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Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you

blogs.reuters.com

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Re: Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you

#81

Post by smsm42 »

Buzaga wrote: post #75
smsm42 wrote: post #65

You could easily afford same vacation time - work only half a year, consume at the level of medieval peasant (no TV, no internet, no modern medicine, no car, no fancy foods or clothes, one clothes change a decade, no electricity, no running water, no sanitation/WC) - and you'll have plenty of money left to live the dream second half of the year. I'm sure if you forgo the modern civilization, you can get through prett…

and what a great civilization! Anyway... I think this analysis is shortsighted, for a start, you can't forgo the modern civilization because you can't have a home and you can't leave it, and if you're in it, there's a cost... And it's understood that the right to have somewhere to live is essential but you can't leave the city and get to a piece of land, land is not produced anymore and it belongs to the rich, you ca…

>>> Then it's also probably a big fallacy that people can really live off of welfare policy goods

People are living on welfare. Here's one paper on how welfare compares to working in the US: http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/work-versus-wel...

>>> you get is barely enough

Barely enough means enough but without extra things, right? I'm pretty sure a random medieval peasant would kill for a promise of being guaranteed not to die from hunger, always have shelter, have basic medical needs taken care of, not counting such things as free education, free communications, etc. I'm not saying we should let people die on the streets, just when you compare something to medieval, be aware how far we are removed from what happened there.

Re: Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you

#82

Post by yaddayadda »

gbog wrote: post #76

"His diet and personal hygiene left much to be desired." Does it means these poor people that happen to be our ancestors had a faint body odor surrounding them? Can we stop with this crasiness? We are animals, animals have "body odor", and it have been considered a good thing for a long time. Every time I hear about personal hygiene I remember this American girl who was learning Chinese with me in a university in sou…

Hygiene is much more about 'health' than it is about body odor. Several examples:

- brushing one's teeth (minimizing decay and tooth loss)

- properly washing one's hands (minimizing the spread of disease)

- having toilet facilities (http://www.satoilet.co.za/projects/)

http://www.wordnik.com/words/hygiene

Re: Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you

#83

Post by thyrsus »

igravious wrote: post #24
valtron wrote: post #16

We get weekends off -- so that's around ~100 days at least.

Well then, let's petition for a 3 day weekend. That'll give us the 150 of our medieval brethren. I propose we couch it in terms of equality legislation: Fridays for the Muslims, Saturdays for the Jews and Sundays for the Christians. This serves all Western monotheistic (Abrahamic) religions equally. In order to balance things out though we will need to raise hourly wages across the board by 20% because we'll be only…

So that's why North Carolina Republicans just outlawed "Shariah law".

Re: Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you

#84

Post by alexeisadeski3 »

Fingel wrote: post #71
alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a personal decision though, right? Some choose more leisure and others don't. Go talk to some ski "bums" or surf "bums" to see what I mean

Bike bum here writing from Whister, B.C. Work 20ish hours a week for Silicon Valley startups remotely and still manage to actually save money simply by not living in the Bay Area. I have a ridiculous amount of leisure time and relocate whenever I feel like it. I know this isn't possible for most people, but I wonder why more of my peers (and those on HN) don't choose a similar lifestyle.

Wow, fellow bike bum in Whistler. Small world.

Re: Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you

#86

Post by alexeisadeski3 »

pg wrote: post #4

Statistics about how much time medieval peasants spent working can be misleading, because a lot of what they spent their time on when they weren't doing fieldwork was still work, e.g. tending their own gardens, making implements and furniture, working on their houses. They had to make most of the things they used themselves. So when "work" was over they didn't go home and watch TV. It's hard to be sure exactly what l…

Not to mention that American adults work, on average, 25 hours per week:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-13/how-average-america...

Re: Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you

#87

Post by gbog »

ef4 wrote: post #79
gbog wrote: post #76

"His diet and personal hygiene left much to be desired." Does it means these poor people that happen to be our ancestors had a faint body odor surrounding them? Can we stop with this crasiness? We are animals, animals have "body odor", and it have been considered a good thing for a long time. Every time I hear about personal hygiene I remember this American girl who was learning Chinese with me in a university in sou…

Only someone living in the relative safety of a hygienic society would assume the point of that statement is smell . Medieval peasants died from their lack of hygiene.

I know that.

But, without context, if you hear about someone that his "personal hygiene left much to be desired", it just means "he stinks", right?

Then when you write about Middle-Age peasants who died for some lack of understanding of contagion mechanism, you do not write "personal hygiene left much to be desired", unless you want to be ironic, sarcastic, or whatever figure de style you are trying to add.

Re: Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you

#88

Post by wwweston »

pg wrote: post #4

Statistics about how much time medieval peasants spent working can be misleading, because a lot of what they spent their time on when they weren't doing fieldwork was still work, e.g. tending their own gardens, making implements and furniture, working on their houses. They had to make most of the things they used themselves. So when "work" was over they didn't go home and watch TV. It's hard to be sure exactly what l…

> a lot of what they spent their time on when they weren't doing fieldwork was still work, e.g. tending their own gardens, making implements and furniture, working on their houses.

It's certainly true that by and large we benefit from an industrial economy where we hire out ourselves for specialized labor and hire others to do things for us. It'd be something of a challenge to be able to furnish a modern household with a full-complement of typical goods without anything pre-made, and since goods are a lot easier to come by, both in variety and cost, people can afford to be selective about what kinds of self-crafting they'd prefer to engage in (or none at all).

On the other hand, tending your own garden, tooling around in the shop, making furniture, and working on home improvement projects are all activities apparently recreational enough that many seem to do them for fun even when it's easier to pop over to Ikea or otherwise hire it out.

I hear some people even seem to like build their own software for fun. :)

The labor you get to personally enjoy the fruits of -- that you can do to your own standards of need and satisfaction -- is a very different experience than work you're obligated to do as a cog in a institutional production arrangement.

And until most people have the option to pick how many days / hours out of the year they'd like to work as an employee, I don't think it's a settled question that the conventional balance we've got right now is optimal or necessarily superior to all past arrangements.

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