598 karma · joined June 7, 2016
This isn't generalizable, but I have a friend who's a flight attendant at Southwest. They only get paid for time when they're literally flying. Getting on/off the plane and up into the sky from the tarmac are unpaid time at work.
I think that about sums up the "loneliness epidemic". Loneliness and social disconnection are exactly the results of seeking to loosen our need for society. Our society (regardless of where you live, the global monoculture is still there), is sick and we see it largely in Western post-industrial nations like the U.K. and U.S.A.
As more an more people realize the problems inherent to a postmodern, secular, capitalistic worldview, the more they intentionally disconnect to seek shelter from the onslaught of mixed messages, targeted advertising, disinformation campaigns, etc. , the more they realize that cutting themselves off is the only way out. I don't say this to explicitly bash capitalism or postmodernism - I see these statements as social facts that we're all stuck with for the time being. Despite U.S.'s place near the top of the list of social ills amongst industrialized nations (drug addiction, depression, obesity, bad Gini coeff, low life span, bad healthcare, etc.), it's worth saying that these and other problems still exist to some degree in other post-industrial nations. As we've steadily chipped away at traditional life, people have struggled to find replacements for family, religion, social outings, dating/marriage, work and play. While some people find success, other still are in limbo - raised in a world that no longer exists and unsure of how to bridge the gap into a world that offers fewer and fewer opportunities for an "analog" life.
Since modern life is primarily digital, the only escape from it is by intentionally seeking an analog existence. We can all see that excessive social media use, excessive email-checking, and constant connectivity cause social and emotional problems: addiction, feelings of inferiority, feeling drained, overall dissatisfaction. But the alternative is to purposely cut yourself off and suffer the other loneliness, where no one ever messages you, your crush never likes your photos, you never beat that person in a political argument on FB, you never see that cute picture of your friend's children or dog. At the cost of these things, you may gain back fun interactions with strangers, better catch-up conversations when you run into old friends who haven't been able to stalk you on social media, a more romantic first date when you finally talk to that person you've been seeing at the grocery store... At the risk of injecting my own experiences into this rant, the loss of social media in my life has precipitated a person who is more social when it comes time to be social and more at peace when it's time to be alone.
The solution to the broader problems though, of a society we feel we need to disconnect from, it would seem, is to start by fostering societies that we don't see as inherently problematic. Truly healthy societies don't breed drop outs, rebels, "lone wolves"... they breed people who want to get along and can at least stand each other enough to share some notion of the public good. How we do that is beyond me, though.
I know that's a socialist longshot in capitalist America, but I really think that going forward the government is going to have to take a larger stake in tech in order to avoid the types of conflicts we've been seeing between private companies and public interests.
1. Get a job programming and slowly build up your skills/expertise by learning from those around you.
2. Develop a lesson plan for yourself and figure out how to build and deploy different kinds of apps.
I don't know if you're into #1 but I think it can be massively useful. There's so much stuff you don't know about that some dude who's been working somewhere for 5 years does. You can pick up best practices, design ideas, constructive criticism, better coding, better tools, knowledge that's easier to get in person than from a webpage. Today no single person makes a truly great and novel software application, and working at a tech company will make that apparent to you.
As for 2, some ideas assuming you know how to code:
1. Write an HTTP API that talks to several different databases. Learn how the databases work and when to use them. Get good at using them both from their CLI and a programming language.
2. Write a site using React/Angular/etc. and HTML/CSS to query an external API and display the results or organize user input into a fun framework.
3. Find a way to publish both of the above so that mom can interact with them.
4. Figure out how to wire a web app that you wrote to an API you wrote.
5. Find a way to deploy that as a complete system.
6. Figure out how to write a simple iPhone/Android App if you're interested in that.
7. Now make it do something cool, presumably by hooking it up to an API that does the heavy lifting.
8. Now make it all pretty.
9. Now figure out how to get it in people's hands. Collect their feedback and figure out what's working and what's not.
10. Go back to whichever step needs work and fix it.
That's easy to say, but there's a ton of work in learning all of these skills. It's one thing to write an app, it's another thing to get it in people's hands, and it's a third thing to get it to really really work to the point where people love it. A lot of people spend 40 hours a week doing that for years and don't/can't do everything - that the reason there's so much specialization in the world of software engineering.
It's also a bit disingenuous to say that these services cripple your ability to independently operate - when I was on the dole I was having a blast going hiking and biking, drinking wine, writing music, and playing Nintendo Switch. That's about as independent a life as I could ask for, frankly.
When I meet informed conservatives, I quietly rejoice because it's so interesting to talk to them. One of my best friends is also a "free market" type guy and we get along amazingly well, even when we talk politics. However, I haven't found many educated people who out-and-out support Donald Trump, and those I have found often express very caustic beliefs that get in the way of polite or fulfilling discussions. Hence, I just don't do it. There's a level of "coming to the center" that those people just won't do with me, so it ends up devolving into a series of fallacies that just don't need to happen.
FWIW I occasionally express centrist positions at my left-leaning job, I don't get fired or reprimanded. Nor do I get reprimanded for advocating for socialism. I don't think anyone would be either for expressing conservative positions. Maybe I'm naive.
They might, however, face social sanctions or get in an awkward debate if they were arguing that two people on my team should not be allowed in this country as immigrants, or that my gay coworkers shouldn't have the same rights as everyone else. There's obviously going to be a clash of beliefs and they should recognize that. Similarly, if any of us were to make sweeping generalizations about white people, it'd be awkward for the white people on the team, and it might spur a big debate. No one likes to feel attacked, especially at work, so we learn to feel out what's allowed or what's out of bounds and then work with that.
Without a doubt, if one of my coworkers came to me and said "Look, I like working with you but you have to stop shit talking conservatives at work" I'd be more mindful of it and avoid making it awkward. I'm not sure why these men feel that they aren't able to do that.
I suggest these men do the same. Move to Dallas or New York or somewhere where conservatism is a little more appreciated. Move to Denver or Atlanta. Find somewhere that feels like home, where there are other conservative techies. Claiming the victim status as a white man in the most expensive city, in the highest paying industry comes off as a little entitled, at least to me.
There's a layer of semiotics that's important to any outward appearance. Wearing a swastika but saying "Nonono it's a Hindu symbol of fertility" probably wouldn't go over well. Nor would saying "Well I didn't like the Holocaust but I really did think the Nazis had some good ideas about things". Similarly, wearing a hammer and sickle shirt will get you into trouble in more conservative places.
The MAGA hat's obviously on a different level than that, but it does explain some of the reasoning. That hat in particular represents (sometimes fanatical) appreciation for a man that liberals believe is doing immense harm to our nation, it's citizens and its image via racist, reactionary and backwards-looking politics. Because of far-right extremists, I get scared when I see that hat, to me it signals some form of white supremacy that I need to stay away from. So yes, wearing it at work might make people uncomfortable.
Computers can already infer sentiment, not to mention recognize patterns extremely well, and are likely trainable to provide example feedback to any given cultural current. Is culture really any more diffuse than something like conversation, which computers already do reasonably well?
Furthermore, it seems odd to suggest that computers would have trouble in numbers games like war/trade war/resource allocation. These are essentially reducible to games, and with Go out the way, it doesn't seem that figuring out the best tariffs to pass or best places to bomb would require much more logic.
Maybe I'm being naive, but I think your conceptions of the limitations of machines are founded on essentially nothing. There's little, philosophically or scientifically, in the way of physicalist/functionalist conceptions of the mind that supports your viewpoints!
There's little reason to doubt, in my eyes, that our brains are extremely complex machines, running on electrical impulses and neurotransmitters, to produce responses to stimuli. As such, I don't see why you would privilege our machines over another machine. Why is our learning experience different from that of a machine? Do we not learn from trial-and-error, from explicit (social) rule-programming, from inference? Is evolution really at odds with computers? Some ML algorithms already boast "evolutionary" traits. And are our 5 senses really so sharp? What about beings who "see" all EM radiation or feel rumblings deep in the earth, like a seismograph does?
First, in the classical "market" scenario, we're talking about little atomic firms, each with goals and hopes and dreams of profit. Each of these firms has some kind of "knowledge" and some kind of decision making apparatus. They all have some functionality. In a sense, these firms are like people - so much that our government treats them as such in many cases!
In many cases, a lot of these ideas and processes end up being the same, and when it is, we call it collective wisdom[0]or collective intelligence[1]. I won't go too deep into that.
So while financial markets and the firms that comprise them aren't exactly _machines_, they do display a form of intelligence different and sometimes more effective than our individual knowledge.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/collective_wisdom [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/collective_intelligence
Leftist cynicism aside: I'm talking more about the "socks on the floor, chair in the way, keeping the house in order mentally" side of things
I think the danger here is that by conflating emotional labour and cleaning, we obfuscate the true depth of what emotional labour is. Emotional labour what goes into having a mentally ill spouse, a child dying of cancer, a colleague or friend fighting through divorce or depression, the strain of a job that expects a positive mood when you're all wore out inside.
Cleaning is fixed by labour. Having a husband who doesn't clean, gets defensive, can't communicate, can't remember his fucking kids birthdays, etc. is fixed by emotional labour (or divorce). To me that sounds like the author married a person who's not accountable, doesn't share her standards about how labour should be divided, harbors gendered conceptions of how a household should be run, doesn't share her standards of cleanliness, doesn't share her standards for communication skills, etc.
So my response, in a nutshell, is that while this woman is right to push back against gendered standards of who does household work, it has nothing to do with emotional labor, per se. It has everything to do with the fact that she apparently picked a husband who is really hard to live with, or at least hard enough to live with that she's forced to write a tangential thinkpiece about it
Last month I deactivated my Facebook and have yet to turn it back on. In the months prior I started finding alternative sources of news: NYT, Pitchfork, HN, various sub-reddits, Bandcamp, what have you. I outsourced social media to Twitter and Instagram. I outsourced messaging to text/Slack. A bunch of my friends have done the similar things in the last few years.
The lower levels of cognitive dissonance are noticeable. It's not like Facebook has a monopoly on the things I hate: notification spam, stupid arguments, unfulfilling articles, and vacuous political rants all exist elsewhere. Maybe it's the dissociation between who a person is and what is posted. On Reddit you don't know the person and they don't get a big platform to express themselves outside of the comments. On Twitter you can't go on these huge rants and following/unfollowing people is fairly impersonal. On Instagram, you never get "why haven't you posted?? come back!!" notifications. And news sites do what they do best - deliver the news without some other third party getting to give their doctoral thesis on what they think it means.
This was linked in the article and at the top of the page so.. https://www.zerynth.com/built-with-zerynth/
You're not wrong though, almost no one is using it right now
> "There’s an enormous crowd of professionals skilled in using Python “potentially” able to develop the software for the “next big thing” in IoT and to ship new amazing embedded applications in a short time."
Potentially is the key word. People aren't currently doing this, but they will if Zerynth succeeds in what they're doing.
> Who said this, specifically? What is your point in bringing it up?
Sanders. The point in bringing it up is to point out the irony that Wall Street already does this behind the scenes, but people called the Senator crazy for proposing it.
> I'm getting the sense that you'd be in favor of this - can you tell me why, in your own words, you believe we should be trying to "recoup value" from the activities of high frequency traders?
Shortest terms I can put this is: our country needs the money that Wall Street siphons off of the economy. We need more government money to educate, house, feed, and care for people. High frequency trading, unlike traditional investment, is not a "mom and pop" thing, it's a tool only accessible to the wealthy to enrich themselves. Thus, we should disincentivize it in order to generate tax revenue and discourage practices that are not accessible to shareholders.
Curtis sees the connection between machines, hierarchies, capitalism, and technology. Curtis aptly points out that in our world, technology has not bred equality, that rather, the very concept of ownership spits in the eye of non-hierarchical society. I also question the degree to which Silicon Valley types fundamentally believe in (socioeconomic) equality - while Rand supporters often invoke freedom, liberty, justice, etc. they generally fail to mention equality at all. Instead, they opt for lofty "rising tide" rhetoric or relate back to a "free and open web". However, Curtis is dead right about the type of fantasy that technological progress has given our world.
This fantasy - that if we just keep pushing forward, we can solve our problems belies a fundamental, inherent fallacy in late-capitalistic logic. That is: when the problems are necessary parts of the system, it is impossible for the system to solve them. Current nation-state-capitalism relies on a few tenets that cause many of our planet's problems. Nations and people must compete, rather than cooperate. Growth must always continue, lest we face stagnation. Property and the means of acquiring wealth must not be equally distributed, in fact, such distribution would be inherently immoral. The last point here is explicitly Randian and is at the heart of global society's moral compass. That what one man has, no other has a right to take, regardless of how that property was acquired. Thus it is wrong for Palestine to contest the land given to Israel at the end of the 2nd World War, it is wrong for young black men and women to stand on the bridges that wealthy San Franciscans take to work, it is wrong for the government to appropriate the wealth of Mark Zuckerberg - despite the fact that his idea and wealth was ostensibly stolen from others.
The fantasy of a "free web" can be only be recognized in its relation to property and ownership. While megacorps like Google and Facebook make lofty claims about freedom, they unequivocally deny that the rest of the web ought to have access to their data, their infrastructure, their systems. They support the laws that make hacking illegal, and in many cases, prove two-faced about what they really want: a free web, but with some limitations that favor them. Google, for instance, supports net neutrality but does not have any interest in limiting their own ability to profit off the web. What we end up with is a "free society" where the ultimate arbiters of justice are not beholden to society in any way - capable of setting their own rules and saying "you may enter if ..."
"AWOBMOLG is a series of films about how the development of computers has impacted human culture. In particular, it examines the computer scientist's mechanistic worldview, and the way that this belief has negatively impacted the world."
But honestly that's pretty dry and it lacks some of the details that the original quotation has. I know what you're talking about w.r.t. overly flowery language, but I don't see this as a blatant example of it. Zizek or Haraway are the first that spring to mind when I think of that problem.
However, despite its shortcomings, Bandcamp is where cutting edge music lives in an age without Soundcloud. Labels like PC Music, Mall Music and Dream Catalogue have all pushed independent music to bizarre new limits in the last 4 years alone. Orchid tapes, an indie outfit, made their name off of Bandcamp releases. Alex G, Katie Dey, Elvis Depressedy, and a slew of other musicians have been recognized for their indie releases and now enjoy moderate indie popularity. As long as no one else is beating them, Bandcamp will continue to run on its skeleton frame and empower artists who use it.
Debating definitions is bad, can we not?
TL;DR figurative language sometimes doesn't follow definitions exactly
Anyway - the problem isn't that wealthy or poor people believe the kind of garbage that comes out of TED talks, it's that they fund it! The wealthy buy the books, the wealthy go to the conferences, the wealthy give them seats on their News Media channels or feature their talks prominently on their news websites. The wealthy run the Universities that give people their doctorates that legitimize their wacky capitalistic ethos. The poor can repost a TED Talk to Facebook, and that's about as far as their power to influence goes. The truly poor do not even have the money to buy 8 plagiarized Fareed Zakaria books.
It's worth mentioning, also, how little you need to make to be "wealthy" in America. With generational wealth playing such a big factor in people's finances, merely NOT having mountains of debt or being in good health are game changers. Throw a $100k salary on top of that (that's more than 75% of people make) and you're living large enough to buy a Fareed Zakaria book every hour for the rest of your life if you so needed.
1. Transportation costs: when everything grows in Ohio (and/or South America), it's going to cost a lot more to get it in front of consumers in Seattle or New York. To make matters worse, there's a built in timer on the goods. 2. Waste: something like 12% of America's food supply goes bad in transit. Then after that, some more rots on the shelf. That which doesn't is brought home, or to a restaurant and is wasted there. There's not much we can do about the last part of the equation, but having the food fresh in the store is a big step for the first two prongs. 3. Aesthetics: This one I don't fully understand, but apparently people turn down perfectly good produce because it doesn't look normal, despite being perfectly healthy and nutritious. I've always had a taste for mutant carrots, myself. It's possible (not guaranteed) that selling this produce at reduced costs and directly from the dirt where it was grown might help that.
It'll all come down to whether or not grocers sign on - my guess is that the price point on something like this will ultimately be pretty good, but it might take 10 years for the technology to develop enough to be useful out in the wild.
The problem with the "two types" thinking is that it is always in a person's a person's best interest to get something for free. Ironically, this rhetoric is often used by capitalists, fearful that leftism might become effective, by claiming their opponents are the ones who want free stuff. There are lots of ways to get things for free. For instance, you can steal your workers time and fail to compensate them (common in fast food), you can coerce a government into cooperation ("We'll move to India if you don't give us the tax breaks") or you can campaign to get your friends into the government.
The fallacy of libertarianism is a belief that capitalists don't want a state mechanism with the power to tax and regulate. That is exactly what capitalists want. They're given state protection via a police or military force, state welfare through tax write-offs and incentives, power and influence in crafting legislation that fits your worldview, and less turbulent markets due to stifling of demand. The alternative is Hobbes' "short, nasty, brutish" life - duking it out eternally trying to achieve efficiency instead of excess, competing endlessly, only to profit in the slightest.
It's often said that "it's in our nature to be competitive" but it's also in our nature to be cooperative, and corporations display this fact amazingly well- they use collective influence and power in numbers to achieve ends that small businesses never could. Until people outside of that system learn to cooperate well enough to bargain for their own interests (e.g. Labor movements), it's going to be smooth sailing for the "crony" capitalists.