We used to have that adage about how anonymity made people worse on the internet
Many of us have been saying that’s untrue ever since people started claiming it was real.
All you need to do is go to Facebook to see people being horrible under their own names.
It’s true. It’s also true that for our ancestors who toiled in farm fields picking weeds by hand, or risked being mangled by machines in a factory, a cubicle would seem like absolute luxury.
But, comparing ourselves to previous generations of office workers, the only thing that seems similar to what “knowledge workers” have to deal with today are the typing pool / secretarial pool / steno pool from ye olde days:
One place I worked was so overcrowded and loud that everybody on my team was wearing headphones all day long, just to preserve their sanity.
The level of noise and the fact everybody wore headphones to overcome it meant that often the best way to chat with the person sitting within a metre of your desk was by text over signal / google messenger, etc.
That’s the purpose of meetings and meeting rooms.
We had meetings and meeting rooms, but we only went there for required meetings.
I think the kinds of things they were trying to make happen were those informal discussions you sometimes get. That was part of the purpose of having pool tables, ping pong, break rooms with snacks, etc. It was a place where people could bump into each-other without an agenda and talk about what they were interested in without sticking to an agenda.
But, they didn’t seem to realize that the physical space was much less than half the requirement. The other half is that people feel happy, safe, energized, confident, relaxed, optimistic, etc. If you’re stressed out all day because your workspace is way too crowded and lacks privacy, you’re not going to want to do that. If you’re worried you’re going to be hit in the next round of layoffs, you’re not going to want to do that. If you’re getting stack ranked against your teammates and put in the lower half of the stack, you’re not going to have the confidence to bring up your ideas.
It’s also not a coincidence that a cubicle is designed so your back is to the entrance, whereas most offices are set up so that the person sits behind a desk facing the door.
If you compare it with Gold
Which you shouldn’t do because gold is a very volatile commodity. It went down from 2012 to 2018, then up from 2018 to 2024, then it went up extremely quickly since 2024. Gold is just something people put money in based on FOMO, or based on fears of stock market crashes, or based on other “vibes”.
In addition, a lot of the world’s gold is simply held in the form of jewelry in India. It’s not even used as a direct “investment”, it’s just a pretty, shiny metal.
the USD moved in lockstep until the US left the Gold [Standard]
You’ll never guess why that happened… although if you look at the name of the standard, it might give you a clue.
which is why a single blue collar salary that used to be enough for a good house, a car and the expenses for a family of 5 in the 60s
In the US. You know, essentially the only industrialized country that escaped from WWII with its manufacturing infrastructure intact, and was, as a result, supplying the entire world while everyone else was rebuilding.
The UK was another victor in WWII along with the US, but their workers weren’t living in luxury. Rationing of meat ended in 1954 in the UK, nearly 10 years after the war. If you want to know what it was like in the UK in the post-war period, just look at stories of the early lives of the members of the Beatles.
In the US, the post war period not only followed the war, but also the great depression. The great depression ended with the New Deal, which shifted a lot of power from the rich to the workers. Workers from 1945 to the 1970s or so greatly benefited from those policies.
So, this 1960s family with 5 kids, a car and a good house on a worker’s salary wasn’t typical. It was probably the best off that workers were in the world since European workers who survived the black plague – and all it took was a devastating world war that destroyed the infrastructure of most of the world’s developed countries, other than the USA, plus a devastating depression lasting a decade that forced the government to institute programs that gave workers benefits.
(Oh yeah, and it only applied to white Americans.)
AI art is currently free because it’s subsidized by the AI companies who are spending investors’ money to try to buy marketshare and mindshare. When that subsidy ends, you’ll have to pay for it too.
It does provide nearly unlimited access to knowledge. But, the Internet user needs to bring their own ability distinguish knowledge from strongly held ignorant opinions.
If you’re an eye surgeon you can probably use the Internet to find out the newest techniques in eye surgery. You probably have enough knowledge of your own to spot fraudulent things, and to know where the real information can be found and how it can be vetted. OTOH, if you’re an eye surgeon, you might know nothing about farming, so you might not be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you’re not careful you might come away believing some crazy farming-related conspiracies.
In the past there were gatekeepers. That sounds like a bad thing. In some ways it was. But, at least Walter Cronkite wasn’t allowed to go on a rant about the chemicals turning the frogs gay.
Yes people make creative things, but they don’t make games that requires a game studio and give them away for free
They used to, they called it shareware. It could happen again.
Look, if my personally ignoring copyrights for certain things causes certain media companies to go bankrupt and causes a whole re-think of how the creative economy should work, I think that’s a good thing. I don’t think my choices are that powerful, but we can always hope.
Of course you understand that people made creative things before copyright existed. You understand that that happened when the copyright term was 14 years. You understand that it happened before Warner Bros. Discovery existed.
You understand that it is possible for a company to make games without requiring a 120 year copyright term, right?
Right. Copyright is supposed to be for the good of the population. In order to encourage people to create things, they’re given a short monopoly on it after which it enters the public domain. The original copyright term was 14 years, I think.
The new setup is absurd. The public doesn’t benefit for more than a century, at which point the copyrighted item is probably of next to no value.
And, like you said, the artist rarely benefits. Writers are probably the ones who come the closest to benefitting. They only have to pay their agent a cut, their publisher, then, finally Amazon. With advances, etc. you have to wonder how much they get paid for each additional book sold. Musicians basically don’t make anything anymore, with the bullshit that Spotify (partially owned by the record companies) does. And then movies, TV, and other video stuff, the amount that creators get is massively watered down, and that’s after the “Hollywood accounting” makes profits from even successful things disappear.
I really don’t respect copyright anymore because it doesn’t benefit me (a member of the public) nor does it benefit the artist. It’s just a tool to hand money to certain entertainment conglomerates.
“give it back” means “seed to at least a ratio of 1.0”
There are a few authors and musicians who do things like that, selling things DRM-free on their own site. But, the US “content” industry is a handful of mega companies who are doing everything possible to maximize copyright so they can lock up and control as much stuff as possible.
Piracy has never been stealing.
When you steal something, the real issue is that the other person is deprived of some tangible item they used to have.
When you “pirate”, you’re merely violating a copyright. The government granted someone a monopoly on the expression of an idea, and you’re not respecting the government’s decision on that item’s exclusivity.
Something about using an LLM to make art and wanting people to appreciate them for that.
Nobody said that your nerdy cousin should do it for free. Give him/her $10 or something.
You ate at the onion.
Yes, then (as expected) the companies passed on the cost to their customers.
If there were a competitive marketplace, retailers would be offering refunds to their customers or putting on huge deals so that annoyed customers didn’t switch to a rival retailer.
But, when Amazon has some massive chunk of the market, what happens if they piss off a customer? What are they going to do, go to the mall? The mall closed a long time ago.
Google’s