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The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
201–210 of 222 posts
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
"What they earn" only has meaning with respect to some wage; if one works a job at some wage then what they earn is just a matter of arithmetic, no matter if that wage is set by a government, a monopolistic employer, "the free market", or something else. A more interesting question is: how should we as a society set wages to best benefit society? Your answer, I gather, is to leave it to the market. I'm not sure what…
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…
> Your scheme of society (government) deciding everyone's wages.
I'm not (necessarily) suggesting that the government decide everyone's wages. Leaving it to the market is just another way for society to determine wages.
> you appear to subscribe to the Labor Theory of Value, where someone's effort and time determine their wage
That's not what the LToV says. To start, a wage is a price, and Marxists draw a distinction between price and value.
But that's also not even the point I was trying to make. My point was: "one keeps what they earn" is a truism under any system, if "what they earn" is taken to mean "what they're paid". If, instead, "what they earn" is taken to mean "the price of what they produce", then that's obviously false under capitalism wherein companies make profits, so I assume that was not your intended meaning.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, yes who doesn't know about the famous German welfare recipients living in lavish palaces with their 10 comely mattresses and their stable full of fast horses, which will pull their gold-encrusted carriage to the hunting lodge a few times per month, and a small group of life guards to keep them safe. It is highly misleading to compare lifestyles between different centuries like that.
And their 21st century health care, their high life expectancy, their unlimited access to information etc etc. Would you prefer to live in the 19th century with the average life expectancy at 35 and your 10 shitty mattresses (there's a reason they had 10) instead of living today and get to live 75 years and sleep on your one modern mattress that's of higher quality than those 10 19th century mattresses combined? Pala…
That should have read maitresses (autocorrect can be a bitch), and the average life expectancy for a 19th century king was more like 70.
> Palaces 150 years ago sucked in comparison to modern apartments with isolation so good you barely have to heat, modern plumbing, hot water on demand, showers and electric toothbrushes.
I'd much rather live in Versailles or Neuschwanstein in their then-valid state than in an 1960s-era social-built flat, thank you very much.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
You work for somewhere between 6 and 14 hours per day, and the rest of the time you can choose to spend anywhere you're able to go, and tie relationships with whomever you're able to attract, and your owner can't decide these things for you. That's a categorical difference, not one of degree.
Mandatory on-call duty exists, as do drug tests, background checks, security clearances, etc. Employers can certainly decide how "free time" is spent and with whom you associate.
For employees under such rules, it certainly is a notch closer to slavery. I would guess the vast majority of people on this site are not under such rules.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> In a lot of places, it is socially unacceptable to wear the same thing for days in a row This piques my curiosity as it's definitely not the case where I live. Can I ask what sorts of places?
I grew up in Indiana, in the interior of the US. I'm female, if that helps. It was never acceptable for me to wear the same thing for days in a row. This is so pervasive that I used to have a system to make sure I avoided that while not having to launder things if they weren't dirty. The first person I met that did that was an exchange student from Germany - we were both 17 at the time. I've since moved to Norway and really don't know anymore if folks notice: I always just wear black and usually buy multiples of the same item. Even if I wear something different, it looks the same. Plus, half of my social group is other immigrants and might not represent society really well.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are quite a few Amish communities that pretty much live like that. We are lucky in the US- we still have quite a bit of wilderness, plenty to lose yourself in, and live a hunter gatherer lifestyle. I think it would be significantly harder to get away with farming without buying the land, at least in the contiguous states.
> Amish I think a typical Amish family farm is nowadays worth $1-2M, maybe more. And I believe their children have been moving to new places in recent years, in search of more affordable land. > farming without buying the land Illegal cannabis farms apparently operate in national forests. There are surreptitious irrigation systems, and there's a whole cat-and-mouse game to find and destroy them. > We are lucky in the…
> I think a typical Amish family farm
Maybe I was confusing amish with Quaker? I think it was a quaker village near where I grew up, they still use horses to plow fields and stuff like that.
Either way, they're obviously not all living like that, but whichever one it is, they have communities here and there where they live old school
> Illegal cannabis farms apparently operate in national forests
This is a million times easier to do than grow crops. Of course it's possible people could get away with growing crops in national forests, but the risk/reward just isn't there like it is(was?) for weed.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 yo…
> Which has a grain of truth to it, just no nuance.
I see it in action all the time. In the small, parents know that kids are sloppy with money given to them. When they earn the money, they suddenly get careful with it. In the large, politicians play on the "tax the rich" theme because that means someone other than the bulk of voters will be paying the bill.
> free market fanatics
This sort of thing discredits your postings. It isn't necessary to be a fanatic to study economic history and see how well it works. The evidence is pretty compelling - far more than a "grain" of truth.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#208Earlier 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…
> Your scheme of society (government) deciding everyone's wages. I'm not (necessarily) suggesting that the government decide everyone's wages. Leaving it to the market is just another way for society to determine wages. > you appear to subscribe to the Labor Theory of Value, where someone's effort and time determine their wage That's not what the LToV says. To start, a wage is a price, and Marxists draw a distinction…
The company's profits are not taken from the worker. The company provides a framework within which the worker can produce value, and the company therefore gets a share of it.
Otherwise, the worker could do the work outside of the company and get it all.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
As long as it's a uniform, muted colour and you don't get it stained, nobody will know if you're wearing the same pants or shirts every day.
Levi's 1954 501z. Quality denim doesn't require regular washing. In another life, I did wear a uniform so these things might be linked.
No post body was provided.
Re: The Right to Be Lazy (1883)
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Boo hoo. The fact that society has upgraded is no argument against clothes getting cheaper, an absolute gain. The issue of repairability is mostly one of demand: almost no one wants to repair his own clothes, given how inexpensive they've become. Electronics and appliances are the same. For many people, it's not worth repairing something that can be bought new for a day's or even a week's wages. If people started val…
Society 'upgraded' how - what does that mean? Anyway, there is an environmental price as well as a $$$ price to clothing production. What you pay might not be the true price (eg. aquifers getting drained, soil erosion, CO2 emission etc, possible deforestation). Even ignoring my point about non-fiscal cost "that can be bought new for a day's or even a week's wages" is great if you're rich, even relatively speaking. Fr…
Your point was that, now, "it is socially unacceptable to wear the same thing for days in a row, even if you change your undergarments", ergo, society has upgraded (its expectations of acceptable wear), i.e., moved the "goal posts". That means, we solved the old problem of not putting people in rags, and have a new problem, of constantly new outfits. Absolute gain: clothing problem "solved", replaced with new "wardrobe problem". This is what progress looks like. We always find new, harder, problems. The fact that there is a problem distracts people from admitting we have solved some.
You're moving the goal posts in your rebuttal by adding environmental concerns.
Absolute poverty has been dropping dramatically as a fraction of the growing world population. Look at the trends, not the snapshot. Show some fricking gratitude for the world of plenty in which humanity exists.