SomethingMusic
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User ID: 181
SomethingMusic
4d ago
The breaking of social covenant and the rise of selfish societies
Recently in the news, Red Lobster is reporting an 11 million dollar loss, which is forcing the company to close many restaurants and possible file for chapter 11. The problem? Their '$20 all you can eat shrimp' deal was too good. Some anecdotal evidence indicates that large tables would order one or two orders of the never-ending deal, causing huge losses as large parties would share a single plate for $20, causing significant restaurant losses.
In the past few years, NYC has seen significant increases in retail theft, with stores facing many millions of dollar losses, with the estimate of retail theft being up to 4.4 billion dollars for the state alone. The cost of thefts cause a cyclical cycle, it forces stores to raise prices to cover the loss of the theft, which in turn prices people out of purchasing goods, which again raises theft. So far, the plans the governor has been trying to put into place seems to have done little to curtail any theft.
A 2024 jobs report shows a massive shortage of manufacturing labor, with 770,000 manufacturing jobs open. Labor participation has not recovered from the COVID crisis, with participation at 63.3% just before corvid and around 62.5% from the most recent report. Labor participation was highest before the 2008 housing crisis during the Bush admin around 67%. 7.5 million men have dropped out of America's workforce, meaning that they are not job seeking and therefore wouldn't be tracked as part of unemployment in FRED data.
There's a lot of words spilled on the internet on 'high trust societies'. Places like Japan where a lost item will be much more likely returned to its owner than, say, Detroit. Or rural America, where people will pay money at an unattended farm stand for fresh fruits and/or vegetables. However, trust doesn't fully cover what's going on in the west. /u/johnfabian's post is not about trust, but rather the breaking down of the covenant between constituents and their governments that keep a society basically functions. These social functions are much more simple than trust. It's about not running a red light, not driving the wrong way down a highway, or waiting in line for a train rather than trying to crowd on regardless of capacity.
Western society flourishing was largely predicated on this tacit understood social covenant: on an individual level, each person does their best to contribute through labor - be it stocking shelves to software development to entrepreneurship. In turn, the government upholds the status quo and optimizes legislation for stability and prosperity for the working class.
However in recent times this has changed. I'm not sure if the western governments decided they can have it's cake and eat it, too, or that the only way to perpetuate power is finding a new voter base, but the recent focus on marginalized groups has significantly eroded the trust away from indigenous constituents. It doesn't take a genius to tell that demographic groups are being treated, litigated, and policed based off of completely different rule books, and this type of treatment always creates division and resentment. The covenant between government and the constituencies broke, which changed the payoff matrix. As governments pick and choose which demographics to control, people become more selfish, as the ability to create value from freer markets diminish.
This is why 'selfish societies' is a better term than 'low trust' societies. As much as people love to yell at corporations for perusing short term gains, individuals pursue selfish gains at the cost of others even more as shown from my examples alone. Trust does not fully explain how people behave in the aforementioned examples, but selfishness does. Low male employment, antiwork, and the rise of NEET-dom has nothing to do with trust, but selfishness adequately describes the motivations for the ideological positions they hold. Obesity isn't a trust issue, it's a selfish issue, where people would rather eat themselves into oblivion instead of finding a healthy balance and self restraint. Even the declining birthrate is a result of selfishness; people would prefer to have the increased income and enjoyment of consequence-free fornication instead of laying an effective and positive groundwork for future generations.
The question, then, is it possible for a government to regain the respect of its constituents, and can the people understand that there needs to be some amount of selflessness to create an environment to nurture the next generation?
SomethingMusic
3d ago
How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?
Is this necessary? Cynicism isn't always a necessary characteristic when reading an earnings report. Jordan Peterson said something that I that I try to take to heart, which is "believe people when they say something is the motivation for their actions." This doesn't mean that their explanation is the real reason for the action, but it is what they believe is the reason behind their actions. Corporate entities have a good reason to not lie on earnings reports and losses (getting sued and/or fired for lack of transparent reporting on earnings), I am willing to take their statements as generally factual, even if corporate stupidity is closer to the real reason.
They couldn't see that one coming at their giant company, that's been running all you can eat deals since my grandmother was taking me there as a kid? This is classic "loser execs blame others for their failures." Every restaurant to ever run an all-you-can-eat deal knows that the first thing you do is say, No Sharing on the menu, on the salad bar, and sometimes a couple other places in the restaurant. "Any Sharing of Salad Bar food will result in an additional salad bar order being charged." My local diner run by a greek dude from Lesbos knows that. How the fuck would Red Lobster not know that? Every all-you-can-eat buffet I've ever been to also reserves the right, on their menu, to cut you off. My concrete contractor and his sons had been thrown out of every smorgasbord in three counties.
And Red Lobster didn't have any kind of metrics tracking the Shrimp deal, to notice that it was causing losses and end it early? This whole debacle beggars belief.
You're correct it could be pure mismanagement of their corporate entity, but this is why selfishness vs trust is an important distinction. Adam Smith understood this concept that self-interest could result in creating public good. A corporation would do something 'good' (offer food for a lower than profitable price) at the goal of customer acquisition. The result was increased popularity and attendance of the restaurant, but at the cost of underestimating the popularity and/or any potential abuse of the deal.
Which can be directly and obviously traced to the trend towards low-staffing in stores. CVS and Walgreens used to have three to five employees in a normal sized store, and the closest you ever got to "Self Checkout" was my local convenience store where I would wave my Arizona Green Tea at the owner and tell him "I'll just leave the dollar on the counter" so he wouldn't have to get up. Now I go into CVS, and if I need someone I spend five minutes searching the store for the one person working there. And that single employee is almost never at the front desk, where they might at least see me leaving and yell at me, they are nearly always somewhere else in the store, stocking shelves or something. If I wanted to steal some stuff, who the fuck is going to stop me?
To say nothing of self-checkout, which invites casual small-scale theft, even by otherwise honest people. On at least three occasions, I've stolen things in self-checkout by accident. A small item in the bottom of my reusable bag (because they charge me for regular bags), didn't make it out of the bag. At no point have I ever felt like there was any chance that if I chose to steal a few small items I would get caught by the bored employee pretending to watch. To say nothing of, say, buying one 15lb bag of cat food and four 20lb bags, and scanning the 15lb bag five times. Even if I were caught, would the bored teenager at Target really call the cops, or would he just accept I made a mistake and make me ring it up again? It's zero risk.
Why do these companies accept these downsides? Because they'd rather lose goods to shoplifting than pay employees, their losses to self-checkout theft are less than the cost of paying a cashier. They could hire greeters and cart checkers, like Costco does, but they don't, because they lose less to shoplifting than they would have to pay greeters and cart checkers.
Companies are not accepting these downsides. Many places I see are now employing full-time security guards to prevent theft, are closing self checkout locations (my local Walmart has closed all self-checkout locations and has people checking customer receipts on exit), and has gates to prevent people leaving without going through a checkout. Any store which is unable to adequately prevent losses are closing. Brooklyn has losing 50 different chain stores in the past year. Companies are reacting to increased theft and are shutting down unprofitable stores. The losses of accidental check out are negligible to people deliberately stealing significant dollar amounts of items from retailers.
SomethingMusic
3d ago
You're right this is not clear, I'll admit to this thought being a little half baked but I want to get it out before I forgot or moved on to other things.
I would assume, based on this, that the increase in selfishness then, would be found in the, non-marginalized, non-favored, demographics, but my vague understanding of the spike in shoplifting is that this is not the case.
My argument is when governance stop enforcing laws unilaterally and starts responding to perverse incentives, that all parties start switching to self interest over mutual growth. In a game theory matrix, the best but 'unstable' outcome is both the government and constituents do wats best for each other, when one party defects for one reason or another, they both slide to following self interest, creating a more stable or predictable, but significantly less beneficial, environment.
I think government action, or often inaction, is probably contributing to the rise in the overtness of these behaviors, but I am not sure the mechanism is any more complicated than, some people will act up if you remove the consequences from their actions.
Why do you think governments are selectively enforcing laws? And what are the consequences of the government making these deliberate choices?
SomethingMusic
4d ago
Selfishness doesn't always come at significant cost to someone else, but I'd argue the choice to pick former over the ladder does imply some amount of selfishness in the term of short term gain over long term benefit.
SomethingMusic
27d ago
Why America's social policy is not helping the poor
There's a section of Youtube lately that is focusing on the faces of poverty in America. Not in a predatory way like 'get rich quick' influences, crypto scammers, and redpill adjacent-sphere individuals like Andrew Tate who are looking to exploit the desperate poor to make profit, but rather to shine a light on the mindset of poverty in America.
One of the most recent videos is by Andrew Callaghan interview and documentary about the Kia Boys, a group of young teenagers around New Haven notorious for stealing and lifting Kia's and Hyundais who had a vulnerability in their system allowing easy theft. It's a fascinating watch, but what's most interesting is how they want to spend the money they earn from carjacking. Not to support their families, not to pay for college or to get a GED, but rather to consume the latest fashion trends and to aspire to selfish hedonism.
Another youtuber is tackling American consumer debt and looks at how consumer choices end them in significant, and often insurmountable debt without extreme lifestyle and person changes. Caleb Hammer interviews people (in a fairly obnoxious and click-baity style) in significant loan and credit card debt, breaks down their finances, and tries to get them on a budget with a varying amount of success. The most common factor of the guests he has on his show is eating out- for most of his guests, almost 33% of most of their monthly income is eating out at various establishments and other spending that does not significantly increase their quality of life. Many of his guests would have significant personal income if they could have some self-control in their consumptive habits.
The problem America is currently facing is not entirely related to HBD, which is a low hanging fruit for discussing antisocial behavior. Rather, it is the culmination of various American policies which have created an underclass which sucks endless resources and only returns crime. It is plenty possible to gainfully employ low intelligence people into socially acceptable positions even as technology improves and our AI overlords come near. In fact, it would probably significantly increase the quality of life of many jobs having lower intelligence people working menial tasks to the best of their ability alongside more trained and capable individuals. The problem is that we have created a society in which there is not enough incentive or will to create the stability necessary to turn around these neighborhoods and communities.
This is the same problem America had in the occupation of Afganistan. A true occupation and social change would need significant more support and time than what the American politics around. It would probably need a full generation to be educated as well as an extreme prejudice to crackdown on Islamic extremism for Afganistan to actually significantly change, maybe 40-60 years.
Unfettered illegal immigration further strangles poverty-stricken America. The social resources are stretched thinner, to the point our politicians decided it's better to serve incoming illegals than their own constituents on the off-chance they're willing to work the menial jobs for well below livable wage for the area. Of course it helps the government are subsidizing migrants to the tune of $350 per day, or $127,750 per year per migrant which would launch them almost into the top 10% of earners in the United States.
So the question remains, what can be done? It's quite possible liberal policy is somewhat correct but doesn't go far enough. Instead of social security checks, benefits should be more tied between work programs and corporations. Imagine that individuals in section housing have to work at Amazon fulfilment centers. Perhaps the government and Amazon could strike up a deal that with enough workers, Amazon could lower the throughput per worker (to increase livability) in exchange for a tax subsidy to offset the cost of having to hire a non-optimum amount of workers. People in section housing could be bussed to the job, and also have regular police presence and social workers more intimately involved in their lives along with people helping them understand budgeting. It would require insane amounts of manpower, but it would also be the first step in actually beginning to address the problems of the slums.
SomethingMusic
11d ago
Maybe people are feeling well?
SomethingMusic
27d ago
I always find it a pity that CS Lewis' most successful work is Narnia series, considering so much of what he wrote exploring the human condition is so eloquent and excellent.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
There is a plethora of factors that is infecting all of media, resulting in subpar writing. I would push back a bit in that games like Red Dead 2, The last of us (at least part 1, maybe part 2), It Takes Two, Control/Alan Wake 2, Balders Gate, Cyberpunk etc. all have reasonably coherent and compelling storytelling from the last few years.
So part of your reasoning has to come from separating the wheat from the chaff. There's simply MORE video games being released with varying degrees of writing quality. Of course, many game don't worry much about the writing quality and are still successful (Balatro doesn't have a plot, for example), so writing doesn't determine if a game sells well as much as one might think. Market saturation really does make it more difficult. The barrier of entry of making a game and publishing a game has become much lower, so more people are making games on the off chance they make an insane return on investment.
But let's pretend to ignore that for a bit. I believe 'creative' commercial arts has a too many cooks problem. So many people want to put their mark on a game and implement their ideas into a game. The great works of the past had a few people working on a project - Shakespeare, Tokien, Stolzheneizhen, Wagner, Mozart, are all singular people who had maybe one or two additional contributors in the creation of their works. Video games have hundreds of people included in making a game which can create too much noise. This makes some sense as games are much larger and require a lot more additive details than the historic games you reference.
Another problem is voice acting in modern games force succinct writing - now that major games are all fully voiced, it caused a sudden change in how game characters are written. The biggest example for me was the difference between the characters in FF9 and then in FF10, where in 9, characters had to be unique through how they're written creating dynamic, nuanced and unique characters. FF10's characters weren't nearly as dramatic because of the difficulty of writing for recorded voice.
While blue tribe organizations like Sweet Baby probably has a negative effect on modern game writing, I think it's fairly minimal considering the volume and quantity of games produced.
SomethingMusic
26d ago
I somewhat agree and disagree. I think 'dead' time can be repurposed over time, if not to enhance productivity but instead to do something marginally more constructive, such as reading a book or picking up a room a little bit. Assuming you don't replace it with TV/vidya/low hanging fruit.
I think 6 days is too short of a time to have any significant effects or adjustment. A month or more might be a better sample.
SomethingMusic
27d ago
He had a recent interview with Lex, apparently it was a false allegation because he was coming into some HBO $$ for a documentary film he created with Jonah Hill and others.
SomethingMusic
25d ago
I don't even want to imagine what it's like trying to drive in urban India. Of course, my poor American perception of India is bifurcated between 'enlightened' gurus whose philosophy saves humanity, people living in extreme poverty bathing in cow dung, and the people trying to scam me from call centers.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
I call this 'city insanity' in which urban dwellers over fetishize what rural homeowners know as destructive pests. Squirrels, Rabbits, and Possums are other frequent pests that urbanites consider needing special protection. I believe it's some weird combination of personification and lack of personal experience that create these attitudes.
SomethingMusic
26d ago
You're missing the forest for the trees. You're focusing on Amazon as a company rather than the issue of finding undereducated, isolated, an unemployed young men/women an attempt to integrate into society proper as a successful alternative to violence, drugs, and petty crime. It doesn't have to be Amazon, just any job that doesn't require a high level of previous training and education.
The other aforementioned people you created to dismiss my idea don't necessarily need the program I'm proposing, it's not like those people are about to resort to criminal behavior or aren't going to be assisted by other government programs or are incapable of finding work themselves.
Having that experience on my resume would make me less likely to get a real job (to say nothing of the opportunity costs, where I could be using that time to upskill or expand my resume) and more likely to stay dependent upon the system for life.
Could you expand on this? I feel like this is just rageposting instead of an actual example. Also, you don't necessarily need to put work on your resume if it's something temporary while looking for a permanent position.
Of course you're under no obligation to provide an alternative, but poopooing something just because you don't like my general idea doesn't really disprove what I'm getting at, either.
SomethingMusic
16d ago
Basil, Mint, Rosemary (not all at once)
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
I'm not a priest nor an apologist, but this reasoning seems incomplete-
The God of the signifier, the God who turns everything upside down. Ancient commentators, in traditions as diverse as neoplatonism and Buddhism, recognized a problem: if God is perfect, unchanging, atemporal, mereologically simple, then how was it metaphysically possible for him to give rise to this temporal, dynamic, fallen, fractured creation? How did The One give rise to The Many? The orthodox answer is that “He did it out of love”
Love is partially the answer, but as you observed it is rather incomplete. The traditional Catholic response is that free will and original sin, which causes suffering, is part of His divine plan of giving people free will and the autonomy to disobey him. Imagine for a second that you have no choice but to worship a deity, is that actual worship? Is following a law with a gun pointed to your head a good law? Free will and its consequences of suffering ultimately stems from the truth is that adoration without choice is not worship.
I understand your conflict about Christianity, but it seems a lot of your conflict comes from the popular social media representation of Catholicism. CS Lewis points this out in the Screwtape letters:
One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread but through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes I our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather in oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print.
This quote also addresses the next thing you mentioned - the declining attendance and participation of the Church. I agree that it is a sad state of affairs that church attendance is largely the invalid and the old. However, I also see it as a chance for the Church to realign itself to church teaching instead of chasing the leaving masses. The 'trad catholic' you see and push against online is, as you see, disingenuous tik tok coomer bait for lost meant to spend their simp bucks on their OF equivalent. However, I see the performative aspect is rooted in a desperate desire to get back to the Church forms that go back to its foundation. Even though the pope has been cracking down on Latin mass, I highly suggest trying to attend one in your area if it is still allowed to be performed.
From what I've read of your criticism, your problem is the state of your local church and the online personas that 'promote' it rather than church teachings or doctrine. I would argue that if you think the church is so lacking in direction, volunteer and participate in your church as much as possible! I am a big believer of being the change you want to see in the world, where you see decline, I see opportunity (if I have time, I currently am pretty swamped).
Attempts to give art a rational “purpose”, saying that it “teaches us moral lessons” or “provides entertainment”, all sound so lame because they are so obviously false. The purpose of art is to bring us into communion with The Beyond - that’s it, that’s the long and short of it. To make art is to attempt to do magic, and to be an artist is to be a person who yearns strongly for this Beyond, at least on an unconscious level. If the artist does not ultimately believe in the possibility of transcending this realm, he simply dooms himself to frustration - but the fundamental animating impulse of his actions does not change. The aesthetic is what remains when the vulnerable overt metaphysical claims of religion have been burned away: under threat of irrationality, I am compelled to reject God, free will, and the immortality of the soul, but you cannot intrude on the private inner domain of my sentiment and my desire.
Maybe because these aren't the purposes of art? Art's primary goal is communication. To convey an idea or thought that words fail to fully transmit. Beethoven's 5th symphony communications the light triumphing over darkness. The Sistine chapel exists to celebrate and communicate the love of the divine Christ. One of the reasons why I'm somewhat okay with AI taking over productive is because it will fulfill the commercial and consumptive aspects of art, leaving the artists who are looking to express and idea that is difficult to put into words.
Can you expand how the failure of the artist leads you to compelled to reject God? I fail to see the logical connection there, but I may be misreading something.
Unlike you, I am not particularly worried about the end of the Church, but actually rather hopeful that the 'decline' of the current church is a rejection of the modernizing reform from Vatican II and for the church to find its way to better represent the core beliefs of the church. Catholicism has been historically persecuted and actively hunted for long stretches of time, so the latest pushback against the church is nothing new and in the long term not something I find particularly disheartening.
SomethingMusic
25d ago
I'd donate for that. Give me some time and proper motivation and I could probably write it.
SomethingMusic
25d ago
Was this in India or in England?
I live in a city where the road rules are decaying every day. Red light? Suggestion? Stop sign? Suggestion. Left turn from the right turn lane on a red light with oncoming traffic? Fuck you get out of my way. Speed limits? Square the number and you get the speed of the average driver.
I hate driving, but the alternative is a bus fill with drug addled obnoxious lowlifes who are one bad look away from starting a fight on a bus. Also they never run on time and are simply inefficient ways to travel.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
I generally don't participate on ground level wellness Wednesdays, but I'd like to announce some personal breakthroughs!
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I'm getting married! We've been engaged/planning for several months already but it's finally beginning to feel real. There are a number of hurdles to overcome, but ultimately I'm quite happy with the person I chose and that we'll be able to work together to have a healthy relationship.
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I have spent my entire life perusing classical music on the professional level, and I feel like I've had personal breakthroughs with my playing. Some minor setup changes and a couple successful concerts has increased my confidence as a performer, especially from last year where I had some abysmal concerts/auditions where I was quite unhappy with how I played. I need to practice more to help increase consistency but I feel a lot more confident performing.
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I finally tackled my health a bit and got back on asthma medication which has helped my lung capacity significantly. I really want to get back into exercising but time constraints/energy make it difficult. It has some strange side effects, but the upside for me outweighs any downside.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
The adaption of Islamic catchphrases and memetics is not just due to the integration and adoption of Islam and Arab communities onto the western internets, but also a subversive statement against both Red and Blue political bastion. The Red tribe, especially evengelical christians, are way too pro-Israel for the average terminally online pro-Palistinain. On the other hand, Islam's patriarchial beliefs also appeal to the anti-woke pro-feminist movement while also still being Blue coded, as Blue tribers are overwhelmingly on the side of Palestinians, which was demonstrated recently in the city I reside in.
Islam is still a significant threat to Western values, though these values are being abandoned as quickly in modern 1st world governing bodies. A lot of the appeal of Islam is aligned to the exhaustion of devalued men and workers in modern society. Using force when reason doesn't work to achieve your goals, trodding on rights of individuals for the sake of self-preservation and the patriarchy and finding an ideology not of mutual servitude but of domination and strength has a lot of appeal to disaffected western men.
SomethingMusic
27d ago
It was a spitball idea, not one that I think should be implemented verbatim into government policy. There needs to be a way for at risk and poor people to have constructive outlets and understand the importance and value of gainful employment. If you think its so juvenile, can you think of something better?
SomethingMusic
26d ago
That is a good point. It's easy to skip the introductory literature of an author for their more comprehensive works once you know the depth of their writing.
On the other hand, It's not like Smith or Dostoevsky wrote children's stories, so either way can work?
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
They like to live and dig near house foundations. Generally not as bad as other varmints but can be pretty destructive.
SomethingMusic
26d ago
It is a good point, I don't know the breakdown of the money spent on immigration in a place like NY if it's simply housing/food or if it includes translators, lawyers, social workers, etc. I'm sure someone knows, but articles are largely rage bait or too sympathetic to really dig into how these dollars are being spent.
SomethingMusic
1mo ago
This is really cool! Not only a concise summary of some of their philosophies, but how other philosophers supported or rebutted their claims. I been realizing my browsing of the internet, like so many others, is increasingly stagnant and I only frequent about 5-10 websites regularly. Anyone else have some cool websites to check out?
Wow, there's certainly a lot of conversation going on that I guess I've inspired! I apologize I haven't been active as I've been busy with my personal life, so I don't always participate off of surface level comments.
@you-get-an-upvote
Is correct, I posted the OP, not him. The focus on the male side of the lack of participation in the labor force is simply because that's the current headline and more noticeable trend. Population - wide employment participation seems to rarely fully recover after any financial or social crises. Even 7-8 years after the 2008 financial crisis labor participation never recovered. The male participation is more newsworthy, since the past 25 years has seen a 10% decrease of male labor participation compared to the ~3% decrease in female according to FRED. My goal wasn't to focus solely on males, but rather point out the most noteworthy trends and the underlying reasons behind them.
Whether males or females should increase their participation in employment is another discussion entirely.
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