351–360 of 368 posts
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This speaks to the "labor" argument made above. More efficiency means harder work, but it must also be less work, unless we are trying to extract more from workers. OTOH, it might not be so bad to extract more from workers. More money and all.
Exactly - if you can do more, you can get paid more.
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Where these discussions trip up is different kinds of programming tasks vary in how mentality draining they are. Some days I can spend 10 long hours working through straightforward problems and come home energized. Other days I mentally check out after spending 3-4 hours beating my head against a really difficult problem then go home and have little desire to do anything but zone out and recover.
There’s a thing in the wedding photography gig called a wedding hangover. Basically most of us are absolutely dead the next day after “just” an 8-12 hour wedding. It seems stupid to a lot of people, but that many hours being hyper vigilant and stressed wrecks you. I did landscaping work as a teen on very hot days and that’s nothing compared to a wedding.
I’m sure it gets easier, but it’s a grind.
It's the one thing I miss most from working for Dutch companies: being able to take a 20% pay cut and work 20% less. Theoretically, that should be a great deal for my employer: the extra rest, and just the way productive work is usually spread out across the week, means that my productivity definitely was not down 20% compared to now, so I was cheaper per hour. Yet even that culturally seems to be a hard sell in a ma…
Every store in the small town was closed, so we decided to head to a restaurant for lunch… and it was packed.
All the shops close up around noon so people can go eat lunch, then go back to work.
That seemed so remarkably human and logical, yet insane as an American. I never wanted to leave.
Good. If civilization isn't moving to improve quality of life, but to make sure that we keep working more and more, we have to ask ourselves what exactly is the point of technological progress.
My dad's factory went to 4 day work weeks in the 90s and never looked back. Everyone was happier, and the various suppliers and customers learned pretty quickly not to call on Friday because it was rare that anyone was there. And now I rarely schedule work for Friday's If something important comes up I have an extra day to deal with it, otherwise I get my 3 day weekends and family life is good.
Ditto, a good chunk of the nuclear sector moved to 4/10 and 9/80 in the 1990s. The days are long, but man is it nice to not have to work Fridays. Helps with the commute too.
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We already do. If you work less, you get paid less, thus can afford less food and shelter. You get lower unemployment benefits. For healthcare however, you get the whole package, regardless.
Your only value as a human is based on the compensation you get from your worldview, I'm not sure many would agree with you. If you are poor you are undeserving of care, regardless of why, your value as a human is directly attributed to how much a capitalist system values your labour. Don't you see the disconnection and how morally wrong this is?
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In other words, you get the full package while contributing less, if you choose to work less.
You’re not contributing less, you’re contributing exactly the same amount of money.
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> Labor lost most power with the rise in globalization. It was much easier to strike and affect businesses when they had a limited hiring pool restricted to one country. Now they can just move to another country where labor is less demanding. I find this argument often used in defense of nationalism or protectionism, which is why it's interesting when the nationalists will turn around and argue against this same argu…
Is that a bad thing? To raise one nation after another into the middle class?
Furthermore there's no guarantee the locals will actually be "brought into the middle class." It's entirely likely a nation will get simply stuck as a cheap labor force for other nations indefinitely, see India and the Philippines.
Finally, the cycle doesn't just end at "nation is done being exploited for cheap labor and instead now had a middle class and imports cheap labor," there's late stage capitalism which is where the usa is at where the inherent contradictions cause systemic collapse. See: the American crises in healthcare, infrastructure, housing, homelessness, individual savings, and rapidly plummeting incomes.
Then of course the obvious question: what happens when there's no more cheap labor to exploit?
Or the other side of the question: what happens when automation has driven the value of human labor down to pennies?
Capitalism doesn't have an answer for these questions because under a capitalist system (and indeed some Marxist ones too), you must justify your existence through labor and labor utility.