I won't even look at a youtube video essay about an obscure vintage RPG (my preferred form of guilty pleasure viewing) if it's under 20 minutes long.
Going to need some recommendations
Readit Newsmalignblade commented on TikTok has turned culture into a feedback loop of impulse and machine learning thenexus.media/tiktok-won... · Posted by u/natalie3p
> I think that has always been the case, we just tend to compare today’s average stuff with the best stuff from earlier days.
I agree with this of course, because generally nobody remembers the bad stuff unless it was the worst. I beg to differ with music, though, because there's an opposing effect: we tend to be left with the most marketed music, which was usually a cheap knockoff of something interesting going on at the time. The shitty commercial knockoff becomes the "classic" while the people they were ripping off don't even get a wikipedia page.
You're raising a good point about how "best" is defined.
If you ask most people, they are by definition more likely to connect with broadly disseminated cheap knock offs than they are with whatever 'legit' inventive underground creator, simply because they've heard the former and not the latter.
Just a mental exercise: If you ask 1000 people if they prefer Knock Off or Original, and 900 say Knock Off, which one was better? If the answer is still Original, by what metric do we measure quality?
malignblade commented on Move Fast and Abandon Things engineersneedart.com/blog... · Posted by u/JKCalhoun
If minimum wage didn’t work, what metric makes you believe that a similar system but paying those who don’t work, will?
This type of thinking truly baffles me. This magic UBI will be minimum wage for the masses that don’t work.
How could that, possibly, be sustainable or even good?
Answering your literal question, how could it "possibly" be good:
Minimum wage probably doesn't work because it means a lot of people live in precarity while both emotionally and physically exhausting them. It might just be that minimum wage has stagnated while COL has skyrocketed. If the point of minimum wage is that it provides people with a guaranteed dignified life as long as they are employed, that needs to keep up with the cost of living a normal life in order to keep its effectiveness. That is one reason it might be "failing" although I don't know exactly what you mean by that.
> get us from the service economy to agency and self-actualization
This is the thing I think most people have a hard time connecting to "measurable utility" but will probably be the most sweeping effect of UBI or similar. Think about your typical gig worker, minimum wage worker in some high-turnover environment etc. This person probably does not have the financial safety net to pursue something meaningful, or to take the risk reskilling, or to otherwise improve their emotional and financial well-being.
You will probably always have free-riders or people who just want to consume without producing. But is it better to have a society of exhausted, frustrated, barely-hanging-on people, or a society of people with the _potential_ to to be creative, passionate, and exploratory?
Conversely to you, I find it hard to imagine that a society with surplus wealth would be more effective if it chose to subject its people to precarity and emotional strife instead of empowering as many of its people as possible.
Some references: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/https://www.statista.com/chart/25574/living-wage-vs-minimum-...