fleddr (u/fleddr) - Readit News

fleddr commented on It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO nybooks.com/articles/2023... · Posted by u/syliconadder

bogomipz · 2 years ago

I'm curious why and when did those go away exactly on Dutch TV?

fleddr · 2 years ago

I only have speculative answers on offer...

Somehow the sexual revolution of the 60s/70s running out of steam, and a correction taking place. A growing influence of American culture as well as Muslim immigrants, both more conservative. And perhaps feminism changing course.

fleddr commented on It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO nybooks.com/articles/2023... · Posted by u/syliconadder

wkat4242 · 2 years ago

TV shows are about human life and sexuality is as much part of life as anything. A lot more than violence. I do also wish this wasn't such a taboo.

But the US is far from the only country that's so sensitive about it. Pornography in China is forbidden, in India is very iffy. In Islamic countries it can be extremely illegal.

Even in the Netherlands where I'm from movies have become a lot more prudish since the 70s/80s.

fleddr · 2 years ago

In the 80s/90s, on Dutch TV we'd have daytime deodorant commercials on public channels featuring naked women applying the product.

Wasn't even considered sexual content, and in no way shielded from kids either. The context isn't sexual, and it's a perfectly normal body part.

The sexualization of the human body is nothing but a cultural invention.

fleddr commented on French workers protest plan to increase retirement age cbc.ca/news/world/france-... · Posted by u/thesuitonym

bjourne · 2 years ago

At some point we have to rethink what "contributing to the system" means. What are web developers designing ads for online casinos contributing?

fleddr · 2 years ago

Great comment.

The status quo is so bizarre. Human life has no inherent value unless it makes continuous contributions to "the economy". It would be economically most efficient to drop dead on the day you retire. Thanks, human!

All of this to keep a machine running that wrecks the planet and everything living on it, including ourselves. Probably some 50% of the economy is pure bullshit that nobody asked for, just keeping each other busy.

At some point we lost the plot. The economy doesn't work for the people anymore and drastic productivity increases have somehow not really improved our lives in terms of freedom, time, physical/mental health, quite the opposite.

fleddr commented on French workers protest plan to increase retirement age cbc.ca/news/world/france-... · Posted by u/thesuitonym

fleddr · 2 years ago

The French are sometimes ridiculed for their "unrealistic" worker demands but as a Dutch person, I greatly admire their unity.

Here in the Netherlands, we pride ourselves on our "polder model", a trinity of government, employers and unions that come to a consensus, hence no need to strike. That system worked well for some decades hence society runs on auto pilot.

Trouble is, due to globalization and ever more temp contracts (fire at will), the power of unions have been decimated and the combination government/employers are calling the shots, slowly eating away at worker rights.

Our "holy" retirement age used to be 65, unchanged for a huge amount of time. It was declared as unsustainable to keep it that way, instead it should become a rolling number, coupled with life expectancy. My pension fund predicts my retirement age at about 70.5.

This change was pushed through because keeping it at 65 would cost 5B per year for the foreseeable future. Absolutely unaffordable for our tiny country.

40B in support to keep businesses open during COVID though...just pulled from a hat. 25B in energy compensation so that households don't freeze to death...arranged in mere weeks.

Just saying...unaffordable means no political will.

Anyway, regardless of the money mechanics, retiring at 70+ is absurd. It effectively means no retirement at all. I know a huge amount of boomers, many were able to retire at 58-62, especially blue collar. Most by then already were in poor health but managed to pull off a decent decade of rest and joy with still some activity like going on holidays.

By 70 it's over. Some dead, the others depleted. Their partner may have died. They have severe health issues. No energy or will power left to truly have one more adventurous run. Hobbies abandoned. Health and quality of life declines exponentially. 60-70 and 70-80 are not the same thing.

Further, nobody actually wants these old people at work. Blue collar people are broken by then and white collar is either obsolete and outdated or strongly discriminated. I'm in my 40s and struggling to stay relevant.

The point of my rant is that there's always an economic reason to make workers' lives shittier. Always. Every time there's a rational reason to do so that seems to make sense. And that's how you end up working as a couple for 50 years straight. It's never going to be enough.

Only with unity as seen in France can you call out their bluff.

The age should actually be 60 and we should be having ever shorter worker weeks. A concept I call "time for wealth". In the future we probably have to do with less stuff. But it's not a vision for the future to say to people that their wealth is under pressure whilst still needing to work themselves to death.

Hence, we trade that wealth for time. You learn to live with less material goods which increases your appreciation of them. More durable/reparable products. Higher prices because externalities are included. Doesn't have to be bad at all, restoring some sanity here. In return for this material "poverty", you get more economic security, more free time, retire earlier. Also fits in well with our AI future that will disrupt work.

I think that's a vision people can get behind, and we'll still leave the door open for the super achievers that want more stuff.

fleddr commented on The perks workers want also make them more productive fivethirtyeight.com/featu... · Posted by u/rustoo

fleddr · 2 years ago

My take on this is that bizarre as it is, most companies do not seem to care much about productivity in the first place.

If you look at the typical knowledge worker (non-manager) today, they're drowning in meetings, chat and email. Leaving tiny snippets of time to do actual work, perhaps as little as 2 hours per day.

I find it absolutely baffling how there doesn't seem to be any serious effort to address most of your productive base being spent on communication. Basically, people spent most of their time figuring out what they're even supposed to do, and when, and precious little time actually doing that.

This is why the 4 day work week works. I'll repeat it again as this is a key insight: This is why the 4 day work week works.

It's not because of a better "work life balance", as much as I love to believe that. It's because a 5 day work week has overhead as high as 50-75% where no actual work gets done. So to cut back from 5 days to 4 days, you just scrap the least useful meetings/chats/email whilst you continue to do the 25% we used to call actual work.

In other words, when your employees work a day less and still are just as productive, you should be embarrassed and have a serious issue in your organization. And sadly, this issue seems to be the norm, and somehow gets no attention at all.

Collaboration is not the solution, it's the fucking problem. In a utopian work state, you'd give me a work package that is clearly specified and I'll get to work. I wouldn't need 17 meetings to understand what you even mean, report status 3 times per day to 50 people, call 3 vendors to resolve dependencies, get a sign-off from 5 internal institutes or be pulled into 20 directions at once regarding 7 other projects.

fleddr commented on 2023 State of Software Engineers [pdf] pages.hired.email/rs/289-... · Posted by u/hunglee2

dgs_sgd · 2 years ago

On page 21 we see that only 25% of engineers consider a great/exciting product to be an important work priority, and only 24% consider strong mission/vision. Are 3/4 of engineers just not that interested in what the company is actually building for the world?

fleddr · 2 years ago

In our work culture of "toxic positivity" we've forgotten that most employees, in any business, care about pay and job security first and foremost.

fleddr commented on Banning words won’t make the world more just theatlantic.com/magazine/... · Posted by u/furrowedbrow

fleddr · 2 years ago

We should spend less time on the crazy outcomes of these institutes and more time on why they can even exist in the first place. They are somehow funded yet not accountable to anyone.

Nobody asked for this, it doesn't help anyone, and it cannot survive the most basic scrutiny of the public or market. And yet it exists and even grows. Rather than playing whack-a-mole with outcomes, the underlying mechanism should be explored.

My unscientific take on it is that it is not a matter of real belief, instead a matter of fear. Case in point, businesses do not really care about things like DEI, but a series of impactful lawsuits has scared them senseless. Hence they dress up the optics of DEI to stay out of trouble.

Similarly, universities are under pressure to appear "on the right side of history" by aggressive student activists, fueled by the flames of BLM, MeToo, whichever other social justice outrage. Hence, they dress up an extensive administration and force it upon all staff as part of their performance review: demonstrate the 3 ways in which you contributed to the cause this year. It doesn't matter if you believe in any of it, just do it regardless. Since none is equipped to do anything actually useful (livable wages, accessible healthcare and housing, etc) the next best thing is some imagined micro aggression.

A factory of bullshit and optics driven by fear.

fleddr commented on All you may need is HTML fabiensanglard.net/html/i... · Posted by u/ecliptik

H4ZB7 · 2 years ago

nope, it's definitely just for vanity. it will be hard to explain that on a forum dedicated to people whose work revolves around upholding this myth, though. html not being readable without css is a bug or bad positioning. i would never design a document format that requires something as complex as css to be readable. anyway i find sites that use just plain default html readable. one big mistake people make is to let their browser take up a full widescreen monitor on such pages. the fact that the browser tries to be the OS discourages them from resizing it (windows+left on windows or gnome or the equivalent on windows is enough). its mostly the tables (iirc) that look like crap, even though they didn't have to

fleddr · 2 years ago

Ah yes, the myth of rejecting nihilism. Just like my last restaurant visit where I ordered stale bread and water. Enough for survival, the rest is pure vanity.

fleddr commented on Germany opposes EU plans for client-side scanning tutanota.com/blog/posts/g... · Posted by u/CharlesW

fleddr · 2 years ago

Whatever happened to concepts like "probable cause" and "innocent until proven guilty"?

fleddr commented on Honestly, It's Probably the Phones noahpinion.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/jinjin2

zeroonetwothree · 2 years ago

I don’t know how to get friends :(. I’m stuck with only virtual relationships.

fleddr · 2 years ago

Go do volunteer work, it's where you meet people that like to see you coming. Then build from there.