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Someone is stealing your life (1990)

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Re: Someone is stealing your life (1990)

#51

Post by georgieporgie »

tomrod wrote: post #47
georgieporgie wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood how wasting time on the job can possibly be termed 'theft'. It's irresponsible and a failure to fulfill expectations, but it's not theft. (btw, I also don't see employers as stealing life from employees)

Theft of labor resources, if you're salary non-exempt and reading HN is not in your job description :-)

I understand the definition of it. What I don't understand is the use of the word 'theft'. "Misappropriation of resources which exceeds our standard of what is reasonable," perhaps, but not theft.

Re: Someone is stealing your life (1990)

#52

Post by tomrod »

exit wrote: post #21

why was foljs comment killed at 2 points? looks like how he characterizes hn is true: 2 points by foljs 52 minutes ago | link [dead] HN is not really a good place to post this. Here the audience is mostly aspiring "entrepreneurs" dreaming of making it big, so they are tied to the rat race and take all the "american dream" BS to heart. Apart from a statistical insignificant minority that will "make it", the majority c…

A few points:

HN is not amero-centric

"The American Dream BS" is not correctly stated in the original piece, thus cannot be the "BS" cannot be what HN folks want to follow

* Anyone can make it if they choose to. Not everyone succeeds on the first try, but the odds are with the person who chooses to learn from mistakes and try better the next time.

* Success is ill-defined when one makes money and prestige the only inputs. As an example of what one small subset of the world thinks, view the third quotation here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_O._McKay#Quotations

Re: Someone is stealing your life (1990)

#53

Post by grammaton »

rick888 wrote: post #37
rwl wrote: post #26

The upshot of this piece is much more significant than the comments here have been willing to admit. Yes, you can write the author off as having a whiny, blame-others attitude. Yes, you can say that if he would just take matters into his own hands, the path of entrepreneurship is hard but ultimately rewarding. And maybe that's right. But if you say that, then you have already accepted a premise that the piece is call…

"But if you say that, then you have already accepted a premise that the piece is calling into question, namely: why should that be the choice that everyone faces?" Do you have an alternative? Humans have tried many different methods over many thousands of years and our current system is the result of trying and failing many, many times. It's the most fair and allows pretty much anyone to be successful. Life is diffic…

"It's the most fair and allows pretty much anyone to be successful."

These are highly debatable points.

Re: Someone is stealing your life (1990)

#55

Post by grammaton »

nhangen wrote: post #18

How about redirecting the argument to state: "You are giving your life away" If you change it that way, then I agree 100%. This line: "Do you expect us to be forever passive while you get rich stealing our lives?" Really bothered me. There's nothing wrong with getting rich, and there's nothing wrong with paying people what they're willing to work for. Instead of placing the blame on someone else, perhaps people like…

" there's nothing wrong with paying people what they're willing to work for"

This is where people miss something important, in my opinion. On the surface there's nothing wrong with paying people what they're willing to work for. But when you dig a little deeper, "what they're willing to work for" is really just a proxy for market forces and labor supply and demand. Just because someone accepts working for a certain price doesn't mean it's what they wanted. If they enjoy putting food on the table, they have surprisingly little choice.

Re: Someone is stealing your life (1990)

#56

Post by grammaton »

cookiecaper wrote: post #29
lionhearted wrote: post #3

> On the other hand - or so they say - you're free, and if you don't like your job you can pursue happiness by starting a business of your very own, by becoming an "independent" entrepreneur. But you're only as independent as your credit rating. And to compete in the business community, you'll find yourself having to treat others - your employees - as much like slaves as you can get away with. The whole piece is like…

For the record, this was written in 1990, when low-cost startups like web sites were pretty difficult to conceptualize. Back then, there was very little you could do, outside of generic consulting, that didn't have a huge bootstrapping cost, making credit ratings much more important as you had to get a loan or an investment to get anything done. The internet has changed much of that now.

Exactly. Most of the respondents to this thread don't seem to realize that we occupy a very unusual and richly privileged period of history - or for that matter, a very privileged position by dint of being fortunate enough to work in an industry that does allow it's workers a very high degree of autonomy if they choose that for themselves. Even then, it's still very hard and risky work.

Re: Someone is stealing your life (1990)

#57

Post by nhangen »

grammaton wrote: post #55
nhangen wrote: post #18

How about redirecting the argument to state: "You are giving your life away" If you change it that way, then I agree 100%. This line: "Do you expect us to be forever passive while you get rich stealing our lives?" Really bothered me. There's nothing wrong with getting rich, and there's nothing wrong with paying people what they're willing to work for. Instead of placing the blame on someone else, perhaps people like…

" there's nothing wrong with paying people what they're willing to work for" This is where people miss something important, in my opinion. On the surface there's nothing wrong with paying people what they're willing to work for. But when you dig a little deeper, "what they're willing to work for" is really just a proxy for market forces and labor supply and demand. Just because someone accepts working for a certain p…

Sure, that's true, but if the market doesn't pay you what you feel you are worth, then you have the option to build something that does pay you what you are worth. It's not up to me, as a boss, to take care of someone.

Re: Someone is stealing your life (1990)

#58

Post by grammaton »

jonnathanson wrote: post #11
lionhearted wrote: post #3

> On the other hand - or so they say - you're free, and if you don't like your job you can pursue happiness by starting a business of your very own, by becoming an "independent" entrepreneur. But you're only as independent as your credit rating. And to compete in the business community, you'll find yourself having to treat others - your employees - as much like slaves as you can get away with. The whole piece is like…

Yes. It takes effort, and it also takes balls (for lack of a more gender-neutral and appropriate word). If you want to get out of the drudgery and soul-hemorrage of the rat race, then you need to be prepared for the risk. Most people aren't. They do the mental math, figure that they need the salary or the stability or the medical coverage too much to risk it, and they take the blue pill. They resign themselves to the…

"figure that they need the salary or the stability or the medical coverage too much to risk it...it's a choice nonetheless."

You don't see the contradiction here? What if someone is ill and really needs the medical coverage? What if they have dependents?

Just because you are fortunate enough to be healthy and relatively responsibility free (if you are), doesn't mean that everyone else is in the same boat, and that people who make a different decision do so because they have infinite choice.

This is a big problem with most of the just-world arguments I see about these issues - they never acknowledge that not everything in life is a choice, no matter how much we want to make it so.

Re: Someone is stealing your life (1990)

#59

Post by grammaton »

lionhearted wrote: post #38
moultano wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're giving this enough thought. Some traits are an emergent property of systems, and while it's technically correct to say that this is blaming "other people," it's not a useful idea. It's like getting mad that someone lied to you, and blaming their neurons. The system we're in has some undesirable traits, and it's useful to think about them and how they might be fixed. Unless you're suggesting that…

> Some traits are an emergent property of systems, and while it's technically correct to say that this is blaming "other people," it's not a useful idea. This is exactly blaming other people, from the article - > It was during the years of office work that I caught on: I got two weeks' paid vacation per year. ... In other words, no time was truly mine. My boss merely allowed me an illusion of freedom, a little space…

Your point is well taken that it tends to deaden one to looking for solutions - but that does not, in any way shape or form, invalidate the author's arguments.
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