As somebody that was using Windows XP up to its EoL, I am fairly certain I was in the minority (at least amongst home users.) I don't think anybody I knew was using XP by the time its end came. The only reason I was still on it at the time was a complete lack of income which meant using very old hand-me-down hardware.
The situation with Windows 10 feels quite different, because most people I know that use Windows are on Windows 10 currently.
I was working at a web design company a little after windows XP went EoL. One site had a member on thier board who kept raising a stink because the redesigned site didn't work right on their computer. Found out that they were using IE6 or whatever on XP. Our estimate for the fix was $600, which was like an additional 2-3% on top of the original estimate so it was approved. The $600 was used to buy a new laptop for that board member with Windows7 and whatever the latest IE was installed.
> 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.
>> 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.
Also don't discount the pressure exerted by employers to explicitly encourage mediocrity. So often, there's a huge amount of pressure to implement a half-working kludge and never pursue a more appropriate/complete fix. IMHO, it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results and ever present budget pressures that encourage kicking the can down the road.
If your employer is explicitly discouraging you from doing a good job, what are you supposed to do? Some people will resist, but they're definitely swimming against the current.
Most workers have learned that going above and beyond almost always backfires. Employers don't value long-term employment relationships, so working hard just results in you raising the bar for yourself, with no benefit.
A lot of these people were once starry-eyed highschoolers and college students who got burned too many times. They put in the time, the effort, the blood, sweat and tears, and what did they get? No thank you, just more work. Eventually they can't live up to the standard they themselves set, and they're let go. Meanwhile, bozos show up late and half-ass everything and then that becomes their expectation.
Dang, feeling this right now. Went above and beyond again and again, for years, barely got a thank you - let alone a raise of any sort. Now I’m completely burnt out and don’t have the energy to even consider my own ideas for my own next move.
GE [1]? Boeing [2] [3]? The stocks go up because management and shareholders pull forward the gains as financialization destroys the long term value of the enterprises. Works until it doesn't.
> Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-Standing C-Suite Greed
I suspect this is true to a certain extent, but IMO this narrative has been exaggerated to the point where it is completely useless. If Boeing execs were only focused on "short term profits," how did commercial aviation deaths decrease despite there being significantly more flights?
Are there actually more issues or are people just more aware of them? Like I said, commercial airline flights are significantly safer than they were in Boeing's supposed golden era despite these publicized scandals.
If your position is "well, it lasted this long and the organizational rot only killed a few hundred people" we may be unable to meet on this topic. How many deaths would be sufficient? I argue the decline in fatalities over time is due to commercial air traffic regulations and systems.
> "well, it lasted this long and the organizational rot only killed a few hundred people"
It should be clear that is not what I meant. This reinforces my view that popular criticism towards Boeing is unhelpful and ironically is relevant to the posted essay. People care more about gotchas more than deep discussion.
If the 737 Max incidents were due to negligence on Boeing's part, the many of the incidents in the 70s were also due to negligence. You can't have it both ways.
It’s not meant as a gotcha. It’s meant to illustrate that the effects of financialization, stripping an enterprise of its value, and the culture that enables this (of which short termism is a component) can take some time for the symptoms to surface. Boeing cared more about profits than safety, this is what the evidence shows. If you disagree, of course, you’re entitled to your opinion. I believe I’ve supported my thesis adequately with citations. It was a long corporate journey to the crash sites, but the journey is well documented.
(GE also took substantial time to fall apart, but with no deaths to my knowledge)
The problem is that the opposite is as destructive. Doing new things WILL cause accidents. And in the case of Boeing, of course it will result in planes failing.
And the "solution" to any level of this kind of criticism is really easy: do less, eventually do nothing at all anymore. But, in truth, that's even more destructive, in fact that that's happening is what this whole thread is about.
We need a balance. There needs to be some tolerance for risk, certainly at companies like Boeing.
>If the 737 Max incidents were due to negligence on Boeing's part, the many of the incidents in the 70s were also due to negligence.
They don’t necessarily have to be classified as the same contributing factors. The de Haviland Comet may have failed due to our lack of understanding of metal fatigue with a pressurized cabin. That was engineering ignorance. If a manufacturer did the same today, it’s negligence because those are known engineering principles.
Boeing was knowingly not following their own procedures for safety critical design. They also admitted to conspiracy to circumvent FAA oversight. Which of the above categories would you put those in?
We've learned a lot since then. Every time there's an accident, we learn from it and adjust the safety procedures. Incidents going down over time is to be expected, can't compare outcomes today with the past, after so much accummulated experience.
>> GE [1]? Boeing [2] [3]? The stocks go up because management and shareholders pull forward the gains as financialization destroys the long term value of the enterprises. Works until it doesn't.
> Boeing consistently went up for many decades prior to the MAX crisis. So did GE.
The point is they could have probably kept going up if they hadn't done that.
It's like how if you choose to eat your seed corn, you'll be fat and happy for a season, then you and your family will certainly starve to death next year. You'd most likely had lived if you hadn't made that short-term decision.
> Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.
And how often are the "life cycles" really just the accumulation of bad short-term decisions catching up with the company?
You can kludge and kludge and kludge, but eventually that makes the app unmaintainable. Then you're in "total rewrite" or go under territory.
> It's like how if you choose to eat your seed corn, you'll be fat and happy for a season, then you and your family will certainly starve to death next year. You'd most likely had lived if you hadn't made that short-term decision.
Part of that is probably embedded in the environment. The market favors risk-taking. Everyone is dipping into their seed corn, hoping they can use the extra energy they have now to secure some new corn and cover for the surplus. Sometimes they can't, and they starve. More importantly though, anyone who didn't dip into their seed corn is no longer there - risking a bit gives you a competitive advantage over those who risk less.
This dynamics plays at multiple levels in large companies, and arguably is deeply embedded in the overall business culture.
It's not totally irrational either - "eating your seed corn" sounds stupid in isolation, but the calculus changes when every village around you is at war with you and everyone else, all while the whole region gets hammered by natural disasters. Saving the seed corn to survive the next year may end up killing you next week.
>And how often are the "life cycles" really just the accumulation of bad short-term decisions catching up with the company?
I do think technical debt is a real problem, but to play devils advocate, the “life-cycle” is often a pivot from “innovation” to “maintenance”. Companies rightly begin to focus on the aspects of business that make them money and will often cannibalize R&D to focus on high-margin areas. That’s why “mature” companies often focus on innovation via acquisition.
Perhaps that's the trick to longevity then, not seeking endless growth. All the oldest companies on earth seem to small, geographically contained entities (e.g., hotels, restaurants) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
> No company goes up forever. They all eventually strangle themselves with bureaucratic inefficiency.
So they should act to strangle themselves faster? It feels like your reasoning is equivalent to, "Eventually you'll die, so there's no point taking care of your health. Go save money by avoiding the doctor, take up smoking, and eat junk food all the time."
Being relentlessly focused on the short term will do that, eventually.
You seem to think the assumption "all companies die" means you can simplify away their journey, but it matters if they get there faster or slower (at least to society, if not the decision-makers to maximize their personal profit while hoping to not being the ones left holding the bag).
> Old companies die and new ones take their place. This is not a problem for society. In most cases creative destruction is a net positive.
That's what they say, but I don't think it's true (at the high end, at least). For instance: if Boeing dies, the market will not replace it. It'll be an Airbus monopoly for large jets, and maybe the the communists will eventually build a competitor (Comac). IIRC, it's too expesnive for Embraer to make the jump into that market.
...which is why the market is supposed to have competition. Company strangles themselves with bureaucracy -> next company is ready to take over. But when a monopoly strangles itself with bureaucracy, there is no next company to take over and you get rent-seeking behaviour and unmotivated employees that just phone it in because they have nowhere else to go. End result: the public foots the bill for less quality at higher prices.
The book on GE is specifically about how they lied, cheated, and committed fraud -- er, accounting irregularities -- for decades, in order to maintain the illusion of number goes up predictably.
In retrospect, it was exactly as unlikely as Madoff's numbers.
But ALL of the FANGs pride themselves on predictably rising numbers. They all have a semi-believable story, and in fact only Amazon has a unique tactic (which is cheating taxes entirely by having zero profit, hence their revenue goes up predictably instead of profit. The others have steadily rising profit with slight variation in the rise of their revenue)
But all of them do it. Facebook/Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple. Even the non-FANG fangs like Tesla, Twitter, ... and all have stories about faking it. Most are advertising and that's easy to fake on both sides (buy your own adertising, and of course fake engagement), Amazon has zero profit so they proudly declare they're faking it for the government (but, of course, they're not cheating you), Netflix has steadily rising subscriber numbers where everyone else has failed, even Apple's growth has switched to subscriber growth, the part of their business that would be the easiest to fake.
In fact this is quite common in the whole S&P 500, including outside of the US, with numbers not quite as dramatic as the FANGs, but still going up.
> Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.
> It's not about prioritizing short term results.
Why did they need to grow in the first place though? If a company is already profitable, and growing will end up making them less functional and eventually erode profits, that sounds like it's due to prioritizing short-term results over long-term stable profits.
Boeing was forced by courts bolster safety, compliance, and quality programs as well as admitting to conspiracy to thwart FAA oversight. I don’t know about you, but my experience is that when companies undermine those types of oversight, it’s almost always due to schedule and price pressure (ie short term results). (Not to mention, the whole impetus for MCAS was to rush the design to market so they wouldn’t lose out on AA as a customer).
Again, the vast bulk of Boeing's history was before that.
> the whole impetus for MCAS was to rush the design to market so they wouldn’t lose out on AA as a customer
The impetus for MCAS was to make the MAX behave like the previous 737 model to reduce the expense of retraining the pilots.
In general, flying is safer when pilots do not need to "code switch" when switching airplane models. Many crashes result from a pilot reflexively doing the right thing for the previous airplane they flew, rather than the one they are flying at the moment.
>Again, the vast bulk of Boeing's history was before that.
I’m not sure what you intend to convey with this statement. If price reflects reality, the current price should reflect the current reality, no? Whether the White Sox were the best team 100 years ago has little bearing on my prediction about their chances this year. I fail to see how Boeing’s prior culture prevents them from succumbing to short term incentives. I know your point is the downfall is a bureaucratic one, but the evidence does not point to that (they actually cut corners on bureaucratic requirements).
>The impetus for MCAS was to make the MAX behave like the previous 737 model to reduce the expense of retraining the pilots.
Go deeper. Why was this considered necessary?
(Hint: it’s because they wanted to rush the design to market with a less expensive (and lower quality) product. Ie cost and schedule pressure. You stopped at the proximate cause.)
Boeing stock price still almost doubled in the past 10 years. Went up by hundreds of percent in the past two decades. GE stock is worth 40x what it was worth 40 years ago, when Jack Welsh took over management! These two seem like two very successful companies, led by succesful strategies.
Do stock prices even meaningfully represent anything anymore? Looking at some valuations makes me feel like it has all devolved entirely into gambling.
A lot of badly managed companies (or just companies in stagnant industries) saw their stock prices stagnate or fall. Boeing and GE had large rises though (meteoric in case of GE).
The value of a stock is based on long term results. If the investors catch wind of the company sacrificing the long term for the short term, the stock price will go down accordingly.
Stock price is pretty much completely unrelated to the performance of a company because the vast majority of investors have no idea what the fuck is going on in the company.
Look at Tesla. They're doing extremely poorly right now and have been for about a year, and if you look at their stock price you wouldn't think that. They're valued more than, like, every other auto manufacturer combined. Looking at that you'd expect them to hold 50% of the market in all markets they're in. But they don't get anywhere close to that.
The stock market is just gambling. You can't see the other person's hand.
So what is your thesis on GME? Long term play? It is literally a brick and mortar selling physical video games in an era where consoles are increasingly shipping without the ability to play physical media. And yet…
Not really. It’s based on expected future results. Sometimes that’s based in reality, sometimes it’s hopes and dreams. How else do you explain companies that have never made money being having any positive stock price?
There are no “results” just projections.
We probably agree that the stock will eventually reflect value. I think we’d quibble about how long that takes. As the saying goes, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. In other words, don’t bet on the market always reflecting reality.
I don’t see that happening in practice, because the competitors are focusing on the short term as well. Another reason is that it is easy to deceive customers about the relative qualities of a product as long as it is cheaper than the competition. So it’s rather the short-termists that are driving a race to the bottom (or at least to
mediocrity).
The most successful companies, in my experience, are not successful because they're so much more awesome than everyone else. They are successful primarily because of luck... the luck of having competitors that suck total ass.
Microsoft, for instance... or in more modern times, Tesla.
I wouldn't put Boeing into that category, though -- it took more than just a lack of good competition to accomplish what they did, back in the day.
Buybacks do not do that any more than dividends do. Buybacks merely allow publicly listed stock owners to precisely time their capital gains tax events.
Surely, there is some amount of income that a business’s owner is allowed to pocket without bad intentions, which may or may not come at the cost of long term investments. Especially in stable/declining businesses.
No, buy packs are pure market manipulation. There is a reason why they were banned prior to 1982. It's a SEC rule that can easily be reversed too but the rich love their ability to manipulate markets for their benefit.
> Buybacks do not do that any more than dividends do.
There's at least a clear relationship if the dividend is reinvested.
If the dividend is spent, though, eg by someone in retirement, then they're different. Under buybacks, the retiree would have to sell some shares to get cash, and would eventually run out. Under dividends, the retiree would be able to continuously pocket money.
stock markets are indices of successful companies; you need to look at the composition. The metric I would look at is the age of the companies in the S&P 500 or similar, and that IS increasingly skewing young, which shows both a focus on the short term and increasing markets
The focus on short term results could generally be true. Perhaps... generally nothing is true though of course.
(1) consider how many stocks are delisted and/or go out of business. We might be thinking with survivorship bias. A cook google gave this headline "America has lost 43% of listed companies since 1996" (though, more research would be needed to really be sure that's accurate and to determine any more nuances that might be important).
(2) If there are an ever-present amount of short term rewards/results, then we would get growth. A series of short term growth would be hard to distinguish from long term growth.
(3) Long term and short term growth can be mixed, and the strategy does not have to be static. A company could hop back and forth between them. This point contradicts the premise a bit, at the same time we can't discount long term from the noise that we see (it could be signal).
(4) Stock price is not necessarily always tied to financial results. It's supposed to be the sum of all future revenue divided by the number of shares (or something like that), thus, stock price is in part also the expectation of revenue and not actual revenue. Tesla is a notable example, the price of their stock is still very high, with anticipation of amazing revenue gains, but recently their revenue has not been growing by a ton.
The financial industry isn’t immune to “who cares”-ism, or folks who are bad at their jobs. Heck, the index fund is the ultimate “who cares?” product - you’re explicitly saying that you don’t care about underlying fundamental valuations and are going to piggyback off the price discovery mechanism of other active investors, and you accept average returns as a result.
In practice, financial results are driven by transactions, and so any mediocrity that doesn’t lead to the customer going elsewhere isn’t going to show up in the financial results. You need an actual competitor to risk losing money to sucking. But I’ll note that in cases where there is an actual competitor to sclerotic old industries, one that actually does care, the investors in the competitor tend to become fabulously wealthy and the investors in the old industry go broke.
Stocks suck up all the value. For example the value of a house is in the living space it provides. If you convert it to money, you end up with... money.
are you discounting the supply of new companies that continually replace the decliners? What's happening to those the previously existed for 50+years? Will we ever see a new company last 100+ years?
This perfectly illustrates why I've always preferred working at startups over major corps including FAANG / MANGA.
There is a top down culture of not embracing mediocrity that genuinely makes me thrive at work. My current company has a good work life balance and if I make a point that some part of the system needs improvement, my voice actually gets heard. Only place I've seen where sprint retros actually made impact. Most of my friends have no work life balance and also don't have a voice when they see half-assed work.
The numbers showcase the effect of this as well. The startup has thrived even when VC's have tightened their purses.
Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term.
So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die. Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for generations.
I think your comment comes from a very specific point of view. Like software/tech jobs. (Even there you have long term stuff that we all would definitely benefit from).
There are so many things where short-term only thinking is counter-productive. It swallows money, creates frustration and leaves an overall net-negative to society and the world.
Just one example would be city planning. Repairing a road? What else is there like fiber cables, maybe some tram tracks, and so on, long term planning would be to acquire a holistic picture and to plan one timespan where everything is done fast but with quality. It’s a few months construction, after that everything is fine for years or even a few decades to come. But what you see instead is one part of the state that manages fiber cables doing there own thing, another part that manages street quality do their own thing. So the street has a construction site for a year (for just improving one part) then a few months nothing then another year of construction again, nothing, construction and soon you have over a decade of constant on and off construction work on this one street. Something that could’ve been done in 6-12 months once and be done, if planned correctly and with long term and holistic picture in mind.
And this is just one example. The world is full of stuff like this. Short term might be a good thing for very specific types of projects, but I hard disagree that short term is overall better in any way.
In my opinion this shortterm thinking is a huge negative factor of modern societies. Because not everything is a tech startup where things change super fast.
> Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term.
That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior.
> So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die.
So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then?
> Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for generations.
Maybe if you're in some startup, but that's not the usual case.
> Results now are way better than results later.
So be "very proud [for taking] home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans."?
It's not just a political derail to bring up a highly-visible example of the described behaviour. People don't care if they aren't forced to care, and in a world driven by deadlines, we're only motivated to care a certain amount.
There used to be an intrinsic motivator of "well, my kids are going to suffer if I don't push for long-term relationships", but now we aren't having kids, so that carrot doesn't work, and that attitude is bubbling up into the corporate world.
Sure, but let's be clear, we shouldn't be taking any lessons from the Trump regime on how to live in virtually any aspect in one's life. If anything they're a shining example of everything not to do.
I think they mean (to stretch the analogy), we are razing trees to build rapidly changing highways so much now that the tree you plant today may be chopped down in a couple of years through no fault of your own.
> Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term.
The opposite seems far more obvious to me. Short-term results aren't going to last. Planning for the long-term - whether that's a career, family, or whatever - is critical to a fulfilling and healthy life.
Seems self evident that increasing pace of change of society tilts the rational strategy towards short-term over long-term gain.
Do people disagree that the pace of change is increasing? Do people disagree that short termism is rationally appropriate in a highly changeable situation? Long term planning requires a stable backdrop. I agree with you.
“ 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.”
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.
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.
“ you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest”
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.
"But these interests don't overlap within a sufficiently large and diverse group of people, as much as financial self-interest does."
I honestly don't think this is true. Finances are a tool to get security and comfort in our society but it's still just a tool to achieve the real goal. I bet if we had viable UBI that gives people their basic needs, most people wouldn't worry about finances.
At the end of the day, most people are employed in part because they want to (or need to) make money.
Therefore, the greatest common denominator for an arbitrarily large and heterogenous group of employees at the company is the paycheck.
This isn't really disputable. Your argument doesn't really counter this fact, either. Sure, UBI might remove that common need that nearly every employee has, which could change the calculus entirely... But we don't have UBI, and the GP wasn't making an argument about some hypothetical world, they were making a point about the one we actually live in.
> 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.
Eloquently put. This is what drives me nuts about Brian Chesky. He wants employees to take ownership - but doesn't give them any ownership.
If I worked for BNB and was aggressively pursuing a new idea, I could still be laid off any second because of his ego. That isn't ownership.
In software specifically, we're now at year two+ where the entirety of investment and innovation is in literally replacing people.
We have CEOs and prominent figureheads making openly hostile statements about replacing their software workforce with LLMs, and coming out with bold proclamations about whatever models are going to be better than whatever title of developer in $TIME.
How there can be any loyalty or long-term thinking from employees at all in such circumstances is beyond me.
I can't even think of an analogous scenario at any time in my life. Open worker hostility.
IT/tech has kind of represented this to the average worker since forever.
When I switch from development to running IT, I sat with people to understand how the company worked. Everyone I sat with was terrified I was going to automate away their jobs.
Personally, I find it harder and harder to take pride in the work that I do, and in the effort I put in, when others who have no understanding of the quality of my work or amount of effort I put in are empowered to handwave it away with bullshit excuses and are applauded for doing so.
I don't think you're wrong that hard work is also no longer rewarded the way it used to be, but I think there are a lot more factors in play here.
Hard work is also a bit of a commons problem. If you're the only hard worker in a group, it's easy to be taken advantage of. If everyone's a hard worker, they probably all understand the value of hard work, and are more likely to reward it accordingly.
I think another social issue affecting this is people's measure of what makes hard work "hard". Social media shows is a parade of very talented people doing impressive things, while rarely giving us insight into the amount of effort that goes into those accomplishments. To anyone who hasn't put in the level of effort required to be "really good" at something, it's very easy to underestimate how much effort is truly involved. And when someone consistently underestimates how much effort is involved in doing "hard" things, they'll also consistently overestimate the amount of effort they're putting in relative to the results they're achieving. This will lead them to believe they're doing "hard work", when in reality their level of effort is closer to "mediocre".
The solution to this is worker's self-management, an economic model that was pioneered by Yugoslavia, but has mostly disappeared with its dismantlement.
Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market.
This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.
Yugoslavia also had severe political repression, with peace between the provinces only maintained by a (near) dictator with a cult of personality. Their economy and standard of living was mediocre at best, and only even possible within a limited geopolitical context where they sat between competing superpowers. It wouldn't be possible to create something like Yugoslavia today. Stupid to even try.
I'd argue the repression of reactionaries was part of the secret sauce that made it work so well. We saw what happened when they were loosened in the 90s.
I'd posit that the rise of the Nazis (which caused the rise of the SFR Yugoslavia as a resistance movement) taught us differently.
Karl Popper, himself an Austrian that saw the rise of the Nazis and had to live in exile as a result famously formulated it as the paradox of tolerance.
In Yugoslavia you couldn't even get bananas or coffee or jeans. People had to go to Italy or Austria to buy it. You had to wait more than a year to get a car. Of course then there was no gas for it. Inflation ate your paycheck before you could spend it.
Because it was destroyed by right-wing extremists in the 90s, funded by Western capitalists that were scared it would show the world a viable alternative on how to run an economy
I really like what you wrote, because it demonstrates what kids in Yugoslavia were thought from a young age. There was this idea of a foreign enemy that it there to get them and any economic and political fault in the country was because of the sabotage of this invisible foreign enemy.
Yes. Or would you prefer working dawn to dusk picking bugs off of your crops, with the constant spectre of crop failure and famine?
Do you prefer living in a mud hut to a house with air conditioning, central heat, hot and cold running water, electric lighting and flush toilets? All courtesy of economic powerhouses.
Maybe you'd prefer spending your free time spinning thread with your spinning wheel, making cloth, and sewing all your clothes? (The first industrial target was textiles.)
This is a false dichotomy: Either your country is an "economic powerhouse", or you're living in a mud hut, with nothing in between. A country can be a good, decent place to live, where people's basic needs are taken care of, with opportunities for modest life improvements for those who want them, without being an economic powerhouse (and all of the bad that comes with that).
> Despite facing numerous challenges, including political instability and external pressures, the Yugoslav economy achieved significant growth and modernization during its existence, with a particularly strong emphasis on education, health care, and social welfare
You need bricks to make a house. Where are you going to get the bricks from? You need lumber to build a stick frame house. How are you going to saw the lumber? Where are you getting the steel for the saws? Where are you getting the nails from?
Those all come from economic powerhouses.
The steps from mud huts to modern buildings came from economic powerhouses.
Only some parts were industrialized. Most of the the best companies were existing before Yugoslavia. They were nationalized after the revolution, the owners killed or they escaped to the west. Very little new industry was developed by the regime itself.
Do you think that was the lifestyle in Yugoslavia? And their heyday was half a century ago at this point. You're presenting a false dichotomy. Nobody's gonna live in a mud hut using a spinning wheel just because workers run companies.
>Nobody's gonna live in a mud hut using a spinning wheel just because workers run companies.
That exactly what will happen. In the best case, if you lacky enough, you will be live in a mud hut. The rest will envy those who can afford to live in a mud hut.
Workers can start running companies at any time, no one restricts them from running their companies. The only reason they don't do this is that this will be worse for workers.
So you are being hypocritical. You don't want workers to run companies (they can do that now), you want workers to have no alternative.
What are you even talking about? Nobody lived in mud huts in Yugoslavia, that is verifiable fact.
And no, workers can't start running companies because they lack the capital and thus the means of production. That's the problem with a capitalist system, the power is with the entrenched capitalists.
When a "problem" has no solution then it's not actually a problem, just a fact to be accepted. Like gravity. There's nothing wrong with worker owned cooperatives, but for anything that requires significant capital you have to run things the way that capital owners want. And large-scale economic central planning where governments allocate capital has been an abject failure everywhere it has been tried, so don't insult our intelligence by suggesting that we give it another shot.
This is absolutely not true. In absolute numbers, the cost of starting a business is quite low, and workers have a lot of money, much more than their employers. And if workers collectively stop spending their salaries on unnecessary things, and instead organize a fund - on average, in 2 years they will have enough money to buy out the entire company they work for, or organize a comparable one.
There are no problems with capitalism, capitalism just allows you not to do all of this, not to suffer 2 years of poverty for the sake of living in a mud hut (if you're lucky enough).
You’re roughly describing the whole point of Yugoslavia’s workers’ self-management. This is in contrast to what the Eastern Bloc had with the government establishing and running the factories directly. Also in contrast to the capitalist system where someone with enough capital establishes and runs the factory themselves while employing the workers.
And no, you didn’t have to live in a mud hut for it. In fact, it was more affordable for the regular worker to build a house than it is now. Those houses were/are comparable to what you see in Germany today. Go check out the real estate market in Slovenia if you don’t believe me, look for houses built 1950-1990.
Ah yes, taking the last 4 years post pandemic, in the midst of massive climate change, and in a near world war and then comparing it to 60+ years ago in the height of the Cold War and US global dominance.
Usually the sign of the fairest and most humane systems of government and economy is when people get shot in the back by border guards if they try to escape.
Generally yes. Unlike Soviet occupied Eastern Europe, most regular people in Yugoslavia were able to obtain passports and travel internationally. There were some people barred from leaving or held as political prisoners.
You responded to a rhetorical question with the wrong answer (you can obviously live well on only modest means as arguably the majority of people do, even in the US), and then proceeded to lay out maybe the most egregious false dichotomy I've ever seen right after. I'll try to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you hold a definition of "economic powerhouse" that aligns more with "a first world country" rather than "a shareholder-maximized corporatocracy".
There seems to be a false narrative here that increased economic production will always lead to higher quality of life. I would venture to guess you only have to look into your own life to disprove that narrative.
I doubt you work 20+ hours a day. You probably realize there are diminishing or outright negative returns on quality of life for trying to maximize productive output. I would say we should apply the same logic to the economy as a whole; focus production on the things that actually improve society instead of operating on the assumption that “more production is always better.”
Being an economic powerhouse or not isn't required for the idea to be a reasonable and workable one.
But given the high levels of dysfunction/conflict that led to the breakup of the country, I doubt they'd meet whatever bar you set for "economic powerhouse".
The conflict was due to it being a federation of several culturally quite different nations. When Tito died, the politicians that replaced him started heavily pushing nationalist ideologies amidst the 1980s economic crisis (which was not limited to Yugoslavia).
PS. You're arguing with people who lived there. How can you be so certain you know better than those of us who saw it first hand? And I'm in no way saying it was a perfect system, btw.
If you had lived in then you should know the standard of living was poor. More then a million people left to work in Germany as Gastarbeiters to send money home. Gas was limited. Common goods had to be brought through the border with Austria or Italy. Inflation was crazy, everybody bought German Marks the same day they got their paychecks, otherwise the money was worthless by the next day. What happened to you if you were caught as a political opposition in Yugoslavia is a story on its own.
Are you asking about diets? During most of the Cold War period, average people in Yugoslavia generally had more and better food than the USSR or China but less than the USA. They ate a lot of bread and potatoes. You probably won't find detailed records with percentages.
That is such a big lie. There was no worker self-management in practice. All the companies had leadership structure like most companies have today. Those leading them, were loyal members of the communist party and were politically appointed. They were the betters, the avant-garde and had access to things a normal worker couldn't dream of, like special stores which had western goods. No worker had any say how a company will work and had no share of the profits besides a paycheck.
> 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.
I agree that I think this is a big chunk of it. There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is. Doing good work is only rewarded with more work without the extra pay or benefits.
A ton of large employers have removed any and all incentive to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired.
“ There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is”
Loyalty actually gets punished. The only way to get a decent raise is to change companies. Your car insurance will keep going up until you change companies. With cable the best deals are available only for new customers and existing customers see their cost go up.
It seems companies hate their employees and customers
> It seems companies hate their employees and customers
They do! Imagine the profits if they could keep making the same money without the customers or employees! Those pesky humans really get in the way of maximizing the profit
Agree that part of it is the increasingly toxic work circumstances. Many people get no health care, poor wages, and zero job security, so... they are pretty demoralized much of the time. And many work multiple gigs, so they are also tired all the time.
Grey beard here, it's much different than in the past. In the past people worked a second jobs for XYZ, like a vacation fund, a fancier new car than they could normally afford, or home remodels. Today people work a second just so that they can afford their 1/3 of rent with their roommates.
Blaming employers seems incomplete at best, since many of the worst abuses are employees practically bilking the very cosy employee-employer relationship, eg the MTA in NYC. Huge budgets, lots of dysfunction, very little done. Even the grandparent mentions a city worker.
I'm not trying to absolve employers here, since they are almost certainly the ones who initiated this trend, but there are very few incentives to care about employees when employees take advantage of it. The end result is they make life more difficult not just for the employer, but for their fellow employees.
It's kind of a self-fulfilling cycle in that way. Employers have taken away any and all incentives to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired, so now that's what they get.
Because that's now employees behave, now employers won't offer anything else - but without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change.
> without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change.
In my lived experience, unions permanently cement the anti-employer (and often anti-customer) attitude present in some employees. Once in place, they don't produce a massive change of heart where employees are willing to rise above and beyond the exact terms of their collective bargaining agreements, but instead result in a rejection of the traditional work ethic and the embrace of minimal output and often malicious compliance across the board.
It's one reason many of us have had such bad experience working with unions in the past. The customer suffers along with the employer, and worse the customer often pays a higher price for this privilege.
Employers behave as adversaries to their workers anyway, comparatively wealthy and powerful adversaries. So either you union-up and present yourselves as a united and somewhat formidable adversary, or you don't and remain a (relatively poor and powerless) individual, no match against your (already existing) adversary.
A good chunk of the readership here is in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_aristocracy and have their incentives firmly aligned with their employers thanks to superb pay and equity grants. Poor? Powerless? Certainly not them.
Yeah, right up until the point where you get sucked into a massive layoff right as your company is posting record profits and boasting how much code is written with AI now.
I think a lot of people in tech are realizing how helpful unions could be right now.
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.
A lot of companies, including mine, played this game for a long time. They were forever going on about how we're all a big family, and we all have to watch out for one another, and how's your mental health today? Do you need a hug? Here, have some free burritos.
Then COVID hit, and all that ended. They fired half of the staff in 10 hours, and since then have showed their real faces, because it's too soon for them to go back the other way. Everyone will know it's just a show.
On the gripping hand, if you do put in the hard work, you are likely to be exploited. I can think of several examples of excellent workers: they come in, do great work, do not play politics, are known for being dependable, etc. Management ignores them and promotes the mouth breather who does nothing but cheerlead themselves at every opportunity for accomplishing the most basic of tasks.
Be careful that's not selective memory kicking in. I've thought that too but have had to point out to myself that some very deserving people were in fact promoted.
Your point more generally, that squeaky wheels get the grease, does seem to be typical.
Obviously deserving people do find career advancement. Yet it is incredibly frustrating that I can think of two load bearing individuals who were the most dependable people in the company, yet received no recognition for this fact. They would just constantly roll up their sleeves and do the vital, non flashy work that kept the business functioning.
I think you're right, but it's not just work. It's all organizations and social institutions.
We have relationships with other individuals, but we also have relationships with groups as a whole. And the way we tend to those relationships depends on how we believe the other party tends to us.
If you have a relationship with someone who treats you with trust, kindness, conscientiousness, and care, you will naturally reciprocate and feel good about doing so. But if the partner is thoughtless, callous, or cruel, only a fool would put effort into that relationship.
So it is with our relationships with all of the various organizations that make up society. If the company I work for is giving me the fewest possible benefits and is happy to fire me if they get the chance, why should I do anything but the bare minimum? If my government is being used as a tool for enrichment by cronies and oligarchs, why shouldn't I do everything I can to skirt paying taxes? If the giant store chain I buy my groceries from keeps jacking up prices and shrinkflating products, why shouldn't I slip a few extra apples in the bag without paying?
Acting their wage is reasonable. Can't ask for a smile and pride in work from those forced to participate in the torment nexus. 60 percent of Americans can't afford to meet their basic needs, for example.
If we want better outcomes, employers must provide the necessary comp, benefits, and work life balance to arrive at those outcomes. Otherwise, we get slop because that's what is paid for.
Yea, I was also going to trot out the "act your wage" phrase. As a worker, you can't buy groceries with "pride". And as an employer, you're not going to get a craftsman who cares by paying them bottom of the barrel wages. The labor market is completely broken.
there's also the fact that you can't really show pride in work if you're being forced to follow a script or the demands of some piece of bureaucratic paperwork.
i think a prerequisite for being proud of your work is that you have enough autonomy so that the final product is truly the result of your decisions and mastery.
It is broken, but complaining is free. Everything else mentioned (wages, benefits, quality of life) has a cost. We can either pay up, stop complaining, or treat the complaining as performance art when we know the solution but choose not to implement it. If we want people to care, we have to pay them enough to care.
Completely broken on multiple levels. In a lot of industries now, as an employer you can't win even if you buck the trend and lead out your competitors on wages and benefits. The highest paid warehouse worker, waitress, etc. will still barely make ends meet, never be able to afford a house, so on. Decades of devaluation of labor (automation, venture capital, bad laws & regulations, etc.) has really done a number, and I don't see a way to easily reverse the damage. IMO, the top end of the economy needs to be brought back closer to the bottom end, but I just don't see it happening.
Which is of course an argument for the idea that workers rights, civil liberties and welfare might just have outsized effects on productivity and economic growth compared to their sticker price.
All roads lead to unionization and strong worker rights, which HN is allergic to (broadly speaking). “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” Churchill supposedly said. Wages must go up, worker power must go up, there is no other legal path to success (broad improvements in economic security) in this context. If you can show me an alternate path derived from first principles, I’m all ears.
The SVG equation is very difficult to read if you're using a dark OS theme because the blog uses the OS preference for dark/light theme (and doesn't seem to give an option to change it manually, either.)
On the side, not criticizing OP but I hate the word "cosine similarity" and I wish people would just call it a "normalized dot product" because anyone who took sophomore-level university calculus would get it, but instead we all invented another word
This is a really bad faith interpretation of what he's saying. I think a more reasonable interpretation is that he's claiming the 2020 election was rigged (a claim he's made many times already), which in turn means he was able to run again for 2024.
Here's a current story. No idea of this news source but it is widespread. CNN is in a defamation lawsuit directly related to not waiting for a response to straighten out facts.
I witnessed a pretty alarming situation on TikTok surrounding the story about the Dalai Lama asking a young boy to "suck his tongue." Traditional news outlets ran the initial story, and then followed up shortly after to provide important cultural context, as well as the Dalai Lama's apology.
My girlfriend's TikTok For You Page, on the other hand, only showed her stuff about the initial story and then she never heard anything else about it. We both walked away from this news story with completely different views of reality.
Maybe it's a coincidence or caused by some less nefarious reason, like an algorithmic bias towards newer news, but it seems very suspicious given China's relationship with Tibet.
> Maybe it's a coincidence or caused by some less nefarious reason, like an algorithmic bias towards newer news, but it seems very suspicious given China's relationship with Tibet.
My SO who is of Vietnamese origin noticed a similar issue.
VN and China have a very acrimonious relationship, and there definitely is a push in Vietnamese language TikTok to both rehabilitate China's image which has been perilously bad since the 2014 standoff [0], as well as to rehabilitate Trump's image.
It's hard to ascertain how much of it is manipulated via the algorithm, but either way there is a lot of content that is generated and posted on TikTok with a pro-Russia or pro-China slant and to a level incomparable to other platforms.
It's quite possible that the victims were convinced to try the app by the attacker outside of the Play Store and the app existing on the store was just an attempt to give it additional credibility when they were directed to download it.
Are there any roles at this company that would be appropriate for a hobbyist programmer with an interest in network security, but without any professional experience? I'm pretty comfortable with Python and I've spent a lot of time goofing around in the network security space over the past several decades. The tools I already work with are pretty limited but I am quick to learn new technologies. KnowBe4 has been on my radar for a while now because I am located right next to Clearwater but I haven't seen any positions that seemed appropriate for my low level of professional experience. Even the technical support role says it expects a minimum of one year experience in a similar role.
Hey sp0rk, feel free to reach me via email at the address in my bio and we can chat.
I posted here to hire for my team specifically but I’d be happy to get some more info from you on your background and see if I can point you towards any openings that I think would be a fit.
I think the average person (myself included) does not know that something can be considered ePaper without being bistable. The two are married in my head because all of the ePaper devices that I've been exposed to thus far have been bistable. If I were you, I would find a clever way to communicate this fact without making it sound like too much of a drawback.
The ability to apply a boolean search (as a filter) to the text would be very useful. For example, "-parts" would get rid of a lot of results that I have no interest in.
Just looking through the current results, the only other one that really jumps out at me is "-server" to get rid of the server GPUs that can't be used for gaming.
The situation with Windows 10 feels quite different, because most people I know that use Windows are on Windows 10 currently.
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