Yep, when I was a kid I remember people grousing about how stuff used to last forever and now it doesn’t. 20 years later, I got to hear people talk about how stuff made when I was a kid used to last forever but now it doesn’t. Now I get to hear how stuff made 20 years ago used to last forever but now it doesn’t.

Every time something breaks, someone points to something 20 years old that didn’t break and forget all the stuff that did break.

Of course, the practice of repair was different when the appliance costed relatively a lot more.

E.g. a TV was more likely to be repaired, but also costed about 10x as much relatively speaking.

So if it would have cost you 25% of the price of a TV to get it repaired, you would have got it repaired. If it’s just as easy to repair now, then the repair would still be over twice the price of just buying new.

It said right in your quote that people do work that “no one volunteers to do”. If they aren’t volunteering, then something is providing the impetus.

Broadly the writing avoids the more difficult nuance of how the community gets unplesant work to be “shared” when no one volunteers. This suggests enforcement one way or another.

At small scale of a commune, some pretty human interactions can probably serve to drive this in a pretty reasonable way, by instilling sense of duty and comradery and potentially shame inherent to everyone knowing everyone else in a nuanced way. As you scale up, when inevitably people start losing track of each other, those soft mechanisms deteriorate, and the systems start to develop cracks for exploitation. Capitalism breaks in some ways, other systems break down in others. Fundamentally human behavior when interaction becomes diluted at scale tends to suck.

allocating a few days a month to all fit members of a community to do work which no one volunteers to do.

Ok, this basically sums up the answer: the community forces labor one way or another. What is the enforcement, carrot vs. stick for making people do their fair share. How do you reward people for doing unwanted work? How do you deal with someone refusing to do it, or “maliciously complying” and doing it terribly to make the job easier and/or get out of doing it again in the future?

So the agreement is that there is work that needs some external impetus to happen, because not every job has enough people intrinsically interested or civic minded to make it happen. The question becomes which solutions manage to be more fair than others? For unskilled and unwanted jobs, the current answer has a lower class overworked because they are the most desperate, and that’s bad. A forced labor system might manage to distribute the burden more fairly, though thanks to people being crap it’s likely for a system set up to do that to be abused to overwork some demonized demographic, ending in a similar outcome a different way.

Whatever the case is, it’s not as rosy as “people freely work on wikipedia and programming, therefore people will freely work on anything society may want or need”

This is unfortunately a bit naive, that for every problem no one wants to do there’s a solution that people both want and can create.

If you want to dismiss excessive waste as a failing of society, we can speak of work like line men who repair power infrastructure. It’s not super engaging work.

Problem being the jobs that don’t inspire passion, curiosity, and purpose, but we still need them to get done.

Alternative motivation may be viable and in fact drive better results when feasible. You find the right person with the right passion who wants to do the job.

Problem is not every sort of job can pull that off. You aren’t going to find enough sewage treatment enthusiasts to handle that demand. You aren’t going to have enough line men to keep the grid going reliably and safely.

Now let’s discuss all the people eager to volunteer to work sewage treatment plants.

The proportion of people with more innate motivation versus need for a job to be done varies wildly between jobs.

But when someone approaches work with innate motivation, amazingly better stuff happens compared to people in it just for the paycheck.

I think you are on to something, but I’d say it actually largely deflates the ‘people didn’t vote and if they had, maybe the outcome would have been different’ narrative.

“Did not vote” rules in non-swing states. I wager that, for example, most people didn’t vote in california not because they see their candidate as a lost cause, but because they know “their” candidate has carried the state for sure.

So in a shift to proportional electoral vote or popular vote, you’d probably get a lot more voters engaged in California, Hawaii, NY, and pick up democrat votes but you’d also get more red voters from Alaska, Texas, Utah, Kansan, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabamba, Tennesse… etc… I’m not sure which group manages to bring out more non-voters in that scenario…

“I’ve delayed the deadline to let the very promising peace talks that are definitely real and not at all made up proceed”

You know it’s bad when the last message is essentially “we are just going to stop talking publicly about it”

Sure, but this comic is in English…

Dating fine, but if going for a long term commitment, it may be rough to be in your 60s with a partner in their 80s. They have to understand if they are theoretically on that path and that their relationship will transform into elder care at some point. Also before that the older one will stop keeping up sexually.

If both see it as a short term fling, probably ok. The 46 year can probably keep up with a 25 year old in the ways that matter, and may have enough money for some interesting experiences to share.

I say it’s generally a problem of long narratives, but some genres like comedy can get a pass since they don’t have to rely on growth and progression.

To the extent a story needs to develop, running a long time is likely to doom something.

Running a few books or a handful of seasons can work, but if a story has to evolve over decades…

Haven’t gotten around to One Piece (that episode count is… daunting), but I think I really know it’s done as soon as they have a ‘tournament arc’. Give up all pretense and just have them fight for the sake of fighting.

And then there’s bleach, where, oh look, he has a somewhat cool sword, oh it has a cooler form, oh there’s an even cooler form, oh now he has mask powers, but limited, oh wait, we were lying that wasn’t his real cool sword form… Ugh…

Think another example of ludicrous power escalation was when in Loki they just had a drawer of assorted infinity stones. Yes, played for laughs but the problem of escalation suggested is real.

I think the real problem is trying to keep a story going too long, and the need to escalate everything constantly serves to ultimately undermine how that progress feels.

The stories tend to be repetitive, end up where a villain gets a new MacGuffin and the hero has to get some new capability to overcome only for the next villan to have an even bigger MacGuffin, rinse and repeat with each time being portrayed as some impossibly large leap over the last. To keep characters going they time jump, they get cloned, they come back from the dead, they cross over from some alternate universe.

Basically, most genres of fiction have a risk of overstaying their welcome if you try to make it go on a long time.

It’s not so much a problem plaguing fiction in general, but fiction that runs a long time.

If it’s a contained story with defined end that comes relatively soon enough, the stakes can be relatively fixed, arcs can run through to a logical conclusion, etc.

If you have unending, soap-opera like story, then you hit problems. Characters can never actually be fully realized, they have to have their development paused. Any romantic ‘will they/won’t they’ gets ludicrously drawn out. You usually get tougher plot armor because fans are really attached, or a revolving door of characters that you don’t get attached too, or people inevitably managing to be alive after having died. You have power creep where insurmountable challenges get overcome through progress and then something has to reset the new capabilities to table stakes.

Giving us the ow for now, later it’s going to give us the d.

Reminds me of a time when my nephew was playing vintage Super Mario Kart and started trash talking me about how long they had been playing and that I didn’t stand a chance.

“I was playing this since before you were born kid”