This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
No direct culture war implications, at least not directly left/right. However, this was easily predictable by readers of Michael Crichton or Ayn Rand, both names in the “up/down” culture war (to coin a phrase).
Crichton’s most famous work, Jurassic Park, was largely about chaos theory. When working with a complex system, that is to say one driven by logic and rules, an outlier can bring down a house of cards through emergent effects. John Hammond not paying for a team of programmers led to dinos eating people. Today’s a mundane version of that.
Rand had a lot to say about innovative producers versus free riders, and apropos to today, about smart people who can create or repair machines versus everyday people who can just use their interfaces until something goes wrong. When it does, the cynical cry of, “Who is John Galt?” escapes their lips.
The American IT industry was hit hard by COVID. Businessmen, C-suite execs, saw their people remoting in from home and trying not to return to the office. These execs, many of them free riders, realized they could halve their costs by hiring remote MSPs from out of country for IT and relying on Crowdstrike to be their security bottom line. A flood of IT layoffs happened this past year, deflating IT wages and making entry level jobs scarce.
Then today, only people with the admin password or a modicum of critical thought could restore the most well-protected systems. Today, companies across the globe learned who their John Galts were, their Eddie Willers, their Dagny Taggarts.
Although, as to the left/right culture war, imagine if this or worse had happened on Election Day and all the votes had to be hand-counted.
Crowdstrike was the company who the DNC had analyze their network and blame Russia for Guccifer 2.0. I can write up a conspiracy theory about this being a result of the deep state panicking over the failed Trump assassination and forcing a patch to create a backdoor to cause a future major outage to maintain control pretty easily.
More options
Context Copy link
I do think that it is slightly more complicated than that. First off all the lay offs of 80% of Twitter showed everyone that you don't need that many people to run a website. It was predicted by multiple of people that if Twitter didn't stop working other big tech companies would follow. Then there is the whole deal with Section 174 also that has affected the bottom line. Tech isn't unaffected by higher interest rates, when money was cheap they could amass people to be ready for "initiatives". Well not anymore.
I can give you the point of the free riders. The worst thing about them is that they actively make our tech worse to promote some number go up on their OKRs. Google is making search worse so people stay longer trying to find what they came to google for and watch more ads. Windows search always hits Bing when you do a search locally on your computer, just that it increments a number so a free rider can get a bonus. Just to take examples of search.
Your Section 174 link was fascinating. I feel that it underplayed the back story. It was sketched very briefly, but appears to go like this:
There are fiscal responsibility rules. If the US government passes a tax cut, the law should also include a tax increase in the future to balance the budget over the longer term. Legislators game this by writing a future tax increase that is stupid. Yes, it is in the law, but there is a nudge and wink that it will be repealed before it takes effect. This time the repeal never happened, so the deliberately stupid tax increase goes into effect.
This compounding disfunction bodes ill for the future of the US.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link