Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

/r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

tracingwoodgrains.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 566 posts

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#261

Post by bloaf »

gavinray wrote: post #182
JSavageOne wrote: post #156

I remember stumbling upon /r/antiwork a few years ago and being so happy I'd stumbled upon a thriving movement that so effectively criticized one of the core principles of society that everyone takes for granted - that everyone must effectively sell their labor to someone else (unless they're rich enough to opt out, or clever enough to create some business or invest their way out). To me anti-work is the recognition…

>Universal basic income I'm going to sound like I'm being snarky here, and I promise I'm not. How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? I don't say this from a place of privilege. I grew up lower class trailer trash and have been homeless. Maybe I don't understand the concept fully but it seems a bit absurd and unfeasible

If you give someone a fish, they starve after a day.

Teach someone to fish and they can eat + sell the fish.

But if I make a fish-catching machine to catch fish for everyone, does everyone eat, or does everyone starve?

UBI is essentially a means of ensuring that in a world where the robots catch all the fish, people can still afford to buy a fish.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#262

Post by brodouevencode »

ghaff wrote: post #83
brodouevencode wrote: post #60

I might be alone with this notion, but does anyone else just _not care_? Don't get me wrong I've had my share of shitty bosses, employers, coworkers, pay, working conditions, and customer abuse but over time I've managed to fix every one of those. When a new problem crops up I talk to management. If they don't want to fix it, I leave for another place and hope for the best. This includes stints in being self-employed…

To be fair, there are a whole lot of low skill jobs that are pretty crappy. And if I didn't see a path to a job that wasn't low skill, I'd probably prefer to not be working too.

But that's just it - as far as I can tell (in the US specifically) there's always a path out.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#263

Post by wpietri »

gavinray wrote: post #182
JSavageOne wrote: post #156

I remember stumbling upon /r/antiwork a few years ago and being so happy I'd stumbled upon a thriving movement that so effectively criticized one of the core principles of society that everyone takes for granted - that everyone must effectively sell their labor to someone else (unless they're rich enough to opt out, or clever enough to create some business or invest their way out). To me anti-work is the recognition…

>Universal basic income I'm going to sound like I'm being snarky here, and I promise I'm not. How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? I don't say this from a place of privilege. I grew up lower class trailer trash and have been homeless. Maybe I don't understand the concept fully but it seems a bit absurd and unfeasible

It is definitely outside the box. But think of it like this:

For the last few hundred years, human productivity has vastly increased. Thanks to technological progress, farming has gone from what the bulk of people do to a niche activity that most see only driving by.

Who benefits most from the productivity increases? The rich. We are approaching gilded-age levels of inequality, while the wage for most workers is stagnant. What if instead of concentrating that wealth on a few people who won the "ovarian lottery" [1] we split the dividends of our ancestors' achievements among everybody?

This isn't totally ridiculous. For example, Alaska has spent decade giving each resident about $1000/year from a fund built up with oil revenues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

So imagine a program like that but bigger. Maybe a poverty-level income for each person, like $1000/month. What would happen? Some people wouldn't work. But that's nothing unusual; only 63% of people in the US work right now. (And really, how many people are doing bullshit jobs that don't add much to the economy?) Others would keep working because they wanted more money, or just because they like working. (Personally, I'm in that last group.)

Could this work? Personally, I'm skeptical but curious. But it's definitely not impossible.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/16/warren-buffett-says-being-a-...

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#264

Post by optimiz3 »

dymk wrote: post #233
tomrod wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this is true. Asset valuation is a bit tricky when you're an outlier. It's not terribly liquid.

Lucky, tricky problems get solved when there's a trillion dollars on the line. For the most part, this idea that taxing the rich is in-theory difficult is just an illusion created by them, to dissuade people from even thinking about it. And yet I have 22% of my equity sold and sent straight to the IRS every year. This is behind the scenes a complex multi-step process, and yet it happens like clockwork, easy as pie.

> And yet I have 37% of my equity sold and sent straight to the IRS

You need a better accountant / portfolio manager.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#265

Post by stemlord »

BoppreH wrote: post #220

Deliberately misleading article. The community was mad at Doreen because they held a vote on whether to send someone to the Fox interview, and the consensus was NO. She violated an explicit choice of the community, and this complaint has been clearly articulated from day 1 of the aftermath. No mention of it in the article, though. And even the small things are misleading: > the classic thread “whats your job on the l…

>The community was mad at Doreen because they held a vote on whether to send someone to the Fox interview, and the consensus was NO.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter whether Doreen stood for the original ethos or the newer sterilized version that apparently would have consisted of the majority of votes, fact is that she didn't do a good job representing either in the interview. They really should have considered using a professional spokesperson who knows how to handle a live roast on national tv, if they actually had voted that someone participate.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#266

Post by xtracto »

JSavageOne wrote: post #156

I remember stumbling upon /r/antiwork a few years ago and being so happy I'd stumbled upon a thriving movement that so effectively criticized one of the core principles of society that everyone takes for granted - that everyone must effectively sell their labor to someone else (unless they're rich enough to opt out, or clever enough to create some business or invest their way out). To me anti-work is the recognition…

> I haven't browsed the subreddit in forever but just took a look, and it's sad to see it's just a bunch of stupid memes now. Every decent subreddit eventually devolved into a bunch of stupid memes.

The September that never ends. This has been a problem in the internet since its initial days (in the Usenet for example). The problem with systems like Reddit (less so news.ycombinator) is that the "ethernal september" cultural shift gets amplified by content voting. Given that the masses have equal right to vote content, the "minimum common denominator" is the pattern that arises in the system.

Sites like Slashdot or news.ycombinator try to work around this by giving voting powers to certain "filtered" populations (Slashdot algorithm was actually nice when I read about it). But I feel the current approaches serve to "delay" the inevitable path towards low-effort content, instead of cutting it from the beginning.

The one thing that was nice about usenet is that all comments were equal, so there was no "amplification" of the low-effort content. I think for people to provide higher effort content, there should be some kind of incentive. Social incentives is what StackOverflow or Quora used to have, as well as Slashdot at certain level (you knew you were in a conversation with highly technical individuals). I also think that using real names would help.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#267

Post by dymk »

optimiz3 wrote: post #264
dymk wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lucky, tricky problems get solved when there's a trillion dollars on the line. For the most part, this idea that taxing the rich is in-theory difficult is just an illusion created by them, to dissuade people from even thinking about it. And yet I have 22% of my equity sold and sent straight to the IRS every year. This is behind the scenes a complex multi-step process, and yet it happens like clockwork, easy as pie.

> And yet I have 37% of my equity sold and sent straight to the IRS You need a better accountant / portfolio manager.

Updated ;) ETR != highest bracket, ofc

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#268

Post by achenet »

smus wrote: post #188
pmorici wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I happened upon the r/AntiWork comments section from time to time before that Fox News segment and it always struck me as full of people who were making every excuse not to take responsibility for their own circumstances and who have a fantasy that low skill jobs should some how pay enough to be life long careers instead of viewing them as stepping stones to bigger and better things.

You cannot structurally expect everyone to have a good career in the us. It is not currently mathematically possible. Please don't delude yourself into thinking the economy could function the same as it currently does without lifelong service industry workers

there is no reason to believe that a service worker can't have a good career.

This may not be the case now, but that can change.

I'm always wary of paraphrasing Graeber, but it's possible that living in a world where a small handful of individuals own the majority of the wealth has led to the market rewarding various jobs in a way that creates more misery than is strictly necessary - for example corporate lawyers being paid hundreds of thousands because they can help billionaires get even richer, while farmers producing the most important of all resources, food, are constantly hovering around the poverty line.

EDIT: and as a mathematician, I would appreciate a proof of your "mathematically impossible" proposition. :)

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#269

Post by barbazoo »

danenania wrote: post #239
gavinray wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Universal basic income I'm going to sound like I'm being snarky here, and I promise I'm not. How exactly is this supposed to work? The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work? I don't say this from a place of privilege. I grew up lower class trailer trash and have been homeless. Maybe I don't understand the concept fully but it seems a bit absurd and unfeasible

One way to think about it: we already have a basic income in the US. Nobody starves to death in the US. Nobody is denied medical care in the emergency room. In many places (though not everywhere), there are shelters where a person can sleep inside. There are food stamps and a patchwork of welfare programs. However meager they may seem, things like this amount to a form of universal basic income. Does it prevent peopl…

Nicely written. I like to think of UBI as a tool to get out of a local minimum which isn't easily possible if you're a slave to your minimum wage job.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#270

Post by wonderwonder »

JSavageOne wrote: post #156

I remember stumbling upon /r/antiwork a few years ago and being so happy I'd stumbled upon a thriving movement that so effectively criticized one of the core principles of society that everyone takes for granted - that everyone must effectively sell their labor to someone else (unless they're rich enough to opt out, or clever enough to create some business or invest their way out). To me anti-work is the recognition…

How does UBI work if everyone just decided not to work anymore? How would it work if everyone involved in say medicine decided not to work anymore of if everyone involved in the military or border patrol said 'nope, I'm done'? Would we just print more money to give to the people that streamed over the border? What if the people that print the money or send the checks decided to quit?
Post reply on HN