for - other types of tipping points - not climate but human mismanagement of resources

Leaked Amazon memo warns the company is running out of people to hire by [[Jason Del Rey]]

Why is it that so many of Americans' gut reactions is to "kick the can down the road" rather than to solve the underlying problems?

Do Americans Really Have More Free Time Than They Used To? by [[Derek Thompson]]

While using different verbiage, Kaiser is talking about the idea of information overload here and providing the means to tame it by appropriately breaking it up into pieces upon which we might better apply our energies to turn it into something.

Observation in 1994 of short term training of high school graduates for specific tasks which seems to hold true of similar customer service reps in 2024 based on anecdotal evidence of a friend who does customer service training.

I love this image:

Via Bryan Mathers at https://bryanmmathers.com/education-work/

This is one of the things that doesn't seem to be being explored enough presently, or at least I'm not seeing it outside of the SAG and WGA strikes where it seems to be a side issue rather than a primary issue.

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-23

You don't consult with the customer when you're thinking of changing the formula for the soap, I know. But is that the appropriate model for this situation?

REPORT: Executive Excess 2023 - Institute for Policy Studies by Sarah Anderson in August 2023

see article about this report at https://hypothes.is/a/D6qzfENbEe6qDg8H-IEo6g

Lauren Aratani in CEOs of top 100 ‘low-wage’ US firms earn $601 for every $1 by worker, report finds at 2023-08-24 (accessed:: 2023-08-25 08:20:02)

The dramatic increase in economic specialization of humanity driven by the Industrial Revolution has many benefits to societies, but it also has detrimental effects when the core knowledge and shared base of the society is lost.

Certainly individuals have a greater reliance on specialists for future outcomes (think about the specialization of areas like climate science which can have destructive outcomes on all of humanity or public health outcomes with respect to vaccines and specialized health care delivery), but they also need to have a common base of knowledge/culture and the ability to think critically for themselves to be able to effect necessary changes, particularly when the pace of those changes is more rapid than humans have generally been evolved to accept them.

Rank (social or otherwise) can be a signal for predictability from the perspective of consensus views for how to behave towards others with respect to the abilities or values being measured.

Ranking people for some sort of technical ability may be a better objective measure rather than ranking people on social status which is far less objective from a humanist perspective. In employment situations, individuals are more likely to rely on social and cultural biases and racist tendencies rather than on objective measures with respect to the job at hand. How can we better objectify the actual underlying values over and above the more subjective ones.

I've seen a bunch of people sharing this and repeating the conclusion: that the success is because the CEO loves books t/f you need passionate leaders and... while I think that's true, I don't think that's the conclusion to draw here. The winning strategy wasn't love, it was delegation and local, on the ground, knowledge.

This win comes from a leader who acknowledges people in the stores know their communities and can see and react faster to sales trends in store... <br /> —Aram Zucker-Scharff (@Chronotope@indieweb.social) https://indieweb.social/@Chronotope/109597430733908319 Dec 29, 2022, 06:27 · Mastodon for Android

Also heavily at play here in their decentralization of control is regression toward the mean (Galton, 1886) by spreading out buying decisions over a more diverse group which is more likely to reflect the buying population than one or two corporate buyers whose individual bad decisions can destroy a company.

How is one to balance these sorts of decisions at the center of a company? What role do examples of tastemakers and creatives have in spaces like fashion for this? How about the control exerted by Steve Jobs at Apple in shaping the purchasing decisions of the users vis-a-vis auteur theory? (Or more broadly, how does one retain the idea of a central vision or voice with the creative or business inputs of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of others?)

How can you balance the regression to the mean with potentially cutting edge internal ideas which may give the company a more competitive edge versus the mean?

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>John Mount</span> in Good Stationery as a Tool of Thought | MZLabs (<time class='dt-published'>11/30/2022 13:11:31</time>)</cite></small>

When did the definition of a so-called "conventional job" emerge? Presumably after the start of the industrial revolution when people began moving from traditional crafts, home work, farm work, and other general subsistence work.

What defines a non-conventional job? Does it subsume caring work? What does David Graeber have to say about this in Bullshit Jobs?

This broadly applies to both oral and literate societies.

Desire, ability, and need are all tough measures however... each one losing a portion of the population along the way.

How can we maintain high proportions across all these variables?

I've been told since the first day I started working at the Division of Hospital Medicine at @UCSF that my work doesn't bring in $ to cover my salary. It's a narrative of manufactured scarcity, a common tactic in capitalism. The CEO is making $1.85 million plus bonuses.

— Rupa Marya, MD (@DrRupaMarya) November 4, 2022

A Hospitalist’s economic value is in what we *save* the system in terms of quality-driven care and patient throughput (DC/unit time), not in how much we bring in through profees. Because of how the system is structured, you’ll only see our value when we aren’t there.

— Rupa Marya, MD (@DrRupaMarya) November 4, 2022

This sounds a lot like hospitalists fall under David Graeber's thesis in Bullshit Jobs that the more necessary and useful you are the less you're likely to get paid and be valued.

I suspect the ability to track an employees' direct level of productivity also fits into this thesis. One can track the productivity of an Amazon warehouse worker or driver, but it's much more difficult to track the CEOs direct productivity.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1587519501431717889.html

Pomeroy suspects that Paxson may have kept to a strict work schedule to keep his mind sharp, but he doesn't propose or suspect that it may have been the case that Paxson's note taking practice was the thing which not only helped to keep his mind sharp, but which allowed him the freedom and flexibility to keep very regular work hours.

https://www.engadget.com/amazon-attrition-leadership-ctsmd-201800110.html?src=rss

Amazon tracking their hourly workers and not their middle management's efficiency.

Originally read on Tue [[2022-10-18]] 1:25 PM

Ha!

Is part of this effect compounded by America's history of the Protestant work ethic (see Max Weber)?

Do the wealthy/powerful benefit by this structure of penalizing the unemployed this way? Is there a direct benefit to them? Or perhaps the penalty creates a general downward pressure on overall wages and thus provides an indirect benefit to those in power?

What are the underlying reasons we tax the unemployed this way?

The savings indicated here is almost a factor of 10! How can we not be doing this?

Compare with statistics and descriptions from Why Fewer American Children Are Living in Poverty (New York Times, The Daily, 2022-09-26)

Of course this idea of "learned right" sounds a lot like the problems built into "just". He defines it as meaning "understanding" but there's more he's packing into the word. While his vein example is lovely, the bigger issue is contextualizing everything all the time, which is something that commonly isn't done or even done well over time by educators. This work takes time and effort to help students do this as they're not doing it for themselves until much later in life.

One really oughtn't downplay their research skills like this, rather they should wear them as a badge of honor. Downplaying them leeches away one's power.

Ph.D. researchers may potentially go deeper into sources, but this is only a function of time and available attention.

This sort of debate also plays out in spaces like writing computer code. The broader industry determines who is and isn't a "coder", but this is only a means of creating power structures that determine who has power and who doesn't or who is part of the conversation and who isn't.

Don't let Maggie fool you here, she is definitely part of this conversation.

What areas of work over time does this pattern of level of experience not apply to?

There is definitely a level of minimal literacy at which one could be considered a reader, but there is no distinction between amateur reader and professional reader the way there might be between an "amateur researcher" and a full time "academic researcher".

Other examples of this? Video game playing?

https://catswetel.com/blog/2021/5/4/an-extended-subtweet-on-power

https://news.yahoo.com/former-teacher-says-she-fired-171921981.html#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=16593976639480&csi=1&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.yahoo.com%2Fformer-teacher-says-she-fired-171921981.html

This is an example about preparation for going into a conference (or battle, which is suggested by this particular conference's topic). The work provides a primer for what is about to happen and can be analogized to ancients taking the ark of the covenant into battle before them. It serves as a cultural talisman representing what they're fighting for, but it also likely served as a mnemonic device for their actual battle strategies and plans from the time. They take it with them as a physical review reminder and device.

Humans make sense of information in different ways and as a result respond to it and their environments in diverse manners, a fact from which companies can derive direct value.

This idea is becoming more commonplace now, but here it is in print in 1994. Are there earlier versions of this in the literature?

Dan Pink's book A Whole New Mind lays out an idea he call's "Symphonic Thinking" which is a practice of finding connections between unrelated ideas. He suggests that this practice is an important key to the future of work.

Link this to other incarnations of this pattern in history: - Raymond Llull - Llullan combinatorial arts - Niklas Luhmann - linked zettelkasten - Marshall Kirkpatrick - triangle thinking - Dan Pink - symphonic thinking - etc...

Dan Pink A Whole New Mind #books/wanttoread

Given the importance of dance in oral cultures, what, why, and how has dance moved to be one of the seemingly lowest and least well paid art forms in modern society?

How might modern dance regain its teaching and mnemonic status in our culture?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/business/office-covid-preference-wristband.html

I had this same sense early on, but it involved a capacious memory rather than a reliance on written notes that I needed to consult.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1522184354490990595.html

I love the simplicity of these graphics.

https://cagrimmett.com/thoughts/2022/04/26/why-blog/

A great essay on why bog!

—Winnie Lim

If speed comes at a cost, then one should be cautious when working on ideas around productivity. When does one become too productive? Be sure to create some balance in your processes.

Amazon warehouses optimize for worker productivity, but this comes at the expense burning out the workforce. If the CEO and senior executives couldn't or work at a similar pace for weeks on end, then they should be loathe to force their low paid workforce to do the same.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1518214731026292736.html

Some useful truths here.

https://reinventingorganizationswiki.com/theory/wholeness/

This sounds a lot like the management philosophy of W. Edwards Deming who encouraged managers to empower workers to take ownership of their craft and work.

This is a surprising effect for teaching and learning, and if true, how can it be best leveraged. Worth reading up on and testing this effect.

Indeed humans do seem built for categorizing and creating taxonomies and hierarchies, and perhaps allowing this talent to do some of the work may be the best way to learn not only in the short term, but over longer term evolutionary periods?

Willpower is a limited resource which depletes quickly and isn't something that can be improved with deliberate work or exercise.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/09/opinion/culture/jeremy-strong-new-yorker-careerist-striver.html

Is this a general feature of the conservative far right of constantly denying our humanity and care for each other?

There's been a normalization of providing exterior indicators of internal ideas and people's mental states. Examples include pins indicating pronouns, arm bracelets indicating social distancing or other social norms.

But why aren't we taking these even farther on the anthropological spectrum? Is one society better or worse than another? One religion, one culture? Certainly not. Just like Leah McGowen-Hare's green band indicating that she's a hugger isn't any more valuable than someone else's yellow fist bump indicator. We need to do a better job of not putting people into linear relationships which only exist in our minds until we realize how horrific and dehumanizing they are.

Cross reference:

• https://indieweb.org/photography_policy
• https://indieweb.org/pronoun#Pronoun_Badges

Are there other examples of this job function in the broader American culture? What do these job descriptions and titles look like?

https://getpocket.com/collections/a-guide-to-the-great-resignation

This is an interesting starting point for discussing the ills of comparative anthropology which will tend to put one culture or society over another in some sort of linear way and an expectation of equivalence relations (in a mathematical sense).

Humans and their societies and cultures aren't always reflexive, symmetric, or transitive. There may not be an order relation (aka simple order or linear order) on humanity. We may not have comparability, nonreflexivity, or transitivity.

(See page 24 on Set Theory and Logic in Topology by James R. Munkres for definition of "order relation")

An interesting take on creative work by Jeremy Strong

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/Better-mortgage-firm-has-mass-layoff-Zoom-16673576.php

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/evangelical-trump-christians-politics/620469/

Evangelical Christians have been held together more by political orientation and sociology than they have by a common theology. This has set them up for a schism which has been exacerbated by Donald J. Trump, COVID-19, and social changes.

Similar to Kurt's quote, "We go to church to see and be seen", too many churches are focused on entertainment and being an ongoing institution that they aren't focusing on their core mission. This is causing problems in their overall identity.

Time at church and in religious study is limited, but cable news, social media, and other distractions are always on and end up winning out.

People are more likely to change their church because of politics than to change their politics because of church.

The dichotomy of maleness and femaleness compound the cultural issues of the evangelical church.

Southernization of the Church

Pastors leaving the profession due to issues with a hostile work environment. Some leaving because parishioners are organizing and demanding they be fired.

Peter Wehner looks at the rifts that are appearing in the Christian evangelical movement in America, some are issues that have been building for a while, while others are exaggerated by Donald J. Trump, the coronavirus, the culture wars, political news, political beliefs, and and hypocrisy.

What part does The Great Resignation have in part of this? Any? Is there overlap for any of the reasons that others are resigning?

What about the overlap of causes/reasons for teachers leaving the profession since the pandemic? What effect does the hostile work environment of politics play versus a loss of identity and work schedule during a time period in which closures would have affected schedules?

What commonalities and differences do all these cases have?

https://i.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/qhg5jo/this_resume_got_me_an_interview/

https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/netflix-employees-stage-walkout-protest-dave-chapelle-special-the-closer-transphobic-1235093535/

Interestingly, this is still all-too-often how business owners, entrepreneurs, and corporations view their own workers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MBaFL7sCb8

Passion is a terrible yardstick for life.

You create life by living it.

"Do not loan money to a person following their passion." —Scott Adams advice on being a loan officer

Passion is where your energy and effort meets someone else's need. —Terri Trespicio

This is the water we swim in.

This is Water by David Foster Wallace

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ7CyM1Zrqc

An interesting experiment to change one's schedule this way.

I feel like I've seen a working schedule infographic of famous writers, artists, etc. and their sample work schedules before. This could certainly fit into that.

One thing is certain thought, that the time of waking up is probably more a function of the individual person. How you spend your time is another consideration.

“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” ― Picasso

“Everybody has the same energy potential. The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways. I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings, and everything else is sacrificed to it...myself included.” ― Picasso

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. —Picasso

see also: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/03/07/child-art/

What a great quote to include in the closing!

Josiah Wedgwood was apparently the first to institute a system of clocking-into work.

We attend to time in large measure as a need to be able to synchronize our work.

Eternal struggle of competition here. The workers (and the poet) admonish that one compares themselves against their neighbors (competitors) than simply themselves.

The fix for this is for the leadership/bosses to participate themselves to see if the yield isn't as good as it might otherwise be. So much could be fixed if the "boss" is involved in the actual work or physically on site at least some of the time to experience what is going on. Participation counts.

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

The Uncomfortable Truth is the Difficult and Unpopular Decisions are Now Unavoidable.

Topic is relevant across a span of global issues. Natural resources are Finite.....period! Timely decisions are critical to insure intelligent use of resources. DENIAL is the enemy and 800lb gorilla in the room. Neoliberisim and social dysfunction feed on any cognitive dissonance and poop it out as "crap". True believers of American Capitalism (yes there is a difference) have become "cult-like" and drink the fluid of the cult to the very end, human consequence is of no concern.

Point being: Reality is always elusive within a cult controlled (authoritative) mindset. Cult members are weak sheep, incapable of individual logic/reason. Authority can not be challenged. -- Denial, a human defense mechanism has been and is the common denominator in all personal and global conflict. Denial can be traced throughout modern history and rears its ugly head whenever the stakes are high.

@dancohen @ayjay, don't forget the noble professions of philosopher's clerk or secretary:

What it would be like to be a philosopher’s clerk: “It’ll be a matter of filing the generalisations, tidying up paradoxes, laying out the premises before the boss gets in.” —Tom Stoppard

For five years he [Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)] served as personal secretary to, yes, Francis Bacon. In fact, I’ve noted over a course of years that the job of a secretary can be utterly fulfilling just in case one’s boss happens to be Francis Bacon. —Daniel N. Robinson

(reply to https://micro.blog/dancohen/11752827)

https://theamericanscholar.org/blue-collar-brilliance/

Acknowledging the work and art that blue collar workers do is an important thing.

Sometime in the past six months I ran across a description of how migrant workers do this sort of activity in farming contexts. That article also pointed out the fact that the average person couldn't do this sort of work and that there was extreme value in it.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Alan Jacobs</span> in July Check-In · Buttondown (<time class='dt-published'>07/01/2021 09:19:13</time>)</cite></small>

Idea of John Paul II's encyclical being a form of blogging in a different era. They're all essays in form, it's just about distribution...

This same sort of illusion also occurs in email where we're always assumed to be constantly available to others.

An interesting take on valuing one's time.

reflecting on the year after george floyd for me is that the different responses that we all have right are valid and true and authentic and they create possibilities when they're read in you know its full context um but some of what is happening or some of what the role of the the classroom or the the person is to do is to try to say this is the range of the acceptable response and i feel like as a teacher our role is to kind of say you get to choose how you want to show up but base it in something that's real that's authentic that's not just about you this but it's about the collective so how do we cultivate that connection to collectivity how do we cultivate that ethical uh commitment and conviction to one another but at the end of the day how do we allow young people and everyone really the agency um to decide how they want to like show up—Christopher R. Rogers (autogenerated transcript)

This is a powerful teaching philosophy. Return to reflect on this.

a lot of our assessment system our accountability system in education is built around being able to say oh are you on the right path and not acknowledge the multiplicity of paths or in in some ways that the uh the things that are structuring this path is oppressive to our humanity in the first place—Christopher R. Rogers (autogenerated transcript)

He very carefully encapsulates a lot of the issues we've got in modern education here. Should we worry about the "standards" like memorizing and correctly using a semicolon over acknowledging our humanity and removing focus from eudaimonia?

when i was in high school just a high school in chester pennsylvania there was like english class there was also like a card game that was happening in the back of the room and no one like asked those students what they were teaching in that card game because we were like supposed to be doing worksheets in english class but that's also an intellectual practice so like ...—Christopher R. Rogers (autogenerated transcript)

I love the idea of this parable of a card game in an English class.

Moral: Don't marginalize the card game in preference for the supposed main topic as it has its own power and value, and may in fact be more valuable to the participants and their lives than the "main conversation". Value the thing for itself and not for some perceived other thing. View it in a positive framing rather than in a negative one. Simultaneously, don't attempt to subvert it either to reframe or re-capture the topic. Let it be what it is.

you could kind of go deeper with that is um do the work of like fred moten and stephanos harney's uh black study or radical study in in the undercommons of of this idea of like um there are these molds intellectual practice you know that sometimes we don't give you know uh you know credit to or sort of like survive underneath in the subterfuge of what's happening—Christopher R. Rogers (autogenerated transcript)

He's talking about work (scholarship) that may sit outside the mainstream that for one reason or another aren't recognized (in this case, because the scholars are marginalized in a culture mired in racist ideas, colonialism, etc.). At it's roots, it doesn't necessarily make the work any more or less valuable than that in

cf. with the academic samizdat of Vladimir Bukovsky who was working under a repressive Russian government

cf similarly with the work of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Consensus can very often only be consensus until it isn't.

How do these ideas interoperate with those of power (power over and power with)? One groups power over another definitely doesn't make them right (or just) at the end of the day.

I like the word "undercommons", which could be thought of not in a marginalizing way, but in the way of a different (and possibly better) perspective.

Quote from Daniel Markovitz

This does raise the point of whether or not some of the things elites are doing is actually good or productive for society. Many are only working at privatizing profits and socializing losses which can be phenomenally caustic to society as well.

This may be the case for high-earners, but where do these people sit with respect to the higher elite or "leisure class"?

Are these hard working high-earners a new class of people that has emerged that aren't the previous elite of the mid-1900s?

What effect does the rise of finacialization (versus manufacturing or service sectors) since the 1970's have on this shift? Did these high-earners arise out of a hole in the market to service the elites on the highest rung up to make their wealth grow faster?

There seems to be a hole in this argument with respect to the prior quote:

Fifty, 60, 70 years ago, you could tell how poor somebody was by how hard they worked. Today, that relationship has been completely reversed. Elites work for a living. They work harder than they used to. They work harder in terms of brute hours than the middle class on average, and they get most of their income by working.

Twas ever thus in corporate America

Another specific example of this has been noted by Zeynep Tufekci of an economist becoming the face of criticism of the education space being open or closed during the coronavirus pandemic. The woman, who had no background in public health or epidemiology, became the public face of the argument about whether schools should be open or closed.

The ability to set the bounds of the discussion or the problem is a classical example of "power-over" instead of power-with or power-to.

I want this career!

One of the major problems that underlies our society is that the police represent power-over when what we really need is power-with or power-to.

An interesting break down of power.

More context on the Basecamp story

Seems fairly innocuous corporate speak until you think about it for a minute...

Too often corporations use the idea that the workplace is a "family", but when times get tough, we don't abandon our families the same way that corporations will summarily fire their employees to try to survive themselves without any real thought about their supposed "family members".

We need to restructure how we interact with work. There's a definite bias against/toward some careers that isn't levied against other. No one ever says that Wall Street investors should put others before themselves.

Work is not going to love you back and we've been lied to about the idea that we should love our work.

This portends to be an interesting concept: user domestication

Documentation of the problems of yes, but of always yes. Some interesting thought experiments could be done with this.

An odd-sounding, but somehow very American sales mantra.

I read this and can't help but thinking about some of my own personal workplace experiences (as well as some of those of others). Many often experience the need to move from an early workplace to another as a means of better experiencing direct promotion, both in status and in respect as well as in pay naturally. One will often encounter issues in promotion at the same company, particularly when it doesn't properly value work and experience, and thinks of you as when you first started work as a young kid still wet behind the ears. Compare this to moving to a new company with a new social group who doesn't know the "old" you, but automatically ascribes to you the rank and value of your new post instead of your past rank(s).

In some sense making one's old writing/work private (or deleting it on Twitter as is more commonly done for a variety of reasons) becomes a means of preventing the new groups of readers or viewers of one's site from seeing the older, less experienced version of one's self and thereby forcing them to judge you by the "new" you imbued with more authority than the younger tyro of the "old" you.

They're right that overwork and identification with work has become all too prevalent over the past several decades.