4 ms·

We don’t really pay one person to dig ditches and another to fill them. Is there something more concrete and real that you’re concerned about?

asah 4y ago
We pay a food company to feed a person calories they don't need so they develop diabetes etc which we pay doctor to cure, insurance company to adjudicate and drug company to medicate. We build roads and buildings and cars designed to require excessive maintenance and then wear out early, e.g. cheap uncoated metals. We develop JavaScript frameworks, rando databases, hipster languages etc and educate/certify people in them, write millions of LOC then replace them a few years later. This is shallow innovation and it's a crazy amount of make-work. There's an alternative, which is to ask whether something EVEN HAS A CHANCE of being relevant in 10 years. Experimentation and risk-taking is fine, hamster-wheeling and "bullshit jobs" are a waste of life and destroy the earth, for little benefit.
- pawsforthought 4y ago
  More absurdity: Slap on sunscreen, then use statins to counter the high blood pressure (rather than get free exposure to the sunlight we all evolved to live under). Have both parents in full-time employment, while kids get warehoused in daycare. Overwork people to the point they have neither time nor inclination to cook for themselves from scratch, instead using meal kits, ready meals, takeout, restaurants. Alienate people from their own bodies with manipulative marketing that weaponizes their insecurities against them, then patch up the self-esteem with totally unnecessary cosmetics, gyms, fashion, surgeries, etc. All these activities fatten GDP, but which of them really represent human flourishing? We measure the wrong things, at least in part because the right things so often cannot be measured. We need to trust in the unmeasurable, but that is antithetical to the technocrat.
  - mercy_dude 4y ago
    > slap on sunscreen, then use statins to counter blood pressure. I have always thought most of the sunscreen products we have today have shady ingredients by just looking at the list of endless number of chemicals. I mean why do we need 50+ chemicals in a product when just zinc oxide can do. This was confirmed when Neutrogena last year had to tee all some of their sunscreen products last year. Increasing blood pressure is a new one I haven’t heard of before.
    - pawsforthought 4y ago
      I elided a whole lot of detail, but the claim is that exposure to sunlight is implicated not just in vitamin D production, but also in a whole raft of beneficial biochemical processes, including nitric oxide release from stores in the skin [1]. This promotes vasodilation, thereby lowering blood pressure (and indeed, all-cause mortality [2]). The interventionist’s prescription, though, is to always wear sunscreen, to take vitamin D supplements, and to take statins to control blood pressure. I suppose my original point was that this represents a perverse exercise in ditch digging and filling. Using one expensive product to block the sunlight we evolved under, then using yet more products to compensate for the disrupted natural functioning of our skin (which we likely don’t fully understand anyway, so the counter-interventions are a partial remedy at best). [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6830553/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6830553/ [2]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26992108/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26992108/
- SkyMarshal 4y ago
  > There's an alternative, which is to ask whether something EVEN HAS A CHANCE of being relevant in 10 years. Experimentation and risk-taking is fine, hamster-wheeling and "bullshit jobs" are a waste of life and destroy the earth, for little benefit. I sympathize with this sentiment, but it's impossible in practice to reliably predict what will be relevant in 10 years. Also, I don't believe it's possible to get the signal without the noise. I've even come to believe the noise may be the generator of signal. We live in a probabilistic universe, not a deterministic one.

asah 4y ago

We pay a food company to feed a person calories they don't need so they develop diabetes etc which we pay doctor to cure, insurance company to adjudicate and drug company to medicate. We build roads and buildings and cars designed to require excessive maintenance and then wear out early, e.g. cheap uncoated metals. We develop JavaScript frameworks, rando databases, hipster languages etc and educate/certify people in them, write millions of LOC then replace them a few years later. This is shallow innovation and it's a crazy amount of make-work. There's an alternative, which is to ask whether something EVEN HAS A CHANCE of being relevant in 10 years. Experimentation and risk-taking is fine, hamster-wheeling and "bullshit jobs" are a waste of life and destroy the earth, for little benefit.

pawsforthought 4y ago
More absurdity: Slap on sunscreen, then use statins to counter the high blood pressure (rather than get free exposure to the sunlight we all evolved to live under). Have both parents in full-time employment, while kids get warehoused in daycare. Overwork people to the point they have neither time nor inclination to cook for themselves from scratch, instead using meal kits, ready meals, takeout, restaurants. Alienate people from their own bodies with manipulative marketing that weaponizes their insecurities against them, then patch up the self-esteem with totally unnecessary cosmetics, gyms, fashion, surgeries, etc. All these activities fatten GDP, but which of them really represent human flourishing? We measure the wrong things, at least in part because the right things so often cannot be measured. We need to trust in the unmeasurable, but that is antithetical to the technocrat.
- mercy_dude 4y ago
  > slap on sunscreen, then use statins to counter blood pressure. I have always thought most of the sunscreen products we have today have shady ingredients by just looking at the list of endless number of chemicals. I mean why do we need 50+ chemicals in a product when just zinc oxide can do. This was confirmed when Neutrogena last year had to tee all some of their sunscreen products last year. Increasing blood pressure is a new one I haven’t heard of before.
  - pawsforthought 4y ago
    I elided a whole lot of detail, but the claim is that exposure to sunlight is implicated not just in vitamin D production, but also in a whole raft of beneficial biochemical processes, including nitric oxide release from stores in the skin [1]. This promotes vasodilation, thereby lowering blood pressure (and indeed, all-cause mortality [2]). The interventionist’s prescription, though, is to always wear sunscreen, to take vitamin D supplements, and to take statins to control blood pressure. I suppose my original point was that this represents a perverse exercise in ditch digging and filling. Using one expensive product to block the sunlight we evolved under, then using yet more products to compensate for the disrupted natural functioning of our skin (which we likely don’t fully understand anyway, so the counter-interventions are a partial remedy at best). [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6830553/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6830553/ [2]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26992108/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26992108/
SkyMarshal 4y ago
> There's an alternative, which is to ask whether something EVEN HAS A CHANCE of being relevant in 10 years. Experimentation and risk-taking is fine, hamster-wheeling and "bullshit jobs" are a waste of life and destroy the earth, for little benefit. I sympathize with this sentiment, but it's impossible in practice to reliably predict what will be relevant in 10 years. Also, I don't believe it's possible to get the signal without the noise. I've even come to believe the noise may be the generator of signal. We live in a probabilistic universe, not a deterministic one.