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Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

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Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#161

Post by simplemath »

amelius wrote: post #141
dota_fanatic wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if all the 10x and 100x engineers were all on the same team. Keep competition, but play for the same team. The losers are losers because they didn't create the best solution, but the losers are winners because they get to enjoy the spoils, since they're on the same team. Isn't status everything, after a point? Why can't the United States actually be united? Develop universal human code, highly vetted, secure,…

> Imagine if all the 10x and 100x engineers were all on the same team. Yes, and imagine they were doing fundamental physics or medicine, instead of social media apps...

Imagine if we lived in a world which valued these things over the accrual of money.

I would guess that a majority of the people who create the technology that enables the latter would greatly prefer the former.

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#162

Post by turar »

balfirevic wrote: post #150
chimprich wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could make a similar argument for taxes. The state provides a stable environment, covers risk, and handles overhead. Yet people (in some countries, at least) are significantly more accepting of corporations taking many times the value they are creating in profit versus the state taking a proportion of their earnings in taxes.

That's because their relationship with employer is voluntary.

Same is true for vast majority of countries.

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#163

Post by EC1 »

mikekchar wrote: post #82
EC1 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of it isn't true though? Don't look at how it reads, just read the words. I feel the same way, like you're being stomped in the face every day by an invisible boot except nobody knows who's wearing it, but we all feel it. We are collectively losing our identities and blending into one due to how hyper connected we are and how available cheap forms of entertainment are. It's all quite eerie. I still haven't…

Earlier someone said that they want to opt out of the whole thing. Although I'm not you and I can't know precisely what you are feeling, I'm going to make an educated guess that this is the key to your freedom. This invisible boot is an illusion. I once read an article on privilege. The idea is that if you were a slave owner, you could "promote" some of your slaves to be "head slaves". This privilege creates a kind o…

>After that, I think you will find that you are no longer being stomped in the face every day.

Yeah, all of that is all well and good, for you. What you wrote has no effect on me as I've already made the same realizations way way back. They weren't even conscious realizations worthy of merit. I've just always lived this way.

I don't care about anything in my life except my hobbies. Day job -> piano. I hang out with a couple of people a couple times a year.

Currently saving for a remote cottage way out north so I can isolate myself and work on my music. That's all I want to do.

And that's what I mean about the invisible boot. Just to have a modest dream like that here where I live, I need 250k minimum for the land+cottage and all things included in that.

Even the tiniest dreams are straight impossible. Owning any semblance of a property that is close to the downtown core if you're not a multi millionaire? Hahahahahaha good luck. 0% of my friends will be buying property in their life times, which means they will move further and further away.

The invisible boot is the stagnation of wages and the exploding cost of every day things, combined to shatter any and all dreams.

There's nothing to actually live for, and I don't mean folks like me who are in the unique position of being in a highly paid job without any "life strings". But my friends? It's over, working their entire lives just to maybe afford necessities for that month.

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#164

Post by dragonwriter »

simplemath wrote: post #160
dragonwriter wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post-industrial is here, or near, in much of the developed world, sure, but that just means that the economy has shifted from producing tangible goods to services and intangible goods, and importing tangible goods from elsewhere. That's just a shift in comparative advantage in an economy with scarcity, not a shift to or toward post-scarcity.

I would say that the part of post-scarcity that's actually cogent to my orginal comment is that we are already, via largely and increasingly automated means, cheaply producing vast quantities of consumer goods with decreasing amounts of human intervention. I didn't mean to credulously insinuate that we are approaching the utopian ideal of a post-scarcity world, as any cursory glance at reality would readily indicate…

Thats not post-scarcity, just high productivity relative to the past. Which is something people could point to as being true relative to the (comparative) past at many points in history (conservatively, pretty much most since he agricultural revolutions of the middle ages in the West.)

Because misery is empirically shown to be driven largely by relative, not absolute, deprivation -- both compared to one's own past and one's visible surroundings -- greater productively doesn't even approximate post-scarcity (indeed when it was involves greater or more visible inequality, it makes the impact of scarcity more palpable.)

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#165

Post by refurb »

Retric wrote: post #158
refurb wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the top 1% has (for example) 90% of the income, then only paying 50% of the tax might be considered unfair. The only number I could find is that the top 1% earns 22% of all AGI (adjusted gross income). This is income after all deductions, etc; the amount of income the tax rate is applied to.[1] I'd be interested to see how much of all income is earned by the top 1%. [1] http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-lat…

AGI is a lie. EX: Calculate bill gates lifetime wealth and lifetime AGI. Hint, that 30 billion he donated never counted as AGI.

AGI is not a lie, it's Adjusted Gross Income, that is the income you actually pay tax on.

It's not like it's some super secret formula that no one knows how to calculate.

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#166

Post by refurb »

Retric wrote: post #157
refurb wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top 1% of income earners pay 50% of all federal income taxes collected. What would you consider a "fair" share of the top 1%'s wealth?

If you exclude payroll taxes AND ALL OTHER TAXES. Then sure you can play with the numbers. Reality is they are not paying 50% of income tax as social security is a federal tax on income. There are also plenty of regressive taxes. Pay for lunch that's taxed, pay for an accountant free . Guess who spends more on accountants?

Why is Social Security a tax? It's a separately funded program that pays out based on what the person paid into it. It's also capped.

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#167

Post by Retric »

refurb wrote: post #166
Retric wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you exclude payroll taxes AND ALL OTHER TAXES. Then sure you can play with the numbers. Reality is they are not paying 50% of income tax as social security is a federal tax on income. There are also plenty of regressive taxes. Pay for lunch that's taxed, pay for an accountant free . Guess who spends more on accountants?

Why is Social Security a tax? It's a separately funded program that pays out based on what the person paid into it. It's also capped.

Just because you call a tax an insurance fund or a pogostick, does not mean it's somehow not a tax. Government collects money from X, and hands it out to Y that's a tax.

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#168

Post by Retric »

refurb wrote: post #165
Retric wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI is a lie. EX: Calculate bill gates lifetime wealth and lifetime AGI. Hint, that 30 billion he donated never counted as AGI.

AGI is not a lie, it's Adjusted Gross Income, that is the income you actually pay tax on. It's not like it's some super secret formula that no one knows how to calculate.

Income is income, Adjustment is where the lie comes from.

Sure, you can pretend it's meaningful number, but ex: charitable donations are not deductible from payroll taxes so they are clearly not going to reduce income. Or for a more obvious example, donate 1 million in appreciated and you get to deduct the full 1 million from income. (see if you can spot the problem with that.)

PS: Hypothetically, if they said AGI was income - 95% of income over 10 million per year would you still use it? After all that's just an adjustment.

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#169

Post by womplord »

dota_fanatic wrote: post #53
simplemath wrote: post #8

Overworked? Everyone is overworked. We live in a post scarcity industrial world, or very very close to it, and bad actors have gobbled up the spoils of the huge gains in productivity in the last 50 years. How much of the entire economy is predicated on grey money? How much of your time is indirectly consumed by this leviathan? The more I think about it, the more i want to opt out of the entire fucking thing.

Imagine if all the 10x and 100x engineers were all on the same team. Keep competition, but play for the same team. The losers are losers because they didn't create the best solution, but the losers are winners because they get to enjoy the spoils, since they're on the same team. Isn't status everything, after a point? Why can't the United States actually be united? Develop universal human code, highly vetted, secure,…

Kill yourself

Re: Overworked? Good habits, not holidays, are the answer

#170

Post by simplemath »

dragonwriter wrote: post #164
simplemath wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that the part of post-scarcity that's actually cogent to my orginal comment is that we are already, via largely and increasingly automated means, cheaply producing vast quantities of consumer goods with decreasing amounts of human intervention. I didn't mean to credulously insinuate that we are approaching the utopian ideal of a post-scarcity world, as any cursory glance at reality would readily indicate…

Thats not post-scarcity, just high productivity relative to the past. Which is something people could point to as being true relative to the (comparative) past at many points in history (conservatively, pretty much most since he agricultural revolutions of the middle ages in the West.) Because misery is empirically shown to be driven largely by relative, not absolute, deprivation -- both compared to one's own past an…

>Post-scarcity is a theoretical economy in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor needed, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

As to how relatively miserable we are as a function of how miserable we were... I'm really much more concerned with the idea that as a socioeconomic entity, the global economy generates enough capital that we could solve hunger, base poverty, eradicate solved diseases and even wage slavery. Today. That we haven't and won't is all the indictment I require.

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