🇳🇱
There is just a constant sound of sirens in the distance at this point. Most everyone on facebook from Philly is praising the rioters with comments like "let it burn", granted not a damn one of them own property or a business...
> not a damn one of them own property or a business...
@freemo Heh, if you social contract concentrates on protecting property, then it's not very surprizing that people who don't own any don't feel firmly attached to it.
Not that I condone looting/arson of course, this part of your toot just seemed amusing to me.
@timorl well yea thats exactly my point.. Obviously most people are selfish and only care about themselves. so if they dont own any property they really arent going to care how many lives are ruined by its destruction.
Thats exactly the point I was highlighting there, so we largely agree.
@freemo Oh no, that wasn't my point at all. I mean, I agree that this is related to selfishness, and someone completely selfless wouldn't do any of that. But my point was rather that countries/cultures in which social contracts concentrate less on protecting property and more on e.g. economic solidarity have people more hesitant to break the rules.
I encountered this concept fist in a discussion of homeless people shitting in streets. Since the social contract does not give homeless people literally anything (this was true at least for some of them in the context of the discussion) why would they feel the need to abide by even its simplest requirements? I think this situation is similar, although the contribution from this effect is relatively smaller.
@timorl Well sure, on the extream end of that if all property was owned by everyone, such as in a commune, then it is less likely that people are going to rebel and destroy property.
But while your point may have been coming from a different perspective I wouldnt say its all that different.. The underlying aspect of that is still that people dont care if property is destroyed as long as it isnt theirs. If the property is shared (economic solidarity, whats yours is mine) then that is less likely to happen.
But thats all still just selfishness in my mind "if you arent going to give me what you have then Id ont care what happens to what you have"
@freemo I understand that perspective, but I feel it still ignores the core of what I mean (or maybe just disagrees with it on a very fundamental level). If you think of a social contract as a, well, contract, then people shouldn't be forced to accept it if the terms are ridiculously unfafourable to them. You wouldn't really call someone selfish for refusing to accept a contract with very bad terms. It's not quite the same with social contracts of course, but the perspective is not completely invalid either.
As a pretty extreme example consider feudalism. It concentrates on protecting the property rights of the monarch (for simplicity lets say in the Russian sense of owning everything in the country). The peasants get little out of this contract -- at best they get some protection from outside threats and the possibility to live relatively peacefully. I would say in this case they can break the contract (by revolting) without being labelled unusually selfish.
I'm not saying this is the main thing fueling the current US riots (and definitely not saying the current US social contract is as bad as the extreme feudalism example!), only it's an interesting perspective as to what form they are taking.
@freemo Oh, and despite the extreme examples I don't mean extremes here. I'm trying to point out that the balance in the US is much more geared towards "property first" while in most of Europe it's much more geared toward "solidarity first". Neither are on the extreme end of the spectrum, and Europe doesn't have significantly more communal property than the US (I think?), but the social contracts are still visibly different.
@timorl So the big difference here is that in your analogy it would be the surfs rebeling against the lords. In this scenario that would look like the poor rebeling against banks and governments. burning down personal homes and businesses would be like the surfs burning down a random farm in the country side.. it isnt owned by the farmer but the farmer relies on it for his livlihood.
In fact its worse because in modern society if your business burns down and you have a mortgage you still owe the mortgage. So your hurting your fellow man even more so.
@freemo Yeah, I wasn't expressing myself clearly and in that example revolting was the only possibility. The riots in the US are not really a revolt, that would need organization which is missing. The feudalism example would have to be significantly altered to reflect the riots better.
I mean there is this whole social contract which, in the US, concentrates on protecting property. If you have enough property to live comfortably (i.e. you are at least middle class) you get quite a lot from the contract and have good reasons to accept it. However, if you have significantly less than that, then the social contract gives you... not much. Not completely nothing, the US is not completely... anarcho-capitalist? But the cutoff where they get little enough to not accept the contract on good grounds is pretty high in the US. And if the social contract is bad for them, why should they feel obliged to follow its conventions anyway?
I should still stress I don't the riots are the correct way of enacting change -- in fact I very much doubt they will. I'm only trying to explain the surprizing support for them. People don't feel the social contract is fair, so they reject it or at least are not very bothered if it's broken. I postulate that if the social contract included more "terms" providing for people without much property, they would still feel obliged to uphold the parts about property being important despite not owning much themselves.
@timorl I wouldnt say thats exactly true.. more than half of the US's 500 richest people all started with nothing. The US creates a system where the billionares are by in large part people who started with nothing.
I'd say that is what the social contract gives you. Not to say it is perfect, There is a lot I would do to improve wage mobility. But as someone who pretty much cant work anywhere in europe without taking a 66% pay cut I cant say the social contract is very appealing in europe when it comes to ownership and wealth speaking as a person who has roots in the poor community (I started out on welfare).
@freemo That is the wrong statistic for this problem. The issue is how many people start out below middle class and stay that way, and what they get out of the system. The people who end up extremely rich are a statistical fluke from that perspective (not to devalue their work, they just make up a miniscule portion of society).
From what I understand the US social order used to include a relatively likely path from lower class to middle class, which was slowly getting less accessible over the years. (I haven't checked any statistics on that, but this is my impression from reading about US history. Please correct me if I'm wrong.) This was essentially a part of the social contract -- as you point out, this can be acceptable for the poor. But it no longer seems to work, so with this part of the contract gone it gets less appealing etc.
It's not surprizing you like the social contract when you get more out of it, symmetrically to what the poor people feel. I think this is "selfish" to about the same extent. You don't like changing the contract in ways which would make you take a pay cut, they don't like keeping it as it is in ways that keep them poor. And note the quotation marks around "selfish" -- I suspect you would accept changes to the social contract that would cost you a bit while increasing social mobility (if that was possible of course), and the rioters probably would have accepted some changes like that too (although they would have had to happen in the past). The fact this didn't happen is a coordination problem, 'cause politics is hard. :/ It didn't happen, and now we have cities burning.
@timorl Well yes and no, depends what you care about..
If we just look at how many people start out below middle class and move up to middle or higher, we are really asking "how many people commit themselves to learning marketable skills and getting a job". We arent really asking anything about how much **oppertunity** they have to do it. A country can have the best oppertunities in the world but if no one is hard working enough to take advantage of it then the statistics will be low.
What I would say you are seeing is not that there is any less oppertunity to move from lower class to middle class, but rather the self entitlement of the lower class, coupled with a change in mentality in other areas (like you deserve to get paid just for doing hard work regardless of the skills you have) has largely shifted.
I'm relatively young, but I have been hiring people for about 2 decades now. I can say I've seen a huge decline in how much work a person will invest in themselves and even the work ethic of those who do. Its very hard to hire the vast majority of the yougner generation.
From what I've seen the issue mostly boils down to people sitting around thinking the system is corrupt and meanwhile they have no useful skills to speak of, the fault mostly lies in their own laziness in some ways (though there are systemic issues in the cost and quality of education too).
I am a person who started on welfare and worked his way out of it. so generally I expect people to be able to do the same.
In some ways I agree, in others I dont, and I sometimes change my opinion on some points..
It reminds me of a conversation i had with my cousin just yesterday.. He was complimenting me on how "brilliant" I was, and I insisted "its not something that just comes to me. I spend hours every day studying textbooks and learning different things. Your just seeing the end result of a lot of hard work, hard work anyone can do"... he kept insisting he wouldnt be capable of it, and I kept insisting he would.. he brought up the point that even when i was very young the whole family knew how smart I was. We talked about how I took a calculus book from a common cousin we both have (he is a doctor) at age 8 and was reading it trying to understand it. Even then I insisted most kids could probably understand calculus at 8 if they bothered to have parents that encouraged them and beleived they could. I insisted "how many kids do you know are even encouraged to try calculus at 8 years old? Kids are like sponges, they can learn a lot more than we give them credit for!"
Anyway, truth is, I dont really know. was I naturally smart, or is it I just believed in myself and insisted on trying where no one else does... Well I think its the latter but i dunno, some are clearly just "slow" and maybe cant.
But regardless I do think people are capable and just dont put in the effort. I think most of it though is they are beaten down and dont **think** they are capable, so they never try.
In the end ill summarize with this. I dont think im any smarter than anyone else. I think I am just hopelessly confident than anything I put my mind to I can do, and that optimism has carried me through and caused me to put in the effort where others dont.
And yes, the ability to dedicate yourself is something not everyone will have, and that's what it's designed to exploit
@freemo Yeah, I think we have hit our core disagreement here. I sincerily doubt the culture has shifted that significantly without the opportunity ecosystem changing. I have never been to the US, but "poor people are just lazy" seems like a terribly silly explanation.
@timorl I think its a little more than "poor people are just lazy".. I think its more like "poor people dont believe there is a way out when there is so they never take the steps that would get them out"
@timorl In other words, it is self defeating mentality of "the system is corrupt the reason i am where I am is because the system wont help me"... thus they never rise up above it because they believe the narrative.
But a few decades back the narrative was VERY different, everyone believed "America is the land of opportunity, you work hard and anyone can make it here".. nothing fundamentally changed but the mentality and the mentality is EVERYTHING.. people worked up from nothing with no help from anyone, in slave-labour like conditions and were successful rich and created empires.
Its all in the mentality.
We don't have a worse attitude, we just refuse to give in to capitalism, we won't be manipulated into leaving them behind, we want to make things better for all of us
@freemo I don't believe you can explain that much with mentality. People follow incentives most of the time, and it's not that easy to hide the incentives from them. I mean, that's the whole reason free market systems work at all -- people follow incentives closely enough to be a decent enough approximation of the theoretical rational agents. And the places where the system breaks down are usually related to broken incentives -- tragedies of commons and such. If people's actions could be changed that much with mentality, then centrally planned communism would be achievable...
@freemo Oh, also, I'm going to sleep, so I won't be answering for a while. This was already an interesting discussion, so thanks!
@timorl I think you just give way too much credit for people to reason through the reality... Most people, especially americans right now, follow narratives and rather blindly. Few people are objectively evaluating their situation, identifying incentives and acting on it. People are not that rational anymore.
@freemo The "rational" in "rational agent" has only a surface similarity to epistemic or instrumental rationality. It only requires following incentives, which seems to be part of human nature much more than actual rationality. Culture can modify mentality to add or remove various incentives, but I would be very surprized if it could remove "improve quality of live" from the list. So if less people manage to improve their quality of live, then either the US culture managed to change human nature significantly (which I very much doubt) or it became much harder to follow that incentive.
From what I can tell there are some reasons why the latter might be the case -- increased cost of education and medical care, lower wages in some sectors, other sectors either disappearing or becoming less accessible (deindustralization). All of those can be verified as facts (I had the impression that these are true, but I only looked for stats for a couple of them, so again I might be wrong). All of them mean that people have less resources (both money, time and also mental) to pursue quality of life improvements.
And regarding your stories of helping people -- although they are commendable, you gave them a very valuable resource in the form of your time and advice, so it doesn't relate strongly to solving the systemic problem. Considering your income, they couldn't really afford aquiring that resource without your charity. Maybe this approach could be scaled up (using more specialized, less expensive tutors; maybe as charities, maybe as government programs), but the attempts I am aware of failed to be effective. :/
@timorl The key here is that it follows **perceived** incentives, not actual ones.
Therein lies the problem. In modern society perceived incentives are significantly disconnected to actual ones by most of the masses.
Those who are capable of accurately evaluating incentives and following them have largely come out of poverty and are middle or upper class by adulthood. Those who cannot generally act in self-defeating ways and never really make it in any direction.
@freemo @timorl It’s hard to admit you succeeded unfairly at the expense of others . It would be wonderful if the system worked, and anyone who fails had no one to blame but themselves. You want to believe that if they tried, then they would be just as successful as you. Next thing you know you’re believing scam artists who are robbing people, then telling you “It’s their fault for not stopping me.” Benefiting from a system doesn’t disqualify you from opposing it, but so few get that…
I've devoted much of my life to helping people succeed through the same path I have.. and more often than not it works.
I've taken countless homeless people or people in extream poverty and did little more than tutor them (of which they did most of the work) and are now making 100K a year, no need to exploit anyone, they just read some books for a year or two and then went and got a job.
I've seen so many people, not just myself, rise up from poverty to riches by doing nothing more than investing in themselves that its ahrd for me to think its just some system where only the evil can rise... I see no evidence of such nonsense.
Well that depends, there are many fields you can go into. If you'd like me to tutor you and help you get that 6 figures and your really commited to it I would be more than happy to take you on as a student.
Just tell me a bit more about your interests and we can try to figure out what a good lesson plan would be to get you where you need to be. Also let me know what hours you have free to sync up so we can make sure your progress goes well.
Individual managers and boses can absolutely be assholes. The key is making sure you have the marketable skills so that they need **you** not the other way around. Then youll be the one in control of the negotiation. We can get you there though and I'd be happy to help.
@freemo @timorl I’m not sure my interests are all that relevant. I like nature and animals, but there’s not much money in that, and my allergies and endurance lock me out of a lot of it. I’m interested in free software, which is too beset by closed source cheaters to make a lot of money. Linguistics? Library Science? Both dead ends without a high end degree. I think you mean what interests I have that could potentially make money, not in general? Regardless, thanks for offering.
Well i guess I mean a bit of both. Ideally maybe we can get you on a path that is truly one of your interests, but perhaps if that isnt marketable we might need to talk in terms of marketable interests maybe.
Of the things you said Library Science, Lingusitics, and maybe free software are the biggest potentials I can think of.
Degrees are how a lot of people get into it but in my expiernce a degree isnt worth half as much as doing something impressive to show yoru skill.
For the people I helped int he past usually we spent some time training on a subject, and then the alst step is them building or doing something impressive and that impressive feat either makes them money directly (if they want to start their own project/company) or serves as the means to convince someone to hire them.
I think of everything you listed the easiest path to make a good income might be software. Are you completely unwilling to do software in a commercial setting? Open source might limit your options but it can certainly make good money under the right conditions.
@freemo @timorl My biggest money making idea has been to make a wildly popular open source video game that I could then make money from selling support, funding for maintenance and extensions, and donations. The… closest I ever came was making a crude sprite that moved around when you pushed the arrow keys. Lately I’ve been mostly working on tools for finding friends lately… very slowly, because I’m actually kind of bad at programming.
@freemo Commercial doesn’t matter so much as whether they’re nonprofit or free. My biggest worry about software companies is the ones that secure more of the economy’s riches for fewer elites, making software to analyze and control people, do all the accounting needed to enforce exploitive hierarchies, or find ways for rich people to get around the law and get even richer. It’s a moot point really, because I have no friends, much less friends running software companies.
@freemo Commercial doesn’t matter so much as whether they’re nonprofit or free. My biggest worry about software companies is the ones that secure more of the economy’s riches for fewer elites, making software to analyze and control people, do all the accounting needed to enforce exploitive hierarchies, or find ways for rich people to get around the law and get even richer. It’s a moot point really, because I have no friends, much less friends running software companies.
@cy Well you can consider me a friend now, and I have a lot of connections in software companies. So if that is something your interested in, and if its something you have the skills for, I certainly dont mind helping you get started.
Presuming you have the right skills I can easily show you how to get a job offer a day. Its just a question of if thats what you want for yourself and what, if anything, youd have to learn first before being marketable. But I'm happy to help there.
@freemo Sorry, I meant friends in real life. I do have Internet friends. I’m… honestly not very skilled at software. And I wouldn’t mind having you as a friend.
My advice for careers is to take all the things you enjoy doing, all the things you are good at, and all the things people value, and pick a career in the intersection between those three . And if the intersection is the null set then uh… I don’t know what to do.
@cy that is good advice...
Sadly I do not exist in the real world, I only exist as a reminant in the internet. I am not real. So while I am sorry I can not be a real life friend to you I am happy to be a friend and try to help as best I can :)
With that said, I'd say that if you decide it is a good career for you, commiting everything you have to learning software development is probably an excellent path to making good money.
If you can find the motivation to do so then I'm happy to help guide you in that in any way I can be useful.
I have worked largely at high-paid commercial type jobs, but I have also made money in the open-source arena. so I can hopefully help you reach either of those goals.
@freemo It’s alright. I’m certain there are people in my geographic area, and it’s just a little hobby of mine to try and figure out who might like me so we can build things, pool resources, and engage in biological activities like sports. Your encouragement and enthusiasm is help itself, I think. I don’t know how to find motivation, but I’m sure you could help if I ever do.
Oh and if you know anyone cool in the Portland area.
@freemo @timorl Incidentally game development isn’t too bad, if you keep your expectations reasonable. There’s a lot of support for isometric games these days, that individuals can manage. And it is a lot of work, but unlike writing stock analysis programs for a big bank, people can actually enjoy what you’re making.
Though I’m still torn on whether that enjoyment is healthy, or manufactured mind control.
