Personally while I'm opposed to programmer certification, systems like these certainly make me wish such a thing existed.
The problems arose when people realized that the same controls and abilities to instill this equity and “fairness” provided the platform to enable wide scale exploitation in the other direction. Want more profit? Change a variable that was a single number whose action would cause great stress for many people, but would produce a desired result. The goals and metrics would always start out resonable but eventually would cross a certain point, and once they did, there was no going back to the way things were.
Draw your own conclusions to the similarities in this system to our modern day technical web triumphs.
To put this another way: the most efficient way we could have possibly found to get the use of nuclear arms in war globally banned, was to have someone use one. The Cold War would have been far riskier if the world hadn’t seen Hiroshima and Nagasaki—it would have been a stand-off to the use of weapons we would have as-yet had no understanding of the consequences of using. It probably would have ended with the use of hundreds of bombs, rather than just two.
It’s sort of the moral equivalent of a “work to rule” strike: the best way to get through the lesson that something is bad, is to stop pushing back against it and just let it happen for once.
I suppose doubling down of fossil fuels and burning of rainforest is great, we’ll just have to adapt quicker to the super extreme weather. But we can adapt with more aircon! Yay!
Maybe we are just monkeys who can’t actually learn from things that we haven’t experienced but then we’ll be replaced by nature any day now. I’d rather learn things the easy way, if at all possible.
Being a sociopath could be considered as a person's life choice, but it's not something to be considered bad. It's merely a medical condition.
It'd be nice if humanity was smart enough and empathetic enough to avoid the horrible mistakes we've made, but we're really not.
Not trying to hijack and turn things political here, but it was just an observation. Sometimes you need some chaos to bring about change for the good...sometimes the thing we fear most is what we NEED to happen in order for those in power to pivot and change their ways.
I would file this under 3. Moral Disengagement - A generalized cognitive orientation to the world that differentiates individuals' thinking in a way that powerfully affects unethical behavior.
Whereas the intention of building an oppressive system such as the one described above is, what, selfishness? Laziness? Programmers, because of the high-demand nature of our role, do not tend to be subject to the usual financial pressures that other communities are. I'm not sure what would motivate someone to build such a system as opposed to walking and finding a better job offer.
Not really.
If you work for Raytheon, you are supporting a company that sells arms to the following countries: https://www.raytheon.com/ourcompany/global
Northrop Grumman have a list of their worldwide presence here: https://www.northropgrumman.com/AboutUs/OurGlobalPresence/Pa...
If you work for a defense contractor, you are not 'protecting your society' - that's not even the intent. The intent is to make money by selling tools designed to kill other human beings.
Say you have a call center run as a co-op. You’ve got workers and HR people. Both the workers and HR people are shareholders. If you can eliminate the HR people, then the workers can each have a larger proportionate share for the same work. Automating HR eliminates the HR people.
This is my point.
Eventually someone will come in and say the system in the OP was necessary for the company to stay afloat, pay its employees or retain value for its retired shareholders.
It creates jobs. A lot of people don't have the self-control to keep from taking longer and longer breaks, either costing the company money or getting fired. Some jobs pay more to hire people that do have this self-control, but there are only so many of those people. This creates a business model that works when supplied only with the lazier employees who are left.
Another system like this is the timeclock. It's a tyrant and getting out of bed on time every morning is the hardest thing I've ever had to do, but there's just no way to run a factory without it.
