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?
I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
Exactly. Companies and wealthy people have cancelled the social contract a long time ago and have decided to go for profit at any cost. It’s hard to be excited about work when you know that you get raises below inflation rate while the company makes record profits. And the CEO may do a town hall claiming how great business is and then lay off people two weeks later. Or DOGE. In theory this is a good idea but instead of improving processes so government workers can do a good job they just laid off people and let the people who are left deal with the mess.
No wonder people become cynical.
The supermassive corporate structures that have accreted together in the modern world are beyond the scale of imagining. We are familiar with a vastly smaller % of the org chart, as the size of that chart balloons.
I tend to think there used to be a connection within and across the corporate entity, more shared purposes, shared cause/alignment, and perhaps sometimes at successful places ability for the good ideas to rise. Large companies sometimes love to preach "intrapreneurial" spirit, encourage the individual will & ownership, all while refusing to acknowledge the constraints & impositions of corporate hierarchy, the lack of freedom, that the large organizational structure imposes.
I think there's a real muting of the human will at most large companies, and that caring and trying is only permitted in very narrow scopes. That only some folks are able to maintain will and drive, while fitting themselves into the particular shapes demanded by the org chart around them. At the smaller scale we are not individually abutted by so many others to whom a concern may be charged.
(The impacts of what behaviors we see around us are also bounded by these forces, dimish our spirit collectively too. We grow up & adult in a world where everyone is buried deep in an org chart.)
When a group of people get together to do something, the most visible effect will be that of GCD(each person's motivations).
If you collect enough people, with sufficient heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest, everything else, while it may exist, contributes with an arbitrarily smaller intensity.
In my mind, there are various links from this to the financialization-led practice of securitizing and "cutting up" everything into an "optimal" number of pieces, without stopping to think if the objective function truly captures the desired end result. However, these links are not clear enough yet for me to expand further on.
I think most people want to have security and some predictability for their lives. One way to achieve this is by having money but there are other ways too. Reducing humans to purely economical beings who always want to maximize profit is a gross simplification that appeals to economists and bankers but it doesn’t reflect reality.
I didn't. Please read the multiple qualifiers I added to that phrase.
>> If you collect enough people, with sufficient heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest.
What that means is that if you scale groups of people too much, the only common interest you'll find among _all_ of them will be financial self interest. Hence GCD - "greatest common divisor". Of course people do things without monetary incentives. But these interests don't overlap within a sufficiently large and diverse group of people, as much as financial self-interest does.