Wow, this is very heavy and strange to me. I live in such a bubble - I basically never interact with lower class people enough to hear about anything like this. I've lived my entire life in the middle class, and I am kind of very afraid of the lower class world. It's different, hostile, requires me to be on my toes, and I just don't know what to expect. It feels dangerous, almost the same feeling as going into a forest that contains wolves and bears *somewhere*, even if the chance you get mauled is small. Maybe I should go travel and see that world.
The nonsensical rules of the factory are very interesting, because to me they make almost complete sense. Of course you wouldn't let your workers learn the flow lines in order, it makes things illegible for you, the people-engineer. If you look at the workers as a kind of substrate that executes instructions, you would want them to learn things out of order, so that every operation is atomic rather than being in a larger context of a flow line, because having a lot of Context is just bad systems design. This is just not how you design a System. Except this is *people* we're talking about, so are the people-engineers so heartless as to force them to stand even though it hurts? I feel like if I was a manager, I'd be nicer, but I don't know, I make LLMs do similar slightly unethical things, so maybe I'm one of the bad guys too. It's very strange to me.
Also, while reading about the various things that the management does suboptimally, a part of me cries out to the free market - how could my beloved free market let this happen? Why does the factory not get outcompeted by a different factory that is the same but lets its employees sit and pays them slightly lower wages? But again, I guess this might only apply in my world, and the lower class world is different. This kind of shakes my "faith" in the kind of econ-brained libertarian ideology I follow, because leftist-ish analysis does seem to engage with working class issues like factory workers in a way that makes more sense. If the free market doesn't shut down obvious issues like workers not sitting at factories, then maybe we do need collective action to shut it down via protests, idk
I'm a manager in a factory. Much smaller, but actually a competitor of the company Aella used to work for. I've done time studies on things like sitting vs standing and some tasks are just done faster when you are standing and it is easier to reach and turn, and other tasks are faster when you are sitting and stable.
Some people complain about standing all the time, and some people complain about sitting all the time. Some of those are the same people. I try to switch up people's jobs so they never get white line fever and start blindly making mistakes (and maybe have a chance to both sit and stand during a day), but I definitely have people who prefer (and may be faster at) just doing the same task for 8 hours straight with a podcast on. I've never had to do mandatory overtime yet, but I know it will happen one day and it will make me sad.
I have a vision of what I want work on my floor to look like, and perhaps that vision is closer to what I would have wanted to do than what my staff wants to do, and perhaps all my time studies and quality metrics are just some kind of justification for doing things the way I want to do just like all the other managers in the world justify whatever they think is the "right" way.
But how does the free market allow for suboptimal management? Well thankfully(?) not everything is a perfect bloodthirsty competition. There's still room for businesses, or branches, or departments to just not be the best they can possibly be and just be okay. I work with vendors I have to chase down and beg to let me buy their product because their sales team can't finish a sales cycle with an enthusiastic customer. I have vendors that bill me 3 times for one order, even though after the second time the manager has apologized and swears this was taken care of. And others that forget to bill me at all for a year.
And you know what, that's kind of a neat thing. We can have all the rocket scientists and brain surgeons to go do their thing and there's still room for Bob who maybe forgets to send out every fifth invoice, but the business is profitable enough that it is better off absorbing those inefficiencies than trying to lure away some hotshot that is otherwise contributing to society in some other way.
I remember getting a presentation in economics by a Marxist professor (the rest were all mainstream) who shared a study, something like Catching Flies with Honey.
At a factory, they gave control to the workers over the speed of the line. They slowed it down when energy levels were low (like the hour before lunch), then sped it up when they could rock and roll. They were able to achieve more total productivity than the previous standard.
At the end of the experiment the managers took back control, even at the cost of lower productivity, because they “just didn’t like giving up control” lol. Curious whether this has the ring of truth to you?
This does not sound like Marxist theory - that theory is about systems, not people personally liking or disliking things. But management does attract the kind of people who like control - that is the price of attracting people who accept responsibility. Not being able to predict how much will be produced by the end of the shift seems annoying - what does one promise to the customer?
This is not classic Marxist theory, of course, but it does not surprise me that a Marxist professor would have some interest in a study like that. Not everybody is bound to discussing the world in the exact same terms as we did 150 years ago
There are many factors at play that render the market slow/unresponsive in these situations. Homo economicus (who always acts rationally, and in his own best interests) is shackled by the limitations of his own knowledge, awareness and mobility. Comparative analyses are costly when you're strapped for cash and time, especially when you don't even know whether or not researching other factories will pan out.
The costs of collective bargaining are def lowest in low skill / interchangeable cog settings. Like, in knowledge based fields where the top 1-10% are actually many orders of magnitude more effective than the avg, you really want them to be able to negotiate individually and thus be incentivized to work to their potential. Someone like Ilya shouldn’t be on the same union contract as me, for obvious reasons!
But if workers actually ARE interchangeable then they all gain symmetrically from being able to bargain together and you aren’t forcing the top ones who make most of the impact to sacrifice for everyone else (and more importantly removing their incentive to do more than the bare minimum from their pov)
Look, Karl Marx figured out the answer to that long ago. In fact, the groundwork was laid by Adam Smith. Basically capitalism tends to dumb-down complicated artisanal work to something really stupid any trained monkey can do. This way, skilled people compete at unskilled levels, because their skills are not needed. And at competing at unskilled levels, sitting is not an option. Quite possibly by those rules they can filter out those who would strike against constant overtime.
This is the part that even leftish critics of capitalism do not quite understand well. That the root problem is that you are a trained chef, but they are not hiring trained chefs, they are hiring burger-flippers. If they are hiring chefs, you can negotiate good conditions. If they are only hiring burger flippers, you cannot.
And it is not just heartless greed or anything like that. The reason that work was dumbed down is machines. The money for that comes from a bank. And that needs to be repaid with interest, because everybody, you, me, want to earn some interest on our bank accounts. No on is really being unreasonably greedy, it is just how the math adds up.
having an asset be deeply integrated with its past and future and a very specific environment will make that asset more efficient, but also would make it less legible in a bunch of ways that are important. Now the asset is only productive if specific conditions are met and it becomes a Project to just replace that asset if it disappears, and you need the asset to have a manager who maintains knowledge about how the asset needs to be utilized, and now the manager can't be replaced either because it has a bunch of illegible knowledge, and the whole system just becomes this precious artifact where nothing can be cheaply replaced or modified, and you start bleeding money on mundane changes to the system
Thanks for explaining! However I don't think I understand yet. This asset we're talking about is a person, right? So how would an employee that understands the whole process be harder to replace than one that only knows the isolated steps?
you want every process at a company to be reproducible from essentially a handbook if you want to be able to replace stuff and make it manageable. Or, rather I think it *could* be like this because that's how it works in code (arguably that's what code *is*), and i'd want the same at a factory. So imagine you've got widgets going down the line and you've got Alice and Bob who are working the line and they're intimately familiar with how the widgets work and all the subtle details and tricks to assemble them. Alice gets sick, and now you can't make widgets at all, because only alice knew that you have to hit the thing with compressed air at the right angle to unstick the internal wires. You've got to wait for her to get better, or arduously figure out the compressed air trick from first principles. Would be much nicer if you could have a step in the line where someone blows in compressed air into the thing, without even knowing why they do it, and then you can just sit anyone down there and tell them to blow compressed air into widgets all day. You don't want that person being intimately familiar with widgets because then they might get clever and do something weird and illegible to make the widgets work, and then they get sick and now you can't make widgets. If you divorce them from any sense of context, then when they run into the issue that would have made them clever, instead you just start failing to produce widgets and it's fairly obvious which step of the process doesn't work. You can quickly figure out a solution, write it down, and try putting in a person who knows nothing about widgets into the chair with new instructions
So you want to make sure that everything the employee knows is also in the handbooks, and you achieve that by not giving employees the opportunity to create any new knowledge that isn't in the handbooks yet.
The world needs to hear more stories of how poverty serves capitalism and its gospel of efficiency. What will happen to people like the young you when the machines and computers take over?
Capitalism got most people out of poverty by creating more and more jobs that are not dull and repetitive and low paying, what are you talking about, what kind of system are you trying to push here.
It's worth noting that the goal of capitalism was not to create jobs or lift people out of poverty. The only goal of capitalism is to generate more capital to be reinvested in growing more capital. If a business owner can maximize capital growth by reducing workers' pay or the number of jobs, they will do so. It was only with the advent of organized labor movements that capitalists were forced to lower working hours and improve working conditions. Unions and government work regulations probably raised more people from poverty than capitalism left to its own devices.
> Systems like "capitalism" don't have "goals". They evolve.
Well, yes, they evolve — or rather, corporations evolve, to compete against other corporations, or to adapt to changing regulatory and political environments — ideally to maintain continuous capital flow — but if they don't remain profitable for a period of time, they fail. The financial and political ecosystem in which corporations operate also evolves, but ultimately, this evolution is driven by (a) the imperative of capital acquisition by individual corporations, and (b) by regulatory strictures imposed by nation-states.
> Individual people - capitalists - have goals. But those goals vary as much as people do.
Bottom line, corporate owners are looking for a profit. And they're trying to maximize their capital return. Just to be clear, businesses are not normally charitable institutions (with some rare exceptions).
China does not run on a purely capitalist system. Energy, Transport, and Banking are controlled by representatives appointed by the government. They are expected to make a profit if possible. Moreover, Party leaders and functionaries are intimately involved in these businesses, taking salaries and profits from them. Likewise, Party leaders and functionaries also sit on the boards of most of the top-level businesses in China. Small businesses and family-owned businesses largely run without much government regulation. Workers in many Chinese enterprises live a little better than 19th-century mill workers in England, but relative to blue-collar workers in the US and Europe, they have little option for advancement. Many live in company dorms whose rent is deducted from their wages. Certainly, ordinary Chinese citizens as an aggregate are now better off than at any time in Chinese history, but life in the factories or back on the farm is pretty shitty.
Yes. What's your point? No country has ever had pure capitalism (or pure communism). But more-capitalist countries have less poverty than less-capitalist countries. Dramatically.
Poverty SUCKS. Under any system. Systems that reduce it are good. Not eliminating ALL of it is not a reason to abandon systems with LESS poverty.
[And, yes, I'm aware I'm using China as an example of capitalistic success - compare China during Mao to modern capitalist China.]
1. Have I suggested that we should abandon capitalism? Answer: NO.
2. Have I suggested that command economies work better than capitalism? Answer: NO.
3. Have I suggested that any country has had pure capitalism? Answer: a QUALIFIED NO. (The exception being the United Kingdom in the early 19th Century, before the landholding Tories tried to curb the power of rising business interests.)
4. Have I suggested that the world is a worse place because of capitalism? Answer: A QUALIFIED NO. (Although I would agree with you that capitalism has created the modern world, and it's spun off a lot of wealth to non-capitalists along the way. But I think I'd disagree with you that unregulated capitalism is a good thing.)
Further questions:
5. Can we agree that capitalists have profit goals?
6. And can we agree that the goals of capitalists don't necessarily reflect the goals of workers, regulatory regimes, or other capitalists?
There you go. Please don't mischaracterize my positions.
Much like the weather, capitalism doesn't *have* any goals.
Capitalism has constantly improved worker conditions during its 250 years, with or without unions. If workers create $100/h of value for their employer it's profitable to hire them for $90/h, and if other employers pay $89/h, that's what you have to do.
By abstracting "capitalism" as a system that is separated from the "capitalists" who drive the system, you're insulating its workings from our critical faculties. The structure systematically misleads observers about what’s really happening (for instance, the modern quarterly report is an exercise in obfuscation). And the uncritical praise of the capitalist system conditions people (like you) to interpret what they observe in ways that reinforce the system.
Please note, I'm not anti-capitalism per se. I just think people bullshit themselves about its inherent goodness. :-)
Of course, many wealthy capitalists have funded think tanks, marketing organizations, and university chairs in economics to promote the idea that capitalism is inherently good. Part of it was a response to Cold War communist propaganda pushes, but it seems to have taken on a life of its own now. It's hard to avoid the Cult of Capitalism here in the US.
Not sure if this is sarcasm or not, Poe's law and all. I've never known capitalism to care about people's quality of life. A few employers do, but they do so in spite of capitalism. Capitalism has created many jobs that pay well, let you travel, and experience life to the fullest. I'm not sure what that has to do with the jobs it creates that grind humans into dust. Charlie wasn't pushing anything. He was requesting more illumination.
I don't dispute that poverty sucks or that capitalism has raised standards of living. But as some of the other comments note, "good capitalism" is regulated capitalism, whether by democratic or other political systems.
It is not inherently a system for serving humanity, however.
I put it more in the category of fire. It can be a transformative good but it also needs something to consume.
Capitalism is always regulated - that's part of the "system". Regulated by the normal rules of capitalist countries - force is not allowed, fraud and deception are outlawed, you have to fulfill your contracts or pay damages, liability if you harm others, etc, etc. That's what we have law and courts for.
I'm pretty sure we already have regulations against that. Try setting up a storefront and put a big sign "Heroin for sale to children" in it. See what happens. [Please do not sell any actual heroin to actual children. At least not without their parents' OK. (maybe not even then)]
Proponents of a concept invariably laud the good parts while sweeping the bad parts under the rug. This is ok if you're an advertising firm, but in real life it results in sweeping people under the rug.
“Long ago I realized that there really are two human species, the ones who have known desperate, clawing, grinding fear of poverty and the ones who haven’t. The paradox, of course, is that experiencing that both sets your heart on ensuring that no one ever has to feel it again and makes you kind of wish that every soul on Earth could spend one day in that state of terror”.
Freddie deBoer in a recent article. It felt relevant.
I was 16 and had gotten bad grades in Gym and Trigonometry my sophomore year of high school because I'd ditched them to play Spades and Magic: the Gathering.
My father wanted me to see what life would be like without a college education. He took me to the factory he owned, and every day of that summer I worked what he thought was the worst job in the factory. It wasn't. They were only 8 hour days, and there was music.
I was 18 and the factory workers had gone on strike. My father's plan to keep the company afloat was that everyone in management took over floor jobs. My summer plans were cancelled and I came to help with the family business.
This was the worst job. 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week. No music because the floor was too loud and it was a safety hazard to have headphones. I remember at the end of the day being exhausted to the core. Coming home and washing all the soot off in the shower. It never all came out. Microwaving a frozen dinner and watching TV, sometimes falling asleep on the couch. Wake up the next day and do it all again.
I remember a job I had a couple years back. I don't want to go into detail, beyond it being physically very un-demanding, and (most of) my colleagues were mostly fine, the pay was serviceable, but it *utterly bored me to tears* and the corporate culture was intensely unpleasant, but in that corporate way where it's hard to point to specific things. I can't point to any thing in particular - in many ways it was a very nice job - but I hated every second I was there. I started to regularly, sincerely, consider hurting myself just badly enough that I couldn't work. I'd get home and just be exhausted - again, this was not physically demanding work.
Parents who think it's okay to create a life (which has no say in the matter) then abandon it at any age are uncivilized animals, especially if they are unwilling to even consider the logical fallacy of the appeal to tradition. They are who I think of first when I reflect on why I am antinatalist. I want to avoid repeating that selfish, ill-considered uncivility.
Thus: If you were Aella's parent, she would not exist. ... Which is one more reason, why you are right: it seems ok for your DNA to leave the gene-pool.
It's weird. My first job was as one of the engineers in exactly such a factory. I loved what I did and we worked upstairs in a sort of heavenly place of peace and quiet with big windows. I spent my days designing complicated difficult things and arguing with people and learning all sorts of new stuff and it was great fun. I kept my own hours and submitted a timesheet, and as long as I was in 1000-1200 and 1400-1600 in case of meetings nobody cared when I worked as long as I did more than 35 hours a week. They were quite explicit that anything I did in the office counted as work, talking to people or reading the many technical books and magazines that were lying around everywhere, even if they weren't related to what I was actually doing. Often I got interested in some problem and worked late into the night or came in at the weekend just so I could think without being disturbed.
Downstairs was a vision of hell with people (mostly sitting on comfortable chairs, thank God) doing robotic repetitive tasks with no natural light, taking things off a conveyor belt and putting some screws in and putting the things back onto the conveyor belt, all day every day. Incredible noise, everything beeping and whirring, people shouting, music, worse than a hospital. And they started work really early, long before I even got up, let alone got in. I wouldn't have lasted a week.
There was never anyone there out of hours except the factory manager who would work from early in the morning until late at night and who seemed to have no life outside the factory at all, although he was married with children.
And yet we all ate in the same canteen, or went to the same pub for lunch, and played in the same company sports teams, and often I would have to go downstairs for a while to fix something that had broken, or to understand a problem that they had so that I could make it go away, and so I got to know a lot of the factory people, both assembly line workers and management. And they seemed happy. Glad to have a secure job that they knew they could do. Glad to know when they would be at work and when they weren't (unlike me, who was always dealing with some new thing that had just cropped up, and often spent my free time thinking about how to solve work problems, and often dreamed about them).
After a couple of years there I felt stuck in a rut and went and found other things to do, where I could be my own boss and learn new stuff and spend more time in the sunshine rather than having to look at the world through an office window. For years afterwards I would go back as a contractor or consultant for a few months.
Some of my friends spent their whole working lives in that same factory, and retired on good pensions when it finally closed, decades later. Such a life would have destroyed my soul.
I came to accept that people are just different. But I never understood.
You had options and they did not. If you had no other option, you would probably find a way to make it okay without killing yourself, as people generally do when faced with something that sucks and there's no way out of it. I have to say your post reads as if you think you're just a higher type of person who couldn't stand such terrible circumstances bc your brain requires more creativity and autonomy and challenge, while they're just some obedient ant people who are content with rote work. Rather you might consider they would feel precisely like you, if it was an option for them, which it was not. I have also had this type of really shitty job, in the past, and now have one that pays 20x as much for work that is far more pleasant, interesting creative, and autonomous. I don't assume that's because I'm just different from the people stuck in the shit jobs, I assume I'm fortunate and they deserve great sympathy.
I agree that this is the obvious reading of the situation! What surprised me and still surprises me is that I think it's not true.
I know plenty of people who have the same or better options as me. Most of them also have much more money than me. In a lot of cases far more than they will ever need. I myself am going to end up dying alone in poverty in a skip. That's the plan. I'm not going to make myself miserable so that some old guy in the future can spend my hoard on yellowing underwear or whatever it is old people do.
I choose to spend my life outside in the sunshine and do as little work as possible, just enough to get by. Most other people seem to look forwards to occasional two-week holidays but think that the idea of taking a year off work and just doing nothing for a bit is some sort of eccentric anathema.
As for the 'higher type of person', if I was choosing my build for the role-playing-game of Life I'd consider 'is miserable if deprived of sunlight' and 'totally incapable of doing anything boring' and 'incapable of following orders' to be massive weaknesses and would want some compensation for them.
Sometimes there are profitable yet boring things which I avoid doing solely because I would be bored. I'm pretty low on Conscientiousness in the OCEAN system and I think that's generally considered to be bad.
From what you say, you're something of my type. Consider that there may be other types.
I am your type, though I also I often say that the only reason I get paid a high rate these days is to concentrate really hard on things that are often incredibly boring. 😂 It took many years but I've been able to grow at least some conscientiousness (being paid more to do it is certainly incentivizing!). If I could be paid to be outside I would much prefer that...at least on all but the worst weather days!
> to concentrate really hard on things that are often incredibly boring
That's a real skill! I couldn't do your job. (I'm getting a strong 'commercial lawyer' feel?)
I'm really lucky that I've always found computers fascinating, so I can tolerate and usually even enjoy programming other people's computers for them for a few months, as long as it's cold out and I'd be sitting inside drinking coffee in front of a computer anyway.
But as soon as the sun comes out I am itching to be off, so I usually try and find a six month gig that starts in September so I can flee as soon as I've solved my client's problem.
But I know lots of people in the same trade who don't enjoy it much, but just find it's their best paid option, and who spend their whole lives inside doing things they'd rather not be doing, the same things, year after year. I don't understand them either!
Let alone the 'work from home' people! One of the few things I actually like about offices is having other people around to collaborate with. When I leave my main regret is always losing all those new friends.
The one time I tried remote working I lasted a month and I still feel guilty about letting my client down. I couldn't get motivated at all and trying to do it was torture. I think I might actually prefer the factory job to that even given the (vast) pay difference.
> I have also had this type of really shitty job, in the past, and now have one that pays 20x as much for work that is far more pleasant, interesting creative, and autonomous. I don't assume that's because I'm just different from the people stuck in the shit jobs, I assume I'm fortunate and they deserve great sympathy.
If you're not in some way different from the people stuck in the shit jobs, how come they don't make the same change?
Lots of things from my background giving me the idea that I *could* do something else, to willingness to move far from family and friends, to me being able to do really well on tests and get into grad school while they could not. But just bc someone isn't academically talented or can't do well on tests/think in the way you need to for higher education doesn't mean that standing all day in a windowless room doing rote work wouldn't be hell. Idk, part of why I probably was so enraged and outraged to be working the type of job where they monitor your bathroom breaks and write you up if you're off task for 16 minutes instead of 15 is bc I had some sense that I deserved better...I'm just saying I didn't. No one deserves that, especially not when the executive officers were making tens of millions each year. The funny thing is I now represent the owners of exactly this type of company when they sell them or get acquired, and it's very interesting to see what a huge range there is between employers who give no thought to every employee possibly just being let go with no warning versus the ones who voluntarily do things like give enormous bonuses from their own gains.
> But just bc someone isn't academically talented or can't do well on tests/think in the way you need to for higher education doesn't mean that standing all day in a windowless room doing rote work wouldn't be hell.
Sure! In fact the 'orthogonality thesis' that capability and desire are well, "orthogonal" (independent, you can't tell much about one from knowing the other) is a major part of the AI doom case.
There are lots of nice outdoorsy jobs that involve largely working independently that you can do without being academically capable. (I once thought quite hard about becoming a ski instructor, and went as far as to get a licence, and I don't ever remember anyone asking me whether I had a degree). But a lot of people will choose the unchallenging factory job anyway.
That's a mystery to me, but I also think it's true.
Been there. Glad you got out. When I worked at a Waterpik factory in my early 20s I could sense something wrong about it. During breaks, and before shifts started, there'd be people mingling around in small groups, like the gaggles you see in a prison yard, each w their own cultural cache and distinct characteristics (the biker chicks, the heavy metal guys, the khaki-panted lesbians, the chipper latina moms who always had delicious smelling lunch spreads). The younger wu-tang hip hop black dudes were the only group I felt much of a kinship with. I remember how religiously everyone there obeyed every rule no matter how laughably pointless or nonsensical, and how much joy they got in tattling on me to mgmt when I blew one off now and then (because my mind couldn't accept that I had to eg sign my name on a ledger each time I needed to use the restroom, or enter the facility through the door on the left side of the big front entrance rather than the right, despite the fact that all the doors opened to the same big foyer). It always brought a sense a excitement and audible chatter when I did something wrong. I lasted a month.
I wouldn't have lasted at a place like that either. I suspect there's a selection process that whittles the people who stay down to only the ones who can tolerate it. That sounds agonizing.
I had a job shucking mussels in New Zealand once. It paid pretty well—union job—and in a few months I made enough to travel a good stretch of the northern part of the South Island on my days off. The work itself was repetitive, almost hypnotic. You could really zone out. Sometimes I’d eat a little pot butter on toast before a shift, and it felt like I could lock into a rhythm and focus better.
I was living in a little dilapidated communal house at the time, sharing a mattress on the floor in a tiny vestibule by the back door with my girlfriend. It wasn’t glamorous, but I liked it. There was something simple and honest about that phase of life.
I remember one of the faster shuckers telling me that after five years on the job, they needed hand surgery. I believed it. You could feel what that kind of repetition does to your body.
I think it’s good to experience work like that—but it’s just as important to treat it as a stepping stone to something more.
At another point, I worked as a photographer, shooting candid photos at fraternity and sorority parties. That was a completely different world—fun, chaotic, and it usually came with free drinks.
I’ve gone through a few career pivots, but I’ve always been drawn to entrepreneurship. I even owned a Hookah Lounge in Yuma Arizona for a while after Iraq. But honestly, doing the grunt work across a wide range of jobs has been invaluable. It gives you a real understanding of how people work—what motivates them, how they think, where things break down.
Funny enough, dishwashing was one of my favorite jobs. If it paid $100K a year, I’d be seriously tempted to make that a career. It satisfies my obsessive compulsiveness—dirty dish in, clean dish out… awwwweeee.
Sorry to hear what you've dealt with but what a triumph to have gone through that and got to the position you're in now. Credit to you for your part in that outcome.
That is a real achievement. Just wish you weren't so anti union, anti welfare, anti addressing market failure, and pro billionaire because 19 year old you would have benefited from enough stability in housing and income and maybe some career advice to be able to sort out the transcripts thing and reform on student loans might have helped sort out the weird middle ground of parents just enough high income earning that refused to underwrite a loan.
When I read this post I read the American story which seems to be that they take pain personally, and not bother addressing or finding the solution as a community.
I'm not talking fully automated luxury communism there's so many issues with a command economy, but there is something better than dog eat dog
Maybe dog has a nice kennel and some grass to play in and foods and options available to them at a bare minimum so they don't always have to eat dog but they can do so later if they're able
I also see a work economy shifted to be so out of whack for the neurodivergent. Pathological demand avoidance is seen as something that can be forced out of a person through the suffering of the market. There is a better way for people the vast median of people who aren't exceptional survivors to be able to get a bit better than what Demand versus Supply graphs tell them they deserve
Truly, I am astonished she is so pro-free-market and anti-government regulation for the common welfare, with such an experience in her background. I had a lot of shitty jobs in the past that were similar to this but not QUITE as shitty, and I can't imagine coming away from it with those views. Especially once you how it gets easier and easier and easier the higher up you go, where you practically have to make efforts for people to NOT give you more money.
Assembly line work. Been there. Miele, best German dishwasher. Best paying student job in town. Got there through connections. 16 DM/hour in 1989, really not bad. The only two steady Germans in the big hall were the 'Meister' and the downie who wiped the floor. Others all Gastarbeiter, guest-workers from Turkey and (then) Yugoslavia. Told me: "work for donkeys, not humans", glad I got an allergy (my hands doubled volume) from the lubricant (hey!) we used to connect the pipes - sure we had protection gloves, but those got holes quickly from pushing those metal contacts. So I could leave without losing much face. Switched to watchman to finance college. Better. Half the pay. Much, much better.
This made me tear up a bit out of empathy, very well written
The most surprising part tho is that you managed to fall thru the cracks on going to college. Honestly, I thought good test scores (SAT/ACT — I assume you’d be able to get good scores on these if you had covered the basic prerequisite math) would be enough to get a merit scholarship to a lower tier school at least? Didn’t realize homeschooling would mess this up
I forget what I scored on ACT (didn't take SAT); iirc my scores were very high except for writing/essay portion, which was quite low. I don't think my overall score was high enough to get meaningful scholarships.
Wow. Girl, you can write! My first ever exposure to you was your masterful mime/hatrack video and I spent more time than I'd like to admit finding you..... So glad I have and so glad for you. What a story you've had, SO looking forward to where it goes. Wishing you all the best. DPM
It’s mind numbing doing any job simply to pay bills, and it’s worse if the job is monotonous or repetitive; needs to be something different everyday. You need that daily variation.
Wow, this is very heavy and strange to me. I live in such a bubble - I basically never interact with lower class people enough to hear about anything like this. I've lived my entire life in the middle class, and I am kind of very afraid of the lower class world. It's different, hostile, requires me to be on my toes, and I just don't know what to expect. It feels dangerous, almost the same feeling as going into a forest that contains wolves and bears *somewhere*, even if the chance you get mauled is small. Maybe I should go travel and see that world.
The nonsensical rules of the factory are very interesting, because to me they make almost complete sense. Of course you wouldn't let your workers learn the flow lines in order, it makes things illegible for you, the people-engineer. If you look at the workers as a kind of substrate that executes instructions, you would want them to learn things out of order, so that every operation is atomic rather than being in a larger context of a flow line, because having a lot of Context is just bad systems design. This is just not how you design a System. Except this is *people* we're talking about, so are the people-engineers so heartless as to force them to stand even though it hurts? I feel like if I was a manager, I'd be nicer, but I don't know, I make LLMs do similar slightly unethical things, so maybe I'm one of the bad guys too. It's very strange to me.
Also, while reading about the various things that the management does suboptimally, a part of me cries out to the free market - how could my beloved free market let this happen? Why does the factory not get outcompeted by a different factory that is the same but lets its employees sit and pays them slightly lower wages? But again, I guess this might only apply in my world, and the lower class world is different. This kind of shakes my "faith" in the kind of econ-brained libertarian ideology I follow, because leftist-ish analysis does seem to engage with working class issues like factory workers in a way that makes more sense. If the free market doesn't shut down obvious issues like workers not sitting at factories, then maybe we do need collective action to shut it down via protests, idk
I'm a manager in a factory. Much smaller, but actually a competitor of the company Aella used to work for. I've done time studies on things like sitting vs standing and some tasks are just done faster when you are standing and it is easier to reach and turn, and other tasks are faster when you are sitting and stable.
Some people complain about standing all the time, and some people complain about sitting all the time. Some of those are the same people. I try to switch up people's jobs so they never get white line fever and start blindly making mistakes (and maybe have a chance to both sit and stand during a day), but I definitely have people who prefer (and may be faster at) just doing the same task for 8 hours straight with a podcast on. I've never had to do mandatory overtime yet, but I know it will happen one day and it will make me sad.
I have a vision of what I want work on my floor to look like, and perhaps that vision is closer to what I would have wanted to do than what my staff wants to do, and perhaps all my time studies and quality metrics are just some kind of justification for doing things the way I want to do just like all the other managers in the world justify whatever they think is the "right" way.
But how does the free market allow for suboptimal management? Well thankfully(?) not everything is a perfect bloodthirsty competition. There's still room for businesses, or branches, or departments to just not be the best they can possibly be and just be okay. I work with vendors I have to chase down and beg to let me buy their product because their sales team can't finish a sales cycle with an enthusiastic customer. I have vendors that bill me 3 times for one order, even though after the second time the manager has apologized and swears this was taken care of. And others that forget to bill me at all for a year.
And you know what, that's kind of a neat thing. We can have all the rocket scientists and brain surgeons to go do their thing and there's still room for Bob who maybe forgets to send out every fifth invoice, but the business is profitable enough that it is better off absorbing those inefficiencies than trying to lure away some hotshot that is otherwise contributing to society in some other way.
I remember getting a presentation in economics by a Marxist professor (the rest were all mainstream) who shared a study, something like Catching Flies with Honey.
At a factory, they gave control to the workers over the speed of the line. They slowed it down when energy levels were low (like the hour before lunch), then sped it up when they could rock and roll. They were able to achieve more total productivity than the previous standard.
At the end of the experiment the managers took back control, even at the cost of lower productivity, because they “just didn’t like giving up control” lol. Curious whether this has the ring of truth to you?
This does not sound like Marxist theory - that theory is about systems, not people personally liking or disliking things. But management does attract the kind of people who like control - that is the price of attracting people who accept responsibility. Not being able to predict how much will be produced by the end of the shift seems annoying - what does one promise to the customer?
This is not classic Marxist theory, of course, but it does not surprise me that a Marxist professor would have some interest in a study like that. Not everybody is bound to discussing the world in the exact same terms as we did 150 years ago
There are many factors at play that render the market slow/unresponsive in these situations. Homo economicus (who always acts rationally, and in his own best interests) is shackled by the limitations of his own knowledge, awareness and mobility. Comparative analyses are costly when you're strapped for cash and time, especially when you don't even know whether or not researching other factories will pan out.
The costs of collective bargaining are def lowest in low skill / interchangeable cog settings. Like, in knowledge based fields where the top 1-10% are actually many orders of magnitude more effective than the avg, you really want them to be able to negotiate individually and thus be incentivized to work to their potential. Someone like Ilya shouldn’t be on the same union contract as me, for obvious reasons!
But if workers actually ARE interchangeable then they all gain symmetrically from being able to bargain together and you aren’t forcing the top ones who make most of the impact to sacrifice for everyone else (and more importantly removing their incentive to do more than the bare minimum from their pov)
Look, Karl Marx figured out the answer to that long ago. In fact, the groundwork was laid by Adam Smith. Basically capitalism tends to dumb-down complicated artisanal work to something really stupid any trained monkey can do. This way, skilled people compete at unskilled levels, because their skills are not needed. And at competing at unskilled levels, sitting is not an option. Quite possibly by those rules they can filter out those who would strike against constant overtime.
This is the part that even leftish critics of capitalism do not quite understand well. That the root problem is that you are a trained chef, but they are not hiring trained chefs, they are hiring burger-flippers. If they are hiring chefs, you can negotiate good conditions. If they are only hiring burger flippers, you cannot.
And it is not just heartless greed or anything like that. The reason that work was dumbed down is machines. The money for that comes from a bank. And that needs to be repaid with interest, because everybody, you, me, want to earn some interest on our bank accounts. No on is really being unreasonably greedy, it is just how the math adds up.
wait, why is having a lot of context "just bad systems design"?
having an asset be deeply integrated with its past and future and a very specific environment will make that asset more efficient, but also would make it less legible in a bunch of ways that are important. Now the asset is only productive if specific conditions are met and it becomes a Project to just replace that asset if it disappears, and you need the asset to have a manager who maintains knowledge about how the asset needs to be utilized, and now the manager can't be replaced either because it has a bunch of illegible knowledge, and the whole system just becomes this precious artifact where nothing can be cheaply replaced or modified, and you start bleeding money on mundane changes to the system
Thanks for explaining! However I don't think I understand yet. This asset we're talking about is a person, right? So how would an employee that understands the whole process be harder to replace than one that only knows the isolated steps?
you want every process at a company to be reproducible from essentially a handbook if you want to be able to replace stuff and make it manageable. Or, rather I think it *could* be like this because that's how it works in code (arguably that's what code *is*), and i'd want the same at a factory. So imagine you've got widgets going down the line and you've got Alice and Bob who are working the line and they're intimately familiar with how the widgets work and all the subtle details and tricks to assemble them. Alice gets sick, and now you can't make widgets at all, because only alice knew that you have to hit the thing with compressed air at the right angle to unstick the internal wires. You've got to wait for her to get better, or arduously figure out the compressed air trick from first principles. Would be much nicer if you could have a step in the line where someone blows in compressed air into the thing, without even knowing why they do it, and then you can just sit anyone down there and tell them to blow compressed air into widgets all day. You don't want that person being intimately familiar with widgets because then they might get clever and do something weird and illegible to make the widgets work, and then they get sick and now you can't make widgets. If you divorce them from any sense of context, then when they run into the issue that would have made them clever, instead you just start failing to produce widgets and it's fairly obvious which step of the process doesn't work. You can quickly figure out a solution, write it down, and try putting in a person who knows nothing about widgets into the chair with new instructions
So you want to make sure that everything the employee knows is also in the handbooks, and you achieve that by not giving employees the opportunity to create any new knowledge that isn't in the handbooks yet.
thanks again for explaining! i can see how that might work better, but also be less enjoyable for the employees.
I’m sorry, what do you mean when you say “illegible”?
Yes that makes sense, standardization is way cheaper and lets you create predictable marginally more effective production.
The world needs to hear more stories of how poverty serves capitalism and its gospel of efficiency. What will happen to people like the young you when the machines and computers take over?
Capitalism got most people out of poverty by creating more and more jobs that are not dull and repetitive and low paying, what are you talking about, what kind of system are you trying to push here.
It's worth noting that the goal of capitalism was not to create jobs or lift people out of poverty. The only goal of capitalism is to generate more capital to be reinvested in growing more capital. If a business owner can maximize capital growth by reducing workers' pay or the number of jobs, they will do so. It was only with the advent of organized labor movements that capitalists were forced to lower working hours and improve working conditions. Unions and government work regulations probably raised more people from poverty than capitalism left to its own devices.
Systems like "capitalism" don't have "goals". They evolve.
Capitalism exists because the countries that adopted it won their wars against their neighbors with different systems.
Individual people - capitalists - have goals. But those goals vary as much as people do.
China has no unions and no (enforced) work regulations. But 30 years ago Chinese could barely feed themselves. Now they drive electric cars.
> Systems like "capitalism" don't have "goals". They evolve.
Well, yes, they evolve — or rather, corporations evolve, to compete against other corporations, or to adapt to changing regulatory and political environments — ideally to maintain continuous capital flow — but if they don't remain profitable for a period of time, they fail. The financial and political ecosystem in which corporations operate also evolves, but ultimately, this evolution is driven by (a) the imperative of capital acquisition by individual corporations, and (b) by regulatory strictures imposed by nation-states.
> Individual people - capitalists - have goals. But those goals vary as much as people do.
Bottom line, corporate owners are looking for a profit. And they're trying to maximize their capital return. Just to be clear, businesses are not normally charitable institutions (with some rare exceptions).
China does not run on a purely capitalist system. Energy, Transport, and Banking are controlled by representatives appointed by the government. They are expected to make a profit if possible. Moreover, Party leaders and functionaries are intimately involved in these businesses, taking salaries and profits from them. Likewise, Party leaders and functionaries also sit on the boards of most of the top-level businesses in China. Small businesses and family-owned businesses largely run without much government regulation. Workers in many Chinese enterprises live a little better than 19th-century mill workers in England, but relative to blue-collar workers in the US and Europe, they have little option for advancement. Many live in company dorms whose rent is deducted from their wages. Certainly, ordinary Chinese citizens as an aggregate are now better off than at any time in Chinese history, but life in the factories or back on the farm is pretty shitty.
Yes. What's your point? No country has ever had pure capitalism (or pure communism). But more-capitalist countries have less poverty than less-capitalist countries. Dramatically.
Poverty SUCKS. Under any system. Systems that reduce it are good. Not eliminating ALL of it is not a reason to abandon systems with LESS poverty.
[And, yes, I'm aware I'm using China as an example of capitalistic success - compare China during Mao to modern capitalist China.]
Why are you being so combative?
1. Have I suggested that we should abandon capitalism? Answer: NO.
2. Have I suggested that command economies work better than capitalism? Answer: NO.
3. Have I suggested that any country has had pure capitalism? Answer: a QUALIFIED NO. (The exception being the United Kingdom in the early 19th Century, before the landholding Tories tried to curb the power of rising business interests.)
4. Have I suggested that the world is a worse place because of capitalism? Answer: A QUALIFIED NO. (Although I would agree with you that capitalism has created the modern world, and it's spun off a lot of wealth to non-capitalists along the way. But I think I'd disagree with you that unregulated capitalism is a good thing.)
Further questions:
5. Can we agree that capitalists have profit goals?
6. And can we agree that the goals of capitalists don't necessarily reflect the goals of workers, regulatory regimes, or other capitalists?
There you go. Please don't mischaracterize my positions.
Much like the weather, capitalism doesn't *have* any goals.
Capitalism has constantly improved worker conditions during its 250 years, with or without unions. If workers create $100/h of value for their employer it's profitable to hire them for $90/h, and if other employers pay $89/h, that's what you have to do.
By abstracting "capitalism" as a system that is separated from the "capitalists" who drive the system, you're insulating its workings from our critical faculties. The structure systematically misleads observers about what’s really happening (for instance, the modern quarterly report is an exercise in obfuscation). And the uncritical praise of the capitalist system conditions people (like you) to interpret what they observe in ways that reinforce the system.
Please note, I'm not anti-capitalism per se. I just think people bullshit themselves about its inherent goodness. :-)
I swear it's a religious belief to them. They can't hear any criticism, even when objectively and plainly obvious.
Of course, many wealthy capitalists have funded think tanks, marketing organizations, and university chairs in economics to promote the idea that capitalism is inherently good. Part of it was a response to Cold War communist propaganda pushes, but it seems to have taken on a life of its own now. It's hard to avoid the Cult of Capitalism here in the US.
Having read this several times, I still don't think this collection of snazzy intellectual words means anything comprehensible.
Well, have a happy Karl Marx birthday, anyway.
Not sure if this is sarcasm or not, Poe's law and all. I've never known capitalism to care about people's quality of life. A few employers do, but they do so in spite of capitalism. Capitalism has created many jobs that pay well, let you travel, and experience life to the fullest. I'm not sure what that has to do with the jobs it creates that grind humans into dust. Charlie wasn't pushing anything. He was requesting more illumination.
Capitalism has literally lifted more people out of poverty than anything else and it's not close.
This. Poverty sucks. SUCKS. Whatever reduces it is GOOD. That makes capitalism good.
I don't dispute that poverty sucks or that capitalism has raised standards of living. But as some of the other comments note, "good capitalism" is regulated capitalism, whether by democratic or other political systems.
It is not inherently a system for serving humanity, however.
I put it more in the category of fire. It can be a transformative good but it also needs something to consume.
Capitalism is always regulated - that's part of the "system". Regulated by the normal rules of capitalist countries - force is not allowed, fraud and deception are outlawed, you have to fulfill your contracts or pay damages, liability if you harm others, etc, etc. That's what we have law and courts for.
What about selling heroin to children
I'm pretty sure we already have regulations against that. Try setting up a storefront and put a big sign "Heroin for sale to children" in it. See what happens. [Please do not sell any actual heroin to actual children. At least not without their parents' OK. (maybe not even then)]
Proponents of a concept invariably laud the good parts while sweeping the bad parts under the rug. This is ok if you're an advertising firm, but in real life it results in sweeping people under the rug.
the pro-capitalism replies are strange to me. It thinks that people are less poor because someone else is controlling the excess on labor.
the replies don't have any quantification for human capital or happiness.
Waiting for any any quantification for human capital or happiness under anti-capitalism.
“Long ago I realized that there really are two human species, the ones who have known desperate, clawing, grinding fear of poverty and the ones who haven’t. The paradox, of course, is that experiencing that both sets your heart on ensuring that no one ever has to feel it again and makes you kind of wish that every soul on Earth could spend one day in that state of terror”.
Freddie deBoer in a recent article. It felt relevant.
I was 16 and had gotten bad grades in Gym and Trigonometry my sophomore year of high school because I'd ditched them to play Spades and Magic: the Gathering.
My father wanted me to see what life would be like without a college education. He took me to the factory he owned, and every day of that summer I worked what he thought was the worst job in the factory. It wasn't. They were only 8 hour days, and there was music.
I was 18 and the factory workers had gone on strike. My father's plan to keep the company afloat was that everyone in management took over floor jobs. My summer plans were cancelled and I came to help with the family business.
This was the worst job. 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week. No music because the floor was too loud and it was a safety hazard to have headphones. I remember at the end of the day being exhausted to the core. Coming home and washing all the soot off in the shower. It never all came out. Microwaving a frozen dinner and watching TV, sometimes falling asleep on the couch. Wake up the next day and do it all again.
Your writing really brought me back.
I remember a job I had a couple years back. I don't want to go into detail, beyond it being physically very un-demanding, and (most of) my colleagues were mostly fine, the pay was serviceable, but it *utterly bored me to tears* and the corporate culture was intensely unpleasant, but in that corporate way where it's hard to point to specific things. I can't point to any thing in particular - in many ways it was a very nice job - but I hated every second I was there. I started to regularly, sincerely, consider hurting myself just badly enough that I couldn't work. I'd get home and just be exhausted - again, this was not physically demanding work.
Parents who think it's okay to create a life (which has no say in the matter) then abandon it at any age are uncivilized animals, especially if they are unwilling to even consider the logical fallacy of the appeal to tradition. They are who I think of first when I reflect on why I am antinatalist. I want to avoid repeating that selfish, ill-considered uncivility.
Thus: If you were Aella's parent, she would not exist. ... Which is one more reason, why you are right: it seems ok for your DNA to leave the gene-pool.
It's weird. My first job was as one of the engineers in exactly such a factory. I loved what I did and we worked upstairs in a sort of heavenly place of peace and quiet with big windows. I spent my days designing complicated difficult things and arguing with people and learning all sorts of new stuff and it was great fun. I kept my own hours and submitted a timesheet, and as long as I was in 1000-1200 and 1400-1600 in case of meetings nobody cared when I worked as long as I did more than 35 hours a week. They were quite explicit that anything I did in the office counted as work, talking to people or reading the many technical books and magazines that were lying around everywhere, even if they weren't related to what I was actually doing. Often I got interested in some problem and worked late into the night or came in at the weekend just so I could think without being disturbed.
Downstairs was a vision of hell with people (mostly sitting on comfortable chairs, thank God) doing robotic repetitive tasks with no natural light, taking things off a conveyor belt and putting some screws in and putting the things back onto the conveyor belt, all day every day. Incredible noise, everything beeping and whirring, people shouting, music, worse than a hospital. And they started work really early, long before I even got up, let alone got in. I wouldn't have lasted a week.
There was never anyone there out of hours except the factory manager who would work from early in the morning until late at night and who seemed to have no life outside the factory at all, although he was married with children.
And yet we all ate in the same canteen, or went to the same pub for lunch, and played in the same company sports teams, and often I would have to go downstairs for a while to fix something that had broken, or to understand a problem that they had so that I could make it go away, and so I got to know a lot of the factory people, both assembly line workers and management. And they seemed happy. Glad to have a secure job that they knew they could do. Glad to know when they would be at work and when they weren't (unlike me, who was always dealing with some new thing that had just cropped up, and often spent my free time thinking about how to solve work problems, and often dreamed about them).
After a couple of years there I felt stuck in a rut and went and found other things to do, where I could be my own boss and learn new stuff and spend more time in the sunshine rather than having to look at the world through an office window. For years afterwards I would go back as a contractor or consultant for a few months.
Some of my friends spent their whole working lives in that same factory, and retired on good pensions when it finally closed, decades later. Such a life would have destroyed my soul.
I came to accept that people are just different. But I never understood.
You had options and they did not. If you had no other option, you would probably find a way to make it okay without killing yourself, as people generally do when faced with something that sucks and there's no way out of it. I have to say your post reads as if you think you're just a higher type of person who couldn't stand such terrible circumstances bc your brain requires more creativity and autonomy and challenge, while they're just some obedient ant people who are content with rote work. Rather you might consider they would feel precisely like you, if it was an option for them, which it was not. I have also had this type of really shitty job, in the past, and now have one that pays 20x as much for work that is far more pleasant, interesting creative, and autonomous. I don't assume that's because I'm just different from the people stuck in the shit jobs, I assume I'm fortunate and they deserve great sympathy.
I agree that this is the obvious reading of the situation! What surprised me and still surprises me is that I think it's not true.
I know plenty of people who have the same or better options as me. Most of them also have much more money than me. In a lot of cases far more than they will ever need. I myself am going to end up dying alone in poverty in a skip. That's the plan. I'm not going to make myself miserable so that some old guy in the future can spend my hoard on yellowing underwear or whatever it is old people do.
I choose to spend my life outside in the sunshine and do as little work as possible, just enough to get by. Most other people seem to look forwards to occasional two-week holidays but think that the idea of taking a year off work and just doing nothing for a bit is some sort of eccentric anathema.
As for the 'higher type of person', if I was choosing my build for the role-playing-game of Life I'd consider 'is miserable if deprived of sunlight' and 'totally incapable of doing anything boring' and 'incapable of following orders' to be massive weaknesses and would want some compensation for them.
Sometimes there are profitable yet boring things which I avoid doing solely because I would be bored. I'm pretty low on Conscientiousness in the OCEAN system and I think that's generally considered to be bad.
From what you say, you're something of my type. Consider that there may be other types.
I am your type, though I also I often say that the only reason I get paid a high rate these days is to concentrate really hard on things that are often incredibly boring. 😂 It took many years but I've been able to grow at least some conscientiousness (being paid more to do it is certainly incentivizing!). If I could be paid to be outside I would much prefer that...at least on all but the worst weather days!
> to concentrate really hard on things that are often incredibly boring
That's a real skill! I couldn't do your job. (I'm getting a strong 'commercial lawyer' feel?)
I'm really lucky that I've always found computers fascinating, so I can tolerate and usually even enjoy programming other people's computers for them for a few months, as long as it's cold out and I'd be sitting inside drinking coffee in front of a computer anyway.
But as soon as the sun comes out I am itching to be off, so I usually try and find a six month gig that starts in September so I can flee as soon as I've solved my client's problem.
But I know lots of people in the same trade who don't enjoy it much, but just find it's their best paid option, and who spend their whole lives inside doing things they'd rather not be doing, the same things, year after year. I don't understand them either!
Let alone the 'work from home' people! One of the few things I actually like about offices is having other people around to collaborate with. When I leave my main regret is always losing all those new friends.
The one time I tried remote working I lasted a month and I still feel guilty about letting my client down. I couldn't get motivated at all and trying to do it was torture. I think I might actually prefer the factory job to that even given the (vast) pay difference.
> I have also had this type of really shitty job, in the past, and now have one that pays 20x as much for work that is far more pleasant, interesting creative, and autonomous. I don't assume that's because I'm just different from the people stuck in the shit jobs, I assume I'm fortunate and they deserve great sympathy.
If you're not in some way different from the people stuck in the shit jobs, how come they don't make the same change?
Lots of things from my background giving me the idea that I *could* do something else, to willingness to move far from family and friends, to me being able to do really well on tests and get into grad school while they could not. But just bc someone isn't academically talented or can't do well on tests/think in the way you need to for higher education doesn't mean that standing all day in a windowless room doing rote work wouldn't be hell. Idk, part of why I probably was so enraged and outraged to be working the type of job where they monitor your bathroom breaks and write you up if you're off task for 16 minutes instead of 15 is bc I had some sense that I deserved better...I'm just saying I didn't. No one deserves that, especially not when the executive officers were making tens of millions each year. The funny thing is I now represent the owners of exactly this type of company when they sell them or get acquired, and it's very interesting to see what a huge range there is between employers who give no thought to every employee possibly just being let go with no warning versus the ones who voluntarily do things like give enormous bonuses from their own gains.
> But just bc someone isn't academically talented or can't do well on tests/think in the way you need to for higher education doesn't mean that standing all day in a windowless room doing rote work wouldn't be hell.
Sure! In fact the 'orthogonality thesis' that capability and desire are well, "orthogonal" (independent, you can't tell much about one from knowing the other) is a major part of the AI doom case.
There are lots of nice outdoorsy jobs that involve largely working independently that you can do without being academically capable. (I once thought quite hard about becoming a ski instructor, and went as far as to get a licence, and I don't ever remember anyone asking me whether I had a degree). But a lot of people will choose the unchallenging factory job anyway.
That's a mystery to me, but I also think it's true.
Been there. Glad you got out. When I worked at a Waterpik factory in my early 20s I could sense something wrong about it. During breaks, and before shifts started, there'd be people mingling around in small groups, like the gaggles you see in a prison yard, each w their own cultural cache and distinct characteristics (the biker chicks, the heavy metal guys, the khaki-panted lesbians, the chipper latina moms who always had delicious smelling lunch spreads). The younger wu-tang hip hop black dudes were the only group I felt much of a kinship with. I remember how religiously everyone there obeyed every rule no matter how laughably pointless or nonsensical, and how much joy they got in tattling on me to mgmt when I blew one off now and then (because my mind couldn't accept that I had to eg sign my name on a ledger each time I needed to use the restroom, or enter the facility through the door on the left side of the big front entrance rather than the right, despite the fact that all the doors opened to the same big foyer). It always brought a sense a excitement and audible chatter when I did something wrong. I lasted a month.
I wouldn't have lasted at a place like that either. I suspect there's a selection process that whittles the people who stay down to only the ones who can tolerate it. That sounds agonizing.
I'm so proud of you and I would love to hear more. Write a memoir. I'd buy it.
I had a job shucking mussels in New Zealand once. It paid pretty well—union job—and in a few months I made enough to travel a good stretch of the northern part of the South Island on my days off. The work itself was repetitive, almost hypnotic. You could really zone out. Sometimes I’d eat a little pot butter on toast before a shift, and it felt like I could lock into a rhythm and focus better.
I was living in a little dilapidated communal house at the time, sharing a mattress on the floor in a tiny vestibule by the back door with my girlfriend. It wasn’t glamorous, but I liked it. There was something simple and honest about that phase of life.
I remember one of the faster shuckers telling me that after five years on the job, they needed hand surgery. I believed it. You could feel what that kind of repetition does to your body.
I think it’s good to experience work like that—but it’s just as important to treat it as a stepping stone to something more.
At another point, I worked as a photographer, shooting candid photos at fraternity and sorority parties. That was a completely different world—fun, chaotic, and it usually came with free drinks.
I’ve gone through a few career pivots, but I’ve always been drawn to entrepreneurship. I even owned a Hookah Lounge in Yuma Arizona for a while after Iraq. But honestly, doing the grunt work across a wide range of jobs has been invaluable. It gives you a real understanding of how people work—what motivates them, how they think, where things break down.
Funny enough, dishwashing was one of my favorite jobs. If it paid $100K a year, I’d be seriously tempted to make that a career. It satisfies my obsessive compulsiveness—dirty dish in, clean dish out… awwwweeee.
Sorry to hear what you've dealt with but what a triumph to have gone through that and got to the position you're in now. Credit to you for your part in that outcome.
That is a real achievement. Just wish you weren't so anti union, anti welfare, anti addressing market failure, and pro billionaire because 19 year old you would have benefited from enough stability in housing and income and maybe some career advice to be able to sort out the transcripts thing and reform on student loans might have helped sort out the weird middle ground of parents just enough high income earning that refused to underwrite a loan.
When I read this post I read the American story which seems to be that they take pain personally, and not bother addressing or finding the solution as a community.
I'm not talking fully automated luxury communism there's so many issues with a command economy, but there is something better than dog eat dog
Maybe dog has a nice kennel and some grass to play in and foods and options available to them at a bare minimum so they don't always have to eat dog but they can do so later if they're able
I also see a work economy shifted to be so out of whack for the neurodivergent. Pathological demand avoidance is seen as something that can be forced out of a person through the suffering of the market. There is a better way for people the vast median of people who aren't exceptional survivors to be able to get a bit better than what Demand versus Supply graphs tell them they deserve
Truly, I am astonished she is so pro-free-market and anti-government regulation for the common welfare, with such an experience in her background. I had a lot of shitty jobs in the past that were similar to this but not QUITE as shitty, and I can't imagine coming away from it with those views. Especially once you how it gets easier and easier and easier the higher up you go, where you practically have to make efforts for people to NOT give you more money.
Assembly line work. Been there. Miele, best German dishwasher. Best paying student job in town. Got there through connections. 16 DM/hour in 1989, really not bad. The only two steady Germans in the big hall were the 'Meister' and the downie who wiped the floor. Others all Gastarbeiter, guest-workers from Turkey and (then) Yugoslavia. Told me: "work for donkeys, not humans", glad I got an allergy (my hands doubled volume) from the lubricant (hey!) we used to connect the pipes - sure we had protection gloves, but those got holes quickly from pushing those metal contacts. So I could leave without losing much face. Switched to watchman to finance college. Better. Half the pay. Much, much better.
This made me tear up a bit out of empathy, very well written
The most surprising part tho is that you managed to fall thru the cracks on going to college. Honestly, I thought good test scores (SAT/ACT — I assume you’d be able to get good scores on these if you had covered the basic prerequisite math) would be enough to get a merit scholarship to a lower tier school at least? Didn’t realize homeschooling would mess this up
I forget what I scored on ACT (didn't take SAT); iirc my scores were very high except for writing/essay portion, which was quite low. I don't think my overall score was high enough to get meaningful scholarships.
Ya, you suck at writing. [*how* many subscribers you do you have?] That's why I didn't read this. :-)
Never thought in all my years I’d hear anyone mention SEL outside of my normal job
Wow. Girl, you can write! My first ever exposure to you was your masterful mime/hatrack video and I spent more time than I'd like to admit finding you..... So glad I have and so glad for you. What a story you've had, SO looking forward to where it goes. Wishing you all the best. DPM
It’s mind numbing doing any job simply to pay bills, and it’s worse if the job is monotonous or repetitive; needs to be something different everyday. You need that daily variation.