• 4 Posts
  • 240 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • You get more stuff, more status, etc. Or alternatively, penalized, threatened, etc. Whatever it takes to motivate people to do the job. Even if paper money isn’t a thing in communist societies (which it still is), money’s just a symbol for debt. You’re going to get something, somehow, for a job people greatly desire to be done without enough doers and they’ll become “indebted” to you disproportionately for doing it.

    In Soviet society for instance, you might be provided a nice apartment in central Moscow if you were doing something “important”. This assignment would be via your government-controlled employer and their agreements with some other government bureau that officially managed the buildings to dole them out to select people.

    So, same deal as anywhere else, just a different mechanism. Higher ration, bigger dacha, jump to the front of the line to get a car, etc.

    Compensation is usually not much about how dangerous a job is, though. It’s more about how many people are willing to do it for any number of reasons. Some people are just not very risk-adverse, and figure they’re going to be fine at a job that is more dangerous. And they’ll be compensated at a normal level as long as there are enough such people to fill the need.



  • The thing that feels hopeless here is that “dynamic pricing” is like…the natural way to sell stuff if that makes sense? Standardized non-negotiated pricetags evolved as part of the growth of industrialization and mass consumerism. It just wasn’t feasible to have individual salespeople trying to milk each customer out of the most possible money for every transaction for small purchases, and big box stores eliminated the shopkeeper role as a quasi-salesperson who might do that from time to time. But that still IS how many, many sales work today. It’s just that “negotiated prices” are reserved for big ticket items where salespeople get a big enough cut. Real estate, B2B deals, new cars, etc are sold by salespeople whose main job is moneymilking based on what they think they can con the particular buyer into handing over.

    Technology, as the great optimizer, is merely making the job of a salesperson automated enough to be applied at the Taco Bell drivethru using your personal data.










  • Well my approach is:

    • Mark off every candidate who did not bother to provide a statement
    • Mark off every candidate with no listed volunteering experience in the little section for it
    • Mark off every candidate whose statement claims they will do things their desired office is not empowered to do
    • Mark off every candidate with a platform that doesn’t claim to be aiming for any kind of change or improvement in particular. (I don’t support chair warmers.)
    • Mark off every candidate whose email is a personal one listed as itsyaboymrthiccpenis@yahoo.com or something else similarly unprofessional
    • Mark off any candidate aligned with the party that supported the coup attempt in 2021

    After this quick pass, which only takes a couple of minutes, I’m typically only left with two or three offices with more than one remaining choice to compare. I then read their platform and pick the candidate with the platform goal that seems most relevant to my or my community’s interest.