The best work is indistinguishable from play. The word's too often associated with what children do ... 'merely' do. But remember how you threw your energies into it? It's great fun. The best work is the adult form of that; you return to it daily and it keeps rewarding: you and those you play with. When the going gets hard hard, solving it is the best.
The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
121–130 of 222 posts
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your scheme of society (government) deciding everyone's wages. Many times. It doesn't work out very well. In fact, people in those societies are always trying to get into the US, where wages are set by the market. BTW, you're free to donate whatever you feel is just to your garbageman. > Try to transcend for five seconds the decades of propaganda you've sustained Are you sure I'm the one affected by decades of propag…
This thread feels so odd to me. I studied economics and I understand things intellectually the way Walter does. LTV for sure does not work. The market decides things by marginalism. But I also live in the real world and I think there's just a gigantic number of people who are paid something different from what they ought to be paid. We may just be seeing the beginnings of it now in the UK, with lots of strikes about…
> another wiseass answer
There is a deeper point to that - that people tend to be free with money as long as it doesn't cost themselves. People behave very differently w.r.t. what is "worth" spending money on when it is their money, as opposed to someone else's.
> what they ought to be paid
How do you propose to determine that amount?
> is not satisfying
Nothing human is perfect. But in trying to get that last step towards perfection often just makes things worse. There's no such thing as a perfect free market. Nor would a perfect free market produce perfect results. It's just that, so far, nobody has devised anything that works better. The solutions I see people propose have all been tried before. If they worked, we could point to them.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
There lies the problem: in todays society, I’m not free to choose how I live outside of a pre-approved selection of careers due to a small portion of people deciding they wanted this specific setup.
There are an incredible variety of careers to choose from and there are countless unconventional jobs out there that people have never heard of. There is no small portion of people creating a pre-approved selection of roles that we have no choice but to follow. Even if there were, it definitely begs the question of 'who are these people' and 'how do they have this power'?
Counterpoint: Youtube influencers, standup comics, foo critics.
(No investor chose to pay them)
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#124This is from 140 years ago but feel very modern "The manufacturers have lost their bearings and know not which way to turn. They can no longer find the raw material to satisfy the lawless depraved passion of their laborers for work. In our woolen districts dirty and half rotten rags are raveled out to use in making certain cloths sold under the name of renaissance, which have about the same durability as the promises…
On the other had, we are a lot better at making things out of cheap materials. Clothes from Target are relatively durable considering the price, especially if you do basic repairs like they would have back then. Even the food is probably better now. It's not perfect, but modern products are pretty amazing. A shirt can sell for $2 and last 20 years in some cases. Of course sweatshops and pollution are still awful.
Sure, clothes from Target might be relatively durable considering the price. But you need more clothing now. In a lot of places, it is socially unacceptable to wear the same thing for days in a row, even if you change your undergarments. You also don't have a realistic choice to make your own clothing. Cloth, thread, buttons and zippers aren't cheap and it became more out of reach in the late 80s and through the 90's (my mother sews and has for decades). That's not even considering things like a sewing machine, fabric scissors, and the fact that you might look like your clothes are homemade (which doesn't always fare well). Your Target clothing also won't be usable when it is worn, so you can't piece it together to make a new garment or even a blanket even if the stretchy material was easier to work with. You really can't do basic repairs like they used to do.
I'm not sure this is cheaper.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#125The best work is indistinguishable from play. The word's too often associated with what children do ... 'merely' do. But remember how you threw your energies into it? It's great fun. The best work is the adult form of that; you return to it daily and it keeps rewarding: you and those you play with. When the going gets hard hard, solving it is the best.
[deleted]
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The concept of "wage slavery" is basically, "you are not free to not earn a wage because you will starve". Slavery usually includes ownership and force. I believe "wage slavery" is mostly used today because of the connotations of slavery that the user wants to hang their idea on to, but also clearly knows that it's not really it. Like "chicken holocaust" isn't really a holocaust, even though some chicken farms are…
> Slavery usually includes ownership and force. Ownership applies very specifically to chattel slavery, and does not apply to the vast majority of extant slavery today. > I believe "wage slavery" is mostly used today because of the connotations of slavery that the user wants to hang their idea on to, but also clearly knows that it's not really it. No, it’s a much more sincere concept than that, from an analysis that…
It seems I haven't made my point very clearly: I wasn't suggesting that there's ample self-maintaining land for everyone, that's clearly not the case. But if there was, would its inhabitants be slaves? And who's slaves would they be? Nature's? God's? Their own?
Is a self-employed black smith who owns everything downstream a slave? He'll mine the ore, smelt the iron, produce his own coal for his fire etc etc. Still, he'll have to sell his product at a fraction of what it's worth it to his customers. Like your "wage slaves", it'll be a very large fraction of it, but it's a fraction, they wouldn't buy it if it cost more than it's worth to them. Is the black smith a slave?
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Would you prefer a society where everyone works 15 hr weeks but the internet was never invented? How is that even a question have you seen the internet recently. Slamming YES so hard the button breaks.
Okay how about modern medicine then? If you got a cancer that only became treatable in the last ten years, would you trade your life away so that everyone in the last century could work 15 hour weeks and most likely never discover the treatment which was the cumulative result of a century of people working 40 hour weeks?
This argument is too broad. Why set the number at 40? Maybe if we all worked 80 hour weeks devising new algorithms to target people with ads and bussing tables in fast food chains, we'd all be immortal by now! Time spent in labor does not linearly correlate with production, especially in high cognitive demand fields like research. Not only that, labor unions and the like had to fight to get work weeks reduced to just 40 hours. Why not ask if we don't need it to be so high? The number is arbitrary, after all.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#128This is from 140 years ago but feel very modern "The manufacturers have lost their bearings and know not which way to turn. They can no longer find the raw material to satisfy the lawless depraved passion of their laborers for work. In our woolen districts dirty and half rotten rags are raveled out to use in making certain cloths sold under the name of renaissance, which have about the same durability as the promises…
A very good thing to read to realize that when one hears this kind of complaining today there is nothing new in it and it is not a signal of the apocalypse coming or of a unique new age. Well, the apocalypse or a new age might be coming, but this is not an indication that it is. It always was the case that one should pay attention to from whom one is buying.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#129Related classic, Bertrand Russel's 1932 'In Praise of Idleness': https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
"An Apology for Idlers" by R.L. Stevenson is also worth reading for the beautiful way it is written if for no other reason.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
This thread feels so odd to me. I studied economics and I understand things intellectually the way Walter does. LTV for sure does not work. The market decides things by marginalism. But I also live in the real world and I think there's just a gigantic number of people who are paid something different from what they ought to be paid. We may just be seeing the beginnings of it now in the UK, with lots of strikes about…
> another wiseass answer There is a deeper point to that - that people tend to be free with money as long as it doesn't cost themselves. People behave very differently w.r.t. what is "worth" spending money on when it is their money, as opposed to someone else's. > what they ought to be paid How do you propose to determine that amount? > is not satisfying Nothing human is perfect. But in trying to get that last step t…
> There is a deeper point to that - that people tend to be free with money as long as it doesn't cost themselves. People behave very differently w.r.t. what is "worth" spending money on when it is their money, as opposed to someone else's.
This is typically where people drop in their Milton Friedman video/meme: "With my own money... with someone else's..."
Which has a grain of truth to it, just no nuance.
> How do you propose to determine that amount?
Certainly the answer isn't "whatever the machine spits out". Which at the bottom of it is what free market fanatics are saying. At least we should work on the machine so that the inputs are something sensible.