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A nation of slaves

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Re: A nation of slaves

#111

Post by tunap »

stefantalpalaru wrote: post #2

An unconditional basic income[1] would speed up a paradigm shift from the current "work or starve" society. Maybe our grandchildren will look back to this time and make funny jokes about digging and filling holes... [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

How would that work from a free market standpoint? What I mean is, when everyone has a baseline amount of money, the relative scarcity is diminished and the market prices will inflate as the value of money(real & perceived) decreases.

I cannot recall the historical character at the moment, but I recall reading of a benevolent king(central or south american?) who give all his subjects generous amounts of gold to the effect that it crashed their economy. Anyone?

edit:reword last sentence

Re: A nation of slaves

#112

Post by habosa »

The discussion here (http://libcom.org/library/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-gra...) which is linked from the original post is, imo, more interesting and thought provoking.

I think most people can immediately identify with the idea of "working" 40 hours while really only doing 15 hours of hard work and 25 hours of paper pushing and procrastinating. Maybe not in your current job but almost certainly in some job you once held.

I think this is a product of work culture. There are, at almost every halfway useful company, a number of truly busy people. These people have 40 hours of things to do every week, or at least need 40 hours to properly instruct their subordinates. However it is often the case that they only really need 15h of hard work from each subordinate. The issue is that it's not culturally acceptable to say to your boss "I just did all you need from me this week in a few hours, I'm going to the beach now". So such a worker faces the choice of either speaking up and asking for more work, or dragging out the minimal work they have to do until it takes an "acceptable" amount of time. Since time is our most valuable asset the culture of a company is considered fair when people are giving relatively equal time sacrifices to the task at hand.

I know I have been lucky enough to have a manager that was not offended if I finished all of my work early and left, but 99% of people never have that luxury. It's psychological, most people don't want others to get off easy.

Re: A nation of slaves

#113

Post by ctdonath »

npsimons wrote: post #53
logfromblammo wrote: post #9

Here's a thought experiment. Mr. Myne has invented an extraordinary machine. This one machine can, using polluted air and brackish water as material inputs, produce a nutritious food substitute and potable water for one person for one entire day with less than $1.30 of grid power. The 2000 kcal daily diet uses about 8000 kcal of electricity and 10 L of dirty water. With this machine, a person can avoid starvation and…

What happens if people decide to stop paying Mr. Myne to use his machines? Someone else invents it? The fallacy is the same one that most people in favor of "intellectual property" operate under: that Mr Myne is somehow so special that he's the only person who could have ever invented the machine. As history has repeatedly shown, even the very special are hardly ever truly unique. Most inventions and discoveries occu…

Why would someone else invent it? If people decide to stop paying for the machines, or at least stop paying enough for him to suitably benefit from making/obtaining & maintaining the machines, why would anyone else fill in the gap if they're not going to benefit either?

Such technologies are common: per-unit and per-use cost may be low, but price of reaching that cost level may be extremely high. Integrated circuits are individually very cheap (!), but the machines making them cost $billions - they're not something you are, on your own, going to construct just so you can have an iPhone. iPhones exist because Apple put enormous money into making their components in such volume as to reach commodity cost.

Mr. Myne's machines may cost just a couple dollars a day to rent & run, but may have cost a billion dollars to produce to achieve that cheap cost - heck yeah he wants 4x retail price thereon because he needs to earn back that billion dollars and make enough additional profit to make the whole enormous activity worth his while.

A thing is worth exactly and only what another is willing to pay for it. If people will pay $8/day for Mr. Myne's machines, that's what it's worth.

Re: A nation of slaves

#114

Post by habosa »

semanticist wrote: post #69
skittles wrote: post #65

A free-market society would never average a 15 hour work week unless there's no incentive to pay for the work anymore. This could happen if we find a limitless energy source and real artificial intelligence. As long as someone is willing to pay for hours of work, people will be willing to work more than 15 hours a week to get ahead.

Why? No, seriously, if I can work 15 hours a week and live comfortably, why is there an automatic assumption that I'd need to work more just because other people are prepared to do that? What does 'get ahead' even mean, in that context? There's so many social and cultural assumptions bound up in your statement that it's nearly meaningless for anyone who isn't you.

People don't just want to do well, they want to do better than those around them. it's natural to many people (maybe not to you, but to many). I read this quote from a wall street executive in an article recently posted on HN: " “It's not just enough to fly in first class; I have to know my friends are flying in coach."

So unless nobody is selling first class tickets, people will work harder to afford them. And in order for the market to work, the seller of tickets will raise the price of first class until only ~10% of flying passengers can afford it.

Re: A nation of slaves

#115

Post by ctdonath »

logfromblammo wrote: post #63
mjmahone17 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why patents ought to be property in the same sense that land or leases are property, and the govt. ought to be able to use eminent domain on them. Pay Mr. Myne a lot for his contribution to society, but then make sure that even the least-well-off can take advantage of this newfound material wealth without exploitation.

While there is no single right answer here, I think maybe you have stumbled across one of the many possible wrong answers. If you haven't already figured it out, Mr. Myne represents the owner-investor class, his machine represents future industrial capital, and your solution was to use the government to seize control of the capital.

...discouraging anyone else from getting into the "Myne machine" industry. Why bother if others are just going to out-vote him, put a gun to one's head, and seize control?

Re: A nation of slaves

#116

Post by raldi »

Dewie wrote: post #107
raldi wrote: post #84

This article is predicated on the idea that, because we're more efficient today than 1930, we should be able to work less and live the same lifestyle. Well, in fact, we can. But you can't ignore those last three words: you have to live the same lifestyle as a typical 1930s person. * No internet. * No TV. * No air conditioning. * No cell phone. * No car. * Bunk beds for your kids. * One bathroom for the whole house. *…

Isn't a lot of that productivity exactly because of all those technologies (and more)? Then how does it make sense to stop using all of those things in order to work less? The Internet helps a knowledge worker to be productive (also enables some procrastination, but oh well). Is canceling your Internet subscription and consulting your 20 volume, 10 year old encyclopedia a benefit? Same goes for cell phones and cars.…

From the article:

> We ought to be able to make ends meet perfectly well with [...] a 40 hour week for 48 weeks a year for a ten year working lifetime.

And my point is that we (well, most Hacker News readers, at least) can do that -- if, at the end of that 10-year span, we live like it's 1930.

Re: A nation of slaves

#117

Post by stcredzero »

habosa wrote: post #112

The discussion here ( http://libcom.org/library/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-gra... ) which is linked from the original post is, imo, more interesting and thought provoking. I think most people can immediately identify with the idea of "working" 40 hours while really only doing 15 hours of hard work and 25 hours of paper pushing and procrastinating. Maybe not in your current job but almost certainly in some job you…

I've heard about almost this exact situation. A brilliant developer I knew when I worked for a Smalltalk vendor (one who made a seminal contribution to his programming community that went on to influence almost every other programming community) was working as a contractor for a telecom. He found that he could get all of his assignments for the week done in 1 or 2 days. Basically, his manager told him to do more work each week, so that the suffering would be distributed evenly.

Re: A nation of slaves

#118

Post by GVIrish »

rayiner wrote: post #99
angersock wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to hold you to task, here: what exactly constitutes "flourishing"? I'd bet you mean something other than mindless growth and expansion--just want to make sure.

What I mean to say is that if the need to produce material things vanishes, people don't replace that need by producing art and culture and placing increased emphasis on family, friends and community. By "flourishing," I don't refer to material production, but social prosperity. Having seen both, a ghetto in a U.S. inner city is objectively much more materially prosperous, partly thanks to government support, than a…

If you compare an inner city ghetto to a village in Bangladesh though, there are other key differences.

Number one, there's no war on drugs in a Bangladeshi village to disrupt family units and create black market violence. That factor alone causes a huge amount of misery in inner cities in the United States.

Then there's the fact that communities may not be as supportive and tightly knit. This makes things much harder on working parents and their children. People have this image of people in the ghetto sitting on their asses and not working but the truth is there are a lot of people working more than one jobs and being stuck in poverty. Objectively the standard of living for those people may be higher than the Bangladeshi village resident, but the cost is that those folks probably have a harder time raising a family.

Either way I totally agree that basic income cannot ignore the role of the community as well as cultural and social constructs. Not to mention the criminal justice system.

Re: A nation of slaves

#119

Post by sliverstorm »

nostromo wrote: post #75
mjmahone17 wrote: post #14

One of the biggest views I see in my parents and grandparents: work provides purpose and dignity, and without work, you have no purpose, and therefore, you are a failure. This is really hard to respond to, especially with people who have spent 50 years working with this mindset, because they feel "invalidated" or "worthless" if their life's worth isn't measured by their work output. I don't think that's necessarily a…

An additional negative aspect of this mentality is that effort, rather than value, is praised. Working hard should never be a goal. It should be a means to a goal.

Effort is praised because it is positive for kids' development. It is a better place for them to root their self worth. You get kids who can handle failure and try, try again.

Re: A nation of slaves

#120

Post by raldi »

angersock wrote: post #95
raldi wrote: post #84

This article is predicated on the idea that, because we're more efficient today than 1930, we should be able to work less and live the same lifestyle. Well, in fact, we can. But you can't ignore those last three words: you have to live the same lifestyle as a typical 1930s person. * No internet. * No TV. * No air conditioning. * No cell phone. * No car. * Bunk beds for your kids. * One bathroom for the whole house. *…

What? That's quite silly. On the internet/TV for example, you are failing to take into account the spread of tech and efficiency. We can have factories produce TVs automatically, and internet infrastructure doesn't require a huge number of people to keep it running--and most of them, I wager, would be happy to keep doing what they're doing, because it's fun . As for fancy restaurants or organic groceries...that's jus…

I think you misinterpreted my comment as if it were about what "we" as a society could do, but I meant it as a comment about what any of us as an individual could do.
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