Tretiak
19d ago
I wouldn’t mind something similar to what Netflix does with its employees. Or at least did at one point.
A friend of mine who was hired on as a full time developer years ago said the base pay they quote you is quite higher than what you’d find for comparable positions elsewhere. But in return they expected you to buy your own health insurance programs, and the amount of non-monetary benefits you received were somewhat scaled back. Stock options and 401k’s were still available as I understood it, but that about ran the full gamut of what you could expect from them.
Tretiak
19d ago
You’ve been seeing that for years already with people’s unbelievably short attention spans. Instagram reels and YouTube shorts only accelerated that. The amount of people I can find who have read a book within the last year or have even sat their way through an audiobook is embarrassingly low.
A) Taking a piss
Unless it’s on someone I don’t like. Then I want to.
B) Paying bills
Self-explanatory.
C) Doing homework.
Self-explanatory.
D) Going to work
Self-explanatory.
Tretiak
19d ago
The strength of the dollar was a lot more than it is presently today. It’s one of the problems with using GDP as a metric. China for instance is the leading national economy in the world in terms of PPP. It already overtook the US several years ago.
Tretiak
21d ago
So he needed lebensraum to avoid the inevitable Malthusian starvation of his people. Not such a bad guy after all.
Yeah he wouldn’t be such a “bad guy” were it not for the implications and designs that were baked into his desire for agricultural sustainability. This wasn’t some national policy of ecology he was seized by. It was part and parcel for his desire for German colonies via the war effort.
Anyone else can speculate endlessly about his ideas for the future state.
Tretiak
21d ago
Competency is competency regardless. In that sense I’m wholly meritocratic. If it stops being about that, I’ve got to start asking questions.
What do you mean? Morality aside,it appeared to be working great.
💀. Well yeah. Morality aside, everything was working fantastically.
Apart from that to the economic point. Hitler either understood or ultimately figured out (or rather his advisors did) that large scale Keynesian state expenditures could rescue a morbid capital economy from destruction. Basically what American businessmen later learned during WW2.
But it’s difficult to say this is because they lived under a “Nazi” program specifically. “Nazism” faced the exact same problem “Communism” did in this sense. The Nazis weren’t in power all that long and so nobody really got a chance to see what a “National Socialist State” would look like. They didn’t just oppose Communism. They also opposed Capitalism. One reason they wanted lebensraum was to prepare for an autarkic economy because they knew their activities were going to lock them out of international markets; quite similar to the way North Korea is today. Hitler specifically wrote about this. They also opposed modern practices of the credit system. The amount of days you could analyze their political program and domestic policies numbers in the mere months at best, outside of the war effort.
The same with Communism. Marx never wrote about what a post-Capitalist system would look like. He died before he was able to do that. When people attack “Marxism” and they point to the Soviet Union, what they’re really attacking is “Marxist-Leninism” which is one particular twist and variation that was grafted onto Marx’ ideology by others and at a different time.
Tretiak
21d ago
I’m not at all convinced a large majority of Afghans view the Taliban that way. Either now or when they first came to power. In the case of the latter, they were originally greeted as liberators because they were at least bringing some kind of order to the place. Believe it or not, that’s how ISIS initially gained a large swath of supporters in Syria because they stemmed a great deal of corruption among the local population.
I also think the American “PR campaign” if you want to call it that for the Taliban is kind of funny.
By contrast, less optimal regimes do not deserve loyalty. In 1945, Hitler was just the mobster in power, Stauffenberg blowing him up would not have let to a lower utility equilibrium, hence it was not treason to try to do so.
The Allies did polling in West Germany a year after the war ended in 45’. Hitler was still remarkably popular even then. Different societies have different attitudes about what they believe their relationship to their governments should be.
For you to have been a patriot back then you’d had to have actively opposed your own government, essentially knowing you were going to be rounded up and executed as these people undoubtedly knew. And they are certainly heroes for what they did.
Ally-occupied Germany was a far better place for the Germans to thrive than Nazi Germany.
It always boggles my mind how so many revisionist types can think otherwise. At heart I think a lot of people have this suppressed desire that they wish to have seen the Nazis win out and to have gotten their racial utopia. If you look at Nazi society it didn’t work very well for the people who were in it. And it certainly didn’t end very well for the people who were in it. Some people definitely benefitted but it wasn’t a government of its citizens, but of a particular category of citizens who the Nazis saw populating Germany’s future.
It’s also why the Allies took very careful steps in their postwar planning of Germany to crush Prussia and its influence over Germany. It historically was a massive fountainhead for its supremely militaristic attitude over all aspects of society. There’s a reason why it was called the “Iron Kingdom” and the “Sparta of Europe.” States like that tend to have a short half life. The ancient Assyrian Empire ended the same way, eventually declaring war on almost everyone within its neighborhood and having a religious ideology that demands you bring order and stability to the world outside by conquering the chaotic neighbors among the fringes of your borderlands.
They could very well turn out to be useful. I have a couple friends who are Middle Eastern (Iraqi-) Americans that I’ve known since childhood. They once told me they laughed pretty hard when they watched Zero Dark Thirty and asked why the scenes had Pakistanis speaking Arabic (they speak Urdu). It’s one of the ways Americans don’t understand other cultures.
Tretiak
21d ago
There must be other reasons.
Do microplastics and hormonal inversions count? Lol. I’m slowly beginning to think there just ‘might’ be something to that…
Tretiak
21d ago
The Brookings Institution noticed this problem quite awhile back. I pointed it out in a discussion once to someone who was in denial. Conversation came to a close after that.
Tretiak
21d ago
Enshittification continues apace, I suppose.
Lol. I’d actually like to see Cory Doctorow make a statement on this now.
Tretiak
21d ago
I haven’t been following any of this in detail but what’s wrong with Hegseth’s statement? I’m pretty sure the left thinks the Boy Scouts are practically the Hitler Youth under Trump anyway, so they shouldn’t object to it’s closure.
Tretiak
22d ago
Maybe some things require a certain disposition to forecast accurately. Who knows. What but I know for certain is it is possible to use history as a roadmap to accurately assess national policies and social outcomes, because people were doing it.
That era was a mistake in a number of ways and now the excesses of it are running hard up against the wall.
This isn’t a product of some Marxist bogeyman though, although many similar aspects of it you can also find at home in the Marxist tradition.
Even the Nazis of all people recognized this problem under their own paradigm. Hitler wrote about it himself when he talked about the contrast of values he experienced in Munich and when he went into Vienna. He noticed that the cities and program of urbanization led into the production of a new system of social values that was individualistic, against the national community and that he saw as “degenerate.” That’s why his appointed ideologues beneath him like Walter Darre and others came up with notions like “blood and soil.” They viewed the peasantry as the ideal model for German society because of its community and family orientation towards society, and they wanted that adapted to big city life.
It’s also why when they went into Scandinavia, they viewed Oslo as “too American” and “socially degenerate” because of its big city and urban lifestyle. The big cities led to a “liberalizing of social values.” It was yet another example to them as reminder of why they envied the countryside. The Nazis actually disliked many aspects of German rural life and called their immigration into the cities “convoys of death.” But one thing they noticed in the 40’s was that the urban cities were producing less than half of the soldiery and births needed to sustain the war effort. The countryside on the other hand had something like a 13%-16% surplus it provided.
So whether it’s this extreme or that extreme, these lunatics or those lunatics, both ideologies ran into different varieties of the same problem. And no paradigm to date that I’ve seen has good solutions to these.
Tretiak
22d ago
You CANNOT fake BJJ ability.
Tretiak
22d ago
I’m sorry but I’ve never understood art beyond the complete ignorance and disinterest of an otherwise ordinary spectator. Abstract expressionism, realism, etc. at least American art; the likes of a Jackson Pollock or Barnett Newman.
I’ve always had an affinity for Socialist Realism and Roman or Ionian Greek (classical) art. But even then I just think it’s beautiful. I don’t have the insight or attachment a professional artist or architect would have, I suppose.
In what sense is “art” a mess today? I barely knew what the hell it was for the last two centuries and it wasn’t for a lack of trying.
Tretiak
22d ago
Virtually the entire atmosphere of the postwar period was like that in the sense that the west came out triumphant. In particular with the US overwhelmingly being the biggest beneficiary. And with that you saw an attendant shift in the social values of the population with the abundant wealth that was following in.
Being the person that tried to restore sanity and imploring them to think of the long-term downstream consequences would’ve made you the party pooper or puritanical boomer of the previous generation. But the conclusion of all this wasn’t hard to see. A lot of what people complain about today and are writing I remember having the identical thoughts about in high school. And it’s not because I’m some sort of enlightened genius and everyone else is an idiot. I’m simply someone paying attention.
Tretiak
22d ago
Indeed.
Some of the best sex I’ve ever had comes from caring about the pleasure of the person you’re with and seeing their emotion and excitement in it. Wanting to make them happy and fulfilled makes the experience much better. People that haven’t experienced that just won’t know. All they’ll ever think is being with someone is just a glorified way of jacking off and that you can do it with anyway.
I knew a ‘lot’ of women growing up. Peers, sisters of friends, friends of friends etc. We were all a group and I still know a good number of them. I was never lacking in opportunities for a fling. That was just never my thing.
Tretiak
22d ago
It was a talked about phenomenon even during Victorian Britain that some women were just completely “whorish” in their attitudes. So you’ve always had licentiousness and the overwhelming biological drive of people in their youth. The question in my mind has one to do with its proper place and context. The sexualization and commodification of everything is bad for both individuals and society.
Fully agree with you on the last paragraph. It also reminds me of the old, funny bash dot org quote:
“It used to be about sex, drugs and rock n roll. Now all we have is aids, crack and techno.”
Yeah. Had managers like that before. High performers get attacked and criticized for daring to have a different opinion. Kiss asses who don’t rock the boat are “safe” in the sense that they don’t notice the incompetency of their boss and see that it gets pointed out. Despite the fact that sharing different opinions, you know, helps to improve the job the managers are tasked with.
I read a book once about the hiring practices of large tech companies. I came across I think it was Sundar Pichai’s interview with Google. Or some major exec for Google now. During his interview process for a low level position he was asked what he thought about Gmail at that time, when it was still new. Instead of flattering the hiring manager, he took a critical line against it and started talking about the things he didn’t like and how he would improve the software for the public. It so blindsided the hiring team that they knew right then and there that they wanted him for important projects.
The role of a corporation and bureaucracy is to avoid risk, or more simply put, to build infrastructure to the extent that a single human cannot damage it all. The inverse of that is that humans become so unimportant that doing good doesn't affect the outcome either. Naturally, the system no longer optimizes for doing good, but for avoiding risk.
This is definitely true. But sometimes it’s out of necessity, sometimes it also happens for other reasons. Larger institutions that are sensitive to certain changes have to minimize risk as much as they can, just due to the inherent nature of the industry they’re in. If you’re in health care, you need to avoid silly mistakes that can have catastrophic consequences, or you’re always having to dodge serious regulatory penalties even though skirting them could empower you to perform much better.
It’s also one of the reasons why smaller companies and start-up's are generally faster and better at innovating wholly new ideas, but aren’t necessarily the best for developing a long-term strategic vision for them. When you’re a quick, move fast and break things type of company it’s easy to be a pioneer with that kind of risk assuming attitude.
I’ve had managers like this in the modern day. These people “love” bureaucracy and attaching “properly” “formatted” “documents” and paperwork to absolutely everything, not knowing it creates unnecessary (<- key word) friction in a very fast paced environment where you need as little of that as possible.
Jobs simply exist because things need to get done. How labor is socially arranged is a different matter entirely.
I’ve read only a couple of books on the empirical evidence for UBI’s efficacy. A great worry from a policy perspective is that UBI would inflate the economy. It wouldn’t grow it. Economic “growth” is tied to “production” (i.e. more stuff being made). Some form of UBI ‘might’ be able to work, provided it replaced all other forms of welfare; including social security (good luck reforming that, that’s a death sentence for any politician that puts even one finger on it). I think benefits could be further enhanced depending on special circumstances.
With AGI, I still think it’s a question as to whether or not that’s truly viable or just tech nerds worshipping a hypothetical techno messiah figure. Narrow AI will continue to be useful in aiding and augmenting human workflows, but if current trends stay the same I don’t see how it would cause an upheaval of the current social arrangement of labor in capitalist society. Technology thus far has only meant the capitalist class uses it to extract even more wealth and value out of those beneath them than they would’ve been able to without it. Keynes prediction of a 4-6 hour work day in the future unfortunately never came.
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