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(midwest.social)
A404 to 
Lefty Memes
I'd love to work
what I don't love is how for a couple years my job was to just clean up other people's messes, babysit other departments (including their managers that outranked me!), figure out how to make the abso ok itely terrible systems that management put in place work for us, take the abuse that people directed at me for those terrible systems instead of management despite how I nearly quit my job because nobody was listening when I repeatedly explained very clearly how terrible those systems would be for literally everyone, and was still expected to complete new types of projects (which we were not set up to efficiently work on) faster with fewer resources and shittier planning, while not getting any meaningful raises.
yeah, that sucked. so now I do 40s and don't worry about the stuff I can't control. I tried, for years. it didn't work. any time management wants to fix that work environment, I'd love to get back to doing lots of actual work. but cleaning up somebody else's shit isn't work in interested in doing
"Even though we allowed HR to replace themselves with AI since they didn't want to work, and the new AI is filtering out all the qualified people who want to work, I have to ask why nobody wants to work anymore."
Shove it up your ass. People want to work for a living wage, but you are putting up endless barriers to prevent that from happening. You are turning away amazing talent before a human even lays eyes on them.
If people wanted to work they wouldn't have to pay us to.
That's not true. Most people are willing to work for no pay at all.
People volunteer all the time. People help their family, take care of their kids, plant trees, keep their street clean, help organise events, ... When people retire they often go work for a charity, just because work gives their life meaning and helps them socialise with people and feel useful.
Almost everyone wants to feel useful. Work gives life meaning.
The reason they have to pay us, is because only an idiot wants to do meaningless work, for too little pay, just to make someone else rich, especially if the end result is that it makes the world worse for everyone but the same people still running the show.
Unlikely to be your original image but could you give me sources for each article? I'm going to share this as a meme in a group I know one guy will take it too seriously and say it's fake and ask
Pretty surprised only 1 in 5 executives agreed with that statement, doesn’t really fit with the rest of the statements
Also, some variation this argument keeps getting re-used again and again since the beginning of time: This new generation is nothing like the old one, they have no respect, are so entitled and don't want to grow up.
Complaining that nobody wants to work in 1940 is wild. There's this huge military that everybody thinks is going to take over the entire planet and the biggest complaint this guy has as apparently the youth.
Priorities, he no has it
The less hard work offers a truly meaningful improvment in one's conditions - material, existential, hell even spiritual - the more people will opt out.
Rational actors, etc etc etc.
Also, if you - by which I mean the extractive class - make it difficult and humiliating to find work, and difficult and humiliating to retain work, then yes, as above, more rational actors will opt out.
Can you run society for awhile please? You seem to have a basic grasp of priorities
I'm very sure that disqualifies you from running for office. Generally speaking what seems to be sought in a potential leader is complete isolation from the society which they will be leading generally as a result of wealth, privilege and if it all possible lack of brain.
Hmm, I'm a fan of the "every setup no matter how well-intentioned eventually produces a dystopia" genre of storytelling, I wonder what kind of dystopia I would produce 🤔
I've been dreaming for years that one of my favorite authors, Peter Watts, will write a novel about the dystopia produced by a concerted global effort to prevent sociopaths and narcissists from positions of power. There's gotta be some kind of horrible emergent outcome that's more interesting than a relatively uninspired left-authoritarian totalitarian state. I'm interested in what goes wrong when the effort succeeds.
Utopian sci-fi: the humans have cracked the problem of society, somehow. Then, external nasties try to ruin it. Drama is created, no totalitarianism required.
Maybe you've heard of Alastair Reynolds' Prefect series, which is set just after a future society has crashed out of just such a golden age due to an alien plague. It goes into detail about how they achieved democratic perfection, and how it all fell apart under (very substantial) external pressure.
Thank you for that recommendation, I hadn't heard of it!
I mention Watts because he seems to have a disturbing talent at imagining hair-raising fault conditions which are non-obvious at first.
I feel like - and this is a matter of opinion only - a "bog standard" left-authoritarian totalitarian state, and a "oops we eliminated all the General Pattons and now we need some due to facing an existential threat" scenario, are probably the most foreseeable issues with purging narcissists and sociopaths from human command structures. Not that there's anything wrong with these, and I'm quite sure some extremely compelling fiction can be created about either - I'm just wondering what kind of bone-chilling Wattsian failure mode I haven't thought of here.
Full context: I have a personal belief that the human species' lack of systematic development & deployment of technique to control dark-triad personalities in command structures may represent a potential Great Filter, so thinking of the possible drawbacks of doing so is kind of a big deal in light of that.
Ohh now that’s a challenge, totalitarian is usually the go to move.
What’s your favorite Watts novel? I think I’ve only read Blindsight (dark but intriguing).
Blindsight changed my worldview in ways that are near impossible to articulate, and not for lack of trying on my part. At the very least it's led to years of fascination with fiction which digs into questions about consciousness and being-hood, especially those that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
More recently his Sunflowers series has been interesting. tl;dr, what if instead of writing a story which makes use of ancient stargates as a plot device, we write a story about the crew which built the stargates, traveling around the galaxy at sublight speed on a craft - term used loosely - with built-in anti-mutiny mechanisms?
Also I enjoyed his short story The Things, classic Watts. CW: rape mention.
I’ll check out Sunflowers! I agree Blindsight was really philosophically engaging. I should add it to my re-read pile since I’ve been reading a lot about being lately
Few phrases actually make me want the speaker to die. This is one of them
It’s true. That’s why you have to pay people to do it.
What happened in 1990 to deserve the 20 year gap in complaints?
Hmm, time to ~~speculate~~! hypothesize!
First, it could just be a sampling effect. Someone put this together, and they only had so much time. These may simply be the dates they happened to find, with no real relation to how public sentiment changed over time.
But if it really is true that on average, fewer people were lamenting "no one wants to work anymore" from 1981-1999, what could have caused this?
Two ideas:
This era really was the peak of America's labor participation rate. The Boomers, the largest generation ever relative to total population, were at the peak of their careers. They were raising kids, putting kids through college, living the Boomer lifestyle, and saving for retirement. And they had to work to pay for all of that. This is a likely factor.
I believe this also may have been an era of a high water mark of undocumented workers coming across the border. Mexico was at its peak of labor surplus, and the US hadn't really started putting up the walls yet, figurative and literal. ICE was founded in 2003.
For a variety of reasons, this really was the high water mark of America's labor participation rate. Again, this could just be a sampling effect. But if it is real, I can imagine some good reasons for it. And when labor is abundant, it becomes cheap. And when labor is cheap, fewer bosses will be lamenting the lack of workers willing to accept terrible jobs for low pay.
Damn, year 1905 ALMOST had it right when they said "nobody wants to work for wages". A slight correction to "these wages" and they wouldve been 100 years before their time.
I have seen this a couple of times. Is there a version with sources. I really would like to confirm this is real before I share this
I know Snopes has some issues, but they seemingly did the legwork already, so:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nobody-wants-to-work-anymore/
What issues does snopes have?
I'll be honest, I wrote that in anticipation of someone bringing up old gripes. Snopes generally does good work.
I hadn't realized just how long it had been, and frankly barely remembered what happened. There have always been accusations of bias or quality issues, but the thing that got people really upset was this:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/deansterlingjones/snopes-cofounder-plagiarism-mikkelson
As I recall, they kept the cofounder on as an executive after this, and that did more reputational damage.
Anyone trying to claim to be an adjudicator of truth is going to have some objectivity issues
When you search “what was life like in 1895?” And the summery is “Life in 1895 was a world of rapid technological transition, stark contrasts between extreme wealth and crushing poverty, and the height of the Gilded Age and Victorian era”
Oof
Dejavu♪
Is that any surprise? Industries on the downslide will always encounter difficulty staffing as will companies that suffer excess greed.
The brass balls of pasting that long list of nearly identical quotes and then getting it wrong in the heading though.
This time it's true, though.
Just one more technology, bro. Just one more and people won't have to work as hard or as long. Trust me, bro.
