I think this is far too triumphalist. Many great artists did it at least in part for the money, and as any amateur dramatics society could tell you, motivation to produce art has very little correlation to the quality of that art. Look at Anthony Trollope, Dickens, Shakespeare! They wrote by the word, or for commission, as did many many others.
And of course there were people in the comments complaining about being told to paint/write/compose in their spare time, insisting that there's no way they can be expected to produce anything of value when they're exhausted after a long day in work. Again, I can't help but think – skill issue?
Look, I can only speak for myself. When the working day is over, I'm zonked. My work is research and development, and it genuinely uses up all my brainpower. Boo hoo, I'm so special, yadda yadda, but it's true. I wrote several novels back when I had the time and now when the work day ends I just want to crawl home and watch something unchallenging. I know you wrote a novel lately and that's lovely, but others aren't the same.
All of which has to sit alongside the fact that writing is something that one does, hopefully, learn. The extent to which it's teachable is over-rated because people like to dream, but lots of good authors needed some mentoring and some experience to write their really good stuff. And that takes time, and energy, and space.
TL;DR: "If you'd like to try and make beautiful things like you did at university, but you're too tired because your job sucks out all your energy and creativity, then I guess it must suck to suck, loser" seems neither necessary nor fair.
EDIT: Lower heat, what you are observing is a filter that basically removes anyone who doesn't have sufficient time and energy left over to run a side hustle along their main job. Deciding that almost all the stuff that gets filtered out would have been crap seems very much to be a just-world bias. It's equally possible that lots of people who would have made great things or even just pleasant things are getting filtered out, and that it's not economically possible to do much about that now, and that this is sad.
Corvos
1hr ago
Upvoting requires you to be logged in. I think it's a usual rule of thumb that accounts : lurkers is approximately a 1:100 ratio.
Corvos
5hr ago
It's not that it's not literally the same coins, it's that people get out more than they put in. It was not earned, in the most literal way.
Specifically, the report found that a single man who earned the average wage ($66,100 in 2023 dollars) every year of his adult life before retiring in 2020 at age 65, would have paid about $466,000 in taxes into the Social Security and Medicare systems, but can expect to receive benefits equal to $640,000—or an additional $174,000—over the course of his retirement.
A single female with average earnings ($66,100 in 2023 dollars) retiring in 2020 at age 65 would pay $466,000 in taxes but is likely collect $722,000 in benefits.
The imbalance is mostly driven by medicare; social security is much closer to breaking-even or even losing you money if you are a high earner, although married couples get more under certain conditions.
Ultimately the scheme was designed in such a way as to rip off the taxpayers of the future to promise gibs now. Those future taxpayers are all grown up and recognise that they are being ripped off and that the economics are going to leave them holding the bag.
Corvos
10hr ago
My old company took in a bunch of Russians fleeing potential draft at the start of the war. One was a bit of a dick but the rest were great workers and are doing well AFAIK.
Corvos
1d ago
Sworn men have always been looked on more kindly than mercenaries. For that matter, so have people who change companies every two years. People distrust those whose loyalties seem too loose.
Corvos
1d ago
I think I set myself up for this, but, um, the talent floor is very low for the way I sing it...
That's fair, I see how that would cause upset. I tried to search wayback for a better dictionary (the Oxford Dictionary) but had a little trouble.
I will stand by my assertion that the more expansive definition was in medical use before COVID.
EDIT: Oxford dictionary 1989 uses "A preparation of the causative organism or substance of a disease (or its products) that has been specially treated for use in vaccination" for vaccine and "The inoculation of an individual with any vaccine in order to induce or increase immunity." (emphasis mine) for vaccination. That to my mind suggests it has always been acknowledged that effectiveness of a vaccine is on a sliding scale and that vaccine is a type of treatment not a type of effect.
Corvos
1d ago
This is mistaken. I was studying this stuff in 2010. There were lots of vaccine studies for malaria and the results showed them to be bad vaccines that produced some-but-minimal utility. As such they were not rolled out. They were still vaccines.
Vaccine has always been used to describe a category of things that provoke the immune system with relevant disease material in some fashion to provide a targeted response and resistance to future infection.
The common usage was based on being exposed to the best vaccines that made it through testing. Did TPTB lean on this to drum up support for a vaccine of low efficacy? Yes. Did that mean the COVID and flu vaccines weren’t vaccines, or that the dictionary definition changed? No.
Corvos
1d ago
In practice, yes, but I’m saying I think that you’ve got the causation wrong. People think that if they’re working a small but necessary job in a company where the CEO gets 1e9 then they should be getting at least 1e8. They don’t object to the leader of a big company being rich, they object to someone being paid 10000x the menial staff who actually make the place run.
Especially since, let’s be honest, terrible CEOs are common and cost basically as much as the regular kind. My founder is a very business oriented guy who made his money as a director in a world famous startup, and even he vents about some of the CEOs he’s dealt with who couldn’t find their arse with both hands.
Corvos
2d ago
I suspect in practice most people in private would agree to a hierarchy in which, say, in a software company the janitors are important but less important than the eggheads, who are important but less important than the CEO. In the privacy of their own heads, I think a lot of low-level workers envisage a hierarchy where the janitors earn X, the eggheads earn 2X, and the CEO earns 3X.
I think that’s not quite right. The intuition is that if the billionaire couldn’t be a billionaire without (broadly) your labour, then you should be recognised as a small but vital part of the whole operation and you deserve more than the bare minimum it would take to replace you with the next available economic unit.
It’s the transition from absolute value (the value of your work to the enterprise) to marginal value (the value of your work relative to the next best candidate) that people find confusing and upsetting.
Striking is a power play but it’s also a way of saying, “see? Your company literally can’t function without the work I do, so it’s bullshit that you make billions from it and I make $5 an hour”.
Corvos
2d ago
Religiosity is higher in US than Europe, so absent other considerations, if most US employees are essentially atheist or Non-Judgemental Therapeutic Deity then in Europe it will be more so.
Not quite sure that checks out - religion is more controversial in US than in Europe precisely because religiosity is higher, and South Europe is more Catholic.
Corvos
2d ago
Nobody said that. But yes, you’re bound morally and legally to raise your child. With an ordinary child you are rewarded by watching it become a full adult with all the faculties and majesty of Man (plus hopefully certain more pragmatic things like elderly care).
Looking at it from the outside, the labour of raising a developmentally disabled child is far higher and the rewards far lower. It’s no wonder people balk.
Corvos
2d ago
Today many Christians would presumably add, "Today, we have greater scientific understanding, and therefore do know what Augustine did not, which is that life begins at conception."
But that would be a very motivated reading. ‘Life’ is either a chemical process that has continued unmolested for 200 million years, living gamete to pluripotent cell to living gamete, or else is something that sperm and eggs don’t have but late term infants do.
“Life begins at conception”, is a convention, and “life is something that slowly accumulates as a foetus develops”, is also a convention. You cannot choose between them scientifically.
There were other cases. The most obvious one is perhaps the case where the dictionary swiftly ‘updated’ its definition of recession to include a non-standard but not totally made up one that didn’t embarrass Joe Biden as he campaigned for reelection.
Plus the Wikipedia edit wars around whether or not Kamala Harris was “border czar” when it would embarrass her (though that’s more two-sided) and the redefinitions of “Cultural Marxism” from part of the Wikipedia series on Marxism to “Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory”.
Meriam-Webster’s dictionary definitions veer left and include left-wing extemporising: https://archive.vn/FI0tu
Wikipedia notably excludes most right-wing publications from being neutral sources while keeping lots of left-wing ones.
It’s a common pattern: the activists rush forward, then the respectable “we just report the world” orgs immediately provide cover by recognising activist claims and laundering them into respectability. So Joe Public thinks “I don’t remember that word meaning that”, goes to the dictionary, see it does mean that (as of 10 seconds ago), and goes, “ah, guess I must have been wrong and the Republicans are making a big fuss over nothing”.
Do all of these individual actions have plausible explanations? Yes. Would they rush to change the definition of certain words to help Trump in the same way, or consider right-wing usages and mores valid in the way they do left-wing ones? Not a chance in Hell.
Corvos
4d ago
Certainly. I was under the impression a low/mid level true believer going rogue could change the data, maybe with another couple of people turning a blind eye, which is why I put the likelihood of it being true at say 10%, but I haven't worked somewhere like google and I'd be interested if you think that's wrong.
Corvos
4d ago
To be fair, people are primed to be skeptical of this stuff because of all the incidents when definitions in online dictionaries and wikipedia would quietly change overnight to back up what had been said by some presidental candidate or politician.
I agree with much of this. Sacrifice is necessary for any important endeavour - in a strike, for example, an employee forfeits pay because they hope to get more later, or even out of pure spite to send the message that they aren't willing to put up with intolerable conditions simply because it's technically still better then the alternative.
I've sacrificed to some degree for politics. I had a very hard time for a year or so, and put myself into some very difficult positions, trying to stop my local part of the university falling to wokeness. I held out for a decent while, and perhaps I blunted the worst of it, but I mostly failed. I failed in part because I ignored the advice of my working class formerly-leftist co-conspirator to go after the people in question for having pretty unsavoury associations with local left wing movements. There was a pretty good chance we could have caught them between being disloyal to the cause and affirming anti-semitism in front of the university. I said, "we don't do that, even though they do", and my friend respected my judgement, but I'm still a little haunted by that failure and the consequences of my desire to do the right thing.
In general, my belief is that political power is based on having both a popular element and a machine. A popular element alone is powerless: they can vote, but they can't choose the options on offer, they can't force the power structures of their country into giving them more than token gestures, and authority figures will be punished for appealing to them. A well-funded, well-oiled machine alone is weak: they can push, they can lobby, they can have quiet conversations, but if politicians are forced to (or want to) disclaim them and their desires in public, they will be limited in what they can achieve. So you need both.
I think this is what @Soteriologian refers to as Zerglings and the Overmind, respectively, and that's what I mean by 'organising'.
The main problem of politics is that maintaining both of those things requires you to do stuff that is icky. So for building a big popular movement, you often want someone like a Trump, whose achievements and gumption I genuinely respect but who I also consider dishonest, venal, and rather thick. You need to be able to cut through by exaggerating, you need to be able to fudge and distract when an issue is going to split your coalition, you need to be able to push your sins and failures onto a loyal follower so that you can be the beloved figurehead, etc.
For maintaining your machine, you need money, power, favours. You have to be able to work with some rather grim people. You have to give up stuff you feel strongly about in exchange for stuff you feel more strongly about. You have to enforce negative consequences on some people who are perfectly nice and probably decent in their way, because they are fighting on the other side and you need to signal that people should be careful before they try that or you simply need to get allies into their seats.
Look at Trump's 1.8 billion fund: it was clumsily executed, but it was the beginnings of being able to fund a machine that could give aid and comfort to Right wingers who fall in battle, the same way that the Democrats gave aid and comfort to all those people who ended up with Yale tenure. And it was scuppered because older senators' revulsion at the graft involved surpassed their desire not to have the country by run by Leftists.
Being a politician means being a sin-eater, for a cause worth it. That's their sacrifice. And it's why I have very little patience for the "do what's right and die free" brigade, because they're actively undermining these efforts and the wellbeing of their countrymen to maintain their own personal feelings of virtue. I don't mean that anything goes of course - when all's said and done, you still do have to be better than the other lot and not just axiomatically so, or what was the whole thing for?
Within the constraints of my own sense of self-preservation and a somewhat conflict-averse personality, I believe in pragmatism. That means you don't affirm pretty things that are no use and don't help, and it means you don't martyr yourself (or others) for nothing because that doesn't help either. Sometimes it might be time to die on that hill, but pick the hill carefully and remember that living on the hill in a pretty hobbit-hole is better.
"Be ye wise as serpents, and innocent as doves" is closer to what I try to aim at, though admittedly with a ratio of 2:1.
Sorry, I'm not trying to be a dick, although I know it's coming out that way, I'm just wearied of the endless conversations on the Right which run approximately:
A: we need to actually organise and compromise on our principles to get results.
B: not organising and not compromising is my principle. How about a fruitless gesture instead?
A: will it help? it never has before
B: the willingness to make a fruitless gesture even if it won't help is the most important thing in the world
A: that sounds like no. do you actually care about making any real change in circumstances?
B: not if it would require me to do anything I'm not already doing
It's very frustrating when half the people who agree with me on concrete things that are going wrong would literally rather eat a bullet than help me try to fix them, or even rather than admit that what they've been doing hasn't got anywhere.
They were beautiful to me. I got shortlisted for a reasonably prestigious prize once, but most of the rest weren’t objectively great. I would really, really like the chance to try and do better someday, but even beyond that, I think that making things is good for its own sake. Maybe my stuff would have improved if I'd had more time to spend on it, maybe it would improve if I could go back to it after a decade in industry.
I don't suggest that we should fund just anyone who asks off the taxes of those who do tiresome, creativity-sucking work. But I do kind of think it's a shame we can't. Lots of the creativity of the 70s came out of super-cheap housing in cities and a dole system that didn't ask too many questions, and I think that the end of that was inevitable and morally just but also killed much of British art, comedy and entrepreneurship (the kind of entrepreneurship that makes genuinely interesting, far-out things rather than just chasing VC funding by jumping on the nearest bandwagon). The system that replaced it, where you only get Arts funding if you're young, black, gay and Marxist doesn't seem like an improvement. The idea that you can tell the Great Artists because they'll crawl over broken glass or because they show amazing talent right out of the box seems similarly suspect.
Some people genuinely never try at all, and maintain the dream that they could have been great by carefully never actually producing anything. Maybe that’s who you’re talking about. But I don't think many/most of the lamenters are like that. Many more like making things but find it hard, and need a bit of space/mentorship - how many people voluntarily pay their hard-earned money for writing courses? Ideally I'd like for them/us to be able to try, and it saddens me that isn't possible.
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