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A comment on I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week. Parent comment

Re:I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Da... by PaulDavisThe1st on Saturday July 17, 2021 @05:05PM (#27868871)
Sorry, but this is BS. The course of a river is a direct result of several close-to-deterministic forces and influences. Caesar's Palace, along with "neurobiology, economics, and regulatory regimes" are manifestations of many different forces, a large number of which are subject to individual and social choice-making. The pretense that "neurobiology is destiny", "economics is as immutable as physics" and "regulatory regimes are natural law" is just completely bogus, and the argument is one entirely in favor of the status quo, by the status quo.
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Re:I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Da... by jbay808 on Saturday July 17, 2021 @05:28PM (#27868996)
Are you arguing against me, the essay, or the excerpt? I don't think your rebuttal really hits at the main body of the essay, which is about how competitive pressure can trap groups into miserable situations that no individual wants, but which are stable enough to be hard to break out of. It's not that you can really predict the form of societal institutions, but just that they perhaps aren't shaped by free choice as much as they seem, because of how much the incentive landscape restricts our choices.

I don't think the point is that the exact detailed form of Las Vegas was inevitable, but rather that it exemplifies the collective madness that these forces can produce.

Although perhaps more relevant to this thread would be how a society might, under pressure, lose its traditional siesta and never get it back. He mentions examples like this too.

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Re:I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Da... by PaulDavisThe1st on Saturday July 17, 2021 @07:11PM (#27869525)
The excerpt, mostly.

The essay does continue its fair share of glib side-stepping of areas of social organization that are less deterministic than Alexander likes to suggest, but it also contains some good points and some interesting examples (even if I don't agree with his explanations/projections of all of them).

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Re:I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Da... by bryan0 on Sunday July 18, 2021 @12:35AM (#27870782)
But choice-making is a product of neurobiology and economics. We’re not going to solve problems like global warming by “choosing” our way out of them. We need to formulate economic solutions so that they’re the only rational alternative.
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