What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

If you want to maximize "Engagement", which these companies explicitly do, then you WILL maximize rage and doom and gloom. They drive engagement more than anything else.

I can see it as a foreign adversary psyop (they benefit from us being demoralized) or as a side effect of the attention economy (more clicks is all that matters) or even a hyper-partisanship epiphenomenon (whichever side is currently down wants people to think everything is awful).

But "our misery is some potential investor’s financial prospect" sounds like some schlock B-movie plot. How is that supposed to work? Are they secretly feeding creatures from the 4th dimension by harvesting misery or something?

You can pretty safely ignore a lot of irrelevant rage bait, but by remaining ignorant to what's going on around you you also risk losing a lot of useful, actionable, information and being blindsided by things that could have been avoided.

I know that if I were corporation hurting and exploiting people for profit or a corrupt politician screwing over the public I'd be very happy to encourage people to "unplug" and stop stressing about things.

I don't think you realize how ridiculous and out of touch it sounds to tell me to "disconnect" from politics to be less angry. I am extremely angry, and I will continue to let that anger fuel my choices until the vile bullshit that has infected this nation is gone.

Enlightening my ass. Tell that to the trodden upon and the dead. Reality sucks and sometimes you have to do something about it or else you're the problem. Tough shit if you don't like it.

For the first couple weeks it seemed like a mild to moderate improvement. Especially not having Elon’s tweets and the Twitter memes of the day in my head 24 hours a day.

But after a month my baseline pretty much reset with the same levels of anxiety, just with different sources/triggers to attribute those feelings to.

And after a few more months, I started to feel to absurdly detached from the real world that it started to become a problem in casual conversations and stuff just being so out of touch with everyone else’s collective experiences.

My boss referenced some big natural disaster or something that everyone knew about from the news and looked at me like I was crazy when I had no idea what he was talking about. Little awkward moments like that kept popping up, never a big deal but started to feel uncomfortable as they added up.

The tipping point was when Biden dropped out and I didn’t know about it for like three days and had to nod along when a friend mentioned it obliquely while I was internally like “uh wtf” until I had a second to Google it to get caught up.

All in all the net change in negativity/anxiety was pretty much a wash, the mind finds different ways to justify how it feels even after losing the ‘20s go-to of “doom scrolling” as the universal source of all life’s problems.

But feeling like an alien interloper posing as a resident of “America, Earth” tipped the scales into hurting more than it helped.

For better or worse we live in a highly interconnected world of immediate information delivery, there’s no quick fix to make that all go away by pretending it doesn’t exist.

I still miss a lot of the people I got to know on Twitter, and with hindsight that was probably more emotionally valuable than the negativity and addiction that came with the package (I know many/most of them have left by now too, so can’t teleport back to that point in time either). But that’s just life, it is what it is.

> A fresh U.S. residential IP address (especially one behind carrier-grade NAT and harder to block individually) is “gold.” Customers pay up to $95 to lease a single U.S. residential IP address for 2 weeks (versus $0.30 for an Eastern European IP).

That's bananas. The place I found a link to that story was jwz's blog, a site that is actively getting hammered by one of the many Rube-Goldberg machines behind these scrapers.

I take your point wrt, say, recommendation engines. But this is a bizarre and fascinating period we're living through right now. I don't plan to stop reading blogs and news any time soon.

1: https://www.nokia.com/blog/one-year-later-the-residential-pr...

The assumption I had not was false.

But... you do notice the cracks. Slowly. You see it at Walmart, I see it when I go out to the clubs. Lots of cops around. Nobody dancing. A bouncer for the bathroom? Hm, okay. I travel to south Texas sometimes and you see it there, too. Lots of protesting. Fear everywhere. You drive through maybe 50 abandoned, impoverished towns. I see it in my community. Businesses closing left and right. Replaced. I say "I give them six months". I'm wrong, they close their doors in three. Weird.

And then I got cancer. I knew the healthcare system was bad, but I was young and healthy, so out of sight out of mind. Not anymore. However bad you think it is, it's worse. 10 people in the infusion room, one nurse running with her head cut off. My IV has been beeping for 30 minutes. The oncologist? She's not in the building, because she's the one oncologist for three different clinics 50 miles apart. Luckily, I only have to pay an arm and a leg for this. They had iPads in the infusion room. They removed those after a couple weeks, I guess they were too expensive. And I can't trust my care team. I have to review every single medication, every single scan, everything. My oncologist mentions medications I've never took. She misreads tests. I don't blame her, I know she's overextended, she probably barely knows who I am. So, I review everything, which means I need to call and request they fax it to my line. I guess a portal is too expensive. My primary care? The next appointment is in two months. Well that's okay, I only have cancer. He barely knows who I am, too. "You never did chemo, right, just surgery?". No... I did four cycles of chemo, we talked about this a couple months ago. He sets his phone down on the table and records our conversation. OK, I guess that's a thing now. I go home. Bills just show up every few days. I don't even know what for most of the time. I had surgery a year ago at this point. Random departments in the hospital still send me bills. I did prepay ~3,000 dollars for the surgery, but I guess that money is for something else? Not sure. I would call the hospital and ask to speak to billing, but I don't have the time or energy to be on hold.

Anyway, I guess my thesis is: yes things are good, for us. We need to remain humble and recognize our experiences are tinted by our privilege.

But I literally cannot afford to engage in this experiment since I'm still looking around on LinkedIn for job calls and have a few messages I'm waiting on.

But most people will still opt to stay on the slop-filled web because it’s free and because they like being angry. And as long as they stay the societal problems that stem from the toxic internet will live on.

I could give you a detailed response but, given your tone, instead I'll say: assume the best and don't make everything about yourself. Several people I know have struggled with negative mental health effects of finding themselves in a caretaker role for a mentally ill friend or partner. In my experience offline groups (not individual relationships) have pretty good immune systems for this. They also often do band together to support or help a struggling friend.

In the same way that you expect a depressed person to receive charity, please offer it in your responses.

Let’s say you have a friend who is always miserable, always needs support, and turns every gathering into a therapy session for them and their problem. Let’s say you’ve been friends with them for say, fifteen years. Nothing has helped.

They never go and get therapy, they never go and do any exercise, they constantly do the same things over and over and still expect support.

Wouldn’t you stop wanting to hear them talk? Maybe even stop being their friend ?

What’s the limit ?

All that and a steady diet of “American Exceptionalism” started as early as kindergarten in our public schools deludes whole swaths of the country into thinking that all of this is somehow good for them.

I grew up going to public schools in the 90s and 2000s in a “blue” part of the country. As I’ve grown up into adulthood with kids, I’ve become so disappointed with my own education. It hasn’t gotten better and it’s worse in a lot of ways.

We homeschool our kids and don’t whitewash our history.

I landed on the opposite conclusion. People don't progress in any domain if technology doesn't force them. Sometimes the ride might be bumpy and it might be taking them forwards kicking and screaming, but without new technology no progress happens on any issue.

Science drives technology, technology drives economy and technology and economy drive culture and science. That's the virtuous feedback loop that drives itself and everything human as a side effect.

Between bots and bit protections all of these is practically impossible unless you build a reputation in relevant places by being a long term member.

Ar least that’s been my experience. I’m sure there are some very niche communities for some stuff that are welcome to new accounts, I had this problem in 4-5 different communities and simply given up.

Unless it's a criminal record holding you back, I really don't think this is the case. Since 2012, I know lots of people that changed careers.

You say no plausible path to automating - I beg to differ.

It would get officers out of harms way.

Not imminent but not zero risk either.

You can create laws to keep making work for a class of workers, but it ends up unpopular. Instead of a social safety net as it was intended, it turns into a corrupt drain on society at large, and a relative disadvantage to your economy versus those that are more ... agile, let's say. Check out e.g. the underpaid but overstaffed government bureaucracies and police forces in most Latin American countries. Giving a third of your society badge and a lousy paycheck often does more harm than good.

I don't consider this observation to be right wing (per the sibling post), it's just how things work. While there's nobility in work and psychologically it's better to keep people employed, I'd just as soon give all the gas station attendants a lifelong retirement UBI so they'd get out of the way and let me pump my gas.

The sad part is that it kind of does work from the other end.

Suppose you're a former press operator who can't expect to find any more work operating a printing press. Should you take a McJob? You have years of experience working with electric motors and hydraulics and pumps and industrial control systems. You might be better off to get a job in a trade. Study for the licensing exam and become a plumber or an electrician or the like. Except that you can't, because you're required to do a multi-year apprenticeship to get into any of those things no matter how much experience you have doing something similar. And you can't even get the apprenticeship to begin with because you're 45 years old and the union won't take you.

When a job is being eliminated by newer technology, the union has essentially no power because the employer doesn't care about workers going on strike when they're about to be laid off regardless. But when those laid off workers then want to get a job in another industry, the union there shows up to exclude them.

Which obviously sucks because then the union is screwing the laid off workers rather than some faceless corporation we might imagine or prefer them to be screwing.

I mean that's you agreeing with Elon Musk, I disagree, I think AI is just normal technology [1], there's a lot of us. Like tech revolutions before, it'll have huge effects on productivity alleviating major scarcities. That's boring to the algorithm, not enough conflict, but it's exciting to a lot of tech workers.

No messiah's and no Jihads, just excited about going to work to make sure we can do more with less tomorrow than we can do today.

[1]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

...is my read, but the wonderful thing about text communication is if I'm in a grumpy mood because I didn't sleep well, the other reading is also entirely possible.

replacement would not happen overnight but they would decrease the amount of jobs required

back then we need a team of 4 - 10 engineer for an project/app, now maybe we need 2-3 max

Either way, I empathize with your anxiety but posit that its primarily driven by techs original sin: the algorithmic feed and the resultant 24hour news cycle. I think the truth will be a lot more boring (mass upskilling and reskilling) but those narratives aren’t easily sold on the feeds.

AI is normal technology but it’s probably the largest upgrade to productivity and massively deflationary especially as it hits atoms and not just bits. That is actually extremely exciting.

If software genuinely becomes a solved problem, everyone is going to working in AI labs (or its verticals).

If AI is also going to maintain itself, then there is no need for AI labs either, at which point we've reached singularity and no one is safe.

That "pipe dream" has already been achieved by most EU countries decades ago. Sure, you might argue it's worse in quality than American healthcare and that wait times are horrible, but I guarantee you most Americans would see it as an improvement over their current situation.

Today, many of those activities are either toxic, like fossil fuel subsidies, or useless, like casino stock markets which force everyone to play PR con games that are divorced from bedrock physical fundamentals - like clean water, a safe food supply, and a stable climate.

Guns won't help anyone when farming dies.

Not for long, anyway.

Are there historical or contemporary examples of this? I googled but couldn’t find any specifics.

The reason I ask is that I in the US, employer-provided health insurance is a large expense for businesses. And anecdotally, I’ve never spoken to any US small business owner that feels that choosing employee insurance plans is a real competitive advantage. But perhaps the historical/contemporary alternatives are worse?

Most of my friends are in some form of tech or creative work, so perhaps that is my bias, but with the threat of destitution removed the vast majority of people I know would turn into maelstroms of creation: art, crafts, coding, building, organizing, civic participation, scientific experimentation, and raising strong families.

Instead they are trapped spending the majority of their time navigating corporate politics to deliver a fraction of their value to society. Seems… dangerously inefficient and corrosive to the human spirit, no?

Oh yes, the usual argument of how what most industrializes nations (and many poor nations as well) have achieved, is somehow seen as impossible just because the US can't manage to do it (because it doesn't profit the oligarchs).

If shit gets as bad as people are hoping it will get, workers aren't going to be in the "gets things" class anymore.

Now, not everyone can, because some people are very disabled. But the internet has brought new capabilities, and some disabled people are able to work remotely. And guess what, they do. They willingly give up the "free", say, 900 dollars a month on SSI to work for a salary.

You see "work" as a transactional unit.

I do work purely because of idealistic reasons. I'm not actually owed anything, I'm working because of us, humanity. Yeah, people are going to slack, and that's just life. It's just statistics, optimize society to such a configuration that people acts have a place and get the support they need. Most of the "slackers" who represent the people just living on the UBI type system you described, probably don't do it as a direct choice. Most likely they feel like they can't contribute to society, but that's something that's solvable. It's a matter of education and culture.

About your quote:

  "have nothing to lose and decide to attack the source of their misery. Bread and circuses will only distract so much."

Of course, the good times also had their downsides, lots of complacency in politics and not feeling the need to fight for better, because things were already better than they've ever been!

Americans would largely languish if big tech wins, big tech is already profiting of our misery now they want to profit in other domains too?

80% of this country is not going to benefit at all from any American corporations because American corporations have open disdain for workers.

Have you seen who we elect to run our countries?

Remind us what the U stands for?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots

Skimming this list, there seems to be one really marked failure, in Finland, but that’s disputed I read also.

Can you list more failures?

That is what earned income tax, payroll taxes, and Medicare and Social Security taxes are.

This is, IMO, why UBI has to be timed almost perfectly for when the AI is ready to be the one who does the work.

If you believe this, then surely you also believe pension plans are the devil? If we can't have UBI then we can start by tearing away pension plans for all of the old people my tax money is being wasted on.

It is NOT about enabling "a modest life" or stopping people from working! On any serious UBI proposal everyone is still incentivized to work.

The miners, auto-workers, ship workers, BT (phone) workers and other swathes ended up leaving the workplace as a general rule.

To massage the figures, the government were able to expand the education sector and take the 'long term sick' off the books.

For the education sector there are mature person degrees, however, education mostly takes the young off the books, the people that did apprenticeships.

Long term sick can be an easy skive, if you have taken up the bottle, can claim to be depressed and have the doctor in the job centre believe you. The incentive is more money than dole and no need to check in with the job centre on a fortnightly basis.

IMHO AI is the fig leaf for what is going on, with further financialisation of Western economies (rent seeking) and absurd energy costs, due to the Anglo-American 'war for oil against humanity', making most Western economies doomed to never be competitive ever again. Soon the only jobs will be 'multi-drop delivery drivers' and 'care workers for seniors'. Immigrants and young people will fill these roles, not whomever is being laid off 'due to AI'.

This is why reputable journalistic outlets disclose financial ties to entities they report on, even if the connection is barely relevant. NPR will tell you about every ad buy that relates to their reporting.

This source could have and should have mentioned this connection in a disclosure, and it would not have detracted from the article. But the fact that it is effectively hidden is a detriment to the level of trust the reader can put into it.

Means they are invested in AI companies

> shape the next narrative

With pro AI narratives because they have an interest in pro-AI

> Aaron Horwath is the director of AI operations at a creative technology company where he is focused on implementing AI in a way that supports both humans and business.

so the old timers not even being able to open Settings of a Windows desktop /j

Recording is too much work. ;-)

The answer is that you don't do it by getting paid (as in exchanging labor for wages). You do it by finding a way to scale your wealth with other people's labor.

Plus, the US government at the time was less than half the size of the private sector [1] so we'd expect he was contributing less to dead-weight government projects and corruption.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_104.10.a...

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Governme...

Don't plan to have fun later, because later may never come.

Being actively miserable 8 hours a day will just ruin the remaining 16.

"the remaining time"

Doing what is intrinsically valuable to you hinges on you still having access to the person you are. Don't take that for granted. A lifetime of settling can easily drive that out of someone, but planning to settle before it even started, as the only option, surely will. How could it not?

Old men [0] living it up because they never did while they lived is the worst. You can't regain a sense of justice, curiosity and innocence once you let it go and out of sight. You cannot have either without the other two, and none of them come back once you misplaced them as something you don't need "for now", but something very cringe and sad can takes their place, and it comes with this conspiracy of not mocking one another, of pretending to be fully featured people, as they stumble and babble into the sunset.

[0] And I say "men" because this is very much a male issue. You don't hear many women talking like that, at least I can't even remember one.

Too bad you have to work super hard until you drop dead, never managing to build that nest egg. Surely you just did not work hard enough. Soo sorry, but its all your fault anyway.

Or maybe you did manage to do that at a tender age of 60, perhaps even 50 or 40 if you were super lucky/smart. Too bad your best and most creative years are past you and you have no family (or spent almost no time with your kids, who are now alienated grown ups). Such is life, you know.

Meanwhile, the kids of the rich live by a different set of rules...

And what if the FIRE plan doesn’t work out? Work generally takes up too much lifetime to spend that time on doing something one doesn’t find meaningful. That’s not a way to live a fulfilling life.

Sounds much more like a warning than a dismissal to me. If 40-50% of the workforce ends up like that then we're living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland failed state.

Suddenly everyone gets paid for doing nothing of added value?

We ban AI and similar ultra-high leverage technologies?

The comparison is useful. Printers had decades to pivot and hence the anxiety didn't exist like it does today. Today's capital allocated wants this to happen within a decade.

Judging by the reaction in discussions it is a very sore point of socialists to point out that Marx was obviously upper class, definitely part of the bourgeoisie and in his actions shows that he is entirely unwilling to give that up. The same goes for other famous socialists, from Engels to Lenin.

There are even voices that claim the point of socialism was never to end inequality but rather to take far more wealth for themselves. The "halfway to robin hood" jokes, they certainly take from the wealthy, and everybody else, but they never seem to get around to giving it to the poor ...

It's not popular, but the reality is that many don't want help ----- but only because they don't understand they're making terrible decisions due to chemical imbalances or chemical dependencies.

It's never popular, but it's the truth. It's also super, super hard because these people are already at risk of being taken advantage of, and I'm literally talking about letting someone else take control of their lives. It would require an insane amount of oversight, audits, and checks and balances. I don't know of anywhere equipped for this

* simplifying, of course.

Teams should really be choosing their model of work themselves, and anyone who doesn't like it should shuffle off to a different team within the company. Top down RTO is nuts.

Actual introverts (especially in our computer world) don't have that and often lack a healthy social life, which can be partly fulfilled by the office's interactions. Some of us even are chronically depressed, which means escaping home is important to allow changing our mindset (which becomes attached to a location given enough time).

NB: in Europe and worked mostly for small to very small enterprises.

Granted, the availability and pain in the ass of actually getting a new job today is suffocating, so it’s not like everyone gets to pick their dream setup anymore

If you don't naturally prioritize those things, the impact of missing them will sneak up on you.

I don’t even buy a lot of things, really, I still don’t own a car and hope I never will. But now I just don’t feel quite so wracked with guilt over getting a haircut or getting the organic raspberries or whatever. There are so many little waste-of-time tasks that I don’t have to waste as much time on. I dunno. It’s funny. “Selling out” is real easy. It makes everything real easy.

I do wonder if this is the first step down the path to “I am a prisoner to my Stuff. Where did my life go”

Just thinkin out loud into the internet

There is a lot of research that spending time in nature, even if the nature is not ideal (bare trees, winter, bad weather, too hot), has measurable impacts on human cognition, memory, and similar mental benefits. It's not even correlated with mood improvements: even if you return indoors more miserable than you left due to the weather, you still measurably mentally benefit from spending time in nature.