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I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

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Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#171

Post by ajsnigrutin »

jplrssn wrote: post #69
avalys wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you airily define ‘productivity’ as reading the classics and spending time with friends?

> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.

I mean, if someone is willing to pay them, why not?

Even hundreds and thousands of years ago, people would put semi transparent rocks onto shiny metal shapes and sell those useless gadgets for a lot of money.

If customers are willing to pay for that, it means that those people made something worth that money.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#172

Post by Telaneo »

a-french-anon wrote: post #58
Telaneo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?

Of course nobody sane wants something like this to happen. The problem isn't the people unable to make ends meets, it's the unwilling.

Most people want to work. Most people want to provide value in some form. The author of the article is unable and willing, but is still treated as unwilling by the system. We're better of acting in good faith and treating everybody who says they are unable as that, and give them the support they need.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#173

Post by Brendinooo »

inigyou wrote: post #165
Brendinooo wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the ones most countries implement don't work very well I guess this is the basis of my critique: the author seems to be writing as though capitalism is robbing him of some ideal that would otherwise exist: invoking the so-called "Protestant work ethic" to describe a system that took over the world and made us all worse off. That doesn't feel right to me because I don't think previous economic systems did better at p…

Why limit the discussion to the current system and past ones? That's like saying memory safety is bad because before C++ there was assembly code and that was even less safe.

> which...sure! We shouldn't accept the status quo. But that's a different argument.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#174

Post by inigyou »

everdrive wrote: post #166
inigyou wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with valuing productivity and unvaluing unproductivity, but capitalism fetishizes it to the extreme, kills people who don't have it, and defines the One True Productivity that you have to meet to not be killed. A lot of artists suffer from this last point where they are being productive but not in ways that capitalism values.

>A lot of artists suffer from this last point where they are being productive but not in ways that capitalism values. I'm just not convinced. If there's not a market for your art, yes you will not be able to sell it and make a living. But, in other systems: - Your art disagrees with the soviet government, so you are sent to a torture / labor camp to work until you die. - The soviet government does not care about your…

oh my god can we stop acting like the only possibilities are american "capitalism" or soviet "communism", it's exhausting

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#175

Post by inigyou »

pj_mukh wrote: post #149
Telaneo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing is clearly the biggest problem, yes, and I doubt you'll find anyone who'll disagree that it's not a big problem. But it's a big problem for political reasons. If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes', I'm sure it could happen. It's just not in the short-term (and long-term?) interests of the economy as it is now. Maybe we should do something about that? Or maybe, just maybe, we sh…

>If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1]. So, I don't think this is true :(. We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.…

What if we let people build their own homes and gave them courses on how to do that?

Also 1 trillion dollars sounds like a single year of national debt interest, the total amount spent and destroyed by the Iran war, or the Pentagon's black budget. I'm sure we can give up one of those for a year to fix every economic problem plaguing the country.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#176

Post by Suzuran »

avalys wrote: post #8
Telaneo wrote: post #5

> If your worth is not determined by your productivity, then what remains of you underneath it all? Everything else. You are worth so much more than your productivity. I'm glad I never got sucked into the protestant work ethic, since defining yourself based on your labour and the value you generate from that sounds woefully narrow-minded (this doesn't feel like quite the right word, but close enough). It's probably h…

Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you airily define ‘productivity’ as reading the classics and spending time with friends?

Does it matter? In the US, we send a sizable portion of our paychecks to the government's Social Security program so it can provide for us in this exact scenario. The government dictated the terms and we upheld our end of the contract on pain of incarceration. Now it's time for the government to uphold their end.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#177

Post by bko »

Altern4tiveAcc wrote: post #168
bko wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reading the classics is productive because it's enjoyable, even though it doesn't help with your work It's productive in that it is hard and a sign of high intelligence. Don't believe me and swap it out with Candy Crush. Is playing Candy Crush productive? This obsession about people with disabilities is weird. Yes, people with real disabilities exist. But focusing on pathologizing every day life is extremely harmfu…

> Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015. That seems to check out with the period people started getting more addicted to social media, pandemic side-effects and increased awareness of…

> Hard disagree tbh but that's more of a personal values discussion

I'm curious about this. Do you have children? Do you look at someone who does nothing hard in his life with indifference? Someone chooses to spend their life playing video games in their parent's basement. Do you think that's an equally admirable life than someone that spends his life doing hard things?

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#178

Post by gyulai »

Tade0 wrote: post #102

> Much of modern Western culture, particularly in the United States, was shaped by what sociologist Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic: the belief that hard work, discipline, frugality, and productivity were signs of virtue. I hail from a culture that's decidedly Catholic, but at the same time shares this mindset. To me it has more to do with farming and the culture around it. On a farm you have to earn your…

> Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic

...hmm. Not sure that this is quite state-of-the art in sociology today. Crediting a particular strand of a particular religion as the locus of a virtue that confers a clear fitness advantage in and of itself, and without recourse to any outside explanation, seems a bit off.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#179

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

zbentley wrote: post #140
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #126

We could provide food for the poor and disabled who lack or are not using family support with a tiny fraction of our industrial output. We wouldn’t even notice this expenditure, let alone whine about it. But what we are providing is actually “Healthcare. Specialists. Medications. Supplements. Mobility aids. Physical therapy. Accessible housing. Delivery fees when you cannot physically shop for yourself. Ride shares w…

I'm not clear on what you're trying to say here. Are you saying we're providing those things instead of food? Or that if we provided food we wouldn't need to provide those things? If so, that's patently false. A lot more than food is needed to give someone a better standard of living.

I’m saying that providing a better standard of living to adults who cannot work is something we are spending ~3% of our GDP and 5% of all fulltime workers on.

That providing these things is something we are doing, that is good, and that is hard work actually.

Re: I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore

#180

Post by bko »

Telaneo wrote: post #154
bko wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reading the classics is productive because it's enjoyable, even though it doesn't help with your work It's productive in that it is hard and a sign of high intelligence. Don't believe me and swap it out with Candy Crush. Is playing Candy Crush productive? This obsession about people with disabilities is weird. Yes, people with real disabilities exist. But focusing on pathologizing every day life is extremely harmfu…

> Is playing Candy Crush productive? If you enjoy it, then yes. > Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an inst…

If you consider Candy Crush as productive I guess words just don't have meaning anymore so there's no point arguing.

I highly doubt you actually believe this, but I have been wrong before.

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