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[return to "The Who Cares Era"]
1. 0_____+U5[view] [source] 2025-05-28 13:44:58
>>NotInO+(OP)
I was just kvetching about this to my partner over breakfast. Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs.

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?

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2. komali+3A[view] [source] 2025-05-28 16:40:29
>>0_____+U5
> 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.

If she's able to do this without risk of being fired, she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism. The worker / employer dynamic under capitalism is: employers try to extract the most labor value for the least cost (maximizing profit margin) while the worker tries to retain the highest labor profit margin possible for the least labor cost (wear and tear on mind and body, time, etc). Since it's not possible to retain / change total capture of labor profit margin on the employee side, since compensation for labor isn't attached to value but rather to "market conditions" (geography, whether or not another employer in the industry recently laid people off, the phase of the moon), the employee's only option is to reduce personal labor cost: work as little as possible, as lazily as possible.

One of the genius strokes of this arrangement is that humans aren't purely economic rational actors: we generally take pride in our work, and also want to be a part of something greater, and even if we don't have either of those things, we suffer social pressure to do good at our jobs or not leave our teammates hanging. So, in reality, the employer has an advantage, because it's basically immune to these human traits. Therefore the corporation can extract even more value for less cost (people will work harder than necessary per their compensation because e.g. they take pride in their work).

As the overall system destabilizes further and normalization deepens and people feel the inherent contradictions more strongly, I believe cynicism will increase and these human traits will hold less influence over the employer / worker dynamic, and people will operate more like rational capitalist actors.

Annoyingly this will probably lead to more articles about how "people just don't want to work anymore."

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3. Ray20+nf1[view] [source] 2025-05-28 20:35:53
>>komali+3A
>she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism.

It is not entirely clear why you call these the values of capitalism. These are universal human values that do not depend on the economic formation.

If anything, capitalism makes people less cynical, simply because it is designed to function independently of such qualities in people. While in many other systems, cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness and deceitfulness of people are simply ignored, giving people with such qualities huge advantages within the system and ruining the lives of everyone else.

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4. int_19+0p2[view] [source] 2025-05-29 11:12:45
>>Ray20+nf1
Capitalism is not "designed", for starters. It is an economic formation that emerged through natural forces. And if there's anything that process optimized for, it's allowing cynical, cruel, unscrupulous and deceitful people (who, as you rightly note, existed before) to take advantage of the new technological advancements like industrialization, which the previous arrangement was not particularly good at.
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