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Maybe you should do less 'work'

johnwhiles.com

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Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#311

Post by deltaonefour »

ironmagma wrote: post #276
deltaonefour wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is promoting communism here. But capitalism is imperfect in the sense that it's unfair. The unfairness motivates productivity. It's the best system but it is still highly flawed. Wealth inequality is one of the major consequences of capitalism that we haven't quite figured out how to tame. It is freeloading in every sense of the word. You pay a slave a dime for work that generates you hundreds of dollars the s…

You have a very different definition of freeloading. The slave situation is totally incomparable on account of how the slave cannot quit aside from by dying. > It is freeloading in every sense of the word. Every sense, except the dictionary definition, is what you meant, I take it? "Freeload - take advantage of other people's generosity without giving anything in return." Giving ten cents is not the same thing as not…

Oh my bad. Throw a penny at the employees face and it's no longer freeloading. This isn't freeloading. Maybe a better term is "fucking over".

Employers fuck people over, they don't freeload off of them. My bad.

>As for capitalism being unfair, that's basically the point of capitalism, in the essence that "unfair" means "not everyone is compensated the same."

Why you're repeating something I stated is beyond me. I said capitalism is unfair. You say that being unfair is the "point" of capitalism. We're saying the same thing. Does the word "point" change the nature of what I'm saying? No.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#312

Post by adamsmith143 »

pydry wrote: post #304
adamsmith143 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>More taxes are a result of earning more and not really from working more although they are usually related Even the mythical 10x engineer is not really getting paid 10x more than their same level peers so no not really. So this even furthers the argument. Why bother having 10x the output if you only see a smidge of that productivity as increased income?

It's not that uncommon for one software engineer to outearn another by 10x, assuming a little job hopping.

I agree but I think it's more relevant to compare the same levels at the same org. I would be pretty shocked to hear that there is any 10x delta in total comp across L5s at Google lets say.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#313

Post by pavlov »

vasco wrote: post #293
kqr wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What set me off (not the one you're responding to) about your comment was the bit about not having a right to a good outcome. Depending on what one means by "good", that one doesn't have a right to it is a fairly strong statement of political opinion, but it was presented as a universal truth. I also think it's very important that people are allowed to enter risky ventures and "fail" while still being secure of a som…

How is it political opinion to realize a fact of the universe, which is that living beings need to take care of themselves and make good decisions for themselves or else "they fail". Barring the simplification, what you're responding to sounded like just a descriptive statement rather than a political stand.

But it is not an axiom of the human condition that everyone must take care of themselves or fail. Taken literally that means no infant could survive, and then we'd have no adults either.

From that point of view it's probably more defining of humanity as a species that we take care of others, not that we survive personally at all costs. There are thousands or millions of species on this planet that only do the latter, and they don't write books and invent recipes and create startups.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#314

Post by lliamander »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #221
caffeine wrote: post #135

You are the boss of a company of one. Your company sells labor to the labor market, it makes investments in assets, it borrows funds, etc. It’s your job to decide how that company is run. It’s your job to decide what investments that company needs to make to get good returns. It’s also your job to interpret the contracts your company enters into and decide what is acceptable, and to appropriately risk-manage legal ha…

Wait, I can think of myself as a company selling my labor power on the labor market? Interesting thought experiment, let's see where it goes. I sell this commodity on the market, to whom? Business owners, I guess. And this is a weird one: I actually have to sell this commodity on the market, if I want to eat and live and all. So does almost everyone else. But the buyers have other options, so I guess everyone on the…

> But the buyers have other options

That's not always an assumption that holds. Many "buyers of labor" in the tech sector right now are very limited on their options, whereas the "labor sellers" have many options.

> Best I can hope for is find an inefficiency and hope to eke out a little bit myself until I can afford to be a buyer?

You will always be a buyer of some things and a seller of others. "Spending" your time to invest in rare and valuable skills that you can "sell" on the labor market can net you very nice returns.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#315

Post by sanderjd »

adenozine wrote: post #165
caffeine wrote: post #135

You are the boss of a company of one. Your company sells labor to the labor market, it makes investments in assets, it borrows funds, etc. It’s your job to decide how that company is run. It’s your job to decide what investments that company needs to make to get good returns. It’s also your job to interpret the contracts your company enters into and decide what is acceptable, and to appropriately risk-manage legal ha…

Do you have kids? This makes no sense from my perspective. I could literally put myself through anything that I needed to, if it meant the safety or well-being of my children. It's not a company, it's a primal force from thousands of years of primordial reinforcement. I'd manage with less capital, so that my kids have a chance at college. I'd manage with less chance of promotion, so that my kids can have my presence…

> I'd manage with anything that arose, if it meant something better for them.

You had me up until this one. It is not (in my view) necessary to optimize monotonically toward anything that makes life better for my children. All the stuff you said before that, I would certainly do if the alternative was deprivation for my children, but having secured their basic well-being, making things even better for them is only one consideration among others. As an extreme, if I had enough money in the bank to secure them shelter, food, education, and enjoyment, I would not then take or continue in a job I hate in order to pad out a big trust fund.

I fear this is a pedantic point I'm making as I suspect this sort of going above and beyond is not what you meant, but it was my reaction to the end of that first paragraph.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#316

Post by TuringTest »

dahfizz wrote: post #130
TuringTest wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it is, and only a very strict and damaging protestant work ethic would tell you otherwise. Oh, you meant that those poor workaholics shouldn't exhaust themselves by overexerting over too much work? With that I can agree. But taxing those producing the most so as not to leave behind those who have received fewer gifts, inheritance or good contacts? That's how you build a civilization. If only because those pr…

Implicit in your position is a lack of agency. The high producers only produce highly because of receiving gifts from their peers. And the low producers are those who have not received enough gifts. You leave no room for agency, competency, motivation. OP explicitly mentions that he just wants to be lazy....

I linked elsewhere to an essay showing how 'lazy' or 'idle' aren't insults, but mere synonyms for 'efficient' and 'purposeful'.

I don't get how you deduce that there's no room for agency. You seem to confound that with the different amounts of leverage that people with widely different origins get; those coming from a more resourceful starting point will produce more, regardless of the actual effort they put in.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#317

Post by lliamander »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #309
lliamander wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of bad faith interpretation and just missing the point in response to this solid bit of career advice is just astounding.

I'm equally wary of the hubris in declaring one has defined all of the required variables for living well. A review of ages of history would tell that nobody ever nails it down that fully. Everything has its price, including a bank account that never goes red.

That has nothing to do with what caffeine actually said.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#318

Post by ironmagma »

deltaonefour wrote: post #311
ironmagma wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a very different definition of freeloading. The slave situation is totally incomparable on account of how the slave cannot quit aside from by dying. > It is freeloading in every sense of the word. Every sense, except the dictionary definition, is what you meant, I take it? "Freeload - take advantage of other people's generosity without giving anything in return." Giving ten cents is not the same thing as not…

Oh my bad. Throw a penny at the employees face and it's no longer freeloading. This isn't freeloading. Maybe a better term is "fucking over". Employers fuck people over, they don't freeload off of them. My bad. >As for capitalism being unfair, that's basically the point of capitalism, in the essence that "unfair" means "not everyone is compensated the same." Why you're repeating something I stated is beyond me. I sai…

> Why you're repeating something I stated is beyond me. I said capitalism is unfair.

You said that as a means of supporting your larger point which is that capitalism is flawed. I am arguing that unfairness (as I defined it) is the whole essence of capitalism, which is very different from saying it's an unwanted byproduct of it. We want unfairness.

If you instead want fairness, there are other systems for that in use by other countries. You can move to one of those countries if you prefer that system. But there are good reasons that capitalist countries are the most prosperous.

> Employers fuck people over, they don't freeload off of them.

It's equally possible for employees to fuck over employers, we just tend not to do it (for good reasons).

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#319

Post by caffeine »

vkou wrote: post #225
lliamander wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of bad faith interpretation and just missing the point in response to this solid bit of career advice is just astounding.

There'd probably be a lot less bad faith interpretation if it didn't end with a double-zinger of 'And once you reduce your life to a neo-liberal economic model, is when you will finally grow up and become an adult'. That last part in particular poisons the rest. Sure, it could be interpreted in good faith, but as it's so damn condescending - why put the work in?

> And once you reduce your life to a neo-liberal economic model, is when you will finally grow up and become an adult

I apologise. It’s not what I meant, in two different ways:

1. You’re not JUST a company.

2. The adult realisation isn’t that you’re a company - it’s that you’re responsible, and your decisions have Real Consequences.

I wish I could write more clearly. I made an edit to try to address this.

Thanks.

Re: Maybe you should do less 'work'

#320

Post by caffeine »

bsedlm wrote: post #233
dxbydt wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ffs. Humans have lived on the planet for 200000 years. This way of organizing people as a company interacting with the labor market with assets & investments & risk management...is at best a 100 years old. Its like a drop in the ocean of time. That said, when I was taking courses in Finance as a young 20 something, I came up with this same exact analogy & took it to its logical end - I conceived a stock exchange call…

> I conceived a stock exchange called the Human Stock Exchange, where every human being was a human stock ticker, I've had a very vague (somewhat similar) idea that I'm stil trying to articulate well. something like what you said but the stock is run on a blockchain then every person can emit their own stock which can get traded around. at some point, the emitter person must (somehow) be made to respond for what they…

Ha it’s actually sort of already happening with NFTs. If your celebrity status goes up your NFT value does too.
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