given that any number of people can simply earn a "living wage" or even have a job. Somebody has to create such jobs, that are productive enough to feed somebody.
Instead of complain about stinginess of businesses, prove your theories by creating jobs that pay better.
However, yes, I would agree with previous commenters that if you can't afford to pay people enough to live on then you don't have a business that society should deem viable. If everyone in society was scrabbling around for resources then you might have a point, but in actual fact, the dominant situation is that there is a tiny group of people who are extraordinarily wealthy, a larger-but-still-not-massive group of people who are comfortable, and a great deal of people who get what's left, often not very much at all. Resources are so unfairly distributed I just don't find your argument at all persuasive.
Socialist thought doesn't assume infinite resources, it just says that democracy should be extended much further than it is right now, particularly to the workplace. We could "create" jobs collectively and not leave the decision of how much to pay to a small group of people who have all the power simply because they have the money to start with.
The talk about "businesses that society should consider viable" is nonsense, as the example of the pensioner wanting someone to clean their apartment shows. What should they do if society doesn't consider them "viable", commit suicide?
If society doesn't deem some business "viable", they can simply refuse to work for that business.
If you want to create jobs "collectively", sorry to say, you are in full blown socialist territory, and you will fail, for the same reasons that socialism always fail (because planning economies can't assign resources efficiently enough).
I don't call them evil for not paying enough.
I say they don't make enough to employ a cleaner as that cleaner's full-time job.
And the full-time job is not a valid argument. So if some company were to split their jobs into part time jobs, it would make it OK for you? I rather doubt that.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/03/how-the-8-hour-workday-chang...
I still think the whole demand is completely backwards.
Article also mentions the info workers who work 12 hours and more - well they do it because they make good money that way. They'll retire by 40 and have the last laugh.
As for factory workers, are you sure the issue is factories not paying enough? Or what exactly is going on in the US economy? What is so expensive? Why is there so much competition for jobs?
Or at least guilds with 'base' contracts / conditions for employments.
Actors all get the same basic level of protection with regards to working conditions, pensions, health care (?), but that does not stop them from negotiating different salaries (with a floor?) for the "100x" performers.
I have personally benefited from rights that unions have fought for. I am grateful to them for this. What I see them fight for now is worker retention. The most common fight is for the worst union members, because you have to represent your worst member, otherwise what is a union worth?
The other common union fight is whether the members are going to be screwed by management or by the competition, where the competition may be in a different country or a state with fewer protections on workers' rights.
I think there are still marginal conflicts where the Union can secure benefits for their members, but I'm not sure how much more they can help society overall.
EDIT: it would also be remiss not to add that much of the power of unions has been stripped away by union busting and bad legislation
It seems to be quite anemic.
One thing that comparing GDP per capita growth tends to show is that global and regional overall development totally swamps even seemingly large changes like the 35 hour week.
What the change also tends to gloss over is that the number of hours worked per worker in France is not particularly low. According to OECD, for 2019 it stood at 1505 vs. 1538 for the UK or 1386 for Germany. The reduction in France, to the extent it changed anything, may have distributed work a bit more but it did not suddenly drastically reduce the hours worked.
The average number of hours worked per worker dropped somewhat over the few years after the reform, but it dropped across all the major OECD countries, and by similar rates.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=France+and+us+gdp+per+...
Here is a ratio to illustrate my point better (the ratio is roughly flat)
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=France+divided+by+us+g...
This talk [1] by by Mark Sherman of the Software Engineering Institute at CMU is about as dark as the summary of injuries Tim presents in his post. He mentions there are on the order of hundreds of thousands of CVE reports that there are neither time nor money to triage.
[1] https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2019/speaker/sherman/
We send astronauts to space knowing that we will kill about 1 in 30 of them. We let thousands die on roads so we can move around cities quickly.
Everything we enjoy about modern society has a certain amount of injury risk.
We are constantly saying skew the bugs, let's see what happens.
Edit: also I'm discussing security bugs where there are asymmetries in the risk profiles and threat models of actors and agents.
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune
- Frank Herbert, Dune Chronicles
It reminds me of someone who believes that all torture is morally wrong, but then adds "and it doesn't work anyway". Now if someone can find a situation where it does work then they can undermine that position with addressing the core argument.
Exactly that's what I want to point out. The talking in the article is not about efficiency or productivity, but that there is a moral compass we have to uphold whatever path we chose to take.
Why? Efficiency means performance per unit of effort. Being more efficient means you can take more smoke breaks, and still perform the same.
Its true that with limited demand being more efficient would give you more break time. That's however not the reality as there is always more to do.
Now it's suddenly profitable to remove all breaks as long as the extra time offsets the reduced efficiency.
This is not really the way the argument goes though. Person A says “torture is repugnant and should be banned”; person B responds “well how will we ever get a prisoner to answer the questions we need”.
And then person A points out that trained interrogators who build some kind of trust or at least mutual respect with those they are interrogating literally always get better results than the adversarial tough guys who jump to inflicting pain, and that if you ask effective experienced interrogators even from repressive horrible regimes, they’ll tell you “nah, skip the torture, because you’ll waste a lot of trouble getting completely worthless results. When you torture someone they’ll tell you whatever you want to hear to make you stop, and the garbage they spew under torture is never actionable. It takes a lot of hard work to undo the damage and regain enough trust to get useful information, if it’s even possible at all”.
This is not to say that torture would be fine if only it were effective, but rather that the people who torture are lying when they cite its effectiveness or potential. The people who turn to torture (or instruct others to do so) are not actually doing it because they get valuable information out of it; that’s just a rationalization. They’re really doing it for (a) the sadistic psychopathic pleasure in the act, or (b) to terrorize and degrade as an end in itself.
The folks who defend torture based on some hypothetical efficacy (always without evidence, or sometimes with “evidence” that falls apart like wet toilet paper once exposed to the most cursory examination) reveal themselves to be not only morally repugnant but also dishonest and disingenuous. Unless they are extremely naïve (e.g. schoolchildren) it is not worth having this or any other debate with them, because they are not arguing in good faith.
— George Orwell, 1984, 1949
But this characterization of anti-torture arguments is a straw man, not reflective of how the discussion goes in practice, and itself missing the point of converations about torture’s essential ineffectiveness.
- Tracer Tong, Deus Ex
The older I get, the more prophetic that quote becomes.
> When we say that one kind of work is overpaid and another underpaid, what are we really saying? In a free market, prices are determined by what buyers want. People like baseball more than poetry, so baseball players make more than poets. To say that a certain kind of work is underpaid is thus identical with saying that people want the wrong things.
> Well, of course people want the wrong things. It seems odd to be surprised by that. And it seems even odder to say that it's unjust that certain kinds of work are underpaid. Then you're saying that it's unjust that people want the wrong things. It's lamentable that people prefer reality TV and corndogs to Shakespeare and steamed vegetables, but unjust? That seems like saying that blue is heavy, or that up is circular.
In the same way, it’s “lamentable” that people buy mass-produced products that are slightly inferior and cheaper, but not surprising.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html?viewfullsite=1
My bigger concern about that is all of the fossil fuels getting wasted doing the haber-process for food nobody's going to use.
If you let the beancounters squeeze out headroom in the name of greater efficiency, you sacrifice resilience and reliability. In other news, water is wet.
This reminds me that capitalism will probably be just fine once people are reminded (yet again) about what risk is, and that they should treat all their counterparties well, to get those long term win-win situations.
Can you elaborate on this? What is the risk, and what do people need to be reminded of?
Not taking orders from robots, or having your agenda defined by robots/automatic scripts, should in fact be a societal norm. One can argue with a human boss, however bad or mean or stupid they are. You can't argue with a robot and that's what makes people's lives miserable.