Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

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There's so much emotional investment into the idea that everything is terrible and falling apart, you can feel the urgency with which the modern world is reframed into a familiar context of good versus evil...

Or maybe you can look at the average worker is one pay check from disaster, that the American expectancy has been declining for several years and maybe the recent changes look more like things that reinforce the problems.

Notably, the biggest issue for rail workers in the recent dispute wasn't sick days or pay but "precision crew scheduling", a system that involves workers being on call for nearly hour of the day, for nearly every day of the year. [1]

The Marxist picture of an evil capitalist villain fits both the rail road companies and Elon Musk pretty well lately. If they don't want it pinned on them, maybe they should change their behavior.

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/rail-strike-why-the-...

> If they don't want it pinned on them, maybe they should change their behavior.

That's not really their modus operandi. They're more likely to buy up all the pins. And the means to produce them.

If that's what you want to believe, you will always be able to find another blog to reinforce that view. In fact, that's almost exactly what you did; you found another article that paints America as one bad coin-flip away from a dystopian hellscape (if it isn't one already).

Just look at the first sentence:

>For months, the world’s largest economy has been teetering on the brink of collapse because America’s latter-day robber barons can’t comprehend that workers sometimes get sick.

We learn so much from this trite piece of... journalism.

1. We're on the brink of collapse (again!) 2. We're living in a new era of robber-barons 3. The people running things are idiots have no idea that people get sick, unlike the very smart author of this article

Meanwhile, in reality, the "crisis" spelled out in the article was resolved in a predictably political (and boring) way. That kind of news doesn't fuel clicks, though. In its staunchly dogmatic opposition to modern capitalism this kind of journalism can't avoid embracing the exact business model it pretends to decry: clicks go up, journalism more better.

> narrow definition of what "programming" is compared to what it has become.

Its not a matter of 'belief'. Its a matter of mechanics: The companies that dont abuse their employees and customers like that get let behind by those who do to get the most market share and profits. Eventually getting either pushed out of the market or gettin bought-out. The mechanics of the system encourage, reward and enforce sociopathy. Anyone who doesnt out-sociopath others is eliminated from the game.

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