Posted by moonka 4/2/2025
Can we please shit-can this notion that US workers are lazy/bad/whatever? That's not the problem. US workers are being squeezed to death. Corporations have gone from 50% tax burden to paying little taxes, the money is flowing almost entirely to the top 1% earners, C-suites, investors, private equity, etc and we're seeing record levels of corporate welfare.
Corporate welfare like..full time or nearly full time employees getting welfare because their employers refuse to give them livable wages, so taxpayers have to step in. Amazon and Walmart are the biggest welfare recipients in the country, and that doesn't begin to count all the sweetheart deals they get on property taxes, the taxpayer money they get for setting up training programs, free infrastructure improvements to support their business.
We have $8BN to give to a lumbering incompetent dinosaur like Intel, $500BN for "AI" crap (which will consume massive amounts of power, land, water...)
...but apparently we can't afford $4BN for LIHEAP which is half as much and keeps elderly people from freezing or broiling to death?
Yeah, that's what happens when the latent cost of employing anyone for anything is so high all the menial stuff get shipped overseas or replaced with fewer expensive employees working with much more expensive labor saving technology/materials.
Also, I'm not sure how much I trust the numbers themselves, metrics and targets and all that.
Then enter "private equity" which has historically extracted/squeezed once profitable businesses for all they are worth. Saddle them with debt, load up them up on consulting fees (paid to PE, by the way), squeeze the labor force/downsize, decrease quality of items. Then when the debt cannot be paid, sell businesses for parts, layoffs across the board, cook the books, and sell to the next sucker.
Small grocery stores -- (too many to name)
Veterinary care -- (too many to name)
Health clinics -- (too many to name)
Electronics -- iRobot
Software -- (too many to name, but nearly any company bought by "Vista Equity Partners" and et al)
Appliances -- Maytag, Instapot, Electrolux
Great names in their industry with amazing benefits to employees. Reduced to numbers. Benefits cut. Pensions cut/abolished and replaced with shitty 401Ks.
Yea everything is getting shittier. Blame the billionaire class, decades of tax cuts for the wealthy that has been a parasitic drain on society as a whole.
Let's say you have someone working a cash register. It is rare for a manager to check the amount of money in the register, and it's certainly too infrequent for them to be able to determine who took money from the register if any were missing. This is a system that encourages low paid employees to take money from the register - it's clearly in their personal best interest. As the store loses money to these issues, it's harder to pay a good wage to a large staff, so individual compensation is going to get worse, further incentivizing skimming.
On could obviously see the system has a flaw, and it could be fixed with more managerial effort. But at the same time the employees are just straight up stealing. They are actively choosing to do something which is clearly unethical simply because they can get away with it. Those upstanding individuals who do the right thing suffer the consequences - whether it be a less prosperous employer or a less trusting management - because of these selfish individuals.
Applying the same principle, those who intentionally do a bad job, such as throwing packages in the bushes or not putting in the effort to make sure a prescription is filled properly, are likewise acting unethically in their own self interest because they can get away with it. They are stealing time or energy instead of money, but in the grand scheme of things they are all mutually interchangeable.
I do think that better pay, better aligned incentives, and better training would all help, and the broader trend of enshittification is obvious. There is a price point below which quality is just not really viable, and those who want cheaper will get what they pay for. But treating those employees who are active participants in this system, the ones who agree to take the jobs for low pay and then cut corners to make up for it, as helpless victims of the system with no agency is intellectually stifling.
We peacefully assemble around jobs. Just peacefully assemble around a new meme of telling the walking dead to pound sand.
Education worked to an extent; most will not devolve into dumb fucks. Pretty pathetic seeing the adults kowtowed by the ossified establishment.
What if instead of a simple furniture item it's a piano. Nobody can have pianos anymore unless they move them on their own?
As for pianos, they would have to get a dedicated piano mover.
You said to never give up your power unnecessarily. Pianos aren't necessary.
Your inequality symbols are backwards.
There are not fewer than 1 million cops in the US there are more than 1 million.
There are indeed fewer than 700,000 politicians but I'm going to assume you meant to say "more than 700k". The majority of those persons are local representatives who have little authority beyond determining what days trash collection occurs and whether a specific plot of land can be zoned residential, commercial, or industrial.
Remember, the alligator always wants to eat the larger number.
1) To the outsourcer, that you're a cheap client who will fire you as soon as someone cheaper comes along or a KPI is missed
2) To those in the know (colleagues, workers, stakeholders), that you don't intend to be here long enough to deal with the consequences of your actions
Outsourcers will never care about your infrastructure or its actual needs, and won't care about your budget either. An employee is more likely to conserve budget with smarter product choices and more in-house builds, while outsourced workers will just nod and accept whatever you point to as gospel, since they'll never have to fix it anyway. In essence, you're paying more money to have someone else handle it then you would have paid someone else to talk you professionally down or implement it properly.
Similar arguments:
* Public Cloud is a form of outsourcing that can often increase costs, especially for static or non-scaling infrastructure/resources. Yet because it's more convenient and skirts CAPEX budgets, more companies will just outsource to AWS/Azure/GCP instead of buying two to three servers, a storage array, and some network infrastructure to host their internal directories/applications/file shares.
* XaaS is also outsourcing, often doubly so. You outsource the application to an XaaS provider, and then outsource its management or setup to an outsourcing firm/MSP/consultant. Then you leave, and the company is stuck with a product they have to pay for because "it's necessary", don't know how to support it, don't understand what it's for, and can't begin to move off of or away from it for at least a year after they hire new permanent in-house technical staff.
* Outsourcing leads to a dependency on consultants, because you don't understand your own estate anymore (and fired the folks who did, so you could send the labor elsewhere) and need someone else to tell you what's needed, with the pretty slide decks to justify it to stakeholders. Now you're paying for the outsourced infra (often public cloud or XaaS), the MSP to manage out, the consultants to update/implement it, and now additional consultants to integrate it with other systems who also require consultants because - again - you outsourced your technical staff. Before long you're just blindly implementing whatever's in the upper-right Gartner quadrant without understanding function or utility, let alone ROI.
The end result is a bunch of grossly overpaid leaders, a glut of burnt-out MSP workers who only get paid to put out fires but never prevent them (and even if they were paid for prevention, they'll only be able to do it for whoever pays them the most), and a lagging domestic workforce you have to invest in upskilling when you do want to bring technical staff back in house. Congratulations, instead of leaving your engineers and architects on payroll, you've single-handedly saved the company enough money during your contract to get yourself all your KPI-tied bonuses, and left the organization on fire while you parachute off to repeat it elsewhere.
The OP is right - people aren't necessarily bad at their jobs, we've just incentivized the worst behavior as a society to the point most jobs are just bad. Now we're even doing it to technology folks (IT/IS/Devs) with LLMs, racing ahead with ever more outsourcing and banking on the fact someone else will clean up our mess.
Might be such startups are unstable, because once the lunch starts getting eaten, the founders are instantly offered "F-you money" to sell their company, at which point it gets rolled into a disaster company. Or it loses its incentives past a certain size.
Rare indeed is a company whose founder(s) both (a) refuses to sell for a generous valuation and (b) actively put the brakes on aggressive growth out of wariness it will destroy the company yet (c) still sees the company to success.
It takes hard work to ignore the easy exits in favor of building a healthy organization designed to withstand the temptations of the modern business cycle. You're not building a mere startup or business, you're building an institution, and that's an infinitely harder job that doesn't pay nearly as well - though it often has far more substantial impacts.
So many people are obsessed with striking it rich via individual success, that they're blind to the reality that we already have the resources and technologies to ensure everyone can enjoy modest success, if we discipline exploitation for personal gain. It's why part of founding a startup nowadays is literally developing an exit strategy, rather than a successor plan: the goal is for the founders to succeed, not the business, and definitely not its customers.
Like show me where in the Apple training they teach how to set ringtones?
UPS straight up flies people to training [1]. Of course their drivers are going to be better.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/UPS/comments/16oizrm/hiring_and_tra...