Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?
A bunch of things I've noticed:
* Landlords seem extremely greedy and do terrible rent seeking tactics like fees upon fees (250 admin fee to rent here, $75 to apply, $300 non refundable pet deposit, $25 a month pet rent, $12.50 community fee, $15 trash valet, $5 online payment fee, $100 a month community internet (for the $50 a month package), going Month to month after a lease ends is 2x the annual price. And then they use RealPage to collude to make prices higher[1]
* People are noisy as fuck and dont seem to give a shit. Seems like every night there's someone with loud as exhaust on "sportish" car ripping around the neihborhood. For months this guy would start up his loud car at 7am and no one care when I complained.
* General worker apathy is endemic everywhere I go people seem aggravated I would dare to check my order and point out they didn't put in the ketchup i asked for, or the napkins, or whatever. Or when I dine in the tables are dirty. Or the gym is filthy, the cleaner just drags the mop around looking busy but accomplishing nothing. But in many instances they keep asking for more tips.
* Software seems to be overrun by a mentality that any future cost is worth it to save even 1 minute of development time today. And this one I think I've observed the root, it seems that people get promoted away from their problems so they're not the ones to solve them. And those who do write good software (albeit slightly slower) are not promotable beacuse they're "under performing" their peers. Why does it seem management (and many thusly incentivized engineers) have abandoned decades of experience showing how to create reliable, robust, reusable code that is both great the customer, fast to iterate on, and only a tiny tiny bit slower to write.
* Seems like everything is subscription model and you have to pay N times to access something thats only worth 1-3x . Eg: I Netflix for a couple hours a month. At the price for 4k access I can almost go out to a theatre. Video games are all trending to subscription models. I just learned the other day that the PS4 games I got with my subcription to PSN all are locked because I stopped subscribing (nearly 50 games) . So I paid them like $125 for access to these games for 24 months, and now I cannot play any of them? At least I still own NES/SNES/N64 Game cartridges that will never lock me out.
* Police seem to not give a shit anymore. I've noticed what seems to be total lawlessness going on in my world. Folks stealing shit. People driving absurdly dangerously in cars that are not designed to travel like that. (tailgating, lane switch, accelerating at the fastest I've ever seen a beat up Sentra do...) . I never see cops hit lights and sirens at them. And every year our taxes (their paycheck) and our insurance goes up (a consequence of poor driving habits). And at the same time, we get these cases where a dude like Tyre, at least as I see the body cam, seems to be basically complying and the police freak out on him, he basically complies, and they taze and pepper spay him, no wonder he ran away -- what is someone supposed to think when they say "on the ground" and you get on the ground and then just keep getting more and more aggressive. Like are you gonna just lay on your face while they potentially pull their gun and just shoot you in the back of the head? How do you know what's going on unless you can face and see them? How can you trust they wont, cause even if it's 99.999999% they wont, you only get 1 one chance and if you get it wrong you're dead without any coming back.
* Over and over again we keep hearing stories of fake people becoming the top paid, respected, or otherwise status people in society. Elizabeth Holmes, Frank/...
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 370 ms ] threadStill better than the midwest where I came from.
but I'm sure I could find a person who does
That is a very local problem, and is not a global question or observation.
> Landlords seem extremely greedy and do terrible rent seeking tactics like fees upon fees
I've had a few landlords in my life, and none of them nickel and dimed me with fees like that. They just raised the rent by maybe 5% every year. If it bothers you, try a new landlord, neighborhood, or city. Or buy a house.
"But houses are expensive where I live" I hear you say. You are the only person forcing yourself to live in California, NYC, London, Vancouver, or wherever. Smaller cities and less densely populated areas are generally cheaper, quieter, and less polluted. The people might be friendlier, too.
> General worker apathy
> Police seem to not give a shit anymore. I've noticed what seems to be total lawlessness going on in my world.
There's lots of places and cultures in the world that still show humanity towards strangers.
I could probably find a place that's about 25% cheaper. and a "fancy" place would be about 2x.
> Venice had prospered under a relatively open political system in which a wide swath of the people had a voice in the selection of the republic’s ruler, the doge, and successful outsiders could join the ruling class. But in 1315, the establishment, which had been gradually tightening its control over the government, put a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro D'Oro, or Book of Gold, which was an official registry of Venetian nobility. If you weren’t in it, you couldn’t join the ruling oligarchy.
> .. certain extreme concentrations of minority power in society can exist under a variety of regimes ranging from authoritarian to democratic. Oligarchic power in advanced industrial contexts, for instance, is almost universally fused to procedural democracy. Although it is impossible to focus on all the cases in the region of Southeast Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore have been selected for the ways in which they help develop oligarchic theory ..
It will get better, it always does. Just takes a while. Make strategic moves and maybe it works out for you.
Refrigerators used to last forever. I still have a 1993 refrigerator that is still working well. In the meanwhile with all brands except maybe for Subzero and other $10k refrigerators you are lucky today if the refrigerator lasts 6 years.
"Oh, if people wanted to pay for longer-lastong appliances then they would still be on the market. It's really the consumers' fault that our $3k fridges only last 5 years"
BS. If I had a dime for every customer who said they'd rather have bought a smaller, less fancy appliance with more longevity for the same price, I'd have enough to manufacture my own line of fridges that don't crap out the day the warranty ends.
If you really want to know if everything is declining, try measure it everyday for the next five years. For example, every day, rate your personal well being, track how (un)happy you are with the current software, how much you pay to your landlords and subscriptions, how many mistakes the police makes, the weather, everything, ... After 5 years you'll have a good idea if things actually got worse than they are now. Sure, some things will get worse, but definitely not everything, and some things will even be better than they are now.
This is reminiscent of my previous struggles with cyclothymia[1], for example. Furthermore, the perception of impending calamity was contributing to the stress and worsened the symptoms further. (I wonder if there is an analogy to be drawn here as well, but I suspect this part is much less generalizable.)
At the same time, it makes sense for people to have heightened awareness of "the bad times": each cycle represents added stress to the system, and with a heightened probability of calamity (eg. becoming insolvent / suffering a mental health emergency).
[1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17788-cycloth...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_formula#Relationship...
In your version pretty much any internet disagreement is gaslighting.
You cannot determine or know ill intent, so it's not really helpful as a property.
> In your version pretty much any internet disagreement is gaslighting.
Disagreement alone does not suffice. You need to tell the other person that what they see is not real and/or that they imagine things. But as I said, it's a bit exaggerated, however it's not so farfetched either.
You're clearly still trying to change the definition and are still ignoring that gaslighting itself requires negative manipulation. From wikipedia, these actions are easy to identify:
>Obfuscation: deliberately muddying or overcomplicating an issue.
>Withholding: pretending not to understand the victim.
>Countering: vehemently calling into question a victim's memory despite the victim having remembered things correctly.
>Blocking and diverting: diverting a conversation from the subject matter to questioning the victim's thoughts and controlling the conversation.
>Trivializing: making the victim believe his or her thoughts or needs are unimportant.
>Forgetting and denial: pretending to forget things that have really occurred. The abuser may deny or delay things like promises that are important to the victim. Although anyone can deny or delay, the gaslighter does it regularly in the absence of real external limitations. The gaslighter may make up or create artificial barriers to allow themselves to deny or delay that which is important to the victim.
Telling someone who asked for feedback, in earnest that you think their perceptions are wrong is not in any way gaslighting.
Gaslighting probably isn't an exact answer, but it's dismissive enough to be close. Hand-waving it as "rosy retrospection". Telling OP to measure things they actually do seem to be measuring.
There could be a name for this exact sort of "You're not really paying attention to everything you're obviously really paying attention to" dismissiveness, and if the churn of language lands on "gaslighting, definition c", I don't have much argument against it.
And when compared to the present, media narrative driven present its hard to see the improvements happening across the global population.
It helps me put stuff in perspective - of course mileage may var (and maybe it's just helping me delude myself into getting out a funk but it works!).
[1] Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
[2] See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income - Anna Rosling Rönnlund https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw
In 2022, we:
- Reversed organ death in pigs
- Made the first embryo from stem cells
- Made a pan-influenza vaccine
- Saw the beginning of time
- Got best-ever results from cancer & obesity therapy trials
- Maybe cracked the case of multiple sclerosis
From: https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1600864770751860737 (https://archive.is/pi95L)
Sorry, I'm not buying it anymore. More than likely, none of that is going to help me or anyone I know from struggling just a little more each year.
As the meme goes, ¿Porque no lo dos?
Sure tech progress is cool, but it's hard to care when I feel more isolated from my community than ever, the world feels "angry", and in many important ways my life feels much worse off than just a few years ago.
The meme about "but living standards doubling every X years!" is little comfort when you can't feel any of those impacts - not to mention that the material is scarcely the only thing that matters for human happiness.
Most of the HN audience is likely at self-actualization stage where its going to be hard for society to help double life standards when every one's such standard is decided in such a deeply personal way for each individual. [1] It's also going to be really hard to measure progress on this front at a societal level.
[1] The importance of Maslow's hierarchy of needs
https://www.theschooloflife.com/article/the-importance-of-ma...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0PKWTta7lU
Another angle is if I struggle and work hard, what rewards accrue to others, and what do I get in return? The ROI on effort seems to be dwindling cause fakes are crowding out the real hard workers. And the buyers (ie wealthy investors) cant seem to tell the difference between expertise and bald faced lies. (I blame social media and rise of influencers for this, a bunch of fancy graphics and a iphone and now you know the 1 real secret the life long scientists have been holding back to our fatloss/clear pores/million dollar a month business).. Then again it was the missteps of institutions that even gave influencers their chance (a little lack of integrity ruins it for all)
From the distribution chart it seems most of the US stock market is owned via IRAs/401Ks/defined benefits and insurance versus individual accounts. [1]
Those evil corporate landlords that drive up rents? Well, likely they are acting on behalf of former hardworking teachers of Canada. Sure there is skimming involved but a bulk is going toward to teacher's retirement. [2]
Of course mileage may vary whether this helps how one feels.
[1] https://i.insider.com/5746013852bcd044008c527e?width=1200for...
[2] Why Canada’s Teachers Run an Investment Firm in Singapore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HXcT_xlLB0
eg: something like 99.95% of the planet (all but 1-2 Million) have 0 or near 0 benefit from most of those findings (save for maybe the vaccine). But important things are going away -- treating people well, having happy lives, justice and being treated fairly. It's not a good tradeoff IMO.
This is not the right way to evaluate the benefits of science. This is the year those advancements start having an affect. The same thing was true about microchips the year they were invented, and about radioactivity, and even about the health benefits of washing hands and drinking clean water. All scientific discoveries are an investment in the future, and those four I just mentioned have at this point touched nearly every single person on the planet, just like the above list may well do in the future.
There isn’t strong evidence that the things you mentioned are actually going away, why do you believe it’s true? Women and minorities are getting more justice and fair treatment than they have in the past. People treating each other well is subjective, and it’s arguable how well they ever did in the past. But murder, violent crime, property crime and hate crime rates have all gone down for the past ~40 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States Happiness is also subjective, but take a look at the Human Development Index and note how all 66 countries in the list on this page have a positive year-over-year growth rate. All of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
I think that depends a lot on where you live and what you look like relative to those around you. I wouldn’t think black citizens in the US in the 1950s would agree with what you’re saying. An Asian coworker of mine said he always thought it would be interesting to go back in time and live for a little bit in the 1940s, but every time he thinks that he has to remind himself what they did to Asians in the 1940s here in the US.[0]
I do think that tech (particularly social media) has amplified a lot of the bad social behavior that people have always had. I don’t think there’s more of it, just that it’s gotten louder. Someone who could only be an asshole to the people around them can now go online and be an asshole to millions of people around the world at once.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
Researchers want to slightly oversell their discoveries, and the media wants to misunderstand to oversell them even more. Humbug 9 times out of 10.
Yep, and they were clear that this was not ignition.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/09/breaking-news-fusion-re...
So a order of magnitude larger output power promised... except when you count total input power and reasonable heat engine efficiencies (if installing one had been planned), it's unlikely they would even get more power out than in !
But then, the very same month I was also made aware of SP(ARC), which is revolutionary because it can (in theory) afford to be so much smaller than ITER (which is ridiculously large and therefore expensive in a super linear way) :
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/10/smaller-more-efficie...
Why can't we do something about the genocide of young black men that is being committed by young black men, for example?
Are you talking about a specific country in Africa? If so, what do you propose? Should we send US military to force a regime change? Because that worked so well in Afghanistan, right?
Our crime statistics show the greatest threat to a young black male is another young black male. Look at the Chicago shooting stats every weekend.
Dig deep into gun deaths and you will see that is young men if color shooting andurdering each other in gang and criminal contexts that accounts for most of the deaths.
And yet the media can only rise to care about gun deaths when it is white children being murdered. That shows their real values.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
Call it whatever you like, but acknowledge that this is horrific.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in...
I have zero sympathy for criminals who're killing each other. Have you tried comparing murder rates of innocent non-violent civilians across different races?
And the greatest threat to a young white male is another young white male. Does that mean that there's a genocide of white men by white men?
More black men are murdered than white men as an absolute count, which is horrific considering that whites outnumber blacks by at least 4:1.
Is it more racist to not talk about black on black violence, or to address it directly? Refusing to acknowledge the issue so we can tailor policy to save black lives is white privilege exemplified.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in...
Murder is bad.
If black people are murdered out of proportion to all other races, by a wide margin, that's something that needs to be investigated.
Down vote me racists.
I resent the Taliban for depriving of the right of women to receive eductaion, but that doesn't mean I support meddling in other countries' internal affairs. Believe in Afghanistan will generate an enlightened regime in the future.
But. The past 5+ years have not been kind to the general arc of progress, particularly in already-developed countries in the West, and the US most of all. There has been genuine, real backsliding across the board on a variety of measures. And it's important to acknowledge that, too.
Here's the link to view the photos by income:
https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street
Compared with historical photos, the narrower scope of dollar-street photos might be less fun? Or not - it's a richly textured image set. Deep linking the dollar-tree site could give richer follow-up context. Perhaps paired guesses of income and location, might quickly teach their relative salience?
[1] https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street/about? [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34559867
This one is wrong. If this were the SNES era to play 50 games the best you could do is rent for $3 to play for a couple nights. That's $150 (more like $300 in today's dollars) which is more than they paid for unlimited access to the games. To match that they'd have not much choice other than retail for $50 a pop, $2,500 for all of them, or $5,000 in today's dollars. Used for maybe half that with effort.
HBO was more expensive when it launched in the 80s and that doesn't count the base cable subscription fee. I pay much less for the 2-3 streaming services that I use than my parents paid for cable when I was growing up. That alone is undeniably better. Plus you can do things like buy any Disney DVD used for $2 pop plus a flat $3 shipping on ebay. No way that happens in the VCR days. Not to mention that used DVD players are practically free vs a couple hundred for a vcr player.
I guess I feel shafted paying $5 a month to get b list games for only so long as I keep paying $5 a month in perpetuity. The eventual sum of this is approaching infinity or something like 1500-2000 for my remaining life expectancy.
Versus on steam you can sometimes buy great games for $10-20, albeit your betting steam will exist in the future to distribute the game to you.
That's not something you can do away with seeing the past in a more rosy way. Because in the past people had to interact to get through life.
The most important thing for socialization is to just have physical proximity to other people in shared spaces, be that a park, office, school, club, etc. If anything, social media is just enabling people to sit in their boxes longer while still getting some form of socialization.
Explain this then: https://www.thelocal.se/20230127/ten-terrifying-stats-about-...
Numbers talk. At least here in sweden rich are richer and everyone else is poorer.
Actually, the fact that people are supposed to pretend things are OK, while everyone over there is possibly a few steps away from being drafted into war, is another sign that things have headed in the wrong direction in exactly the manner OP is suggesting.
You need a backbone of experienced military professional and infrastructure to do that ( eg : France used to have a lot of military center to host / train people. Those have been abandoned in the late 90s )
Why do you think so? Might be different in Eastern Europe, but as a Central European I think it’s quite unlikely that a direct conflict is going to happen.
Nobody in UK discourse is talking about conscription. Mind you, UK political discourse has gone increasingly off the rails with trying not to deal with corruption and incompetence of Tories.
Read [1] recently and it paints an bleaker picture than some other analyses.
https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/whats-ahead-war-ukrai...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deK98IeTjfY
It's a video essay on ammunition stockpiles on Ukraine and Russia by the youtuber Perun. It doesn't paint a rosy picture per se, but it does directly refute at least a few of the points made by the author of the RM blog you linked.
Hackernews is approaching the topic in a very characteristic way but depression is an important phenomenon that manifests to the individual as, among other things, worsening negative appraisals of everything. So do the consequences of poor fiscal and monetary policy. Funny how we use the same word for both.
Not really, no.
Don't get me wrong, 5 years ago I was in the UK, I moved to Berlin towards the end of 2018. Visiting the UK again last December… it felt very broken.
But it was the same kind of broken that I saw in Portsmouth when I was a child. And Berlin still feels as good as it did on my first visit.
Landlords being greedy? Sure. That's one of the things Marx and (from what little I've read of him) Adam Smith agreed on.
People are loud? I'm remembering a neighbour in my mid-terrace place in Sheffield in 2009-10, the husband and wife yelled at each other every night loud enough I could hear the words. I'm remembering a biker housemate in Cambridge who openly discussed the motorcycles with illegal loud exhausts. I'm remembering the stories in my childhood about illegal raves being shut down.
Worker apathy, that's hard to gauge. Could therefore believe it if it came with evidence stronger than an anecdote.
Software development looks like it's much the same combination of fads, technical debt, and Peter Principles as it ever was. But that's anecdotes, the proof is in the pudding, and everything is more stable and less crashy than I remember — while I think that Apple's UI peaked a decade ago, that's mainly because I am deeply nostalgic for skeuomorphic UI.
Subscription models: well, if you don't like them, don't get them. We're getting Netflix for one month of the year because that's enough to watch what we want, and there's plenty of others with different stuff we can watch later.
I'm not going to get a Photoshop subscription, but I did buy Pixelmator, and if that hadn't existed I'd have used GIMP.
The police? BLM started in 2013, the word "woke" originated in 1938 in the lyrics to a song about racial injustice in the legal system.
I have become very cynical about the legal system as a whole, but for very different reasons: if you were fully enforce all the traffic laws the only people who would be allowed to drive would be people like me who don't, if you fully enforced the drug laws you'd bankrupt whichever country you were in, and so on. But none of this is new, as evidenced by Sir Patrick Stewart's stories about his father.
For rich grifters, I suggest Robert Maxwell. He's… mostly forgotten. Fraudsters often are, so the question should be: what's the fraud rate in your country?
Everything is poison? I grew up with acid rain (solved), a hole in the ozone layer (getting better), indoor public smoking (banned in the UK, doesn't seem to be here in Berlin), asbestos (banned), and leaded petrol (banned).
Do we still have problems? I assume so! But they don't appear to be worse, rather they appear to be milder.
But now you have to worry about plastics in your food, leaching of chemicals from batteries that power new technology, depression and suicide, resulting from social media (especially amongst young children and teens), loss of privacy due to technological devices, dangerous side effects from new drugs that are pushed and marketed onto the public, dangerous chemicals and metals found in modern vaping devices, reduced quality of life due to income stagnation and exorbitant real estate prices, etc
Loss of privacy concerns me. Most people seem happy to over-share, presumably because the thing also allows more connections with more niche interests than most people can name.
Dangerous side effects of drugs? I remember seeing thalidomide victims in my local mall. We're a lot more cautious these days because of things like that.
Vaping is an odd thing to have a moral panic about, as the alternative for many people is to set fire to a tube of things known to produce carcinogenic smoke, and stick it in their mouth.
Stagnant quality of life is by definition not getting worse.
Exorbitant real estate prices are the only thing where I agree with you they're a genuine concern for the average Millennial and post-Millennial.
https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/suicide-data-statistics.html
“A "vape," or electronic cigarette, is a device that heats up a liquid to create a vapor you inhale.”
https://www.webmd.com/connect-to-care/vaping/what-is-vaping
What liquid? I know what tobacco is, but I don’t know what a “liquid” is. It could be anything and many of them contain dangerous metals, fragrances, and other mysterious chemicals. Hardly an improvement over cigarettes.
Stagnant wages over time, while they may have the same numeric value, result in far less purchasing power due to inflation.
Ridiculous real estate values are a concern for every generation.
> What liquid? I know what tobacco is, but I don’t know what a “liquid” is. It could be anything and many of them contain dangerous metals, fragrances, and other mysterious chemicals. Hardly an improvement over cigarettes.
Do you really know what tobacco is? Or do you take the mental shortcut that most people necessarily have to take with organic chemistry and mentally categorise "tobacco" as one single monolithic thing?
"""Of the more than 7,000 chemicals in tobacco smoke, at least 250 are known to be harmful, including hydrogen cyanide, carbon monoxide, and ammonia.
Among the 250 known harmful chemicals in tobacco smoke, at least 69 can cause cancer.""" - https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/t...
Combining:
> In US, suicide rates increased 36% between 2000-2018 and declined 5% between 2018-2020
With:
> Stagnant wages over time, while they may have the same numeric value, result in far less purchasing power due to inflation.
Yields some combination of:
There was significant nominal growth in incomes in that group (USA) in those period (both 2000-2018 and -2020, only a brief dip in 2020 and more growth since then but that's beyond the scope of what I'm responding to here), it was only stagnant after compensating for inflation — and then mostly in the poorer half (which I'd say is really bad because I'm European and therefore so left-wing I think the Democrats are dangerously right-wing).
And:
The worldwide suicide rate didn't follow the USA's, and is down by about a third in that period: https://ourworldindata.org/suicide — This graph also doesn't support the CDC percentages you quoted, because it's saying USA +10% over the same period they're saying +36%. (I wonder what the difference is?)
And:
Worldwide income per capita, at purchasing power parity, almost doubled from 7.954 PPP dollars in 2000 to 17.038 PPP dollars in 2020.
And:
The CPI inflation index also account for housing costs.
I can't begin to believe you're not trolling here. Seriously. "Everything" is more stable ?
Pick a random every-day operation ("rent an hotel", "book a flight", "pay your taxes", "order a pizza", etc...). We'll go to the first website that will come out of a google search, and try to follow the process from start to finish using a modern browser on a modern OS of a modern computer.
I bet we'll get at least 3 to 5 bugs (either in page loading, some server crashing, some page layout issue, some text display, some translation, some form field validation, some form submission, some confirmation email not being sent, etc...)
The most charitable view I can have is that software is "as bad as it ever was, but there is now new kind of bad software that lets you badly do things that were not possible in the past". But claiming an "improvement", especially in stability, seems like a stretch.
There was a distant time where those operations were done by calling a human being on the phone. Those were awkward conversations to have, and there were "bugs" in those too - but human interactions had had a few thousand years to iron out those bugs.
As a software engineer bringing my own set of (hopefully not too buggy and moderately useful) software into the world - I seriously miss those days.
I have literally never had any of those crash, which is what I was writing about.
> some page layout issue, some text display, some translation
Almost certainly on some of them, but that's not what I was talking about.
I have, 4.5 years ago, had an airline not understand how a + before the @ works in an email address. But it didn't crash.
And Ryanair's app and website sucks, but it didn't crash on me.
Booking hotels is reliable enough I've done a 1000 km cycle ride where I booked each hotel en route 2-3 hours before arriving because I didn't know which village or city I would reach before that point.
Taxes I can no longer do online because the UK won't let me do their bit online now I live abroad and I don't trust my understanding of German tax terminology for the other bit so I have an agent, but that's a legal issue not a website limit, and I can't remember ever having had a problem with HMRC online.
Likewise, the biggest problem I've ever had with buying a travel pass digitally was 5.5 years ago, because BVG didn't support iPad (not a typo, my phone was a Blackberry and I had an iPad).
I grew up with "System Error Type 11 (Restart)" on a weekly basis; nothing like that happens any more.
This probably explains why we don't understand each other.
I grew up with fairly crashy stuff too, don't get me wrong. I ordered stuff on a Minitel, for heck sake.
However, I suspect the fact we're old timers makes it even harder to sympathize with "normal people" confronted with unstable systems.
Because, a page not displaying properly on your phone, a form not liking your first name because it has a hyphen, a website suddenly switching to Spanish for half its content, a email that says "you'll soon receive " before not receiving anything, the message received in batch of 10 explaining that your subscription will now be "${sub}€", etc... All those things (that I literally encountered _this weekend_, on systems developped by big corporations and / or public service platforms): we hackers call them "annoyances" ; fancy people call them "bugs".
Real people call them "stuff that does not work".
And when your are forced, by law, to use stuff that does not work because the software got all the funding, and people are too expensive, then, some real people call it "barbary".
It's "death by a thousand cuts", for sure, in a world where so many die by actual bullets. So maybe it does not warrant a violent uprising.
But you'd be surprised how much I hear it contributing to the overall anger - being the rich "computer guy" trying to help the real people navigating this.
That being said, some things are far better now and other things have gotten worse. Our social isolation and self-imposed echo chambers are the primary cause from what I can tell.
I've noticed the doomsday type of rhetoric as well. I really just don't see how people can keep eating this stuff up and not get tired of it.
Just personally, when my family and I came over from India, roughly twenty-five years ago, we could only afford to call our relatives in the home country once every other month, for five to ten minutes at a time. And, on half of those phone calls, the line would be too noisy to actually hear or make out anything from the other end. Today, my mom (in the US) and my grandmother (in India) speak for anywhere between ten minutes and two hours, every day, in high resolution video. No, things haven't gotten worse. We might not have gotten flying cars, but we did get videophones, and that's pretty cool.
It's not absolutely most rational point, survivor bias and all, but it does have a point about not being excessively negative/anxious.
Loud motorbikes weren't invented last year, and crime isn't higher today than it was 20 years ago.
"You're just imagining it bro" is a rationalisation that lets people cling on to the Eternal Progress narrative.
But just seriously watch leave it to beaver and then watch any modern tv show and compare the "disrespect". Even if people have been saying "kids these days" for 1000 years, that does NOT mean things haven't been changing for 1000 years for the worse.
And don't even get me started on architecture. There's no rosy colored glasses there. Contemporary five over ones are abominable.
And even for people who did live the best possible situation of 1965, we are no longer poisoning everyone with lead and asbestos in the way we were back then. As well as many things we consider absolute requirements like air conditioning being considered an optional luxury back then.
Who did the lifting?
Over the last 5 years, wealth distribution, general wellness, world order, SW reliability have all declined. There are data points for some of those items but no all of course.
For SW reliability, I include: buggy websites, product requiring cloud access making them intrinsically less reliable and less trustworthy, the services needlessly requiring authentication making credential theft wide spread and spam/scam campaigns more likely to succeed, companies pulling the rug under paying customers feet, dark patterns...
I think a major component to societal decline can be linked to the effects of social media and ill willed corporate and consumerist influence on everything around us, coupled with the on-going social and economic conflicts (war etc) being driven by egotistical personalities that have also been an enduring problem worldwide.
As the Internet grows, greed and ego are consuming resources that were previously share across many prior... There is only the illusion of success played out by people (many of them are trust-fund-driven nepo-babies), as web sites. social and dating apps. and many other prominent online schemes are now simply lottery games that rarely pay out even after years of careful participation. Our ability to climb economically is under great threat by greed of far more wealthy people than us.
The future looks grim as long as we keep letting the wrong greedy personalities win... We really need to stop giving that a pass.
Just an hypothesis.
maybe people also (in many cases correctly) intuit that any effort they put into their role in society, much less extra effort to help solve collective problems, is not only not matched but is likely be taken advantage of by people with outsize influence/power/privilege
a wicked incentive/alignment/coordination problem, in other words
I'm more saying things like "Does design, modularization, organization, or things like SOLID principles" matter at all? When i've had projects that I've had near total control over I've been able to get to a place where many product asks were trivial. Or the obvious extensions were. Things like "Can you add a new permission to the sytsem, or cover a new resource type with permission constraints?" I built a system where the other proposal would have taking a large constant amount of time to add each new resource permission (each permission was a bool column on the user table) . Whereas my design I simply added a couple string consts and a wrapped the resource's ORM portions in a decorator. Basically done in the time it took to have the meeting where the product person asked.
But these kinds of future value software seems to be denigrated because the opinion seems to be that its going to take far too long to implement, but in my experience the "good" solution and the crap ones (accounting for marginally excess bugs) are at most 10% longer to implement. Sometimes the crap implementation appears 50% faster to do, but then an observant person would note that it has pernicious bugs for months or years that destroys the team's velocity.
Also just an anecdote and hypothesis.
But here's an appeal to an expert who I agree with https://martinfowler.com/articles/is-quality-worth-cost.html
you may have been young five years ago now you aren’t.
It's when you reduce all human existence to economy. But turns out money chasing is a bad substitute for morals, principles and social connection (the true version and not the shallow caricature that is sold online these days).
How could this possibly be seen from the outside the US? All I can see from the UK is a significant increase in the amount of whining coming out of the US, but that's just social media.
Was everything always crap and I'm just more aware of it now?
The picture hasnt changed the lens just got clearer.
But yes, judging by OPs posts, people being noisy, landlords and subscriptions, anyone can pick out negative stuff they see. The big ones others would say are the ukraine conflict and polarization of society politically
Two more weeks until RoP goes to 0!
Trust the plan!
When Marx lived in 19th century England, he saw first hand the effects of laissez faire capitalism: workers working themselves to death, workers dying by the score in industrial accidents, children working and dying in mines, etc.
He predicted with certainty that this trend would continue and lead to a revolution of the many (workers) against the few (capitalists), after which the world would become a classless society free from oppression and exploitation.
Except that never happened.
Workers gained many rights, like limits on work-hours, social insurance, free education for their children (who were banned from working dangerous jobs). Most governments creates successful interventionist policy that "de-fanged" the worst parts of capitalism. I would venture a guess that 19th century workers would kill to live or at least send their children into the 21st century. I presume even terrible jobs today would look positively heavenly for someone who was forced to inhale coal dust and destroy his body for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Marx's "theory" was proven wrong by the events that took place since his times. Nothing he predicted came true. This even became apparent during the 19th century, when pro-worker reforms were being introduced in Britain, which caused Engels, Marx's sponsor, to first explain this away by pointing out that Britain's riches originate from its colonies, making Britain "the burguoise of the world", and then blame Britain itself for not going along with his and Marx's grand theory: "It seems that this most bourgeois of all nations wants to bring matters to such a pass as to have a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat side by side with the bourgeoisie."
(I can almost hear him getting more and more upset at the unruly masses who, instead of misery, revolution, and utopia, chose reforms and democracy).
It must be said, at least, that Marx was coming from a place of good. His heart went out to the suffering masses he lived amongst. His writings are full of compassion. But we must be fair and accept that he was wrong in his theories and predictions.
Now, because I know this will come up, as it's a popular doomer trope: there is suffering in the world. Children sew tshirts in 3rd world sweatshops. Factory workers jump from roofs working for Apple, the world's most valuable company. Numberless people live lives of quiet desperation. Without a doubt, all of that is true.
But, comparing the world of Mar'x lifetime and the world of today, it would take some hardcore rhetorical maneuvering to ignore the fact that more people than ever before live comfortable, safe lives with plentiful opportunities for self-actualization.
This can be interpreted in many ways. For our discussion, I want it to serve as evidence that we shouldn't give Marx's writing more credibility than they deserve.
Personally, I chose to interpret it in a way that means that we're simply not done yet. We've made great progress. But our work is far from done--there are still many humans out there that enjoy the most meager fruits of this progress. This must be remedied.
He certainly did not foresee the rise of the welfare state, but that doesn't mean the end of capitalism is going to be much different, its pretty easy to see how things are following the same trajectory in the end.
Why do you think that happened? The creation of well fare state was a direct consequence of the existence of the USSR, the presence of socialist/communist/workers parties in democracies everywhere else and the threat it posed to the status quo. Better give some rights and postpone a rupture.
Just notice that after the fall of the USSR, workers rights didn’t improve anymore, in fact it gets worse by the day: any attempt at unionizing gets crushed, wages don’t increase with productivity, and the economy is turning into an “app economy” where workers are not formally employed and live in an even more fragile situation.
So, categorically stating Marx predictions were “wrong” can be a premature conclusion; the alternative is that we have not lived long enough to see a rupture yet, but the rope has been visibly stretching in the past decades.
> General worker apathy is endemic everywhere I go
I have noticed a major increase in this in my day-to-day interactions
But again, I've stopped looking LinkedIn, disabled or deleted and stopped engaging on the majority of social media platforms (HN remains as a final crutch), and have taken up meditation, therapy, and art as well, so it's not just empty words.
The only thing I have really noticed that's different on a multi-year scale is some companies went fully remote that weren't prepared for it or didn't really want to, which made 2021-2022 my own personal hell with career stability.
e.g. in Best Buy the other day I walked up to a group of 4 workers chatting together about 10 meters from the checkout counter to ask if any of them could open another till so I could purchase the microwave I was holding.
They told me in an ultra-polite passive aggressive way to wait in line at the single checkout that was open.
Obviously no big deal: hourly workers in their teens and 20s have always been less than stellar. Except the worsening trend has been noticeable.
I do understand how this might help the observer, but it also feels a bit like just look away and act like the problems aren't there.
Like we call could meditate for 30 mins a day and feel better about a shitty existence. Or we could spend 30 minutes a day (billions of man hours) doing something about it?
Whether work related, or just figuring out how to find a way to volunteer in the community more in a way that you are passionate about. You might not be able to stop global warming, but maybe you can donate a book on the legal system to an organization that sends books to prisoners so they can better understand and navigate it.
Honestly this is going to be my last comment on here. It’s time to break the habit once and for all.
the world = US? Cause your irl examples (people are noisy, police, environment quality) are very very US specific. And even then I guess it's hyper local in the US too.
But tbh I'd not be really surprised if you really meant that the world = US
> Police seem to not give a shit anymore. I've noticed what seems to be total lawlessness going on in my world. Folks stealing shit. People driving absurdly dangerously in cars that are not designed to travel like that. (tailgating, lane switch, accelerating at the fastest I've ever seen a beat up Sentra do...) . I never see cops hit lights and sirens at them.
Both of these resonate with me. I perceive it as a general decline in the willingness to enforce any sort of standards of behavior by any means (social shaming or formal enforcement by law). Antisocial behavior like drag racing, speeding through neighborhoods, arguing and even fighting on airplanes, being a grown-ass adult in pajamas out in public, etc. You're likelier to get resistance for trying to enforce any sort of basic decency than to flout old (but not that old...) standards.
“Hegel's liberal critics are in the habit of saying that he does not believe in founding a social order on the conception of individual rights. The element of truth in this assertion is that Hegel thinks personal right, apart from a developed system of ethical life, is an empty abstraction; he believes that a social order founded (as in liberal political theory) on such abstractions will be unable even to protect individual rights, much less to actualize the whole of concrete freedom. In fact, Hegel thinks that the greatest enemy of personal and subjective freedom is a 'mechanistic' conception of the state, which views the state solely as an instrument for the enforcement of abstract rights; for this sets the state up as an abstraction in opposition to individuals. In Fichte's theory, for example, Hegel sees the state as a police power whose only function is to supervise and regulate the actions of individuals through coercive force. The only real guarantee of freedom is a well-constituted ethical life, which integrates the rights of persons and subjects into an organic system of customs and institutions providing individuals with concretely fulfilling lives.” (p. xvi)
I'm with you about all the other things but people wearing whatever clothes they want to affects you in literally no way shape or form.
> fertile attractive woman wearing the shortest shorts possible
...so she's wearing more clothing than she did for 99% of the time period in question - that's the observation you're making, right?
To be honest, if you don't find this obviously true, I'm not sure any argument is going to convince you. I'll also add that in many countries outside of America, it is just the default to care about your appearance when in public.
Like forcing women to wear headscarves in Iran.
The reason your argument is not self evidently true is the reason it’s not important FWIW.
Likewise the OP should consider how their opinion is reflected in that light.
And your style of empty comment is the one that’s explicitly discouraged in the site guidelines.
Edit: oh lol, you are the OP, I assume that touched a nerve.
> There is absolutely a connection between the OPs attitude towards pyjamas and women being allowed to show their hair in Iran
Except there isn't, because women's dress codes in areas under sharia law is enforced with violence and generally considered oppression; whereas pyjamas are an unenforced expectation.
Also:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Not the one you're replying to... Not only I don't find this obviously true, but also I find it obviously wrong. I prefer people stop being offended by how others look and stop judging people by their looks. I consider such attitude very shallow.
Imagine a person covered in poo, ripped clothes leaving visible track marks from using intraveinous drugs.
I'm sure if you were forced to interact with that person, you'd not be happy, right? Does that make you shallow?
I'm not sure someone wearing pyjamas is the slippery slope the previous commenter thinks it is, but their point about preferring people who make themselves more presentable is valid.
What someone wears is a part of their self-expression. In this post, you use the phrases "respect for one's appearance" and "care about [one's] appearance" to suggest that people have a responsibility to follow certain norms in how they dress in order to make "'civilization' aesthetically appealing," in your words. Aesthetic is a subjective, and I think it's funny that you are so eager to project your aesthetic onto others. I for one actively choose to wear pajamas, go barefoot, keep my hair disheveled in public because that is my aesthetic and I think it looks good.
I will also clean up my local park, reduce my ecological footprint as much as possible, insert socially responsible behavior here...but you should consider widening your view of what is and isn't ok to wear in public.
Some people, including a lot of philosophers and art theorists that can be considered “experts”, disagree. I would consider myself in this camp, although not a credentialed expert by any means. And no, I’m not “projecting my aesthetic” on to others, simply defending the idea of norms and expectations. This is a very different thing.
As I said in another comment, if you can’t get beyond the idea that Value is not entirely subjective and that everything isn’t just “your opinion, Dude,” then no argument is probably going to convince you of anything. Hence you will just end up in a situation like the OP posted about.
“Everyone should share my values” is essentially an extreme position.
Which is not incompatible with it being subjective. In fact, many of those “knoweldgeable and intelligent” people have written specifically on its subjectivity, and others explicitly on specific, e.g., of a specific culture and time, subjective standards.
And as obvious yes if you personally think that it’s very acutely your subjective opinion. You are literally telling us your opinion. You couldn’t get a clearer example of something that’s subjective.
There’s a worrying level of philosophical paucity here.
Is there room in your clean, well architected, art-endowed society for protest? If not, what keeps the norms in-line with the (presumably drifting) values?
Wow, you just keep digging deeper. Pray tell, what makes some art beautiful and other art not?
Because if that's what they're doing, then I'm 100% with you. Hanging onto existing norms is just opting out of the conversation about what the norms should be.
I suspect, though, that gp is objecting to a different sort of opting-out--one where you're either blind or apathetic to the consequences of your actions.
I guess what I'm saying is, it depends on the pajamas.
If people only do subversive things intentionally nothing changes. That’s in fact what the conservative view wants, safe “change” that doesn’t actually matter. Which is why for example Iran is cracking down so hard on the recent protests because they desperately need for the norm not to change.
Yes, people eventually start doing a thing because it's the new normal--but it doesn't happen spontaneously. Some emergent leader decides to wear pajamas to the office (or whatever) and then the barrier is lowered and others follow suit because the leader had a point and then eventually being comfortable in public is the new normal. But that emergent leader is required, no?
Somebody has to do it first.
I've been witnessing this in my neighborhood. Some apartment complex put up a fence and now the route to the grocery is long and circuitous because we can no longer cut through the apartment complex's parking lot. Some hero dismantled the fence to make a hole and now the whole neighborhood is reopening the hole when the complex repairs it. I'm happy to participate in the maintaining the new normal, but I wasn't the hero that set it up in the first place. I'm in that guy's debt.
Their opinion is that everything they like is objectively beautiful, and everything they don't like is objectively ugly.
How narcissistic do those people have to be to hold themselves in such an unrealistically high regard?
Don’t do this. It’s a weaseling way to claim the person you are discussing things with isn’t thinking.
Do you think the following is fair?
Some people think that freedom of expression in appearance is unimportant. This is the default view of authoritarian societies, especially among people who have not really thought much about the topic.
Are there any noteworthy philosopher who says (in effect, obviously not this exactly) people shouldn't go around in pyjamas?
It's not just part of their "self-expression". It's a reflection on the broader community as a whole.
To give a concrete example, I personally think highly of black Africans in Australia because they're always well-dressed, well-groomed, physically fit and clean.
Back when I lived in Sunshine (area formerly inhabited by white trash, being rapidly gentrified by migrants), the gaunt, green-faced, drug-addicted beggars and whores with welts all over their skin would reflect badly on me. It was a big enough deal that I just needed to go one suburb over and suddenly would be treated well.
Call people like this a bigot or shallow or whatever you want, but this is the global norm and almost everybody seems to understand it except young Westerners.
Maybe someone’s aesthetics say it’s ok to live in a neglected building close to falling apart or drive a beaten up car.
I’d say it’s much more pleasant to be in a community where aesthetics do matter. Styles do differ, but neglect is not a style by itself.
People in many industries wear ties to work. I used to wonder what the point is of a tie, or a good suit. I don’t think it’s just fashion, but what? My take now is that it implies you care about how you’re seen by others - that you’re actively going to burn some of your time and money to demonstrate your vulnerability to your reputation. If someone who hasn’t washed and wears pyjamas gets in a fight in the street with someone in a suit, the person in the suit has more to lose. And that means if I want to make a business deal with one of them, I’m going to feel much safer dealing with the person in the suit because if they do wrong by me, they have reputational face to lose. (Or at least that’s the implication).
So yeah, I also agree with the GP. I think putting effort into the appearance of our cities and ourselves is effort spent signaling to each other that our society is worth investing in. It can go too far, and it was fun wearing pyjamas out on the street during covid. But I’m glad to live in a place that removes graffiti and where people sometimes dress up to go out.
Still, people can have disagreements about the exact ranking of whether Monet's water lilies is prettier than the Mona Lisa or vice versa (or take any Jackson Pollack if you want to extend the analogy). We all agree that they are more beautiful than Timmy's finger painting. Even Timmy's parents. The fact that there isn't one strict ranking doesn't mean that there is nothing objective.
The same objective standards, and subjective disagreements, apply to clothing and personal appearance.
You can look really good with disheveled hair and pajama pants, but that mostly comes down to things like having clean, intact clothes, not smelling bad, not displaying offensive imagery, etc. Similarly, you can be repulsively ugly in a designer suit - just rip it in a few places and let the color fade. Your preference for one look or the other doesn't mean that there are no objective standards whatsoever.
Disagree. I generally wear jeans, t-shirt and jumper. It literally has nothing to do with self expression.
But your points are ones I’ve thought about a LOT the last few years.
In spite of being someone who rejects the idea of dressing fancier going deeper than just superficial beauty, I remember how I carry myself differently when I wear a suit. I feel more confident when I dress well. My wife loves when she sees that I made the effort and I love it when she has (as she often does).
I also remember a friend telling me that the way people dress often also reflects their self esteem. And I know I dress worse when I’m feeling worse.
These things matter. And I do think the general drop in quality of how people dress is a more visual sign of how we care less about each other.
I am genuinely curious why you make the association between wearing a suit and being fake – have most of the people you encountered that wore suits, been dishonest?
I feel that this back-and-forth about public pajama-wearing is really at heart a back and forth between a logic of pure individualistic moral (if nobody is hurt, then what's the deal), and more community-focused moral (yeah, nobody is hurt, but it's not bad either to uphold some standards in society).
I've never been to America, and I'm also living in Paris, where clothing is kinda important, but honestly I'm a bit shocked at the idea of going out in public in a pajama. I feel that, unless you're in a really bad place in your life, you should put some effort in presenting a 'good' version of yourself in public, and public pajama-wearing would be a huge signal that you're letting yourself down/are having a huge breakdown, or have mental health issues.
I noted how well-dressed people are in Paris and my friend answered “because they pretty much have to”. It’s a social pressure and you’re expected to conform to that standard regardless of your means or interest in fashion.
I love not thinking much about clothing. I wear what works, spend less on something that doesn’t matter to me, and save my energy for what does.
I’m not sure how I would benefit from raising the pressure until I am forced to dress better at my own expense.
There's a healthy balance between following some strict victorian dress code and wearing a pajama. It's not about the colors or shape, it's about the message it sends: "I don't bother to dress up"
So yes of course context matters, we are social beings, but expectations of what is acceptable changes. I’ve seen it change in my lifetime, and that happens by people pushing the boundaries. Good luck to them.
Really? My hope is that I don't raise my daughter so poorly she ends up with a slob who wears pyjama in public.
Congratulations. I mean that.
Every non-parent says “my kid will never…”, which is comical.
The most surprising part of parenting to me was how wildly different each child’s personality and temperament are, and how little control I have to affect any of it.
I'm not saying you shouldn't exorcise control at all, as a parent you're responsible for their safety and behaviour. I just mean that coercion should be an emergency backstop that you use as little as possible.
The best approach is to explain why you are asking them to behave a certain way, and why you think certain choices in their lives are preferable, because you think they will lead to them having better lives. Drugs is a classic example, I tried weed when I was in my 20s but never anything stronger. I tried cigarettes. Ive been honest with my kids about it, and explained why I thought stronger drugs weren't for me, and how I saw them affect people I knew. I think that built a lot of trust. The objective is to give them the framing so that when I'm not there and they have an opportunity to try drugs, they will be able to make reasoned informed decisions that they take responsibility for. The same goes for sex, or dangerous sports, or any risk.
Yeah you're just a better parent than everyone else. Congratulations, you can order yourself a "worlds best dad" mug and with you it won't even be a joke!
Now try having that same level of respect for your community, for your public spaces, for the people who share those public spaces with you. It's called living in a community.
Meeting an old friend? I'd wear something fun - maybe a nice dress, maybe fishnets and a choker. Depends on the friend.
I'd rather not go back to the 1920s where everyone had to wear suits. It's nice being able to express myself.
All these acts belie any notion that maintaining our shared spaces is a personal responsibility and that those spaces could hame some function beyond selling or maximizing immediate personal utility - whether that be inspiring wonder, awe, tranquility, community or contemplation. Consider the public spaces we actually choose to visit, or why we built them in the first place.
I don’t wish to enforce a dress code on anyone. All the same, wearing pajamas in public doesn’t read as a defiant act of personal expression to me.
Pajamas in public is another of these, but has meaning for the community rather than the individual: It can mean either not caring, or it can mean that it's a safe, friendly community (like we had in the suburbs I grew up in). It depends on the larger context, and people are concerned it more likely than not has the first meaning. And plenty more bad stuff comes alongside not caring.
In America, people who advocate for greater freedom of expression in things like dress and social roles are generally progressives who support strengthening social institutions. On the other hand, people who tend to promote traditional dress and roles are generally conservatives who support hyper individuality.
Nobody is asking you to walk around in a 3 piece suit, there is no slippery slope or conspiracy theory here, it's just "dress like you give a shit about the public space and others in it".
The minimum effort is being clean enough that you don’t smell and don’t have visible skid marks on your clothes. Stinking up a cafe is antisocial.
Nobody needs to look (or smell) like garbage to 'express' themselves.
THIS mindset is what I think is the root of all the other listed problems. Somehow freedom has come to mean "I can do whatever I want as long as it doesn't cause you physical injury" - completely throwing the ideals of common decency, mutual respect, obligation to your community, etc out the window.
We're not atomized individuals with nothing to do with each other except transact for individual gain. If we want to be a community with a unified social fabric, we have to act like it, and that means putting aside some "freedoms" that make the commons worse for everyone.
“Indecently”, perhaps [0], but…
> Walking around in your Cookie Monster PJs just doesn’t cut it.
I mean, you do have a right to do this; its not indecent by any definition that is excluded from the scope of personal rights, it just doesn’t mean some people’s fashion preference.
> Somehow freedom has come to mean “I can do whatever I want as long as it doesn’t cause you physical injury” -
If you delete “physical” with “legally cognizable” [1], that’s…exactly what freedom actually means.
> completely throwing the ideals of common decency, mutual respect, obligation to your community, etc. out the window.
“common decency”, “mutual respect”, and “obligation to your community” (beyond legally defined obligations) are subjective, mutually defined limits, and freedom means that you are not bound by other people’s idea of them that you do not share, and, similarly, they aren’t bound to yours, except to the extent that each of you decides to be, perhaps because you want something from the other beyond what is legally obligatory.
[0] EDIT: Though, honestly, while I don’t see the usual definitions of this in the West as urgently problematic, I’m skeptical of the usefulness and compatibility with liberty of the general concept of “indecent” dress. There are very good health and safety regulations about dress in certain contexts, but the idea that the visibility of body parts is a source of the kind of harm to anyone that would warrant limitations on free choice aside from those particular contexts is dubious.
[1] EDIT: and additionally, define what is “legally cognizable” injury by a robust concept of personal rights both defining such injury from the PoV of the rights of the injured and defining exceptions to when injury is legally cognizable based on the rights of the actor who might cause injury. You can have a bad definition of what injuries are legally cognizable which conflicts with freedom.
When I see a person wearing PJs in public, I think -- actually, I guess I don't really think about it beyond "huh.. PJs in public." You're out there stewing on it, writing about it on the internet, and literally thinking that people wearing things you don't like is stemming from a mindset that's at the root of society's problems.
This casual insight into madness is what keeps the internet exciting.
Where do you draw the line? And who decides when things are turning socially acceptable? Are young people ment to wear the same attire as their parents because that is what I'd already socially acceptable?
I wear stupid things in public because I barely care for anything than comfort. I never thought that could bother someone
Seeing someone in their relaxed clothes has an intimicy, like walking into their home. They tend to be friendlier, more open, smilier.
Uptight suburbs where everyone is wearing "nice" clothes and more strictly following social conventions can feel unfriendly, sad and closed. I can play along with the mores, but I prefer places with more relaxed codes.
What does "a society which takes itself seriously" even mean? To me this just sounds like mindless conformity.
The good thing is that sound cameras with automated ticketing are already here, and I cannot wait until we get them in the Bay Area. https://www.autoweek.com/news/technology/a39906304/californi...
Replaced "clothes" with "X" to point out a pattern.
This has been said a lot, and I'm not sure it's true. It's true on a case by case basis that individual freedom does not affect us perceptibly. But I'm pretty sure it's not true in aggregate. Maybe the PJs don't matter, maybe yelling in the stairwell at an apartment once a year does'nt matter. But it seems in aggregate they might exponentially matter (kinda like CO2).
Its not just the PJs, but also the butting in line, rude/crass ways of speaking, going behind people's back in a variety of ways (sex, taking credit for work, not reciprocating efforts), driving in a way that causes a series of traffic micro events on the road which exponentiate behind them (if you leave a big enough gap for safety, folks speed to fill it in, so you have to slow down to let the gap increase, so even more people pass you), a little white lie here and there to get ahead unjustly etc.
This is actually part of the problem - making shallow jabs on the internet to feel superior is avoidant compared to an actual confrontation; where you have no choice but to reflect on how your views may not apply to all situations.
It was not my intent to shame them either. I was talking to them. Not you.
Fast and Furious came out in 2001. A pop movie about a topic means it had been going on for a long time. Driving fast and drag racing has been thing forever.
And loud cars...look up whistler tips on YouTube from the early 00s.
Salem, OR straight up won’t respond to any noise complaints anymore, citing low officer count. Seems like the negative effects from the 2020 BLM riots are starting to show.
> The goal, Womack said, is to not send a patrol officer immediately out to every noise complaint and civil dispute. Those issues can be handled by the civil court system or by non-sworn employees, freeing patrol officers to promptly respond to emergencies or focus on building trust in the community.
Doesn't seem like a huge deal. I'd rather cops be patrolling for property crime than victimless ones.
I honestly subscribe to the maxim that humanity doesn't really change, it's our ability to view and be affected by humanity that that increases over time. This works in both directions. It's much easier for someone to annoy me on the train, but it's also much easier for me to learn full-stack development on youtube.
People feel entitled to have their kids streaming Cocomelon 24 hours a day and ignore you or challenge you to a fist fight if you as them to turn the music down. "This is TGI Fridays it's not supposed to be quiet"
The heck, where in the world is this? I've literally never seen anyone do that. Recently (1-2 weeks ago?) someone did this on the bus, after loud phone calls they opened some video app and started watching the most random crap with loud noises on speaker. The bus is not a quiet place but even so, after a few minutes someone told him off.
This maxim is probably wrong, since humanity and said human behavior is a function of the environment which is objectively changing.
Where the modern Left has gone off the rails is insisting that we also cannot reinforce good behavior and shame bad behavior, mostly the latter, through non-violent social interactions.
It's great that the government can't prevent adults from wearing pajamas in public, but you'd also be right to make value judgements about the kind of adult who does that.
$X being antisocial or otherwise reprehensible behaviour.
I don't think it's controversial to suggest that comfortable, healthy, well fed, and financially secure people are less likely to engage in antisocial behaviour. Those doing so are typically people who do not view themselves as belonging to (or benefiting from) society.
Frankly, what goal is achieved in meting out punishment on someone already disillusioned with society? The likely result is exactly what plays out in many prison systems today. A cycle of increasing disillusionment, societal expense, and escalatory retaliation.
Is it any surprise that anti-social behaviour is increasing? Advertising exists largely to convince people of the inadequacy of their current situation, be it financial, physical, or mental. What other effect could be expected in the context of growing social inequality?
In an era of general prosperity households have gone from working a combined 40 hours per week to 80, leaving much less time for personal affairs and increased stress.
Many "low skilled" jobs are simply gone, the replacements generally offering much lower pay and poorer working conditions. Consider the wider ramifications in towns where these jobs made up a significant proportion of the work.
Housing grows increasingly out of the reach of the younger generation despite paying an ever greater percentage of their monthly wage to landlords.
Ignoring the other part of the comment, this sentence sounds quite a bit like the stories I've heard about people who very loudly knew that unlike everyone else, they had enough self-control to play with the nastier drugs safely.
1) Ignorant. I promise I can find many songs that aren’t country real quick that they’ll hate.
2) Referring specifically to overproduced modern country-pop crap.
The harsh and indignant backlash to "things would be nicer if people gave half a fuck how they look in public" is probably the best answer to your question that you're gonna get.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was not the end of the Cold War and the paranoia, distrust and apathy you sense now are the culminations of Russia's Eastern German techniques to the West.
We have been in an almost entirely psychological war since 1991. The decline of the West was primarily due to the fact we had a high trust society that foreigners from Europe took advantage of in order to utilize their Old World schemes.
A new Global Oligarchy began to emerge and they have relied on the techniques Russia used to depress and subjugate it's vassal states to the peoples of Europe and America for the purpose of creating the confusion and paranoia necessary to short-circuit civil action against the consolidation of power and wealth within those countries by their elite. Primarily done through media and manufactured conflict.
Civilization must conifgure itself around a new, steeper gradient. Only catch: it must use the old gradient to power this transformation.
https://gist.github.com/clumma/214831723c7d567cc343cc0767273...
(Except coal – it's one of the least energetic rocks you can find.)
There's no catch. It's just that good. Why isn't it being done?
One might have asked the same thing about coal at the start of the industrial revolution.
"For untold years men froze on the site of what now are coal mines, and starved within sound of the Niagara that is now at work providing food."[1]
Steam engines were around for half a century before Boulton and Watt, and coal had been used for heating and metallurgy since Roman times at least.[2] It would have been natural to dismiss them as big, incredibly expensive machines of limited use.[3]
The answer seems to be that configuring and reconfiguring civilization is tricky... But there's plenty of reason for optimism.
[1] https://gist.github.com/clumma/2ffed4289963dec56d39
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Roman_Britain#Coal
[3] https://twitter.com/clumma/status/1603079619527299073
This really resonates with my experience as well. But I can't tell if its society at large that appreciates quality less, or that the relative purchasing power of recent generations has decreased so much that your average-Joe no longer has a say in whether they can get a quality purchase or not. Or perhaps the issue is planned obsoletion. Taking a page from appliance manufacturers these days, literally all the major manufacturers appear to have planned obsolecscence built into their appliances these days. Contrasted with the 45 yo Maytag refrigerator in my garage still running as well as the day it was purchased.
Look at GE - it just recently spun off it's healthcare business from the parent and now only has the Jet Engines division left under the parent company. It used to make just about everything and did massive testing at one point - what changed? The company itself. It was in so much competition by others who stepped up their game or the company got into places it never should have been and lost. A long way from being the offspring of Thomas Edison and JP Morgan.
Hell, did you know that GE was even an on-line service at one time? GEnie. Who beat them? H&R Block for some weird reason (CompuServe). But not by much because Time magazine - the most read magazine in the world for almost 75 years at that point - thought it could do it all (AOL). The only problem: Warner Communications (Warner Brothers) - who seem to not have learned their lesson from Atari. But it was on top for a while. Now it's back to Bell and those who competed with them (Verizon).
We've had incredible advances in technology and productivity since then, so why can't we have that kind of economic environment now? What's gumming up the works?
We saw it during the pandemic as we see more of it now. They're finding ways of mechanizing agriculture to make more food with less labor input. They are finding ways of improving health by improving the cognition of machines to find black and white problems within the data deluge. They're even finding ways of making burger flippers and package delivery people obsolete by building machines to do the tasks.
Because when you push a business to try to solve labor problems, they will look for ways of growth that may not include people in general.
That has nothing to do with nationalistic ideals but with simple Capitalism. If you legislate the requirement of it, then what changes how we evolve?
It seems immoral to force people to do something they may not want to do at the same time people will complain that the value of one person shouldn't be held to be lower than another.
Basic income so far has been showing the best way to address this issue - and we've all seen a form of it during the pandemic. What needs to happen is to get society as a whole to make it permanent.
Certain things have gotten worse, though. The neighborhood was pleasant, with friendly families and social clubs and a walk to the park right there. The television and newspaper and local college and personnel dept. at work weren't constantly telling you how racist you are.
But less so around the mid-1990s, which was the nadir of the perceived incidence and racism in the US (and this is fairly consistent—though the degree of perceived racism and concern about it is not—across racial groups.)
So, while the issue is not new, and not by any means the worst it has ever been, there is a generally greater perception of a problem today tha a few decades ago, whether the problem is worse, sensitivity/standards are higher, or some mix or other factor.
What's gumming up the works are the billionaires who have more money than whole countries using that power to get favorable laws and treatment. Once you reach a certain level of money you can just print more basically by manipulating the systems in place.
I can't sleep on in a macbook.
I just have to assume people espousing things are divorced from reality, because how else can you equate a poor person owning a microwave to societal success?
I assume you live in the US because you probably wouldn't be glorifying 30-50 years ago if you lived in USSR sphere or any country affected by the proxy wars.
Why don't you pick a more representative time period of human existence for comparison, like 1800s or something.
This has really been the biggest scam in recent history without regulations going along with it to reduce the work week accordingly. It's insane to me that we still expect the average worker to spend ~1/2 of their waking life working for other people.
I think moving to a less crowded location where your individual contribution in society is more valued could be a good start.
A lot of people have been moving to California, making it not as nice as it was even 10 years ago. People sit in traffic forever. Rents are unaffordable for everyone moving in.
Social media makes everyone miserable. Probably best to avoid that.
I’m on vacation in Thailand, noticed some nice things about life here:
1. Everyone has a shop under their house, or food truck somewhere. People hang out at their shop, and it’s also like their living space. People come to buy, but also friends just hang out together in these spaces. The constant connection with others is really nice. It’s possible there is less pressure to fine work with the additional income.
2. Best traffic of any country I’ve visited. Crowded, busy, but no one honks at each other. Everyone gets let in, people respect others space on the road. The large number of scooters makes it easy to find parking, get to your destination without too much stop and go hassle.
People are also leaving California in droves too - to Texas where they were lured by people chasing after HGTV "Property Hunters" home prices - just to end up in another ticky-tacky neighborhood being pressured to keep up with the jones.
If the trend of telecommute is allowed to be the norm, then there is a much higher likelihood of population distribution which will bring it back to a more stoic level. But this will impact global trade which we've seen needs to be rebalanced anyhow due to the supply chain issues presented during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Scale that globally, then maybe there will be better ground to discuss "nationality" in a different light compared to our current political borders. Especially when it comes to law and powers given to a person that is allowed by a society.
Because even the UN can use some improvement.
As for why this happened, and continues to happen, and what could be done to fix it... those are hard questions. You can see some good grappling with the subject in this article, and the follow-up listing other people's responses to it:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-co...
One of the reasons that is not mentioned is that in the 1960s, the US's share of global GDP was 40%, today it's around 24%.