Most of us can't hunt either. Somethings go away in time because they're no longer needed (by the masses). That is essentially what society does -- it allows us to multiply a few for the benefit of many so the many can focus on other things.
The resilience is more in ensuring archival process to ensure it's never lost forever, and a continuity plan to ensure enough (but few) people still know.
If you look at the kind of person who makes massive donations to politicians and initiatives that are about massive tax reforms (think Missouri's recent ballot question about introducing a state sales tax and eventually sunset its income tax) you'll notice that a lot of them are very wealthy people who have very, very few people that they have to answer to in their lives. The one exception, it would seem, is the tax man, and they absolutely hate that.
Market forces like inflation aren't a person exerting control over them. They're the results of humans acting within social structures. These people have control over social structures; they're the elite. They can counter that market force with some other market force. Taxes? That's cold, hard math. There's no way around it, no feeling of agency to be had. So while it might be harder to avoid, it's not the financial effect that they worry about, because they have enough money to weather that. It's the feeling of obligation and powerlessness in the face of others that they can't brook.
> and most managers fail to punish at least some of these slow learners of theirs
False, they punish by not crediting that work as work.
Glue work, keeping things tidy, dealing with that annoyance that everyone else has been able to get away with suffering through (and ignoring), all of this will be worth approximately 0 at performance review time because your time is a zerosum game that is traded off with highly visible, political, and otherwise rewardable work.
It's been my experience that in larger companies you generally have to play in the framework.(I'd roughly draw the line at 1000+ employees), at quite small companies (or as a self employed / entrepreneur, roughly <200 employees) you should follow the path of highest EROI on your efforts regardless of who's job it is. In the gap you have to read the culture and management.
I can think of at least two people in my career who were, ahem, load bearing for the company. They did all of the BS, non-sexy work required to keep the place running. Never wasted time on vanity projects, just showed up day after day doing the actual necessary things.
They were criminally under appreciated by management. Their career trajectory significantly worse than those who engaged in the highly visible projects.
Do you exercise because it makes you stronger and faster? Or because it's something you enjoy, and it also keeps you healthy?
Many people get satisfaction from doing their job well. From their perspective, if they are already happy with what they have, why would they make themselves unhappy by constantly pursuing more?
I've been at the top of the org chart. I hated it. I intentionally decided to go back to engineering.
"Appreciation" in this case means, promotions. I don't want them, and would actively change jobs if you forced it on me.
So I am more than happy to just do a great job at my job. I do not desire or want anyone to notice me in any particular way. I want to be paid a reasonable amount, and make sure everyone that uses anything I touch is happy with the experience.
That's a great life. I don't understand why anyone would think that caring about things matters at all.
There's a massive difference between your users, and peers appreciating you, and management appreciating you.
Management doesn't know anything. Why would I value their appreciation?
I care much more about my intelligent peers, or even commenters here, than what a non technical person thinks.
These people exist all over the place and they are the reason why society generally works. Shit would, and shit does go sideways when they stop doing their jobs, small and big companies alike.
>why people would continue to care so hard when their efforts are unappreciated.
Some people have the primary goal of making things work for everyone. Other people have the primary goal of personally benefitting. These are often in conflict. The better a company or team can align these goals, the more effective it is, and the more everyone tends to benefit, but in many organizations the folks looking for personal advantage are most likely to end up in charge.
It's because being rewarded is not the primary reason they do anything. It's a component and it's nice, but it's not the definition if life and existence.
Exactly. As a media tech guy, my best feedback during the past decade of work was always linked to some lazy fuckup of someone else that I "heroically" rushed in to fix by fixing some noob level misuse.
Meanwhile the actually most heroic work I did was literal PCB level repair of a piece of ancient equipment whose function my boss wouldn't even understand, but the failure of which would stop our main room to a grinding halt. I then had to repeatedly ask to replace that equipment with a new replacement.
The highly visible work is often not the one that really counts, especially if you do not understand the subject matter.
Fixing something that’s visibly and publicly broken (or able to be sold) gets immediate praise. Preventing that issue before it occurs is thankless and invisible.
There are people doing that invisible work in every org. They normally become visible around a week after they quit.
Well and this goes further. You will find that some people will only chose to do the visible work. And this will often get great feedback from superiors, although it is the metaphorical equivalent of running around with a fire extinguisher and waiting for fire to pop up in an environment littered with flammable garbage, instead of — you know — ensuring that a fire doesn't start to begin with. So being celebrated for leaving everything at the brink of collapse, they will just do that, while ensuring to be in the spotlight when the shit inevitably hits the fan.
This can become so perverted that the number of extinguished fires is treated as some sort of metric for success by management, instead of seeing it as the failure it is.
Feel free to replace this with "all nighters" in other jobs. Who is more dedicated to the job, the person that just does it all in time with plenty of room for mistakes and unforseen circumstances or the one who slacks around 90% of the duration and then squeezes in some all nighters in the last hours? If your project has to rely on all nighters without good reason¹ this just indicates bad planning to me.
¹: There are legit reasons why working through the night is needed, e.g. the work you do can only be done during the night or there are legit last minute problems that nobody could have planned for. But if you literally have those every time, they are to be expected and are to be scheduled for during normal working hours.
This is only a viable strategy if you are under resourced. There’s a whole art to managing upward by crisis.
Successful communication strategy: There is too much work for the department. If we don’t scale up we’re going to have some kind of incident or failed delivery in the next few months. . I’m doing everything I can to keep this from happening, but there simply are not enough resources. I’ll email you a summary of all of this.
Then proceed to work a normal number of hours until a genuine incident occurs. Refer back to the earlier conversation (and email summary). Receive resources if the problem actually impacts the company. It may have just been acceptable risk for management.
Key mistake I see: Don’t work 80 hours a week to be a hero unless you have a specific strategic goal in mind. You’re actually hurting the company by hiding a resource allocation issue.
Worse, competent managers won’t promote you for persistent Herculean efforts. For a couple reasons. First, they would need to replace you with two people. Second, you are not exactly showing that you understand how to solve a problem with teamwork if you’re solving every problem by working unsustainable hours.
I agree that heroic effort can hide a resource allocation issue, but often the goals of those controlling resource allocation are not well aligned with the hero's goals. By no longer buying supplies for a student, a teacher is not going to get the school system to provide free supplies.
In terms of work in the job description, I could probably be replaced by 1.2 (1.1?) average competent workers. In terms of other benefits of my employment to coworkers and patrons, my impact is hard to estimate. Others bring in goodies for snacking, but I maintain a consistent but limited selection of snacks; others may spend as much or more money per year on snacks, but knowing that certain snacks will be available has significant value.
While I would have liked being promoted one level (from library page to library aide, from shelving only to shelving and check-in), higher positions have responsibilities I would have found extremely stressful. I was passed over twice for a promotion supported by my immediate supervisor (the decision was made by higher ups, the second time my supervisor was miffed that his input was not given more weight) and I had a meltdown at the interview for a third chance when technical issues (not working audio in an online interview) forced cancellation of the interview. I took my reaction as evidence that I was not ready for more responsibilities.
The first time I was not promoted, I was not especially bothered; the person getting the job was competent and went beyond minimal effort. The second time I was told that I would probably get the job (which I think was part of why my supervisor was not happy about my not even getting an interview) and the person getting the job seemed (after some observation) to be less competent and less enthusiatic than the previous transfer. (I think this estimate was not derived entirely from my disappointment: my first impression was "this is a library person" (glasses et al.). Perhaps seeing a library person not seeming enthusiastic about working at a library may have soured me more than if I had no hints of a kindred spirit.)
I like helping my coworkers (I like most of them and dislike none), but shelving books is not that team-oriented. I do not want to manage people (I am not good at it and do not enjoy it).
My advice likely does not universally apply outside of a reasonably well managed business with a P&L statement at the back of management’s minds.
Y’all have to answer to boards of various kinds with completely unreasonable expectations. (I have good friends who work in a library. We live in completely different worlds, you and I.)
I suspect a programmer working for a well managed business might be willing to work unpaid overtime to tidy up code from professional pride. Personal feelings do not generate monetary profit (at least not directly) but have value to workers; the worker's and the management's values are not completely aligned.
This seems to be a wisdom issue both for the worker (e.g., avoiding burnout or even just resentment) and the management (workers who have external principles can be more valuable but they can also be more difficult to manage even decently, i.e., with average ROI)
Your comment reminded me of Bunny the accountant's statement that Skeeve must charge the going rate to have the kingdom on a rational budget and Skeeve deciding to refund taxes to those who complained the most (in one of Robert Asprin's Myth Inc. books). What could possibly go wrong? :-)
It can take years for the damn thing to fail even after the key support stops entirely. In that time you and your colleagues will suffer, and the people responsible will jump ship long before the full impact has been felt, learning nothing from the experience and likely blaming it on the person they leave holding the bag. You can try to get a job elsewhere but things which aren't appreciated at one company often times aren't appreciated at most. Doing a good job is often in your personal best interest regardless of what an out of touch middle manager thinks is more important.
Presumably your official duty is not to make sure that the company does not fail, but something more circumscribed. Work on your responsibilities, and if your manager is nagging you to fix something that isn't that, have him make it official so you get recognized for it. If it should not be your job, push back.
If the entire company of thousands of employees stand or fall depending on your work alone, then you can find something which pays double your salary in less than a day. And thus pay your mortgage.
Right, but that's more a lack of reward than outright punishment. If you work with these people on something that "crosses boundaries" and that something succeeds, you can credit them and in the hope to help their career. I agree that larger places are worse in this regard (though there can be a small part of a large place which is, well, small enough to work like a small one), and that you should generally make sure you're rewarded for your work, and if you're not, either work less or work elsewhere.
The dark part is you, as a consumer who is willing to pay to not watch ads, are worth considerably more than a few cents to advertise to. In fact, the more you are willing to pay to have no ads, the more valuable showing ads to you is…
That's an interesting point, reminds me of the dark pattern of donation options at checkout used to check for disposable income which the store could have captured.
I don’t think this is remotely true for most major ad-tech services.
For U.S. users, Google and Meta average several hundred dollars of annual ad revenue each. To replace their ad revenue you would need to charge ~$30+ a month for the service.
Interesting, yes. I put my approximate youtube numbers into chatGPT and it estimates $2.40-$9 a month, so at most I'm earning them on par with their cheapest offering.
Do you verify every input and output of your car's fuel system map? No, if the car runs well enough most of the time for your purposes you stop looking.
That is where chatGPT is for me these days on the kinds of tasks I throw at it, and for the seriousness of HN comment threads.
You're experiencing market segmentation. You won't pay $8.99 a month, so you don't get an ad-free product like the people who will pay. The service would rather get less than $8.99 from you than nothing, so you get ads.
But the part they seem to miss (or I get lost in the statistics) is that I wont use the service if I get annoyed by the ads. So they turn me into a churn which I wouldnt have been.
Right, you’re just getting lost in the statistics. Overall revenue is a function of revenue per user and number of users. They could go after you by reducing the ads, but they would also be reducing the revenue per user, and they might not gain enough additional people for it to be worth it.
It's my observation over time that there has been a sharp increase in the what people would call the "bare minimum" life. I think it's a combination of credit, a loss of stoicism, and social media pushing a distortion of reality.
An important element of the conversation is does (or how much does) it matter if any specific percentile group is getting disproportionally richer, given all (or a vast majority of) groups are? A group's lack of upward movement is not unjust if their groups actions do not justify a movement upward.
Additionally we also have to recall that the quintile's populations are not necessarily static. to illustrate the idea: members of a quintile may join an adjacent quintile in the next time period. That is, bottom members may move up, top members may move down, mid members may move either way. To the extent their movements are justified by their actions/choices is to the extent we have a fair society.
That is, if people are getting rich from sources not related to taking right actions, or people are taking good actions and getting poorer -- then we have an unjust society.
This can both apply to Rich people abusing their power to get rich, but also with poor people abusing their democratic powers to unjustly take from others that which they have not earned.
The issue is that income/wealth compounds over time. If people in the bottom 40% have very little to invest, they have nothing that compounds. They dont even have an opportunity to risk anything, or make a better decision.
The prices of the essentials are largely out of any individual's control. So any lack of ability to save / invest beyond spending on those is also out of their control. It's a vicious cycle, where excess wealth compounds, and income needed to exist dries up.
Also the rich often see a larger return to their investments than poor people, so having wealth seems to aide in your ability to make more money. Exactly the sort of thing that you implied was unjust.
And your other points about mobility I agree with and are addressed in notes on the site.
What is the issue with wealth compounding? The bottom 40% have a very high value asset -- their agency and actions in the real world. (Working, starting a business (however small), self sufficiency et al.).
The prices of true essentials are exceedingly small. Essential is something like sharing a room with someone, eating rice beans frozen veg mix (ie very inexpensively), wearing clothes from thrift stores, exercising outside and using a library card, medicaid. Everything beyond that is, technically, optional.
Having wealth aiding the overall return doesn't negate my point. Using wealth to get an unjust return does. An example of a better return would be hiring a financial advisor that (somehow) creates better returns using smarter allocations. An example of an unjust return would be creating a monopoly, buying a politician, or extracting profits from unpriced externalities (pollution and bailouts to name a couple). (These do happen in the USA, and I'm all for ending them!)
There's nothing unjust about someone getting more returns on more invested, this will naturally lead to a widening wealth gap over time. It's an inherent property of existence that more invested yields more return yields yet more invested (accelerating).
I do, however, like Scott Galloway's point that we need to find new ways to get the rich to spend their money, we need the poor to start 10000 businesses that gratify the rich and extract their money. Right now they're mostly accumulating it and bidding up investible assets (eg look athe P/E multiple of the S&P 500) .
Most new businesses fail. Then the poor are even deeper in the debt hole.
Some people can/should start businesses, but a lot of people are just not entrepreneurs - I include myself in that group. I realize that there must be ways to extract money from this economy - lots of people are doing it - but I don't think any of my ideas would end up doing that (they're generally too niche), more likely I'd end up losing a bunch of money trying to do that.
You can configure what you believe to be the correct price of essentials on the site. The defaults are BLS group average spending data.
"There's nothing unjust about someone getting more returns on more invested, this will naturally lead to a widening wealth gap over time. It's an inherent property of existence that more invested yields more return yields yet more invested (accelerating)."
Do you see how there is nothing stopping insane accumulation of wealth/power? (assuming returns continue to accelerate in this manner?)
There's nothing wrong with the accumulation of wealth. I fully agree that Citizens united (not capitalism) has created a distortion and corrupting force in the market place.
It's not the wealth that is evil/wrong/unjust/immoral. It's the use of it to corrupt power.
Housing and healthcare are both mentioned and covered.
> sharing a room with someone
> medicaid
in the top 10 CoL metros one can share a room with another person for about $600 a month.
I note that on your links the poverty wage is pretty close to the minimum wage. I'd contend that since contraceptives are widely available, including abortion in many places (or charities helping people get them in other states), we should expect the bottom quintile to not be adding to their expenses.
> "does (or how much does) it matter if any specific percentile group is getting disproportionally richer, given all (or a vast majority of) groups are?"
The page says that at least 50% of all people are not, so this seems like a very moot question until such a time as that changes.
And if it ever does change, we can then move on to the issue that "fairness" only exists to the extent that one is willing to acknowledge that having money fundamentally and inherently leads to having more money due to the nature of compounding growth, and the more money you have the more money you get by no real action at all.
You talk about "earned", but how exactly have I "earned" the compounding growth on my holdings? I certainly don't work for it. It just flows in for free as the world population continues to grow and produce. I can do literally nothing at all but drink margaritas on the beach and my assets will grow more per year than an average person ever makes by labor. Would you say that I "earn" it? I call it "getting" not "earning". There's nothing fair about it.
I like your post a lot, in that you're describing how this doesn't say anything about anyone's chances really. However...
> but also with poor people abusing their democratic powers to unjustly take from others that which they have not earned
How would they abuse their democratic powers? It's their decision to vote either way. So who says that's unjust? Certainly it's not abusing their democratic powers.
Abusing of power happens on the other end of the spectrum, especially in the US thanks to citizens united.... Surely all those super PAC dollars don't buy any influence... As a result, the voice of a single rich person might be stronger than a whole quintile of the population. So chances are that they are unjustly given things that aren't theirs (i.e. advantageous contracts, laws that help them etcetera).
I hold, i guess as a basic principle, that tyranny of the majority is an unjust failure case of democratic systems.
Fully agree Citizen's united has resulted in legalized corruption. But 2 wrongs do not make a right, ethically.
There's nothing unjust about a rich person getting superior results through access to better resources though. Eg hiring a better tax accountant or financial advisor.
Wealth inequality is mainly a statistical phenomena.
If you start a perfectly fair society where everyone has exactly the same amount of money and you play a game were people interact and with equal random chance (i.e. each exchange you get a 50/50 chance of earning 1 buck or losing one), after a few exchanges you get a Boltzmann-Gibbs (exponential) distribution.
If each agent wealth chance of increasing depends on what they already have, you get a pareto distribution.
>A group's lack of movement is not unjust if their groups actions do justify a movement upward.
I assume you mean "do not justify" and the bottom line is that this type of thinking is fundamentally erroneous.
We agree to live in a society of this construction not so everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps (asinine conception that misunderstands structural vs individual agency) but because it is of collective benefit.
If it it not of collective benefit, the social agreement needs to be renegotiated.
There's no chance everyone will agree to live in an arrangement where a minority of the population accrues all of the benefit because they go out of their way to execute financial scams, but I'm willing to litigate that publicly, which we're doing here.
My whole point is that to the extent accumulated wealth is happening by playing by the rules, there is no injustice in accumulating wealth, nor in accumulating more than those who did not do the actions which relate to wealth building. (And there's a randomness factor involved so it mostly has to be taken on average, on average starting a business is profitable, but also lots of them fail)
If the rules technically allow a loophole that allows a minority group to accrue wealth over the majority, why would the majority agree or consent to be in that system? A minority oppressing a majority is classically a definition of tyranny.
Society isn't some abstract collection of rules that must be followed. Those rules are actively negotiated for majority benefit, and we agree that each person has an equal voice in the west.
If that collection of rules is failing, it's considered unjust and something to amend.
"That's just smart" because someone found a loophole or did a scam to accrue wealth isn't an acceptable negotiated state of affairs to most people.
> Those rules are actively negotiated for majority benefit
This is a presumed goal/value. A more conservative take is that the rules are actively enforced based on values or justice.
A value could be that we do not support ill gotten gains, to the extent that the majority votes for free things paid for by the minority it could "benefit the majority" and still violate the value
Past a point of wealth, it seems a lot easier to increase wealth through things of no intrinsic value to society.
If I have enough money, I can buy a lot of businesses (or be in a controlling position) and run them poorly (read: efficently) and as wealth concentrates the capital for a new entrant to compete becomes scarcer and regulation on new competition mysteriously materializes, and without any new competition I can raise prices and no one can really do anything.
And now I have more money to do this more times in more places, and wealth is more concentrated, and legislation just seems to go my way more and so on.
That vague playbook is being applied to just about everything today.
Spirit Airlines went through two bankruptcies, and the people who lead the first one were liquidating it while it was still running to pay themselves back for the first one, and turning debt they had forfeited for equity back into debt to increase how much they'd take out of the remains.
I mean you can't even escape that playbook in childrens sports! That playbook is being run into making children sports league a profit squeezing cartel as we speak.
It's just such a simple playbook that if we really go all in on the idea that anything that's technically legal to make money will be allowed, then having more money and basic "high agency" mindset will lead to making money in increasingly perverse ways.
To me the end game seems to be a race between authoritarianism (will these high-agency wealthy types just be able to keep the poorer class under lock and key with TikTok feeds to placate) and collapse (maybe they don't get the poor under deep enough control before the poor realize they've been given a deal that justifies trying to raze it all and start again)(edit: or maybe better framing, they realize they collectively have no meaningful part in the wealth and raze it)
To me everything you've identified is either 1) Corruption or 2) Consumers being sheep.
If the kids sports is a profit seeking cartel that you do not agree with, then do not give them your money. If enough customers do that they will not be profitable and will cease to exist once they can no longer extract investor capital from the very class this post seems to dislike.
Really roughly speaking the American consumer needs to stop being so complacent and naive, the American voter needs to get a good bit more politically active, and people need to stop choosing comfort over action. the average 2.5 hrs a day on social media could easily be spent to make their lives much better.
The market is not able to fix corruption. Regulation is needed. For example, exploitative labor practices weren't ended in the early 20th century because of customer preference. Laws had to be passed.
The global billionaire class now numbers roughly 3,500 people and collectively controls around $15–20 trillion in wealth. That's about the annual GDP of China.
That's about twice as much as the lower 50% of the population (2% of the world's wealth)... a class consisting of 4 billion people.
Why do people pretend "right actions" has anything to do with it. "Right actions" aren't even possible at that scale of difference. How does "earning" even make sense at these proportions? you think 3500 people are doing that much more than 4 billion others?
The P/E Ratio of the S&P 500 is at a historic high level. Interpreted another way, there rarely is a better time to create a profitable business -- You can get paid $30ish dollars per annual dollar of profit you create.
On the flip side, it's never been so expensive to be an investor of capital. In order to get a return you have to wait 30 years (or 10 if you take growth rates into account), just to see your initial investment. An expensive stock market makes current consumption more rational for investors.
In this case the issue isn't 19k flock cameras, but an utter lack of repercussion for failure to justify usage. In the same way I'd be arrested and jailed if I breached/used 19K ring cameras that do not belong to me, this guy should be arrested and jailed for his misuse. Police unions are a major root cause of many issues in the USA.
It’s clear to me that these networked license plate cameras represent a fundamental impingement on freedom.
Just one example: how is a journalist supposed to meet with a secret source if their locations at all times are logged?
Even if these databases are only ever searched investigating violations of laws, it’s trivial to find ways to twist that against political rivals, protesters and activists, ex girlfriends, journalists, and leakers.
What freedom is being impinged? AFAIK we have no fundamental right to not being recorded in public, presuming it's not indecent.
And I'd reiterate what i said elsewhere:
I believe people respond to incentives. What we need are more laws governing the law makers and law enforcers. It maybe trivial to shoplift, but the laws (when enforced) make it irrational to.
Freedom of the press - by harassing or criminalizing journalists who seek to expose gov or politicians who do wrong.
Freedom of assembly - license plate readers have been used to mass collect plates from people attending political rallies for mainstream candidates.
Freedom of speech and petition - tracking and harassing people for political speech or peaceful protest.
Under the second amendment:
Right to keep and bear arms.
See feds slurping up data on gun show attendees. Doing something that is a basic right should not land you in a gov crime database.
Under the 4th: Protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. Knowing where someone is at all times is an unreasonable search.
And of course the supreme court has ruled that there is no basic right to privacy in the constitution, when they overturned roe v wade, but i strongly disagree with that ruling and believe it was not fair or consistent with the intent of the constitution.
This is the inevitable result of having hundreds of thousands of cameras all collecting data and searchable from one point. Even if every search required a warrant, this would still be abused with cops lying on affidavits etc.
We don't need this system, we don't need to tolerate having this vector for abuse lying around.
No. The recent decades has shown that there are no laws for a sufficiently motivated entity or government. They're just words on paper, a promise. You can't expect them to keep that promise indefinitely, especially when those incentives you speak of (profit for the companies, easy repressions and surveillance for the government) point in the opposite direction. The only way to ensure this doesn't happen is to not have the tools of repression to be available at a second's notice to them. We live in a world of power, not of laws, at least as far as the most powerful are concerned.
Besides, I don't want them to have a right to track and correlate data about my location even if it's the best government ever that only ever uses this to solve the crimes that I agree are bad. No thanks.
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