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

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

#411

Post by dopidopHN »

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

Pool together all ( or most ) social benefits in one single payment to get some economy of scale.( removing the need to have specific admin XYZ to distribute XYZ benefits )

I live in the US, and from what I understand you guys have little to no benefits.

But in place where it does exists, similar sums are already being spend between unemployment, rent assistance, affordable healthcare and the likes.

To give you a idea the RSA in France is around 400€ / month. That’s pretty much a given if you do some paperwork )

A transition to UBI would mean to consolidate it to reach higher level.

And make it non conditional.

That’s a shift for sure.

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

#412

Post by totony »

wonderwonder wrote: post #404
totony wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So we are going to raise taxes on the middle class to give free money to people that choose not to work? 1. UBI aims to streamline redistribution of wealth and remove a lot of bureaucracy around it, reducing a lot of the cost of the current system 2. Why the middle class specifically? Upper class could shoulder most of the costs (if there are) easily >I would not be ok going to work to pay people that have decided t…

Lets say we instituted a 100% wealth tax on the 1%, that's 45 trillion if somehow we could get the cash value for their stocks at a normal valuation(which someone would have to buy). How many years does that fund the UBI for until we run out of that money?

See this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30248741

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

#413

Post by dopidopHN »

wonderwonder wrote: post #328
quirino wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be solved by a Negative Income Tax [1]: > In economics, a negative income tax (NIT) is a system which reverses the direction in which tax is paid for incomes below a certain level; in other words, earners above that level pay money to the state while earners below it receive money. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax Edit: I'm not economically literate enough to say I fully support this,…

So we are going to raise taxes on the middle class to give free money to people that choose not to work? Every single family would then do a calculation to see if its worth the second earner working or if they make more just staying home and getting a UBI. I would not be ok going to work to pay people that have decided that they are fine living on the UBI and don't want to work anymore. Seems like a pretty antagonist…

You could also state : lower class people who choose to do work would be catapulted to another revenue level.

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

#414

Post by pydry »

StriverGuy wrote: post #56
belval wrote: post #8

> How exactly did it happen in /r/antiwork? Casuals found it. You know — the people who use the internet to laugh at funny memes rather than treating every post as a blow in a grand ideological struggle. That's the very force of the reddit hivemind. I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all, so they get a constant influx of people aligned with the reddit mean opinion,…

Off topic, but my tin foil hat theory of r/antiwork is that this a massive psy-op being pushed by some other nation state. Reddits algo easily helps snowball and propagate ideas that are promoted by users within the sub. It is the perfect playbook to destabilize labor markets in a foreign country.

How did the foreign nation state convince reddit to put /r/antiwork in /r/all?

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

#415

Post by TraceWoodgrains »

tgb wrote: post #176
evancox100 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did the author say Doreen Ford was still representative of the current user base? It was pretty explicit that she represented its original form, not what it had become. The whole takeaway for me anyways was the shifting nature of group ideals and membership. One person or founder may represent the typical ideals of the original group, while later they may be wildly unrepresentative due to an influx of more “mod…

It’s in paragraph five, stated very very clearly.

Author of the article here. The user above you is correct. My claim that Ford is indisputably the best representative of the space has nothing to do with its current user base and everything to do with its history. The user base shifted, but I don’t hold that a place’s present is so extricable from its past that 7 years of history become irrelevant when the space grows.

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

#416

Post by enragedcacti »

pmorici wrote: post #294
monkeybutton wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of low skilled jobs in a service economy. I imagine that a significant fraction of all jobs are low skilled ones. Not everyone is chasing the hustle or whatever either, so there's a significant amount of people will be working those low skilled jobs their whole lives. What quality of life do they deserve? Does society want a permanent underclass that are treated miserably?

I don’t believe your premise that such a large share of the available jobs are low skill that there is no room for people to move on to something better. If you look at fast food for example I’m seeing there are about 2.5 million workers which is a tiny percentage of the overall workforce. Looking at the age distribution of the US work force you could staff every fast food restaurant with only 16-19 year olds and sti…

why would you seek out statistics for one single industry that you perceive as low skill rather than just finding low wage statistics specifically?

44% of U.S. workers are employed in low wage jobs with a median annual wage of $18,000. [1]

Sure we can staff fast food with only 16-19 year olds but what about every other sector of the service industry and the myriad of other "low skill" jobs? are there 40 million plus "high skill" jobs out there waiting for the taking? The answer is no. [2]

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minimum-wage-2019-almost-half-o...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/11/21/low-wag...

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

#417

Post by tomrod »

themaninthedark wrote: post #350
bloaf wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am against UBI because I think we aren't there just yet with technology but I do agree that we need a way to ensure that "everyone can eat" when the time comes. Right now we also need to look at how we can provide job for those who are affected by automation and not just say that the coal miners need "learn to code" and move. Edit to add: We have some industries that are highly automated, ie. semiconductor manufact…

Can you nail down what it will look like once we are there?

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

#418

Post by dotnet00 »

whatshisface wrote: post #312
dotnet00 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the argument can be made that the kids' lack of respect for the dad's career might be what's leading to the dad hiding away at work in the first place? I feel this would be something relatable to a large portion of the people on this site, given how many of us practically live our tech careers. Even if we aren't putting in overtime at work, many of us spend time not at work on personal projects or…

If your plan is to live your career, why not just stay single?

because family and being invested in your career aren't mutually exclusive? I explained that...

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

#419

Post by tomrod »

spiderice wrote: post #379
arrosenberg wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ideal way would be to pass a national Land Value Tax, and use the proceeds to fund UBI. The country has plenty of money, but it's all accumulating to landlords. An LVT is the most effective way to both moderate the excesses of the wealthy and continuously fund a social safety net. It would also let you eliminate most other forms of social safety and taxation, since Land/Natural Resources are the greatest stores o…

So if landlords now have to pay for everyone's UBI, why aren't the Landlords just going to raise rent to get that money right back?

Tying UBI to CPI/rental index would quash that dynamic's profit seeking reasonably, I think.

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

#420

Post by nradov »

aeternum wrote: post #408
GameOfFrowns wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the general idea of UBI but I don't see it work without price fixing which is often the first step in an economical downward spiral. Also I don't understand how any low-trust society like ours would survive the transition phase into UBI when people (even though they like working) might take an extended holiday if the UBI pays for all living costs. Suddenly millions of critical positions would be left unoccupie…

Why would it need price-fixing? We basically provided a UBI of 5k as part of the pandemic and it seems to have worked relatively well. If a position is critical enough it should probably be a higher paid position.

Inflation and the national debt are way up. It might feel nice to have an extra $5K today but we increased the burden on our descendants and have nothing of lasting value to show for it. Shame on us.

No one is going to raise wages for a particular position just because it was arbitrarily classified as "critical".

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