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Why? Both are getting away from home purely for spiritual joy.
It takes a really muddy definition of "spiritual joy" to argue that a pilgrimage to worship holy relics is the same as going to gawk at the Eiffel Tower and eat fancy food.
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It takes a really muddy definition of "spiritual joy" to argue that a pilgrimage to worship holy relics is the same as going to gawk at the Eiffel Tower and eat fancy food.
Different ages and cultures will give different spins to the same old human needs and inclinations.
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All direct costs that I know of are proportional to the employee's wage. Could you elaborate a bit and tell us what other costs you are thinking about?
Recruiting and training for all, and for the more fortunate among us benefits like health insurance, transit benefits, etc.
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All direct costs that I know of are proportional to the employee's wage. Could you elaborate a bit and tell us what other costs you are thinking about?
Recruiting and training for all, and for the more fortunate among us benefits like health insurance, transit benefits, etc.
Of course, if you can just use gig workers...
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It's wonderful that there is someone with mind as unclouded by propaganda to enlighten me and improve my limited world view. Did you find any figures or arguments in the original paper that I overlooked? Like, Chinese peasants, German peasants, etc.
No, I generally agree that we've shifted things around so that most workers now are generally a bit better off than before in many ways. I think they could be better off still under alternative systems. I was however responding, primarily, to your apparent argument that anyone criticising capitalism can only be a Soviet-era state-supporting "communist".
That would be a highly creative way of summarising my post.
My problem with the paper was that it started what was supposed to be a historical research with a slogan-like claim that a particular ideology propagated it (literally the first sentence).
As in, there was no misunderstanding, no misinterpretation, or lack of evidence, but evil dudes came and lied to us all.
I countered that I witnessed firsthand how the competing ideology was "propagating" the same "myth", which, simply put, makes the author's assertion a sheer nonsense.
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That's equating unemployment with vacation. And that's overlooking how hard mundane existence was: heat required collecting firewood, cooling was opening a window, cooking was over open indoor fires, food was hard to preserve, beds were scratchy/lumpy/hard, clothing was hand-made mostly from raw wool (clean, spin thread, weave, hand sew) so wardrobes were sparse, water was often dirty & diseased (beer was more necess…
I don't think the concept of "unemployment" is meaningful when we're talking about pre-modern people living off the land.
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I don't think the concept of "unemployment" is meaningful when we're talking about pre-modern people living off the land.
It's certainly more relevant than "vacation", since it's time spent doing little because nobody would pay them for work (and even if they would, there was nothing they could feasibly buy to improve their meagre living standards), not a paid leisure break to spend ones salary on personal enjoyment.
The USA are abolishing themselves... > In Germany, an economic powerhouse, workers rank second to last in number of hours worked. Despite more time off, German workers are the eighth most productive in Europe, while the long-toiling Greeks rank 24 out of 25 in productivity. Work smart, not hard.
Germany has the whole EEU working menial jobs for them. So in Germany VW workers slack off and even protest to get reduced work week, while in EEU German managers walk over a car plant with watches and time each manipulation in order to fulfill their quotas. Yet the sales are reported in Germany, so productivity metrics goes way up there. It's really naïve to think they aren't benefiting from what is essentially soft…
Just look at countries that don't. Like the Baltics. Or CIS. They have to go where the jobs are, en masse.
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The sad thing is that this kind of propagandistic sentences are crafted to make people believe that. Usually people don't understand producitvity so they understand what you said from the sentence. A German reading that will think "Ha we work less and produce more" but that is NOT what productivity means. Productivity is the ratio between man work and output. So if someone works only 1 min a month and earns for that…
National productivity numbers aren't using a mathematical gimmick though, they hold up if you look at yearly output/hours per year. One of the reasons for Germany's high productivity is that manufacturing is a large sector there.
For example consider a family that owns a plantation powered by slave labour. If you look at their gdp/work its close to infinity. Then you go to the plantation and measure the productivity ratio of this as an economy and it would be very low.
So it depends a lot who captures the value of work and how you measure that as well. The more capital you have and the more you can extract wealth without working the more productive you will be.
I'm going to duplicate a comment I made in another thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16652952 ), because it applies equally well here and I'm quite disappointed that I seem to be the only one pointing this out (after that thread reached more than 340 comments, a mere two other people made a similar comment to mine): As I type this comment, there are 55 other comments in this discussion, not one of them us…