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Skillfulness to me implies giving a crap about the world you share with others. Skilled, in comparison, is a consolation price. > One of the most repulsing sto
by vedloseper 9y ago
Skillfulness to me implies giving a crap about the world you share with others. Skilled, in comparison, is a consolation price.
> One of the most repulsing stories that I got from Soviet Union from my grandparents was about excellent engineers being on the same pay scale with manual labour workers.
That's the most repulsing? Nothing about children and old people being murdered en masse? See above, more skillful grandparents would have told wholly different stories.
- dang 9y agoThis comment breaks the HN guidelines twice over: the one that asks you not to take threads on flamewar tangents, plus the one that asks "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not do these things when commenting here? They reliably degrade discussion, and we're hoping for better than internet median.
- closeparen 9y agoIf you care about the world you live in, you should want the people in it to be good at things. If you’ve studied the world you live in, you’ve likely discovered that this is more readily achieved with material incentives than with propaganda about one’s duty to the state.
- blorsh 9y agoAh, but why were there children and old people being murdered en masse? It's because humans naturally resist what was being imposed upon them. The smart and able-bodied are going to get more, and they will resist any effort to prevent this. Corruption and workplace theft were rampant in the Soviet Union. Suppression of this resistance requires violence.