My model says that Maya is acting the way humans react to things in similar situations, so whether or not her actions are “rational” the system is still the problem. Maya’s actions seem like they could be rational for certain utility functions, and you can’t play such games by halves (hence the lack of Slack) but my guess is that most Mayas are making a mistake playing the game at all. She should probably quit.
It does seem like financial stability is in practice much harder to achieve than it used to be, for most people. Especially when student loans and health care get involved. There’s less margin for error even with a “good” job and good jobs are harder to find in a pinch for most people. It is unclear to me how much of that is increased needs (letting consumerism, signaling and positional goods eat all your Slack, general high standards, and not putting up with boring or physically demanding work like people used to) versus how much is a real crisis (student loans, health insurance, child care and other forced expenses, lack of jobs with good pay and job security, being treated like dirt due to that, and taking of Slack in order to control people).
For programmers, especially top programmers, this isn’t an excuse. If I’m a superstar programmer who is worth 100x normal programmer, I can’t get 100x or even 10x, but I can get a new job any time I want and likely earn 1.5x with good perks. That really should be good enough to have Slack.
I like to look at energy usage per capita over time as an indicator of whether we can do more stuff than we could before. E.g. can people own cars. Technology changes this a bit, it makes cars more efficient/cheaper to make so more people can have cars. But looking at money etc makes things too easy to fudge.
So getting energy and people , the energy consumption per capita in 1980 it was 64 million BTU per person. In ~2014 it was 73 million BTU per person. So things are getting better energy wise for the globe. I won’t try to break down per country to see if things are getting better for the US, things get complicated via global trade (exporting energy consumption etc). You could expect that the majority of the increase in energy consumption has happened other places than the US (Asia had 300% energy consumption growth) during that time period though so that there might be a net negative in the US.
It is late, so I’m not going to continue. I think we have a rising inequality from various things, so even if there was an increased energy usage over all, people may feel worse off.
Or if you’re paid by results not the hour, as a contractor, you can earn the same in less time. Or even as an employee, you can just be paid to waste most of your time (though this is fairly unsatisfactory). Eg a friend of mine worked with an excellent programmer who would do nothing for months—literally spend most of the time in the pub or messing around with things that interested him—and occasionally spend a weekend programming furiously to produce what was presented to the (crappy) management as what the entire team had been working on for months.
My model says that Maya is acting the way humans react to things in similar situations, so whether or not her actions are “rational” the system is still the problem. Maya’s actions seem like they could be rational for certain utility functions, and you can’t play such games by halves (hence the lack of Slack) but my guess is that most Mayas are making a mistake playing the game at all. She should probably quit.
It does seem like financial stability is in practice much harder to achieve than it used to be, for most people. Especially when student loans and health care get involved. There’s less margin for error even with a “good” job and good jobs are harder to find in a pinch for most people. It is unclear to me how much of that is increased needs (letting consumerism, signaling and positional goods eat all your Slack, general high standards, and not putting up with boring or physically demanding work like people used to) versus how much is a real crisis (student loans, health insurance, child care and other forced expenses, lack of jobs with good pay and job security, being treated like dirt due to that, and taking of Slack in order to control people).
For programmers, especially top programmers, this isn’t an excuse. If I’m a superstar programmer who is worth 100x normal programmer, I can’t get 100x or even 10x, but I can get a new job any time I want and likely earn 1.5x with good perks. That really should be good enough to have Slack.
I like to look at energy usage per capita over time as an indicator of whether we can do more stuff than we could before. E.g. can people own cars. Technology changes this a bit, it makes cars more efficient/cheaper to make so more people can have cars. But looking at money etc makes things too easy to fudge.
So getting energy and people , the energy consumption per capita in 1980 it was 64 million BTU per person. In ~2014 it was 73 million BTU per person. So things are getting better energy wise for the globe. I won’t try to break down per country to see if things are getting better for the US, things get complicated via global trade (exporting energy consumption etc). You could expect that the majority of the increase in energy consumption has happened other places than the US (Asia had 300% energy consumption growth) during that time period though so that there might be a net negative in the US.
It is late, so I’m not going to continue. I think we have a rising inequality from various things, so even if there was an increased energy usage over all, people may feel worse off.
Or if you’re paid by results not the hour, as a contractor, you can earn the same in less time. Or even as an employee, you can just be paid to waste most of your time (though this is fairly unsatisfactory). Eg a friend of mine worked with an excellent programmer who would do nothing for months—literally spend most of the time in the pub or messing around with things that interested him—and occasionally spend a weekend programming furiously to produce what was presented to the (crappy) management as what the entire team had been working on for months.