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Are you paid to look busy?

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Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#151
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Starting any business requires capital. Not really. A large number of businesses can be started with essentially nothing. Rowling wrote "Harry Potter" on a yellow pad, for one example.

Inversely proportional to your odds is success, though. For many people the stakes are a bit too high: people who are already affluent with safety nets can tolerate more risk.

> Inversely proportional to your odds is success, though.

I seriously doubt that is true.

> For many people the stakes are a bit too high:

Starting a business with little capital has little downside risk, especially if you are already unemployed.

BTW, I started my business with nothing more than an ordinary computer. A friend of mine started his own businesses tuning up peoples' cars in their driveways so they didn't have to go to a shop. His investment and risk was essentially zero, he already had the hand tools needed.

Etsy.com and Ebay.com are packed full of people who started their own businesses with nothing.

Heck, the other day I was at the local public library when they had a book sale. There were people in there scarfing up boxes of books, and checking the value of them with an iphone app. They were clearly intending to resell those books online and make money.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most managers would not accept this. Since most developers are paid salary (as opposed to hourly), many feel like if you were leaving early, you aren't working hard enough. I've seen it at every place I've ever worked. At one place, my manager directly told me I needed to stay until 6 or 7 every night or the boss will think that I'm slacking.

That seems completely backwards. You are being paid salary but treated as if you were hourly. If your managers think it's important for you to be in the office 9-5 every day, why don't they just set up an hourly rate and make you punch a timecard? To me, the reason to have salary is that you are paying a worker to do a job. Highly paying jobs usually require highly skilled workers, and those workers should be judged…

Have you ever seen cost plus government dev projects? They make more money the more pointlessly complex and slow to develop your solution it. If only the world was a sensible meritocracy.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#154
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bucky talked a lot about a world where there was enough food to go around, people were educated, and many jobs were being automated. I assumed he was party inspired by the Green Revolution/Norman Borlaug. That notion dates back to the 1840's at least - the industrial revolution triggered ideological developments out of a growing optimism over the ability of finally doing away with poverty. The birth of socialism wa…

Interesting~ That? That sounds a lot more likely to be true than anything else I've yet heard attributed to him.

This is the part in question, from part I (A) 5. (you can see the whole book here - it's not one of his most accessible works, though: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideo... ), with some inline comments (the quoted text is all one continuous section):

> This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development.

This is a recurring theme with Marx: Revolution is not a political goal, _per se_. Class struggle is not something to strive for, _per se_ - it, according to Marx becomes a necessity when (if, but Marx believes it will inevitably occur) the governments of the current system becomes an "intolerable power", and for this to happen under capitalism, it must not just cause poverty, but cause poverty in contrast with greatly increased wealth.

> And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced;

The above is the specific line I had in mind.

You'll note that Lenin spent quite literally years before he succeeded in convincing enough of the (then) Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party that there was sufficient reason to basically ignore this, and that it would be possible to "short-circuit" this process in Russia. In retrospect, of course, we can see just how wrong he was: It took just until the early 1920's until the Bolshevik's had picked up all the Czarist regimes oppressive tricks and started firmly establishing the Party as a new upper class in the face of the consequences of redistribution in a poor agrarian economy, and we've seen that pattern repeated over, and over.

Marx saw a well developed capitalism as both inevitable, and an absolutely necessary precondition for the development of socialism.

> and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established,

Global trade. Or to take it to its logical conclusion, globalisation:

> which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious position of labour – power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-historical” existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.

> Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

This is one of the parts of Marx that is most often "lost": While on one hand Marx had ideas about immediate political goals (his "Critique of the Gotha Programme" is one of the most accessible, short works on that - it was a letter written to tear to shreds a proposed new party programme for a German socialist party), he wrote very little about the "end goals", as he saw socialism and communism not as something to fight to achieve, but as something that will inevitably happen as a consequence of the development of capitalism.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#155
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Nordic countries and especially in Sweden everyone can collect berries, flowers and mushrooms in the woods. It is the law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#Sweden

And to strengthen that: We're talking not just on public land, but in privately owned forests too. When I grew up in Norway, the notion of whether or not a forest area was owned was moot - many of the places we went for walks or went to collect berries and mushrooms probably were, but I can't tell you which were and which were public, as it was totally irrelevant to us as we have the same legal rights of access eithe…

Man this is cool. It's a little scary here in the US when you could be shot, or at the very least arrested, for a similar act.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not someone who downvoted you but would like to discuss your points. Lets start bottom up. 1) You cannot legally collect berries in the woods. That may have been possible a few hundred years ago. For all my life, I've lived in concrete jungles where pretty much every shrub was manicured and every tree was allowed to survive for aesthetic reasons. More so that that, we don't have commons any more. In the stone age…

> Starting any business requires capital. Not really. A large number of businesses can be started with essentially nothing. Rowling wrote "Harry Potter" on a yellow pad, for one example.

Did she live in a house made of yellow paper, and eat yellow paper as well? Who paid for the yellow pads? And how did her scribblings on the yellow pad become a best-selling novel? Did she just leave the pad in a bookstore and charge people to read it there?

Maybe starting a business doesn't require much capital, but running it until it becomes self-sustaining (or fails) sure does.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#157
post #32
post #26

Combine this with how miserable low-rank work like shopping bag packers and store work is, and you have a great clusterfuck of a society.

I don't think that's the point at all. Even low-wage work would be more satisfying, in the author's view, because your labor is directly beneficial. You can see the results of it. Of course we'd all like to make more money than a store clerk, but in the quest for money we might end up doing things that satisfy us much less than simple labor would. For my part, as a developer, I'm among the fortunate.

Have you ever unloaded a truck with a group of teamsters? I did one summer. I was shocked how aggravated they became at me for hustling. I got sent back to my department because "at that rate we'll have it unpacked in an hour and we've got 4 hours to do it."

Nothing special about white collar jobs here.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#158
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inversely proportional to your odds is success, though. For many people the stakes are a bit too high: people who are already affluent with safety nets can tolerate more risk.

> Inversely proportional to your odds is success, though. I seriously doubt that is true. > For many people the stakes are a bit too high: Starting a business with little capital has little downside risk, especially if you are already unemployed. BTW, I started my business with nothing more than an ordinary computer. A friend of mine started his own businesses tuning up peoples' cars in their driveways so they didn't…

BTW, I started my business with nothing more than an ordinary computer.

Really? Nothing more? You were out in the middle of an empty field, with a computer that you somehow acquired for free, and with that you were able to start a business? What kind of business was that?

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#159
well they sure have a point. then i work from home (telecommute then) i dont work "as long" but i certainly get much more done AND i am also happier.

thats mainly because i dont have to "look busy" or "browse sites for a moment until my brain is able to function decently enough to work again" instead i can go for a job, do the laundry, what not. works much better than sitting on the computer.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not someone who downvoted you but would like to discuss your points. Lets start bottom up. 1) You cannot legally collect berries in the woods. That may have been possible a few hundred years ago. For all my life, I've lived in concrete jungles where pretty much every shrub was manicured and every tree was allowed to survive for aesthetic reasons. More so that that, we don't have commons any more. In the stone age…

> Starting any business requires capital. Not really. A large number of businesses can be started with essentially nothing. Rowling wrote "Harry Potter" on a yellow pad, for one example.

Rowling was an unemployed divorced single mother who had to rely on welfare to support her whilst she wrote Harry Potter. She is quite socially conscious and has always supported the welfare state that gave her a leg up.
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