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Stephen Schwarz's avatar

Now do the same analysis for workplace romance. And work is, or was, where many people meet their mate. Is there any wonder fertility rates are plunging throughout the West?

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Adam's avatar

the solution is for men to be hornier and braver ie "fuck that, I'll find a new job if I have to". of course, that's easy for me to say when *I*... work *remotely*.

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Bwhilders's avatar

Woke and MAGA are literally, 2 sides of the very same coin. In fact, MAGA is just “right”-side woke. I won’t lie and say MAGA is just “conservative” woke because by now, everyone should know that MAGA is no more conservative than Woke is liberal. Americans might not all be dumb, but the whole country is certainly upside down. And it’s so damn exhausting hearing such a wide cacophony of unexamined emotionalism raining down upon all of us like it were free cereal box trinkets.

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Boring Radical Centrism's avatar

>1c) Conversely, many entry level non-corporate staff seem to engage in lots more dangerous humor. That’s a rational response to having less to lose.

I think this is more that higher level staff are more likely to get in trouble over a joke, not that they have more to lose. People don't care much if a cashier makes an off colour joke in the break room. They care more if a manager does, and much more if a CEO does.

Also, while the wage of a CEO might be much higher than a cashier, that doesn't mean the CEO values his job less than a retail worker. They'd both have comparable amount of stress and difficulties finding a new job and adjusting their living standard lower than what they're used to in the meantime. The CEO would probably have a harder time, because being cancelled for an off colour joke would follow them much more than it would a working class worker.

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forumposter123@protonmail.com's avatar

No, it's very easy for low level employees to get new equivalent jobs. People are always hiring and there is little to no background check.

Many corporate jobs you could never get a close equivalent if your deemed a bigot.

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Boring Radical Centrism's avatar

That's what I said, although maybe I underestimated just how hard it is to get another corporate job.

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Frange Bargle's avatar

I would like to find a space where I can explore ideas without fear that someone will use something I say out of context to feed me to the woke wolfpack. Work was such a space until about ten years ago. Now it is not, and I have nowhere to go.

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RareQuip's avatar

Let me know if you find such a place!

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Monkyyy's avatar

Better to be funny then employed *laughs with my 2 digit bank account*

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J. Goard's avatar

Whoa, look at Mr. Fancypants tenaire over here.

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Daniel Melgar's avatar

An excellent, but sad, commentary on the workplace status quo. The takeaway is keep your mouth shut at work because the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

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Thomas Cotter's avatar

If you’re thinking this hard about how people will react to your joke, odds are you aren’t funny.

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Oct 3
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Thomas Cotter's avatar

If you can’t intuitively feel the difference between a “this will be funny” joke and “this will get me fired” joke, then comedy probably isn’t for you.

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TGGP's avatar

An example of Robin Hanson's "automatic norms", where you should expect to be punished for not quickly intuiting the norm https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/automatic-norm-lessonshtml

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Thomas Cotter's avatar

Intuition is a good thing. Autism is a disability.

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Oct 4Edited
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Thomas Cotter's avatar

Yeah, if you couldn’t read the room to figure out if using the n-word would be okay or not, you shouldn’t be attempting jokes.

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Ragged Clown's avatar

Is there any way we can fix this?

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D0TheMath's avatar

I still don’t understand why people work at large & boring corporations. I would not expect the pay to be better, nor their stability (though maybe?), and mostly it seems a matter of *signaling* stability, yet why do people care so much about *that*? Maybe, for men, to seem more marriageable, but then they should quit & find a smaller place to work after marriage.

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Murali's avatar

Small startups are not just less stable, they are also a lot more work. That's why they tend to be staffed by true believers. But most people are not true believers. They want to do the work reasonably well, get along with others and be able to take the leave they are entitled to without being judged. You get to do this in large boring corporations. Part of this is a byproduct of the stability. Stability tends to generate regular schedules. Regular schedules means planned family holidays etc. New startups usually have terrible work life balance because you have smaller budgets, tighter margins and the company usually has a lot more debt and hence a lot less leeway.

Even not talking about startups, small to midsized companies often tend to pay less than larger companies and often tend to be worse places to work. Why? Because, most established small and medium companies will not ever get larger. This means that there is something wrong with the way they are doing things that prevents them from expanding. There is a good chance that this will be bad workplace culture. The causal arrows go in both directions here. Bad culture hurts productivity which hurts bottom lines which in turn causes management to take actions which hurt workplace culture either directly by coming down hard on breaks, micromanaging employees and other shenanigans that go on in small companies or indirectly by not being able to fire people who are bad for the company culture.

Imagine you are in a big company and one of your colleagues is a bit problematic. They are rude and do not work well with many others. If the company has a lot of employees, they can shuffle the bad one around to a place where they fit in better or fire them. Why? because they probably have lots of other people capable of doing the same job and some redundancy so that in case of sickness or family emergencies there are enough people to cover the gaps without forcing people to cancel their leave or sacrifice too much of their personal time. In a small company, there is nowhere else to shuffle the problem worker to. And in a smaller company, you probably need more workers, cannot afford to hire new ones, and also cannot afford to fire existing ones either.

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Vladimir Vilimaitis's avatar

Working at smaller companies usually is much more work for less pay. Plus, you're usually pressured into socializing with people you have little in common with. Big company remote job is the golden mode of existence - keep your head down, do your job, and live easily.

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forumposter123@protonmail.com's avatar

I earn 98th percentile for 5-10 hours a week of WFH that I dictate all the terms of.

In my interview I said my demand was that I have total control over everything I do and my boss not be able to tell me what to do, then demanded higher compensation when they gave me my first offer.

BigCorp email jobs are sweet.

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Oct 3Edited
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forumposter123@protonmail.com's avatar

My friend got laid off from Amazon and took a 50% paycut and had to travel around the country >50% of the time (he has a family, that sucks bro).

Sure, he got some stock with a tiny chance of a big payout and a large chance of a 0% payout. Not worth much to a middle aged person with a family.

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MG's avatar

The whole premise of this article is flawed. It’s VERY EASY to still be funny at the office in ways that will not offend anyone. Calling all PG-rated humor “milquetoast” is ridiculous.

That’s like saying “Spending time with my family is joyless. I can never get my kids to laugh, because they’re not old enough to get racial/sexual humor.” Sounds like you’re just a bad dad.

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Henry Rodger Beck's avatar

The issue isn't vulgarity. There's plenty of excellent humor that isn't blue. There is zero humor of any kind that doesn't offend somebody, least of all when so many people see it as their religious duty to attune the hurt feelings of themselves and any possibly offended party.

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Henk B's avatar

So I imagine you don't believe "humor is an artform that thrives at the borderlands between appropriate and offensive?" I do, so I am curious what kind of inoffensive jokes you make at the office, could you give some examples?

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