I wonder if the middle ground is when one needs to be "unkind" in words, they should be "kind" in action. I worked on a team that had been moved to a project, in part because that project was behind schedule, haphazard and under-staffed. In our first months we were often (and to my dismay) unkind in words without kind actions to follow through. All of our critiques were correct. All of them were important and needed to be addressed. All of them were real problems. And often the critiques were blunt for the sake of being clear to management. But being right didn't stop that unkindness from stinging the other teams that were there before us. We were resisted and drew quite a bit of (understandable) animosity from those other teams. When we changed tack (partially in response to realizing we were being unkind, partially because we'd finally built up the knowledge we needed to do so) and started accompanying critique with solutions or at a minimum viable demonstrations of the solution, things were received much better. We still said hard things, we still brought in half bakes thoughts. But because we were being kind in bringing more than criticism to the table, it was much more effective.
Another point in the "leaky" house's favor is that it doesn't get as dusty nearly as fast as one with an open window. Granted the severity of this issue depend on where you live :)
The libertarian notion that taxes are extortion is frankly childish in how overly simplistic it is.
You get all sorts of benefits in return for your taxes. You can't realistically opt out of them. You can't live without using roads or being defended by the military. You can't tell society at large that when you get hit by lightning that you want they to leave you to die and not call an ambulance
Since you can't opt out, a nontaxpayer ends up being a freeloader and social parasite. The only just option is to have to contribute to the imperfect system
The whole idea of extortion is premises that people can exist somehow outside of society which is disconnected from reality.. No man is an island
The alternative to the current model is not to have no services at all, as that makes no sense, agreed.
> The libertarian notion that taxes are extortion is frankly childish in how overly simplistic it is.
The argument is weak because you constructed a straw man. The libertarian notion is not to live without any of the services provided by a state, but to have different providers which are in competition. The issue is that the state / gov has a monopoly but is exempt from antitrust laws.
The implementation is tricky though because in reality, when functions of the state are privatized there is often a huge amount of lobbying and corruption involved and these functions are given to a small group of big companies which effectively form a cartel once again. Then they extract all the economic value left in the infrastructure, the privatization is declared failed and undone, effectively another channel of syphoning tax money into the hands of big companies.
> but to have different providers which are in competition
it never worked in practice though.
> has a monopoly but is exempt from antitrust laws
because it does a mediocre job at many things, making it quite easy to compete against it when and if it's worth it, but provides those things no private entity would, because it's anti-economical.
like, for example, the proverbial roads to nowhere.
> The whole idea of extortion is premises that people can exist somehow outside of society which is disconnected from reality.
Or people can agree to collaborate (like a church or workers union) without extortion of citizens. There’s plenty of examples where extortion isn’t necessary.
I’m also not suggesting taxes shouldn’t be levied at all, I’m saying land and income taxes are particularly gross, as they misalign incentives. Like I said, the more civilized a civilization is, presumably the less protection people need, so we should pay less taxes. Similarly, the more civilized a civilization the more services can be provided by the private sector. The reverse trend is true for taxes, they charge more for less.
In my (limited) experience private one on one messages are not censored. Or at least this was the case several years back... It's possible things are more strict now.
At least in my tests on Wechat you could discuss tiannanmen square or whatever you want with individuals. Some stickers were censored on Wechat and wouldn't show up. I think images as well may be don't get delivered.
Virtually all censorship and cases of people being arrested are when people talk about these things in large group chats (if a group chat has more than X amount of people it needs to be "registered"). My impression was it's a government fear of things going viral and controlling the public sphere and not about creating a panopticon/state-terrorism
Again.. This might be out of date, but this was at least the case for a long long time.
If you get out of the US bubble, the prices are simply insane
fix a sofa: it's equivalent to a month's salary/stipend here in Asia. 200 bowls of noodle (if it's a cheap noodle then it's more like 500)
new sofa: "new leather sofas of the “not flat-packed sawdust and glue” variety quickly get into five figures"
So like a year's worth of stipend/expenses
Could be that just the US dollar is crazy - but until the economic disbalances of the world doesn't equilibrate (that's on a centenial scale), it's never going to make sense to fix a sofa
"But I’d sure vote for a political party that convinced me it was trying to achieve that"
The only way you can achieve this is by going full North Korea and self sufficient. There is no real upside to this fantasy
A significant portion of the cost is labour, so if you translate that into a local non-US cost does it still seem absurd? I may have misunderstood your point, but I don't think it is a good argument for why running a business fixing things using local labour should be a fantasy.
Aside from that, in my view a world where a sofa costs less than one weeks wages is the absurd and unsustainable one. We've adopted an attitude of being incredibly entitled to cheap tat and that needs to stop.
I think there are two issues that are going in parallel
1. fixing stuff
As long as some dude on the other side of the world is willing to make a new sofa and send it to you for cheaper than it is to fix it locally, the idea of fixing it locally will just never take off. You can ban/limit international trade, but then you're just screwing over poor people on the other end of the world for a "feel good" kind of thing
2. not making cheap crap
You can find some way to disincentivize making cheap stuff. Ban IKEA.. etc. But then you are just making life harder for the poor in your own country. That's cool you can afford a 5 figure quality sofa.. many people in the US won't be able to afford that. It just comes off as a bit heartless as well when rich programmer types deplore the quality of cheap things. There are the five figure sofas if you want. Go buy them - nobody is stopping you. You don't have to force everyone else into that price bracket though
The two things aren't disconnected. But in the end it seems like rich people want to ban cheap things, so that they can have more local repair services for their expensive stuff
The goal isn't necessarily to eliminate the bottom tier from the market. The issue isn't with that, but with the tendency for the market to hollow out, which results in there being no middle-tier products available at all. You have a variety of products ranging from literally shit to figuratively shit, then nothing, then high-end custom-made professional grade stuff you can't afford, and probably can't source unless you know someone who knows someone. Any business trying to do OK stuff for OK price is forced to either sink to the bottom-tier, or become a niche high-end brand.
Or, in short: the problem isn't that I can buy cheap crap. The problem is that I cannot buy moderately expensive good stuff - there's only cheap shit, and moderately expensive shit pretending to be good (and then the good stuff I can't possibly afford).
This is indeed hard to solve. But there is need for a solution. Not because I want a good couch for 4 figures, but because we should have more sustainable and goomd couches. Not just for reducing environmental impact, but also for improving quality of life and financials for all but the poorest, by letting them actually get long lasting furniture.
Currently anyone who would produce that needs to compete with IKEA, and somehow needs to convince customers that their furniture will last longer. Currently the best way to do that is hand-cut dovetails and only hardwoods. But there's quality to be had with modern solutions that are muuuch cheaper than the old methods.
> Currently anyone who would produce that needs to compete with IKEA, and somehow needs to convince customers that their furniture will last longer.
To be honest, IKEA isn’t the problem here. Their stuff is above average quality / longevity until you’re at least a couple levels up in the market. The last time we were looking for furniture, it was eye-opening to see how many companies are trying to charge 2-4 times more for IKEA or lower quality furniture, where something looked nice from across the showroom but if you looked closer it was all sawdust and cheap plastic components.
(and there is another point that belongs to this conversation, even if not addressed in the OP.)
3. Sustainability: Everything will have to be replaced eventually, even repairable sofas. It is important when constructing a piece of furniture (or anything else) how will the parts be recycled? We should aspire an ecosystem that goes: buy -> repair -> repair -> recycle.
Ikea sofas can be underrated. My wife bought a Grönlid loveseat at a consignment store (read: it wasn't even new) for $100 and we enjoyed it for almost 9 years. No sagging or falling apart, it remained comfortable until the day we sold it or gave it away - I don't recall now.
That's a part of IKEA's appeal. Because of the consistent quality and the extensive market share, there's a lively secondary market for the furniture. At least in Europe. You simply cannot sell (or even give away) similarly priced furniture of other brands but there's demand for second hand IKEA.
Lid has more meanings though. It can also mean "inclination" or "hillside" (roughly) which makes more sense in the context. Grönlid would then be a green hillside or green slope or similar. Which sounds like a nice place to lay down and relax for a bit.
I've got plenty of relatively cheap things in my house, including a few from Ikea, that are perfectly good for what I use them for. And I've also bought things like relatively high-end small appliances that crapped out in short order.
And it's often very hard to tell which is which in advance--and it may very well be the luck of the draw in any case.
Even an obviously cheaper Ikea dresser I have in my bedroom. Yeah, it's cheaply made and was sort of a pain to assemble. But it looks and works fine and I'm not sure I could have even gotten a hardwood dresser that cost 5x as much into the space.
Labor costs don’t rise tenfold with proper wood though. It’s the same wooden board they have to cut and mount. US wood-based markets are notoriously ridiculous.
No, but perhaps labor drops tenfold with switching from proper wood to glue mixed with toilet paper. You throw sheets of that pulp on a machine that laminates them, then throw that on a CNC cutter, add a bag with some screws and glue, a sheet with instructions, and ship the complete flat-pack piece of furniture to customer. Not much human labor involved, and it scales well.
Yeah, but you can do exactly that with proper wood too. As far as I understand, there's no reasonably priced option like this in US. Feels like this either-or extremity is a learned coping strategy for something going wrong with wood at US end. And with matresses, and table tops. That something's going wrong at the other ends is well-known, but it doesn't have to correlate 100% with the problem.
The median household income in the US is $76k ($57k post taxes). Germany is $54k ($34k post taxes). China is $13k.
Even compared to Europe the amount of money for spending a US household gets is almost twice as much. There's more expenses due to a lack of a social net however those aren't constant over time unlike taxes. One year you spend $5k for medical bills and the next you spend $5k on a new Sofa.
The problem is that you're talking of massively freeloading social an environmental costs of humongous size onto other people and places. Sure, "flatpack sawdust and glue" furniture made by slave labour while destroying rainforests and dumping toxic waste is cheap for you and right now... But that can't last and won't last.
Sofa manufacture is not what's destroying rainforests or dumping toxic waste.
And "flatpack sawdust" is better for the environment, actually -- where do you think all those leftover wood scraps would be going if they weren't mixed with glue and used productively?
If you want to be using solid pieces of wood in everything, that's a lot more trees you're going to have to cut down.
My late grandmother had some pieces of furniture that were between 300 and 400 year old. We need less stuff and particularly less new stuff. A 400 year-old wardrobe ("armoire normande") is exactly as good as any new one to store your clothes, has much more character, and may still be just as good in the centuries to come.
That's wonderful if you only move a few times in your whole life, and always have space in your bedroom for a wardrobe, and like the style.
It's impossible if you move apartments every couple/few years, the bedrooms come with closets and there's no good place to put the wardrobe and you don't need it anyways because you have closets, and sure it has "character" but it looks completely out of place because it's the wrong character.
If you want to preserve antique furniture and are able to, then more power to you. There are lots of antique furniture enthusiasts.
But I don't want an antique wardrobe any more than I want to wear a high-collared four-button men's sack suit from 1885.
Along the same line it's always interesting to see Americans discuss mattress prices, it's always like "yeah best pay 4-6k at least and they're swapping the names and reviews so there's no way to tell if you're getting a quality product regardless" meanwhile I paid like 250 euros for a locally made memory foam mattress that's a dream (ha) to sleep on.
Post-socialist countries still have an absolute shit ton of these lifestyle businesses or even medium sized firms instead of monopolist megacorps which results in a very competitive market and has turned out to be quite an upside for the end consumer.
I feel the same when they talk about renovations. "thank god the kitchen only came to $45k", "the bathroom remodel was only $30k", "the new fence was $20k, not too bad". I know the have bigger spaces but... damn.
Though home renovation costs are mostly about local labor costs for tradesmen. I suppose I could spend an ungodly amount in a kitchen on super-premium appliances but more likely the bulk of the cost is masons, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, the local shop putting together the cabinets/counters/etc. You can also save a lot of money by being selective as opposed to hiring someone to do a complete makeover.
When I published with an Elsevier journal they explained the "draft" thing pretty clearly. They said you retain copyright on whatever you write yourself. But once you have reviewer feedback and incorporate feedback from the journal editor(s) then it's no longer entirely your work and you couldn't distribute it at your own will. You could pay the journal a huge amount of money (in effect for the work done by the editors), and then the paper would be open access. The fees might not be reasonable (it's kind of hard to judge) but the overall logic made sense to me
So the first draft before review - the one you wrote all on your own - is what you can put up online. I'm not in CS but I assume the logic is similar in other fields.
They also provided a separate link of the final published PDF that you could use to distribute the paper to colleagues and interested parties. This link worked for a sufficiently long period of X amount of days/months. After that it was paywalled and in their garden
From interviews it sounds like Altman is personally very involved in all hires. So it's not surprising that employees are incredibly loyal
He's also presenting the openai missions as a holy crusade. The alternatives for a cutting edge AI guru (who wants a disgustingly huge salary) is working for anemic bureaucratic advertising companies (Facebook and Google). While openai has a sexy new business model that nobody quite understands.. It's "not for profit" and "working for the good of humanity". Employees eat that up, while getting a fat paycheck - and I think very sensibly convince themselves it's true
Add on top of that, you're part of an exclusive club working on some Manhattan project-like cutting edge stuff. You wanna miss out on all the fun ?
They allegedly have tons of secret stuff in the pipeline, it must be exciting to be on the inside
From the point of view the lies and manipulations are all small potatoes in the grand scheme of things and just look like Altman trying to get shit done in the face of stupid layer of bureaucracy in his way (ie. The board)
Meet requires a Google account to attend a video call while Zoom does not. So if your hosting a meeting with strangers, using Meet is not user friendly.
At least personally I refuse to make a Google account bc it requires giving Google my phone number... But I know that's a bit of technoludditism in the current zeitgeist
Is this new? I have definitely joined Meets calls from my personal laptop and I don't have a personal Google account. This includes my last job interview, and, well, I got the job.
Perhaps it's meeting specific, or organization specific?
You can join a Google Meet meeting without a Google account if the meeting creator enables the “Anyone with the link can join” setting, or if they accept you when you click the link.
It's been over 6 months since I've looked into this, so it's possible my info is out of date - but the “Anyone with the link can join” setting is only available to people with a paid Google business account. Nobody in my department had anything like that
On the one hand you have a point, and they're drifting apart culturally - but at the same time Taiwan is not keeping up economically or culturally at all.
If the rate of economic progress stays close to constant, in a decade it's going to be hard to look at the evil communists across the straight who are much better off living standards wise. Taipei is a bit drab and ugly that hasn't seen any development in the last decade. It looks worse than second tier cities in China. Just my surface level impression is that you fly across the straight and people are dressed nicer and look better off on the subway there.
On the cultural front they're also not doing hot.. the domestic culture is anemic. They don't make movies like they did in the 90s. Nobody cares about Taiwan's cultural output (other than bubble tea). The art scene is honestly.. pathetic here. In large part b/c they can't engage with anything historic other than recent history of the White terror. There is an eww factor with regards to engaging with Chinese history - its seen as the culture of the "other" and so you see it in every day life.. no tea ceremony, no hanfu, no interest in history. There is also no real "Taiwanese culture" that would be alien to a Chinese person (I can only think of Pili?). There is some stuff built on top of Fujianese culture.. but it's got no legs so far.
The elephant in the room is that Taiwanese are also starting to consume more and more Chinese media - which was kinda garbage quality for a long time but has vastly improved in the last 5 years. I think this will take off. You can already see it on Tiktok and stuff.. people use a lot more mainland terms and expressions.
If the Chinese were smart they'd build 10-20 ferries and offer people free trips to Xiamen/Shanghai. Most Taiwanese never travel to China and have little sense for the cultural similarities
If the Chinese manage to ramp up chip production then Taiwanese is really screwed. TSMC is some insane percentage of the GDP. The other insane fraction is of course businesses that work in China like Foxconn.. China already has this place by the balls unfortunately
> If the rate of economic progress stays close to constant, [...]
Not going to happen. So far in all economies, catchup growth has inevitably slowed down as they moved to the global technological frontier.
Taiwan was famously one of the Asian tigers. As you already noticed, her growth has slowed down a lot. PR China has seen enormous growth, but has also slowed down in the last ten years or so, and looks to slow down further.
At the moment, PR China as a whole is a lot poorer per capita than Taiwan. Though you can argue that for our purposes here, Taiwanese people would compare themselves to the coastal provinces of PR China.
(Of course, they would also look at Hong Kong as the obvious comparison for a (semi-) independent entity joining PR China. And just going by raw growth, officially joining China doesn't seem to have accelerated HK growth at all.)
My point is that just from .. on the ground "feel" and quality of life .. Hong Kong, Taipei and large Chinese cities are all at rather similar levels (each having their own pluses and minuses). And I don't see them growing at the same rate from here on out.
People keep predicting the slowing of growth in China, but it's not materialized (at least anywhere close to the degree the experts expected). Just over the period of the pandemic I saw personally a huge amount of development and growth in China, while virtually nothing in Taiwan.
I'm just skeptical that once you reach Taiwan's level of development it's some inevitability that growth stalls. There are serious structural problems here in Taiwan that have made it stall (bureaucratic, extreme protectionist trade policy with huge tariffs on imports, little entrepreneurial spirit, anemic art scene, weak work ethic, an extremely non-confrontational culture, etc.).
Similar to Hong Kong, a key economic driver was their function as a bridge between the West and China - but this has become mostly redundant now.
All good things must come to an end. China will stall eventually too, for instance they're getting incredibly bureaucratic now, but they still have some runway.
I'm living in Singapore, which has the interesting distinction of being (mostly) culturally Chinese, but politically independent. Singapore is one of the richest countries on earth (in terms of GDP per capita), and we are working our way up the list of richest cities, too.
> I'm just skeptical that once you reach Taiwan's level of development it's some inevitability that growth stalls.
Growth slows down a lot as you hit the global productivity frontier. Taiwan isn't quite there, yet, but it's a lot closer that mainland China.
I'm not sure what word you want to be using. Roughly and pragmatically speaking, you can catch up pretty quickly (with the right policies), but your per capita (non-oil) income can't really go (much) beyond the US.
Once you reach American levels of prosperity, you will also find yourself reduced to roughly American levels of growth.
That's not zero growth, just very slow growth compared to the preceding years of breakneck catchup growth.
Have a look at eg Japan between WW2 and ~1990, and then from ~1990 to now. Naive extrapolation in the 1980s gave us some lovely cyberpunk, but reality looked different.
You are right that Taiwan at about 33k USD per capita is still quite a while away from the US's roughly 76k USD per capita. And I suspect with the right policies, they could catch up more. Just look to Singapore for what's possible. But even our almost mythical city state has slowed down a lot compared to the halcyon days.
> People keep predicting the slowing of growth in China, but it's not materialized [...]
Just going by official PRC figures, growth has slowed a lot. And that's still compatible with your observation that observed PRC growth was higher than in Taiwan.
> I'm just skeptical that once you reach Taiwan's level of development it's some inevitability that growth stalls. There are serious structural problems here in Taiwan that have made it stall (bureaucratic, extreme protectionist trade policy with huge tariffs on imports, little entrepreneurial spirit, anemic art scene, weak work ethic, an extremely non-confrontational culture, etc.).
Yes, I am glad that Singapore has so far stayed clear of most of these issues. But I'm afraid that eventually, democracy will do us in. Where by 'democracy' I mean giving in to what voters say they want. Protectionism in various disguises is popular with ordinary folks the world over. And so are various measures to weaken work ethics, or to limit migration ('those foreigners are taking our jobs' is a cliched complaint for a reason).
Our Gahmen is far from perfect, but I feel like the strongest policy disagreements I have with them is where against their better judgement they gave in to popular demands.
I just hope that the decline in governance will be gradual enough, that it won't matter for me.
(For comparison, cities like New York or London had pretty poor governance for probably close to a century now (depending on how you look at it) and they are still going strong, even if not as strong as they could have gone.)
I think it's very difficult to compare across countries and using official statistics. Both Tiapei and a place like Chongqing are not at the level of development as Singapore. That's very true. But there are many distorting factors.
For instance on paper the US is very wealthy, but I think this is mostly due to the strength of the currency. An "average" electrical engineer in Taiwan can expect to earn 30K USD a year. That's how much someone without a highschool diploma can make in the USA working in fastfood. I doubt this really functions are a metric of the engineer's productivity. (the US is also not as some natural limit by any stretch of the imagination - it's got absolutely colossal societal issues)
Looking from the outside Singapore seems to have a lot of other challenges. Just due to being a small city state for starters - not to mention the social/cultural factors. I'm not really sure it represents some kind of natural limit. The big Chinese cities are also pooling talent from the vast provinces. While in a city state you're mostly stuck with the talent that's born there
There is also this curious factor that life in Chinese cities is in a sense subsidized by the rural poor. So the middle class quality of life is sustained b/c there are people that are willing to work really hard for very little money. Taking a taxi in Shanghai is infinitely cheaper than taking one in Singapore - b/c there is some guy/girl from the countryside willing to do it for cheap (you have a limited version of that with the Malay and Malaysian Chinese underclass in Singapore). At some point growth will slow as the rural poor become wealthier and life in the cities becomes a bit more expensive
I'm not too familiar with life in Singapore - I've only visited a few times - but it seems to have similar problems to Taiwan with a anemic cultural sphere (growing up people all try to be engineers) and lack of innovation. The only company I know from Singapore is Shoppee - which is basically a low-rent Taobao reseller (without all the innovations of Taobao). Would be curious to hear your thoughts.
I didn't really work intensively professionally in China, but I got the sense there is a lot of experimentation, people just trying stuff out, people starting businesses - at the same time there was a deep appreciation and interest in cultural "things" which was also subsidized extensively by the state. I do wonder how far it can go in a censored environment, but it seems to be flourishing for the moment. I'm sure things will slow down - but I don't feel it's going to slam the breaks and stay at Taiwanese levels of development
And yeah you're right, if it's not the poor getting wealthier then populist measures, regulations and bureaucracy does everyone in eventually :)
I thought Singapore was more like Hong Kong: the real money in a in finance and business, engineering (including programmers) are considered less important and so make a lot less money (they can make more by working in mainland china).
Mainland China definitely seems to value engineers than other Asian countries. They pay better even than Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in many technical fields, which is why I had so many work mates from those countries when I was working at Microsoft in Beijing.
I've worked in both finance and tech in Singapore, and you can make good money in either field. If you look at stats, they also reflect that Singapore's economy is a lot more diversified than Hong Kong's.
Yeah, could be. I might be in a bit of a bubble. The Universities in Singapore seem to be more known for engineering than their business schools - but that could very well just be my ignorance
> (the US is also not as some natural limit by any stretch of the imagination - it's got absolutely colossal societal issues)
Yes, but empirically the US sits close to the global technological frontier.
> The big Chinese cities are also pooling talent from the vast provinces. While in a city state you're mostly stuck with the talent that's born there
Why would that be? People can move to Singapore, just as much as they can move to any other city. The only thing keeping them out are immigration rules that Singapore herself sets. In fact, Singapore has lots and lots of immigrants. I am one of them.
> For instance on paper the US is very wealthy, but I think this is mostly due to the strength of the currency. An "average" electrical engineer in Taiwan can expect to earn 30K USD a year. That's how much someone without a highschool diploma can make in the USA working in fastfood.
Well, and the currency is strong because there's a lot of demand for it.
> (you have a limited version of that with the Malay and Malaysian Chinese underclass in Singapore).
Not really. If you want to point at an underclass here, looking at our foreign domestic workers (ie maids) and the migrant construction labourers would be much more apt. These days, if you have a Singaporean passport, you only really have yourself to blame.
(People with a Malaysian passport also still have it somewhere easier getting a visa to work in Singapore.)
> Would be curious to hear your thoughts.
I think Singaporeans like to complain, and they don't appreciate their own achievements. Did you know that Sound Blaster / Creative Labs is from Singapore?
The Chinese mainland is an enormous market. Market size is a big factor that helps with growth. That's (part of) how the UK industrialised in the first place, and it's also part of why the US got as rich as they are. (Nowadays the UK isn't exactly a big country, but at the time they represented one of the bigger unified markets. Eg across the channel France, even though it was politically united, was plagued by internal tariffs.)
Computer programmers from Taiwan go to the PRC to earn more money. Heck, programmers from Japan and ROK find they can get more money in China as well with the right specialty. It is just one small segment of their economy, but the money China is willing to spend on tech is no joke, and dwarfs its neighbors in terms of salaries.
Post HK crackdown protesters partying in and shopping in PRC. Lot's of buy China movement generating domestic brands across the spectrum happening. IMO yes, PRC cultural catchet will increase, most next TWers will look at sinicized next gen HKers and realize being "another" priveleged Chinese city not so bad. More new TW democracy dysfunction reveals itself, i.e. sunflower kids getting lesson in majority rule now, more jaded people will realize systems matter less than progress. The force against this is cohort voting math + entire LIO+Authoritarian propaganda layer with 100s of western NGOs on the ground. IMO pro-TW identity/independance bloc going to be too loud and too large past 2049.
As someone who works in a "kind" culture (Taiwan) - there is an infuriating flip side
If everyone is constantly worried about being kind, it becomes very difficult for people to say "unkind" things.
- It's hard for people to give you important critical feedback
- People will not give their half baked thoughts (which are the start of good discussions), and only bring stuff up when it's already a problem
- People have a complete inability to tell you "Hey when you do that thing A and B, I really don't like that"
The end result is that people end up masking a bunch of stuff in an effort to be kind which results in
- People having huge blow ups when things boil over
- Insane amounts of office gossip and people saying shit behind each other's back (bc they can't say it to your face and resolve it)
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