Promoting another Go Fund Me, “Find Eric A Soul”. After working for years to create the world’s most advanced search engine, Schmidt tragically failed to find his lost sense of shared humanity. This appeal, which aims to employ generative AI to provide him with a near, non-abstract connection with society, urgently needs your support.
These are the same people who created the tools accelerating the breakdown of community, epidemic of loneliness, and dismissal of human empathy. You mention their framing of their motivations as being pro-democratic and anti-communist. That's similar to arguments of imperialists in the modern era. Colonization and exploitation in Latin America, Asia, and Africa were necessary to stave off global communism. To believe that thinking, you have to ignore the people in those countries - their lives, their opinions, their aspirations, etc. The West was largely successful in dehumanizing, infantilizing, and villainizing people in the Global South. Now, those in power have expanded their target and we're seeing the same dehumanization campaign being used to smear and dismiss the American worker.
In fairness, I don't think that these people care about democracy (though they undoubtedly loathe communism).
I wouldn't describe Peter Thiel as a good Jeffersonian democrat... Given how quickly Zuck has embraced the Trump camp, saying all the right things to the right people, I wouldn't describe him as principled defender of democracy ever.
But, you are correct in saying that the methods and the behaviors and motivations -- asset stripping of people and society -- are the same, as is the dehumanization.
I absolutely agree; they are inauthentic. A true democracy would mean working people would have as much input in how society operates as the tech billionaire class, but they do not want to disperse power. Their commitment to democracy is as superficial as their devotion to “free speech” which is why they can decry communism while advocating for 996 without a hint of irony.
It's the worst of Big Oil combined with the worst of Walmart, and it's "disruptive" to your capacity to trust representations of reality from the powers that be (this is also called dystopian)
We are ruled by sociopaths who could not care less.
All societies eventually come to be ruled by sociopaths, as, unlike the neurotypical, sociopaths are precisely the people who will do whatever it takes to get power.
This is the kernel of The Iron Law Of Oligarchy, as well as Alexander Tytler's observations about the fall of societies. Because sociopaths see everything as a zero-sum, no holds barred winner-take all game, their ability to form loyalty is non-existent, and their ability to even form last coalitions is severely limited.
Just a few paragraphs in and I'm already reminded of a different, but, as I feel, closely related modern internet pest - paywalling.
I can't even open a single, solitary article you linked (I'm generalizing, I just tried one, but I'm too annoyed to try any further) without instantly getting pestered with either some newsletter - subscription BS pestering me or a subscription banner, blocking me from reading.
Not. A single. Fucking. Article.
Not talking about "yeah alright, read maybe that ONE or TWO articles someone linked and be on your way", but not even a single one to check a source.
They need to capitalize every goddamn klick I do in this cursed digital space and unlike books I can't just visit a library or get a scan if need to when it comes to journalistic content.
It's horrible, I hate how the Internet is and it only gets worse.
I actually have a hot take about this: Ads are, conceptually, genuinely good, but terrible in practical terms.
They’ve destroyed user experiences, resulting in people “opting out” with adblockers, meanwhile we have a rapacious digital ads ecosystem that acts as a rent-seeker, combined with a multi-polarization of the Web around a handful of big platforms that consume the disproportionate majority of all advertising revenue.
When you think about it, ads are — at least, to an extent, and certainly imperfectly, and perhaps this is just my platonic ideal — predictable (if you have a CPM of X and you get Y traffic, you revenue will be Z), scalable (if your CPM is X and your traffic is Y, but the next month it’s N, it goes up by the difference between Y and N, multiplied by X), and repeatable (there shouldn’t be any major disparities between similar months within a close time frame).
But the various factors I described have basically undermined all of that.
Also, if we’re talking about things like YouTube, it’s also a market where the sellers (the content creator) doesn’t get to set their own prices — which makes it a really bad market.
I would greatly prefer to pay a (very) small fee to read stuff without ads. If there was a way I could pay say $0.001 per article and read it ad and nag free that would be great. I figure that's more than most sites would get from ads but $0.001 would probably lead me to spend maybe $1-$2 most days which would be quite affordable.
We kind-of had that with Flattr a few years back, albeit that was a voluntary system.
I guess the problem is that the whole idea of microtransactions and a "nag free" system is kinda contradictory. For the system to actually work, you need to have some friction, otherwise there's no impetus to pay. And that would, unless we centralize around one company or platform (which would be bad!), mean having accounts and wallets and logins on every site you visit.
And, of course, you wouldn't be able to pay 0.1c at a time, because there's literally no way to do that without processing fees swallowing up the entire transaction, if not more.
Which means depositing enough money with a site so that, after processing fees, there's money left over. Which essentially means you're giving said sites an interest-free loan with indeterminate duration, as it's based on how often and frequently you visit that site.
I imagine this leaves some big accounting questions, too. In NJ, gift card balances can never expire. My MIL has used gift cards that are decades old and they still worked. Other jurisdictions are not too fussy, especially the UK.
Those balances will probably appear as liabilities on a balance sheet, which while not really affecting the actual health of the company, does kinda look bad. And what happens if the company goes bust? Do we have a system that segments that deposit system from company funds, and only disburses them based on actual reads? Actually, that idea kinda makes sense, though I wonder how much the admin costs would be -- and how you make such a system fraud-resistant.
Suppose you have a third-party acting as the guardian of said balances. What happens if it goes bust, like Synapse did? Or there's a technical error where the records of user balances are no longer accurate? And how can you build such a system that deals in really small transactions, without also having massive administration costs that eat into those really small transactions in a way that defeats the overall point.
Also, I feel like if individuals were made to bear the actual cost of reporting, they'd have a shock. For every hundred Valnet-style listicle that someone shat out in 10 minutes, there's one deeply-reported story that perhaps took weeks or months to complete, involved hundreds or thousands of hours of work, and exposed the author to deep legal risk -- and thus likely required the review of lawyers, which also added to the cost.
Suppose 10,000 people each read those stories. The Valnet example might be able to be profitable by charging readers a penny a time. The latter example might cost a dollar.
Obviously, that's fair enough. You have a market and people pay for what they believe is worthwhile. And I think it might actually be healthy for people to understand the cost of what they read, both in terms of the sustainability of journalism, as well as on a psychological level.
The problem with free content is that it essentially removes a mechanism that people used to distinguish between quality in media. In the UK, the Sun (or any red-top tabloid, really) costs less than the FT, or The Guardian, or the Times -- and people paid more because they valued the journalism of those publications more than those in the Red Tops.
It might also encourage publications to do better stuff, in the hope of being able to charge more than a penny per view, swapping volume for higher margins.
Jesus, I can't believe I just wrote a massive comment disagreeing with you, and ended up thinking "yeah, you might actually have a point there..."
Note: I know I probably made some typos, but I'm on the phone right now and this useless Substack - app won't lemme change anything from here. Funny how the very thing used to criticize the Tech Industry still very much represents it.
I'm not sure it's enshittification, more than the fact that this is a very young company that's still working stuff out, and in the beginning spent more on bringing over writers than developing the actual tech. Which, from a business perspective, makes sense.
Substack's analytics are very barebones, but they're not stopping me from writing here, in part because it's a great publishing platform otherwise, but also because that's where a lot of my audience is.
996 culture. Sounds very Japanese Salaryman. But Japan has passed a ton of laws to stop this and mostly succeeded.
Also I thought we were worried about the demographic decline? 996 culture would seem to make it hard to make babies.... and without babies there are no new consumers or workers.
I'm not TBH too fussed about meta firing people. Ideally they would fire 100% and disappear, but fewer employees means less chance of mischief IMHO
There's one major difference tho and that is that in Japan companies don't hire and fire people like they do in China or the US. Quite the contrary, actually.
The idea behind the whole Salaryman model is (or more accuratel, was), that employees trade full loyalty to the company against guaranteed lifelong employment and retirement benefits from the company. Very different, in China, where people are basically treated as disposable and there aren't any retirement plans to begin with.
Be careful not to lump those two countries together, they share some common cultural roots, but are very different societies.
One thing I’ve always wondered about is how Japanese corporate culture has resisted the cultural changes that swept the US in the Jack Welch era (really, the 70s and 80s) that destigmatized layoffs and basically made them socially acceptable, if not something actively encouraged by Wall Street.
It actually did happen to one major company, Sony, and as expected, Sony turned to complete shit.
Whole executive board full of Harvard graduates now too, making Sony a Japanese company run by shitty, line-go-up Western standards. Yikes!
As for the rest of Japan, it's basically because the cultural exchange between Japan and the West is pretty much one-sided, with Japan projecting probably even more soft power than the U.S. by now.
And thank Amaterasu for that dude.
Japan is pretty much culturally self-sufficient, they have their own movies, books, games etc., so there's not much need for U.S. cultural import. That's the main reason why Japanese are notoriously bad at foreign languages, they don't have any pressure to learn them.
Like I'm a German, if I wanna get outside of the pathetic German cultural bubble, I gotta learn foreign languages, especially English and, in my case, Japanese to broaden my escapism even further.
A Japanese person doesn't feel that need as much.
So that's one important point.
Another one comes probably down to straight-up incompatibility when it comes to the value system. In Japan, companies actually don't operate by a "profits and shareholders first" but more along the lines of "we need to equally fulfill our responsibilities towards our clients, our shareholders and society as a whole".
Very different way of operating. You can actually see them state it if you, for example, look into the shareholder reports of CAPCOM, where they often open with a few sentences that state their philosophy of striving to provide financial, and EXPLICITLY, non-financial value.
And this is, as far as I see, a consistent difference that Western companies completely lack. They don't give a shit about clients, fuck society, screw anything but "shareholders".
So of course that kind of attitude won't get far (with exceptions like westernised Sony) in Japan, I mean it's basically Antisocial Personality Disorder as corporate governance.
Yeah, Sony is an outlier. They've historically had a huge presence in my hometown of Liverpool, and over the years we've seen them expand and cutback and expand and cutback some more, just like every other major tech company.
One thing that I think separates the UK, where I'm from, and say France and Germany where labor rights are stronger and layoffs still carry some stigma, is that you guys never had a Thatcher moment -- a point where the entire social contract gets rewritten for the benefit of the few.
That's not to say that these tendencies don't exist in France, or Germany -- but they're not treated as a given as in the UK, or obviously, the US.
I'm obviously biased, because I've been born and raised in Germany, but I feel like we kinda got the worst of both worlds. We have both a ridiculous rigid labor law and basically state-run capitalistic companies.
For example, there was a case of an employee openly stealing money at the company my dad's working at (solid case, it was physical cash and the door control logs had clearly shown it was the person in question).
To this day, the guy's on paid leave and will leave the company with a severance package, because labor law makes it financially unattractive to fire him for literally stealing.
And this translates to "regular" reasons to fire someone, like plain incompetence. Of course we all know here that being incompetent is an advantage in most U.S. companies too, and that morons never pay for the destruction they cause, but there's at least the possibility for it to happen.
I think in Germany, larger companies are seriously hindered in their flexibility by very rigid labor laws and the "Betriebsräte" (works council), which in theory are supposed to advantage the small guys, but in practice only work to keep the status quo, which means Baby Boomers with the longest employment history.
You might argue that it's not about those laws or institutions, but how they get corrupted by the people abusing them over time. But "it would work if only human nature was different" isn't a very good argument for them...
As for the state-run companies, the best example is probably the Deutsche Bahn (basically what used to be British Rai). In theory it has been privately, in real world the sole owner is the German state.
Which leads to our clueless ministry for transport fucking up properly governing the company and the Deutsche Bahn itself operating on a profit - maximizing motto, leading to the decay of rail infrastructure and probably the most expensive, most unreliable rail transportation in Europe (I heard from a friend from Larkhana that it's at least better compared to Pakistan, because the trains at least come some of the time lol).
And I haven't begun writing about our automobile industry...
PS: I hope you don't mind me fully indulging in my ADHD - fueled ramblemania, I can't help it, I feel at home here.^^
We are seeing the social contract getting rewritten in europe (including the uk) right now, as the rulers have no priority other than The War On Russia.
Oh man, I love China. Shenzhen is perhaps the coolest city I've ever been to, and I very nearly moved there a few years ago. But that's a story for another day.
I don't personally think he made it notably worse. I'm not going to go out and say he improved it, but I think firing 80% of twitter had almost zero negative consequences.
To be fair, I don't think the layoffs had a direct effect on the quality of Twitter, insofar as the culture shift of the Elon era was of vastly, vastly greater significance.
Alienating ad buyers and forcing Elon to pivot to subs meant that, by definition, he had to disadvantage those who didn't buy subs.
Despite me having nearly 7,000 followers on Twitter, it's driven fewer views to this newsletter than DuckDuckGo -- in part because many of my followers have left for bluer skies, but also because I refuse to pay for a checkmark.
Agree with much of what you said but it wasn’t that long ago that coal mines paid workers with company scrip and just a couple of generations before that flat out slavery. No child labor laws etc. So bad working conditions aren’t all that new with the caveat that they started getting worse after Reagan became President. Not to mention what happened under Stalin and Mao. Humanity is generally good but there’s always been a very dark side. Keep up the good work, you are a very good writer.
I think one of my biggest sins as a writer, especially in writing this newsletter, is that my UK perspective pokes through far too often. This is a really good example of that, because in the UK, working conditions *have* declined, especially since the 2010 coalition that brought in things like zero-hour contracts and at-will employment for the first two years of a person’s time at a company.
Course, if you’re American, you’ve pretty much always had at-will employment and zero-hour contracts.
Promoting another Go Fund Me, “Find Eric A Soul”. After working for years to create the world’s most advanced search engine, Schmidt tragically failed to find his lost sense of shared humanity. This appeal, which aims to employ generative AI to provide him with a near, non-abstract connection with society, urgently needs your support.
#pray4eric
I remember Eric when he was still at Sun Microsystems -- he had no soul even back then. He did not lose his sense of shared humanity, he never had it
Cripes, there’s no hope for him. He’s a golem…
These are the same people who created the tools accelerating the breakdown of community, epidemic of loneliness, and dismissal of human empathy. You mention their framing of their motivations as being pro-democratic and anti-communist. That's similar to arguments of imperialists in the modern era. Colonization and exploitation in Latin America, Asia, and Africa were necessary to stave off global communism. To believe that thinking, you have to ignore the people in those countries - their lives, their opinions, their aspirations, etc. The West was largely successful in dehumanizing, infantilizing, and villainizing people in the Global South. Now, those in power have expanded their target and we're seeing the same dehumanization campaign being used to smear and dismiss the American worker.
In fairness, I don't think that these people care about democracy (though they undoubtedly loathe communism).
I wouldn't describe Peter Thiel as a good Jeffersonian democrat... Given how quickly Zuck has embraced the Trump camp, saying all the right things to the right people, I wouldn't describe him as principled defender of democracy ever.
But, you are correct in saying that the methods and the behaviors and motivations -- asset stripping of people and society -- are the same, as is the dehumanization.
I absolutely agree; they are inauthentic. A true democracy would mean working people would have as much input in how society operates as the tech billionaire class, but they do not want to disperse power. Their commitment to democracy is as superficial as their devotion to “free speech” which is why they can decry communism while advocating for 996 without a hint of irony.
It's the worst of Big Oil combined with the worst of Walmart, and it's "disruptive" to your capacity to trust representations of reality from the powers that be (this is also called dystopian)
I’d argue it’s even worse than that.
They don't hate you, any more than a farmer hates the sheep that he shears or fleeces.
The difference is that farmers and sheep are different beasts entirely. We all bleed the same blood, man.
We are ruled by sociopaths who could not care less.
All societies eventually come to be ruled by sociopaths, as, unlike the neurotypical, sociopaths are precisely the people who will do whatever it takes to get power.
This is the kernel of The Iron Law Of Oligarchy, as well as Alexander Tytler's observations about the fall of societies. Because sociopaths see everything as a zero-sum, no holds barred winner-take all game, their ability to form loyalty is non-existent, and their ability to even form last coalitions is severely limited.
Agreed.
Just a few paragraphs in and I'm already reminded of a different, but, as I feel, closely related modern internet pest - paywalling.
I can't even open a single, solitary article you linked (I'm generalizing, I just tried one, but I'm too annoyed to try any further) without instantly getting pestered with either some newsletter - subscription BS pestering me or a subscription banner, blocking me from reading.
Not. A single. Fucking. Article.
Not talking about "yeah alright, read maybe that ONE or TWO articles someone linked and be on your way", but not even a single one to check a source.
They need to capitalize every goddamn klick I do in this cursed digital space and unlike books I can't just visit a library or get a scan if need to when it comes to journalistic content.
It's horrible, I hate how the Internet is and it only gets worse.
I actually have a hot take about this: Ads are, conceptually, genuinely good, but terrible in practical terms.
They’ve destroyed user experiences, resulting in people “opting out” with adblockers, meanwhile we have a rapacious digital ads ecosystem that acts as a rent-seeker, combined with a multi-polarization of the Web around a handful of big platforms that consume the disproportionate majority of all advertising revenue.
When you think about it, ads are — at least, to an extent, and certainly imperfectly, and perhaps this is just my platonic ideal — predictable (if you have a CPM of X and you get Y traffic, you revenue will be Z), scalable (if your CPM is X and your traffic is Y, but the next month it’s N, it goes up by the difference between Y and N, multiplied by X), and repeatable (there shouldn’t be any major disparities between similar months within a close time frame).
But the various factors I described have basically undermined all of that.
Also, if we’re talking about things like YouTube, it’s also a market where the sellers (the content creator) doesn’t get to set their own prices — which makes it a really bad market.
I would greatly prefer to pay a (very) small fee to read stuff without ads. If there was a way I could pay say $0.001 per article and read it ad and nag free that would be great. I figure that's more than most sites would get from ads but $0.001 would probably lead me to spend maybe $1-$2 most days which would be quite affordable.
We kind-of had that with Flattr a few years back, albeit that was a voluntary system.
I guess the problem is that the whole idea of microtransactions and a "nag free" system is kinda contradictory. For the system to actually work, you need to have some friction, otherwise there's no impetus to pay. And that would, unless we centralize around one company or platform (which would be bad!), mean having accounts and wallets and logins on every site you visit.
And, of course, you wouldn't be able to pay 0.1c at a time, because there's literally no way to do that without processing fees swallowing up the entire transaction, if not more.
Which means depositing enough money with a site so that, after processing fees, there's money left over. Which essentially means you're giving said sites an interest-free loan with indeterminate duration, as it's based on how often and frequently you visit that site.
I imagine this leaves some big accounting questions, too. In NJ, gift card balances can never expire. My MIL has used gift cards that are decades old and they still worked. Other jurisdictions are not too fussy, especially the UK.
Those balances will probably appear as liabilities on a balance sheet, which while not really affecting the actual health of the company, does kinda look bad. And what happens if the company goes bust? Do we have a system that segments that deposit system from company funds, and only disburses them based on actual reads? Actually, that idea kinda makes sense, though I wonder how much the admin costs would be -- and how you make such a system fraud-resistant.
Suppose you have a third-party acting as the guardian of said balances. What happens if it goes bust, like Synapse did? Or there's a technical error where the records of user balances are no longer accurate? And how can you build such a system that deals in really small transactions, without also having massive administration costs that eat into those really small transactions in a way that defeats the overall point.
Also, I feel like if individuals were made to bear the actual cost of reporting, they'd have a shock. For every hundred Valnet-style listicle that someone shat out in 10 minutes, there's one deeply-reported story that perhaps took weeks or months to complete, involved hundreds or thousands of hours of work, and exposed the author to deep legal risk -- and thus likely required the review of lawyers, which also added to the cost.
Suppose 10,000 people each read those stories. The Valnet example might be able to be profitable by charging readers a penny a time. The latter example might cost a dollar.
Obviously, that's fair enough. You have a market and people pay for what they believe is worthwhile. And I think it might actually be healthy for people to understand the cost of what they read, both in terms of the sustainability of journalism, as well as on a psychological level.
The problem with free content is that it essentially removes a mechanism that people used to distinguish between quality in media. In the UK, the Sun (or any red-top tabloid, really) costs less than the FT, or The Guardian, or the Times -- and people paid more because they valued the journalism of those publications more than those in the Red Tops.
It might also encourage publications to do better stuff, in the hope of being able to charge more than a penny per view, swapping volume for higher margins.
Jesus, I can't believe I just wrote a massive comment disagreeing with you, and ended up thinking "yeah, you might actually have a point there..."
Note: I know I probably made some typos, but I'm on the phone right now and this useless Substack - app won't lemme change anything from here. Funny how the very thing used to criticize the Tech Industry still very much represents it.
There are three dots at the upper right hand corner of your post. Click them and it will bring up an "edit" option.
At least it works on my phone.
That's special, because it doesn't work on mine. Guess this is just another Samsung - moment...
I have a Samsung. Go figure.
In that case I'll take back what I said about Substack and direct it towards Samsung lol
Enshittification is certainly happening to substack.
I'm not sure it's enshittification, more than the fact that this is a very young company that's still working stuff out, and in the beginning spent more on bringing over writers than developing the actual tech. Which, from a business perspective, makes sense.
Substack's analytics are very barebones, but they're not stopping me from writing here, in part because it's a great publishing platform otherwise, but also because that's where a lot of my audience is.
996 culture. Sounds very Japanese Salaryman. But Japan has passed a ton of laws to stop this and mostly succeeded.
Also I thought we were worried about the demographic decline? 996 culture would seem to make it hard to make babies.... and without babies there are no new consumers or workers.
I'm not TBH too fussed about meta firing people. Ideally they would fire 100% and disappear, but fewer employees means less chance of mischief IMHO
There's one major difference tho and that is that in Japan companies don't hire and fire people like they do in China or the US. Quite the contrary, actually.
The idea behind the whole Salaryman model is (or more accuratel, was), that employees trade full loyalty to the company against guaranteed lifelong employment and retirement benefits from the company. Very different, in China, where people are basically treated as disposable and there aren't any retirement plans to begin with.
Be careful not to lump those two countries together, they share some common cultural roots, but are very different societies.
One thing I’ve always wondered about is how Japanese corporate culture has resisted the cultural changes that swept the US in the Jack Welch era (really, the 70s and 80s) that destigmatized layoffs and basically made them socially acceptable, if not something actively encouraged by Wall Street.
It actually did happen to one major company, Sony, and as expected, Sony turned to complete shit.
Whole executive board full of Harvard graduates now too, making Sony a Japanese company run by shitty, line-go-up Western standards. Yikes!
As for the rest of Japan, it's basically because the cultural exchange between Japan and the West is pretty much one-sided, with Japan projecting probably even more soft power than the U.S. by now.
And thank Amaterasu for that dude.
Japan is pretty much culturally self-sufficient, they have their own movies, books, games etc., so there's not much need for U.S. cultural import. That's the main reason why Japanese are notoriously bad at foreign languages, they don't have any pressure to learn them.
Like I'm a German, if I wanna get outside of the pathetic German cultural bubble, I gotta learn foreign languages, especially English and, in my case, Japanese to broaden my escapism even further.
A Japanese person doesn't feel that need as much.
So that's one important point.
Another one comes probably down to straight-up incompatibility when it comes to the value system. In Japan, companies actually don't operate by a "profits and shareholders first" but more along the lines of "we need to equally fulfill our responsibilities towards our clients, our shareholders and society as a whole".
Very different way of operating. You can actually see them state it if you, for example, look into the shareholder reports of CAPCOM, where they often open with a few sentences that state their philosophy of striving to provide financial, and EXPLICITLY, non-financial value.
And this is, as far as I see, a consistent difference that Western companies completely lack. They don't give a shit about clients, fuck society, screw anything but "shareholders".
So of course that kind of attitude won't get far (with exceptions like westernised Sony) in Japan, I mean it's basically Antisocial Personality Disorder as corporate governance.
Yeah, Sony is an outlier. They've historically had a huge presence in my hometown of Liverpool, and over the years we've seen them expand and cutback and expand and cutback some more, just like every other major tech company.
One thing that I think separates the UK, where I'm from, and say France and Germany where labor rights are stronger and layoffs still carry some stigma, is that you guys never had a Thatcher moment -- a point where the entire social contract gets rewritten for the benefit of the few.
That's not to say that these tendencies don't exist in France, or Germany -- but they're not treated as a given as in the UK, or obviously, the US.
I'm obviously biased, because I've been born and raised in Germany, but I feel like we kinda got the worst of both worlds. We have both a ridiculous rigid labor law and basically state-run capitalistic companies.
For example, there was a case of an employee openly stealing money at the company my dad's working at (solid case, it was physical cash and the door control logs had clearly shown it was the person in question).
To this day, the guy's on paid leave and will leave the company with a severance package, because labor law makes it financially unattractive to fire him for literally stealing.
And this translates to "regular" reasons to fire someone, like plain incompetence. Of course we all know here that being incompetent is an advantage in most U.S. companies too, and that morons never pay for the destruction they cause, but there's at least the possibility for it to happen.
I think in Germany, larger companies are seriously hindered in their flexibility by very rigid labor laws and the "Betriebsräte" (works council), which in theory are supposed to advantage the small guys, but in practice only work to keep the status quo, which means Baby Boomers with the longest employment history.
You might argue that it's not about those laws or institutions, but how they get corrupted by the people abusing them over time. But "it would work if only human nature was different" isn't a very good argument for them...
As for the state-run companies, the best example is probably the Deutsche Bahn (basically what used to be British Rai). In theory it has been privately, in real world the sole owner is the German state.
Which leads to our clueless ministry for transport fucking up properly governing the company and the Deutsche Bahn itself operating on a profit - maximizing motto, leading to the decay of rail infrastructure and probably the most expensive, most unreliable rail transportation in Europe (I heard from a friend from Larkhana that it's at least better compared to Pakistan, because the trains at least come some of the time lol).
And I haven't begun writing about our automobile industry...
PS: I hope you don't mind me fully indulging in my ADHD - fueled ramblemania, I can't help it, I feel at home here.^^
We are seeing the social contract getting rewritten in europe (including the uk) right now, as the rulers have no priority other than The War On Russia.
Agreed. There's a reason I live in Japan not China (actually many reasons)
Oh really friend, there are other reasons? You mean maybe like proper indoor plumbing and not being robbed on the streets by beggar gangs? ;) (joke)
Oh man, I love China. Shenzhen is perhaps the coolest city I've ever been to, and I very nearly moved there a few years ago. But that's a story for another day.
You say that, but look at what Elon did after firing something like 80% of Twitter.
I don't personally think he made it notably worse. I'm not going to go out and say he improved it, but I think firing 80% of twitter had almost zero negative consequences.
To be fair, I don't think the layoffs had a direct effect on the quality of Twitter, insofar as the culture shift of the Elon era was of vastly, vastly greater significance.
Alienating ad buyers and forcing Elon to pivot to subs meant that, by definition, he had to disadvantage those who didn't buy subs.
Despite me having nearly 7,000 followers on Twitter, it's driven fewer views to this newsletter than DuckDuckGo -- in part because many of my followers have left for bluer skies, but also because I refuse to pay for a checkmark.
Agree with much of what you said but it wasn’t that long ago that coal mines paid workers with company scrip and just a couple of generations before that flat out slavery. No child labor laws etc. So bad working conditions aren’t all that new with the caveat that they started getting worse after Reagan became President. Not to mention what happened under Stalin and Mao. Humanity is generally good but there’s always been a very dark side. Keep up the good work, you are a very good writer.
Thank you so much for the kind words.
I think one of my biggest sins as a writer, especially in writing this newsletter, is that my UK perspective pokes through far too often. This is a really good example of that, because in the UK, working conditions *have* declined, especially since the 2010 coalition that brought in things like zero-hour contracts and at-will employment for the first two years of a person’s time at a company.
Course, if you’re American, you’ve pretty much always had at-will employment and zero-hour contracts.
I'd rather live in a retirement community than an insane asylum.
Eric has been an asshole for decades
Great post, but this raised some eyebrows:
“Elon Musk selling cars that are literal death traps”
Are they really that bad? Are you talking about the autopilot? Because when I read ‘death traps’ it brings the Pinto to mind.
“accelerating the rise of fascism in the United States”
… oh please.
“and heading an organization that suspended “lifesaving” HIV/AIDS relief programs in the developing world.”
You mean the CIA spying and sabotage program that uses that as a fig leaf?
“I will also never forgive Elon for what he did to Twitter — and what he did to public discourse and societal cohesion as a consequence”
He just stopped Twitter from censoring so heavily in favor of prissy Californian sensibilities. That’s it.
“nor will I forgive him for trying to overthrow British democracy.”
He made a tweet. And he wasn’t wrong, either.
"and heading an organization that suspended 'lifesaving' HIV/AIDS relief programs in the developing world."
O sodomist, my sodomist...