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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

Having the illusion of control and illusion of good management more than power I think.

I once taught a course and the first thing I was told was to look for a green glow on people's faces: it meant people were playing solitaire on the class computers instead of listening.

A whole lot of managers knows only the work equivalent of that: they've learnt simple proxies for actual management that let them think they know when people are working well from walking rooms (or having people reporting to them do so).

People working from home means they actually have to figure out how to track output, and that takes effort. Effort many managers are not used to.

I had to learn a whole lot to start managing remote and distributed teams. It takes away a whole lot of lazy shortcuts to management.

Lucky for me I was forced to deal with that many years ago, but it was uncomfortable and a big change, so I'm not at all surprised that many resist it now.

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> Having the illusion of control and illusion of good management more than power I think.

It's certainly true that managers are lazy and they would rather measure illusory proxies for work rather than work itself, but America also became a major economic engine of the world by exerting control over people's bodies without paying them. Even though that practice ended several generations ago, the attitude that equates "success" with "power over bodies" is still very common in America. Many states are now trying very hard (again) to control women's bodies with the force of law, to cite just one example.

They counter that you want to kill unborn babies. You counter that by either arguing that technically they're not actually human yet or that women's autonomy is more important. They disagree. You disagree. Brilliant segue.

I think you're leaving out the part where one group feels like they can intervene in someone else's life and decisions about health based on a difference of opinion. The default should be "we disagree, you do you and I'll do me".

In their eyes, you’re intervening in the life and health of the baby based on a difference of opinion (you don’t want a baby).

Abortion is a religious thing (for some reason - God killed lots of babies in the Bible, and also there isn't really much mention of abortion either) more than anything, but I guess you could also say that religion is just a way to control bodies too?

Slavery wasn’t some significant advantage for America (in a time when slavery was super common). It’s pretty widely agreed that dependency on slavery also set the south back economically by decades (look at the GDP north vs south for all of US history after 1800

Did the dependency on slavery directly set the south back economically, or was it the destruction from the civil war?

The South was already set back economically before the civil war. The plantation chattel slavery system hampered industrialization in the Southern US very much in the same way that the serf-owning nobility system hampered industrialization in the Russian Empire. The South, in turn, ultimately lost the American civil war because the northern states were far more industrialized.

As another comment pointed out this was the case long before the civil war (which started in 1861 and I was saying you could see this in the GDP difference even in 1800

> America also became a major economic engine of the world by exerting control over people's bodies without paying them.

The actual economic data doesn't support that. Slaves were never more than 17% of the population, slavery was only ever legal in certain regions, and use of slaves was mostly relegated to a subset of agricultural labor. Moreover, slavery was outlawed in 1865 and the United States would not be considered an "economic engine of the world" until at least the 1880s, and it would not be considered one for its agricultural output but for its industrialized economy.

Furthermore, countries in the new world (e.g. Haiti, Brazil, that practiced slavery for longer and on a larger scale failed to develop strong economies anywhere to the degree that the United States did, so the line from "had slavery in the past" to "became economically prosperous" is tenuous. In fact, slave labor (and adjacent systems like serfdom) historically tends to hamper economic growth, prevent industrialization, and stifle innovation.

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