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Comment by imbnwa | Hacker News Reader

Feel like in America the game has become "how can I make the organization work for me" rather the other way around; we're a long way off from Kennedy's speech. Just fundamental misalignment of interests everywhere: PMs gaming JIRA, so-called "senior engineers" squashing anything that exposes their mediocrity and the fact that they're just punching JIRA tickets one paycheck to the next instead of modeling the problem, even engineers and consultants padding their resume in one org building keyword architectures as a launchpad for working somewhere else with a better salary. Everyone knows it, but its impolite/immature to point out the bullshit explicitly. Shut up, shit down, and listen to yet another round of empty hand wringing about values and culture at the all-hands meeting when the truth is there aren't any; delude ourselves we're doing something at all.

These infrastructure 'managers' don't strike me as any different. It's a blight on American culture and its only getting worse the bigger the inequality gap. Everyone's trying to find the parachute to jump out of the burning plane that's in freefall diving to the ground.

The (ultimately false) class antagonism narrative of /r/WSB that the game really is rigged is a fitting end to a decade that at the outset told everyone they could be a unicorn (or enjoy part of the spoils) if they could deliver a cash cow to elite investors if they only pulled up their sleeves and grinded through.

The Governor of Texas just got on Hannity to bad mouth a New Green Deal as people died in Texas cause no one cared enough to make sure the wind turbines worked in the cold.

View on HN

> The Governor of Texas just got on Hannity to bad mouth a New Green Deal as people died in Texas cause no one cared enough to make sure the wind turbines worked in the cold.

And there in lies the problem.

From what I have read the gas turbines also failed as did the nuclear power plants, yet somehow the wind turbines are to blame.

The first step to fixing any problem is to first identify the actual cause of the problem.

The fact that all of these systems failed seems to indicate the whole system was not properly designed to work in cold weather.

So Hannity spouting his propaganda won't fix anything.

But just like Hannity, I too am just speculating.

What should happen is for the problem to be investigated by someone or some body with the qualifications to do the investigation. They produce a written report outlining the problems and outlining solutions. If someone is found to be negligent then actions need to be taken and those responsible held to account.

But good luck hoping to see that. Most governments try hard to hush up these sort of issues, rather fix them and I suspect the Texas government will be no different.

All of the power sources failed because in the de-regulation of the power grid[0] allowed looser operating temperature tolerances.

The point is, as you allude to, is the wind turbine is absolutely an easy narrative to "blame someone else" instead of "us" being the problem.

So, the current party in power, blames wind/green energy, which then effectively shrinks wind's scope overall, leaving the old infrastructure which is still inadequate.

The thing that frustrates all of us is - the general public is blind that the root problem was never solved. A cold snap like this won't happen in 10-20 years and by then all the politicians will have "blamed green, successfully squashed/fixed it all" and moved on claiming they won.

There needs to be a fight, investigations are the starting point for sure.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/17/how-the-texas-power-grid-fai....

It's all culture war. Wind turbines are sissy energy, diesel is manly energy.

Both failed, unpreparedness all around, but focusing attention on culture war shibboleths is perfect for deflecting attention.

Nuclear is the only superior energy

Indeed. The Texas nuclear power stations are the only ones to solve the US problem for the next 100.000 years. The wind would blow nuclear over the whole mid east, straight to NY. Palo Verde or Diablo are not in such a superior position.

Once upon a time, black lives were important, every death of the pandemic was the personal kill count of the president.. There used to be hilarious mask debates.

Then the elections got over, and nobody gives a shit.. some would think the real root cause of the pain of these issues was actually just not being in power..

Reader, don't mind the musings of this spectators outside perspective of American politics.. I can't vote in the US, so for all practical purposes not human from an Americans perspective..

Your observation is bang on. Biden just had a town hall on CNN where he said minority communities are more concerned with black-on-black or hispanic-on-hispanic crime than they are police violence. Had his predecessor said such a thing? We'd never hear the end of it. But few even know this town hall even happened. [0]

[0]: https://twitter.com/MarkDice/status/1361877410371657738

Edit: Case and point despite posting a video of Biden saying this, my post is being downvoted into the same memory hole as this town hall.

You're being downvoted because you mischaracterized (I'm being generous with that word) what Biden said. You might refocus your attention on the word "just".

And complaining about downvotes, particularly legitimate uses of the downvote, is frowned on here.

Well, BLM has served its purpose, elections are over. Ofcourse he doesn't want to deal with the actual issues in any real way. I think if you get a black person to be president for 2 terms that would solve everything ;)

And yet Texas has built massive amounts of windmills with government subsidies. That’s a fun narrative for people on one side of the cultural divide, but not true.

This alone does not say much. Texas is not 100% one cultural side. In last presidential elections it was 52-46. 46% is large chunk of population.

It does say much because the TX state leadership is very much one sided, and very vocal.

Nahh... true politicians recognize what’s needed, but they are more than happy to run a narrative that suits them and their voters.

I mean, Texas has been leading in wind energy. If they really thought it was sissy energy would they have done that?

Just like Biden talked about student loan forgiveness and now we’re what? Less than a month post inauguration and he’s like “nah, we’re not doing that”.

>the de-regulation of the power grid[0] allowed looser operating temperature tolerances.

Absolutely silly tolerances, mind you. Texas was colder in 1930.

> the wind turbine is absolutely an easy narrative to "blame someone else" instead of "us" being the problem.

It's not only an easy narrative. It's an easy picture. It's easy to imagine a wind turbine frozen stuck. It's harder to imagine how extreme cold affects, say, a nuclear power plant.

It's fundamentally populist because nobody has to explain how it works. It's also obviously wrong: there are wind turbines in Canada. It's the kind of thing that allows people to think they understand, without any deference to an authoritative source of information.

It's a low-trust theory that suggests a United States in transition to a low-trust society[1], and that's the worst part.

1: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/07/22/the-state-of...

> It's harder to imagine how extreme cold affects, say, a nuclear power plant.

From what I can tell, there are only two nuclear power plants in Texas, providing about 2.5 GW of power. But one of them is currently shut down because of a problem with a feedwater pump:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/how-and-why...

> United States in transition to a low-trust society

Trust, like rainforests, is a resource that can be exploited, sold to the highest bidder, and destroyed. Leaving those who benefited from the externlities worse off.

You say "low-trust society" like it's a bad thing. And it probably is, at least the interpersonal trust that your reference cites. But it also makes the point that trust in government is much lower, which is much more deserved and less of a problem than interpersonal trust issues.

I wonder if there's any analogy to "zero-trust" in IT security[0] that seems to be all the rage now. Put another way, is it possible that the current situations could be a crucible that re-forms trust in a better way? (Like building some sort of "trust but verify" culture, along with whatever technology and social institutions to facilitate.)

Sorry if that seems overly philosophical - just musing.

[0] https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/security/glossary/what-i...

I heard that its because Texas is one of the few (perhaps only) states that can't just get power from other grids. That, and many other reasons, but if they are set up in such a way that prevents them from leveraging other grids....woof.

That was a political decision made intentionally to prevent federal oversight of their power grid. I have read they have a few connections though.

Yes, which means they've frozen the state out of spite and secessionism.

> The (ultimately false) class antagonism narrative of /r/WSB that the game really is rigged is a fitting end to a decade that at the outset told everyone they could be a unicorn (or enjoy part of the spoils) if they could deliver a cash cow to elite investors if they only pulled up their sleeves and grinded through.

WSB is a subset of Reddit's bigger issue: A mix of populist ideologies and misinformation. The GME pump was fueled by misunderstandings that people could get free money and hurt corporations by pumping up the price of a stock. Anyone with a basic understanding of investing could see that the stock price was coming back down, but instead Reddit went all-in on the "diamond hands" narrative that encouraged people to hold forever and blamed conspiracy theories for the inevitable fall of the stock price.

The irony is that the barriers to entry for well-paying jobs are lower than ever before. Traditional trade jobs like plumbing or welding pay well these days, and safety standards have never been higher. Breaking into tech is as simple as loading up some free tutorials online and practicing away at any number of free websites. In 2021, you don't even need to live near these companies to get the job.

Reading the front page of Reddit, you'd be convinced the world has never been worse and we're on the verge of societal collapse. Combine this with politicians eager to fan the flames of discontent and promise easy solutions (much like this article) and of course people will be angry and disillusioned. The social media effect works to amplify the negative and dismiss the positive.

> The social media effect works to amplify the negative and dismiss the positive.

You're not wrong here, I use to look at TikTok to fill the time and my god have my emotions become more balanced since deleting that app once I realized how it was making me feel.

But this is another good example of how we're beset from all sides by forces attempting to extract value that will never be returned or re-distributed, just a bigger mess made left for the rest of us

To be fair, news outlets do the same thing.

20 years ago, televised news got people to watch by teasing outrage or fear stories. "You'll never believe what this politician said...". They did it because it worked.

Social media has evolved into people replicating that same behavior. The more outrageous or rage-inducing the content, the more engaged the viewer.

I don't put 100% of the blame on social media platforms, though. We all need to accept some responsibility for what we consume. As much as we like to blame "the algorithm", it's not very different than nicotine in cigarettes or the sugar in donuts. Placing all of the blame on social media companies almost enables the negative behavior more, by pretending that it's entirely out of our control.

This weeks Farnham St podcast talks about how social media blame is unhelpful and how to restore the sense of ones agency:

https://fs.blog/knowledge-project/nir-eyal/

> Reading the front page of Reddit, you'd be convinced the world has never been worse and we're on the verge of societal collapse. Combine this with politicians eager to fan the flames of discontent and promise easy solutions (much like this article) and of course people will be angry and disillusioned. The social media effect works to amplify the negative and dismiss the positive.

Which makes their call that we're on the verge of societal collapse kind of true, but not for the reasons they thought, right?

Reddit is big, but it's still a social media bubble.

The general sentiment and worldview of Reddit doesn't represent the general sentiment of society as a whole.

Step outside of social media, where the worst problems around the world are piped 24/7 into our senses, and you realize that the average person is still doing fairly well.

Whenever the news is focused on someone got offended and is demanding an apology, I conclude that all went well that day.

Well, apart from the average Texan just at the moment.

On average Texas isn't in this moment, so their problems don't matter.

They aren't freezing and without power on average

That really depends on what your conception of an average person is?

I'm not sure it's even useful to look at an average person, vs the bottom 10%? Your average person could be doing fine even with slavery taking up a reasonable portion of people

> Breaking into tech is as simple as loading up some free tutorials online and practicing away at any number of free websites. In 2021, you don't even need to live near these companies to get the job.

Uh no, that’s populist. Tackling hard problems remains something for the researchers and the super-committed.

Hacking together an online version of some existing social structure is indeed easy, but then you need the right connections to play the game

But is WSB an issue?

> The Governor of Texas just got on Hannity to bad mouth a New Green Deal as people died in Texas cause no one cared enough to make sure the wind turbines worked in the cold.

Of course even the wind turbine issue is a canard given that Texas installed a regime that ensured no reserve capacity. Point the finger at wind turbines is absurd since wind only account for 10% of the Texas grid, and Germany isn’t having blackouts even though they also have frozen turbines right now.

This craven scapegoating and deflection when there’s a crisis going on that, which every economist agrees is a policy failure to properly incentive reserve capacity, really pisses me off.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/what-went-wrong-with-texas...

Yeah there's probably a wealth of people better informed than I on the matter, I merely wanted to point out an extreme case of the disavowed negligence running rampant from the top of our society on down

It's almost like people who don't believe government can be good are bad at making good government.

People who belive in government are equally bad. New York has shorted maintenance on the subway for years with Democrats in power. (Democrats for years have been the government belivers, at least when the Republicans are incomptent they are proving their point )

Grift (spelling?) happens without proper oversight and auditing.

It's said that the 4th (agency, branch?) of the US government was the press. Perhaps the destruction of a press sufficiently funded and driven only by the need to produce things people want to read, rather than entertainment people will pay to read or see, is a large factor in the dysfunction we see in the near term.

I would really love if the Government Accountability Office and some other organizations that produced reports for the library of congress...

1) By default had to publish to the public domain, with the report accessible in the public library stacks (mirrored everywhere).

2) Published a yearly report, with pretty color charts, breaking down the IRS input, which funds that goes towards, and where all of that goes (until it hits classified seal blocks; annotating when the classification is re-reviewed for extension and also when the current sunset to auto-unseal is scheduled.)

3) Also a report of all of the reports produced. (an index) Including those under seal, even if the titles are also redacted.

4) Could be directed to produce more reports by some form of citizen's initiative (maybe change.org?)

5) Should also have offices per state, mega-city (metro region), and county.

To bring this full circle back to the article, the inability to build and maintain things is a recent and uniquely American problem. The fifth largest economy in the world can’t build a train (California HSR), but much smaller countries can. New York’s maintenance and construction costs are a laughingstock with no obvious causes.[0]

Obviously something is seriously wrong, and everything needs to be looked at, but the defeatist idea that “Well, it can’t be done, and if we do it, we’d just screw it up, so don’t bother.” Only in America is there one party that refuses to look at entrenched interests, and another that sabotages things in order to make a point, or more recently to simply “trigger” the other party.

I can tolerate incompetence, but really can’t stand sabotage.

[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/new-york-infrastruct...

The problem isn't unique to the US. We.are the worst, but the UK isn't much better, and even France has issues to work on. Spain has great construction, but their opperations are questionable. Assian countries also have variations. There is no reason India should be so expensive to build in.

That isn't enough for me to accept the "equally bad" part.

Also, as a european, I see both american parties as being on the government is bad side, even if one of them are obviously more so than the other.

Competition between parties can only produce better results when there are at least two parties who are semi-sincerely trying. The awfulness of Republicans is a license for Democrats to let down their own standards to the bare minimum above that.

Most of the power plants that went offline were natural gas.

Thank you for posting a source about the wind turbines.

I know others have mentioned this but to make it explicit: the idea that the wind turbines are responsible for the outages is both false, and being widely spread intentionally to increase public distrust of renewable energy. I'm not suggesting you're doing that, but you should be aware.

There's also a pure falsehood story spreading on Facebook that the BBC tracked down and debunked:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-56085733

Text quoted as a public policy PSA, if you want to see the full story and picture the link is above.

""" "In Texas today... a helicopter, using fossil fuels, spraying de-icer, made with fossil fuels, to de-ice a wind turbine, manufactured using fossil fuels, that is supposed to produce clean energy without using fossil fuels," one Facebook post says.

But the picture actually shows ice being removed from a wind turbine in Sweden, using hot water.

BBC News traced the image back to a 2016 report published by Swedish company Alpine Helicopter, demonstrating "airborne de-icing solutions" for wind turbines. """

> a wind turbine, manufactured using fossil fuels

This bit is true, though, and they are also erected and maintained using fossil fuels (among other things). That much should be obvious, and pretending that this insight is somehow a new or shocking idea is over the top pretentious.

There are people full time doing lifetime analyses on these things, and have been for several decades. This is engineering people doing engineering work. Anyone can read these reports and find out exactly where the break even points are.

This is taken into account when planning large infrastructure projects like wind power parks.

The inflammatory wording of the source misinformation was designed to elicit exactly such a response.

Probably some hydrocarbons are presently used as lubricants or plastics somewhere in the design, but those needn't be the long term portions of it, and the energy supplied to forge and shape the materials and components could be provided by anything feeding the grid.

Some people see everything from the perspective of the "survival of the fittest". Seeing everything through the lenses of competition, domination, opportunism and a "winner takes all" mentality.

However, when you see opportunism at scale, you understand it doesn't work. In a society based on opportunism, you will not feel safe, and you won't be able to trust others. You will not want to spend money making your property look better, because as soon as your property looks better than the rest, it will be robbed. You will not want to spend money on nice clothes, because as soon as you look too fancy you will be mugged. If you decide to be honest and have a job, some random guy will appear each month and ask you for a large portion of your salary. Nobody will care about others, so public spaces will be dirty and lack maintenance. And that will drive off investment and tourism, making everyone poor. Would you like to live in a place like that? No.

How do societies arrive to the situation described above? By making everyone believe they're better than average, and that they're entitled to everything without ever giving back anything. A lack of humility.

Collaboration is necessary, period. No matter how much people try to convince you that collaboration is for losers... it's not. If everyone does their part in our society, everyone can enjoy the rewards. Clean public spaces, a culture of respect, safety and prosperity.

And that translates to the workplace as well. If everyone is nice, respectful, helpful and altruistic (while still making each other accountable), everyone will have a better time, everyone will be more productive and, unless your CEO is a jerk that takes all the rewards for themselves, everyone will be better off.

And that translates to engineering as well. Work as a team, support each other, treat each other with respect, don't leave tech debt behind, don't try to game the system. Create a culture of merit.

To what worries me the most is of learned helplessness. I’ve come to accept most of what you mentioned just because no-one else seems to care, why should I?

NOTE: AFAIK them problem wasn’t in wind turbines, someone said renewables actually overdelivered on what was budgeted for them.

>To what worries me the most is of learned helplessness. I’ve come to accept most of what you mentioned just because no-one else seems to care, why should I?

Yeah I'm definitely at this point right now five years into this and this would be the import of my comment really, just, why does no one care? Cause when no one cares about the whole, there's no hope of collective, rational engagement of problem-solving. The Hannity/Texas bit could be proabably be further fact-checked.

But perhaps it all comes down to what Chépe said on _Narcos_, "being an adult means accepting things you wish weren't true"

Edit: originally wrote "there's hope of rational engagement"

I agree about the learned helplessness. I observe it, and then I feel it creeping up myself when I see too many people around me have been bit. But no, we’ve got to find a plausible explanation for mass learned helplessness or we're part of the problem.

> why does no one care?

Because most people just want a check every two weeks. No one wants to rock the boat. Office workers, even tech workers, are so removed from the result of their labor, it's hard to get motivated about anything except a nicer title and more money.

> Office workers, even tech workers, are so removed from the result of their labor, it's hard to get motivated about anything except a nicer title and more money.

I think there were some Germans who called this feeling “alienation“.

The Frankfurt School boys are definitely laughing their asss off right now somewhere

I would also add that we're definitely in the "Beautiful Souls" phase of Hegel's Philosophy of History

For it to be worth it to care, not only does the problem need to be significant (it is), but your ability to influence it also must be (it isn't). American systems are brutally ossified and trying to change that will take millions of lifetimes of sacrifice.

My learned helplessness was just to look at what is going on in the US, ask myself why I'm still putting up with it, and then to leave the country. Unfortunately most people don't have that option, though.

> The Governor of Texas just got on Hannity to bad mouth a New Green Deal as people died in Texas

Everyone's out here bashing him for this, but how do we know that's not what his voters really want? I mean, the constant stream of culture war is what matters to Republican voters far more than any actual policy outcomes, so he's doing what his voters insist on him doing. I'm sure there are Republicans out there shivering in the dark listening to that and cheering him on for sticking it to the environmentalists who they believe are responsible for this.

Time to reintroduce the Fairness Doctrine.

Only if you hate free speech. Those of us who value freedom are still looking for a different answer.

It would be nice if the "free speech" complainers bothered to defend something other than racism some time. Nobody on the right was talking about that when FOSTA/SESTA swept across the US internet.

Seemingly every time someone pops up with the free speech defence, it's in favour of slurs of some kind. It's really eroded support for the abstract concept.

The ACLU has long complained that they end up defending the worst people. That doesn't mean freedom isn't worth defending.

We already hate it enough to pair it with capitalism, where people are forced to work all hours of the day instead of getting to sit down, think, and discuss. Charging for education too, is hatred of free speech, since you gate the tools of expression behind wealth

Ditto with not providing safe spaces for people to discuss without their oppressors present.

If we can make some tradeoffs for freedom speech, we can make others

I for one don't necessarily care about free speech itself, but the benefits it brings for ensuring that new ideas are proliferated and people at the bottom of society aren't forgotten about. Free speech is an implementation detail, rather than a requirement

It is, in fact, very difficult to tell what the people of Texas really want, because their districts have been gerrymandered to hell and gone for decades now. It's nearly impossible for districts outside the very dense cities to elect a Democrat without some sort of massive shift because of the absolutely absurd ways the districts have been constructed, despite how many actual Democratic voters live there.

Update: Rick Perry says more or less the same thing https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Per...

My org has started work on psychological safety based on “The Fearless Organization.” I think it might be a route toward an antidote for the delusions you describe.

https://fearlessorganization.com/

Do you have a review of methods in the book? I’d love to connect and learn more.

Not yet. Just attended the first presentation two weeks ago. The org has been big on psychological safety for a while although I don't see it much since IT is ancillary, not the main biz line.

I worked with one guy who actually tried, on his yearly review, to pass of the number of Jira tickets he completed as one of his primary accomplishments. Anyone want to take a wild guess at the percentage of tickets he closed were tickets he created?

Did you know this because he was reporting to you?

I find people who are constantly measuring some metric they're doing well on (and this metric always changes) and then making sure you know about it are covering for some sort of performance problem.

It's complicated, but you're getting the gist of it.

Maybe... or they are using metrics from above as drivers.

To create and monitor Jira ticket counts, there has the be Jira tickets for management to pay attention to and compare against other employees.

Maybe the employee is gaming the numbers... but there has to be a game to play - and this no different than basing performance reviews on bugs solved or LOC numbers.

management is probably looking at those numbers? Going to be people who change their focus to reflect that attention from above.

Yes, I think that's an element of it.

For me, it's when the metric they're proud of is always changing from quarter to quarter, and it's rarely the one we agree to focus on. Like they make a basket of six metrics and usually at least one of them is doing well, but never the same one consistently, so they're always talking about the great performance on whatever metric randomly turned up well this month.

It's kind of like the inverse problem of management obsessing too much over particular metrics that don't properly capture the bigger picture, and can also be gamed.

I agree 100%, but in this case there was no one who mattered measuring tickets closed. At least the group I worked with knew enough to avoid that kind of fallacy. In general, Goodhart's and Campbell's laws both apply.

show me the metric, i'll tell you the incentive, and show you the outcome

If he was finding valid issues, filing them, and solving them, that's not exactly as malicious as it sounds.

Yeah, I know people could try to game the system with small tickets, but that kind of thing is obvious to any manager who isn't completely asleep at the wheel.

Frankly, as a manager I loathe when employees try to tear each other down or diminish each others' accomplishments. Writing self-reviews and listing personal achievements is difficult, particularly for junior employees. At least this guy tried to put some metrics behind his work. Presumably the manager wasn't so clueless as to take everything at face value.

> as a manager I loathe when employees try to tear each other down or diminish each others' accomplishments

Absolutely agree, and in my job I would address it with more sophistication. My comment was somewhat simplified, perhaps even flippant, for this context.

I understand that there were likely recurring problems with him.

But, people opening jira issues on atomic tasks, refactoring todos, found bugs are generally doing good thing. Yes, you can keep it also on papers around or in .txt file, but if you dont keep it somewhere, it gets lost. And people who dont open jira tickets for these, basically never get around remembering these need to be done.

Also, people who split larger tasks into smaller ones that they track are less likely to forget some aspect of tasks.

Jira is just one way for an individual to track his or her tasks, and TBH it's such terrible software, I wouldn't use it. But, if someone wanted to show off how many deck chairs they re-arranged on the Titanic, it's a good way to track work done.

it's just way better to grift your employer. when salaried, the less you actually work, the higher your effective wage. shrink that denominator!

Sure. Unless there's a generous bonus on quality of work or project completion, the only rational way to play the game as a random employee is to maximize the gain and minimize the effort.

This is a consequence of society breaking down into a collection of selfish individuals, which I think is largely a result of economic theories turning into self-fulfilling prophecies. Nobody is going to take pride in their work when it's viewed as nothing more than a selfish and cynical bargain by society at large.

I would add the reflexive turn in consumer culture from the late 60s on (Bob Dylan, The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke, Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, etc) manufactured the emotional appeal of existential individualism and the absurdity of believing in instutitions and collectivity.

We're basically in the "Beautiful Souls" phase of Hegel's Philosophy of History

But what if your company ultimately acts as a selfish individual, too? Perhaps it even has a fiduciary duty to do so?

There's a good argument that most venture backed software companies are exactly "a selfish and cynical bargain".

It's been a good few years since I've met a senior technical staffer at a 'successful' Bay company who genuinely thinks they're "making the world a better place".

EDIT: Not that I disagree with your broader point that selfishness is an undesirable characteristic for an individual, society or ideology. But it seems inappropriate to attribute the problem to ICs or their managers.

Yeah, the companies are what kicked this into overdrive, I think. I mean if you want to get at the historical and philosophical roots of this problem it's an enormous discussion that won't fit here, but a few broad strokes worth bringing up:

1. We're obviously materially better off than any point in history.

2. Much of modern economic theory is built on the idea of selfish individuals pursuing their own interest. It's clearly been effective in a material sense (see #1).

3. Modern companies are obviously better than some of the obscene abuses of early capitalism.

All of that said, it seems like there was a time when a person's work was connected to and respected by the society around them. You could argue that was always a sucker's game, but I don't think so. Human beings are wired to operate in social communities, and we take a lot of our cues from the people around us respecting and admiring our work.

Many companies at one point followed that model. You were "part of the team/family/whatever." What you contributed was valued. That made it possible to take pride in it. You might work your entire career at one company.

That model is obviously totally dead, and I think the companies fired the first shot. Once workers became chips in a game instead of fellow human beings, they were bound to play the game right back. So here we are, trying to scrounge out some sort of structural meaning to the work we do, when it's obvious to most people that nobody around us really cares or respects what we do. It's just "let's churn this out so we can all get paid." That's a poor way to motivate human beings and I think contributed to a lot of our malaise.

> That model is obviously totally dead, and I think the companies fired the first shot.

I'm not sure it was "companies" in general. I think a major cause was the shift in stock ownership in public companies from individuals to mutual funds and other financial institutions, over the decades after WWII.

From the standpoint of a company that actually wants to build lasting value, you want your public stock owners to be individuals, investing on long time horizons for things like their retirement. Then you can implement longer term plans and strategies without having to worry as much about immediate returns.

But if most of your stock is owned by mutual funds, then the fact that the individuals whose retirement savings are in those mutual funds are investing on a long time horizon doesn't help you; the funds themselves are looking at your short term returns, and if those don't measure up, they'll sell your stock and buy some other company's.

In short, a system that was set up with the best of intentions, to help people diversify their retirement savings and earn better average returns on them, has had the unintended consequence of putting Darwinian selection pressure on individual companies to prioritize short term returns over everything else. Which in turn has led to the demise of the "work for the company your whole career and the company will take care of you" model; no company can afford to do that in the new selective environment.

> All of that said, it seems like there was a time when a person's work was connected to and respected by the society around them. You could argue that was always a sucker's game, but I don't think so.

I think that you are idealizing historical societies here. Yes, society and values of people in it change. But that supposed connection and respect was never guaranteed to all that many people. No matter which period you talk about, past societies had large social, interpersonal and cultural problems of exactly this kind.

> Perhaps it even has a fiduciary duty to do so?

This isn't actually true, but there's a lot of people invested in interpreting Ford vs Dodge that way. Pretty much the only thing you can't do is directly hand investor money to rank and file employees. Everything else can be done just fine if the management wants and is prepared to put up a decent cover story.

you would need to overcome an Occam's razored hypothesis like:

- management largely has asymmetry when it comes to remote knowledge worker output, especially high performers (contrast assembly line: easy to flag slackers)

- we don't have equity or input on direction (contrast worker cooperatives)

- and we're getting paid a lot of money to "hack" on problems (contrast e.g. whalers, dangerous as hell)

so yeah, i'm gonna let y'all rationalize all this, but i think it's just a great time to be a US computer laborer. won't last forever, but you can use your immense savings (you ARE saving, right?) for all that good stuff whenever you want or are forced out.

Don't you see the other end? It's not game-theoretically optimal group cooperation, it's memes-as-agents, caring about individuals as much as we care about individual cells in our bodies.

> as people died in Texas cause no one cared enough to make sure the wind turbines worked in the cold.

That is not true, wind turbines failing is not the cause, that is a lie.

Off topic, but note that Kennedy's speech about asking what you can do for your country was about getting a generation of youth to go fight in Vietnam. People recast it as though he was Gandhi-like for saying it.

I disagree slightly - people aren’t trying to make the organization work for them (in the sense of changing it), but rather, “wow the system is messed up so I’ll do what it asks for even if it makes no sense”.

Preach

i agree, that was superbly written; i wish i had more to add, but don't

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