The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left.
The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)
Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.
Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).
I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.
There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?
In many countries, the UK for example, wages have become stagnant over the last 15 years and "getting on in life", "social mobility", whatever you want to call it, appears to have stalled entirely.
Maybe "Who cares?" is the correct response for many people.
[1] Office of National Statistics via BBC: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/2560/cpsprodpb/13FD8/p...
The massive, huge cynic in me says, people make less because all they do is stare at their phones. Yes, I know, I'm overstating things a bit.
But the other day I noticed the approx 20 year old garbage collector, was staring at his phone the whole time. I am not joking. Truck pulls up, he glances at my garbage bin, back to phone as he snags it. While rolling it to the truck? Staring at phone. While pulling the lever to lift and dump it? Phone. While putting it back in my driveway? Phone.
While hanging off the truck from one arm as it careens up to 100km/hr to the next rural property? Phone.
He's literally not doing his job. He's supposed to be looking for things in the garbage (car batteries, or something else not for normal garbage) during the dump. My bin also fell into the ditch, because he didn't even look at where it was headed.
(And I've had garbage collectors for my entire life, decades of them, and yes it's worse.)
Another example? I had a fridge delivered. One guy was 40. The other 20.
40 year old talks to me, etc as the delivery proceeds. 20 year old? Staring at phone literally every second, monosyllabic answers. Had to be prompted by 40 year old a dozen times to do basic jobs.
I'm not saying it's all phones. But I've heard the cries of horror from people who have been told "if your phone is in your hand at work, you're fired".
I can just imagine, when one is literally that addicted to something, how normal "I don't like work" unpleasantness skyrockets to mega-proportions of inane misery, from the conjoined "ARG, WORK!" and "OMG my fix is missing!"
I envision it as "OK, now I'm working this sucks" mixed with "plus I have shards of glass in my shoes" or some such.
However it's not a universal. China has had immense wage growth, and the emergency of a "middle class" income bracket, where no such bracket existed before. Of course it's an economy still in the throws of massive transformation.
Yet regardless, "staring at phone instead of doing job correctly" isn't going to reverse that trend. Or I guess it could for the few unaddicted.
Yea, showing transforming economies to established economies isn't really a great comparison at all. You have two huge things happening at once. A massive transfer of wealth from those 'rich' economies building new factories to use the cheap labor. This drops wages in the rich economies by shipping the jobs out. In the meantime the people in the rich economies have to move to service style jobs away from manufacturing.
In a few decades the same will happen with China as it converts to a service economy.
