[pinkybanana]

> that aren't doing anything actually useful (finance, fintech, adtech)*.

Cut that crap. Most of the companies in these spaces are value-adding services and products. It is annoying that this kind of thinking is prevalent "If I don't understand how it generates value, it must be useless."

[dgb23]

Not everyone buys into the ideology that equates monetary success with value. For a rational definition of what adding value means to all involved parties, they sometimes correlate and sometimes don't.

I'm personally fascinated by both financial and marketing strategy, it touches on interesting aspects of many dimensions, from mathematics to psychology and much more. And those fields do serve a purpose in an ever changing and evolving complex economy. But is that purpose really that "valuable"?

I and many others are jaded, because their incentives don't align with progress towards solving the big, important problems. They play their self-perpetuating games while putting on blinders.

All this time, energy, brainpower, centuries of stacked education and research only to manipulate people into constantly buying more stuff. Growth for the sake of growth, piles and mountains of concentrated wealth and power, while people die and suffer and are moved like pawns in a game that nobody signed up for.

Nature is furiously shaking and cooking our planet, while gigantic poisonous gas clouds are leaking from its pores. Our forests, insects, fish and fungi die in masses. Our springs dry up and our seas are covered in trash and poison.

Meanwhile our smartest and most fortunate are building gigantic machines and crunch data so they can "add value" covered by a smoke of ideology mixed with pretend skepticism to keep the gears turning.

There is no money in planting trees for the next generations and in facing the hardest challenges that our societies and nature pose, but I'd wager that this would be "value-adding".

[quacked]

That's a good way of putting it. I think that some tech-competitive or modern-conservative people are turned off by the eco-friendly prose you wrote there, but there is simply no denying it- there is trash everywhere and species are dying off within lifetimes. I just watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi and even he remembers when the fish were higher quality and quantity at the market. Unfortunately, there is no money in letting unfished tuna schools run amok, there's no money in restoring the Great Barrier Reef, there's no money in not flying to Hawaii for vacation.

And those are just the flashy ones- there's no money in wild birds, bugs, waterways, air quality, plants, nature.

Do people value the wild and getting through each day in a pure, healthy environment, or do they value efficiency for the sake of itself?

[dgb23]

It's also a type of fake efficiency. The vegetables we grow have less nutrition in them, the technology is not built to last, products get thrown in the trash without being used and people are drained by their work instead of satisfied. We're doing something wrong, I don't know the solution but ideology seems to be clouding us from seeing the problems in the first place.

[drstewart]

Yeah? And how many trees do you plant as a web developer for small businesses? How many fungi have your enthusiastic Clojure scripts saved?

[quacked]

Dunno if you're talking to me or a child commenter, but my career has nothing to do with what I do on the side. I work in tech so I can pile enough cash to convince banks to give me land and doctors to give me surgery. If the U.S. enacted some sort of schema that allowed me to get land and healthcare without providing for banking shareholder's portfolios I'd quit tomorrow, raise dairy cattle, grow produce, or I'd just stand up buildings and clean the side of freeways. If I owned my own time I'd do nothing but fix broken things in the world, and as soon as I've got mine and can quit engineering that's just what I'll do. How many believers in better society have you swayed with snarky comments?

[dgb23]

I’m not excluding myself from this and am working towards it.

[colinmhayes]

I've worked at adtech companies. They were not providing people with any value. The entire business model is built on manipulation and psychological trickery.

[pessimizer]

Murder generates value for murderers; the question is how much value it generates for society.

[kowlo]

Maybe it has more to do with the commenter's opinion of what "value" actually is?

[quacked]

Nonsense. Our definitions of "value" are different. For instance, you likely would only ever work for money, or wish to live in a society that uses financial allocation to determine labor and resourcing. Personally, I do not find "money" to actually be useful except inasmuch to convince people to do actual value-producing activities. You don't need currency to keep the lights on, but right now you need currency to convince anyone to do the actual valuable work to keep the lights on.

I understand how the industries produce "value". I, however, do not find the "value" they produce to be overall beneficial to humanity. Furthermore, even if I accept the utility of currency, it is impossible to deny that these industries have grown into a parasitic nightmare sucking the world dry in the pursuit of ever-higher piles of cash.