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Are you paid to look busy?

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Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#181

Post by burntsushi »

williamcotton wrote: post #90
zo1 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed" You make it seem like there is some entity or group of entities that thinks "Hey, let's go make up jobs". For what reason, you ask? Well, because he has to "justify his right to exist". That puts your argument in the same bucket as "karma", "quantum wellbeing", "deepak-nonsense" and "homeopathy". Seriously though. What is that rant…

What my neighbors are up to is incredibly relevant to my life. We share the same space and we affect each other's lives in important ways. On a bigger and more abstract scale we share the same Earth with every other living human. Stop pretending like you don't live in an organized society and that we all don't have the ability to change the dynamics of our culture through government. We've been doing so for millennia…

Nothing you says contradicts the parent. The parent doesn't say that you should only care about yourself. The parent says that you shouldn't force people to act as if they care about others.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#182

Post by pbhjpbhj »

xr09 wrote: post #24
dsirijus wrote: post #9

My employee next to me is working hard. I'm in elinks in terminal on HN and on IRC, with vertical split of htop in tmux. He thinks I'm working hard too, with all those numbers, columns, scrolling output and blinking cursor. I feel so bad right now. I'm going to go actually work.

When reading stuff like this I wonder, how do the Windows folks manage to do the same? A browser disguised as Visual Studio? doubledesktop.exe? I'm so thankful for my *nix with all these little toys.

Well there's this - http://mashable.com/2011/07/03/hardlyworkin-excel-facebook/ - that makes Twitter/Facebook look like an MS Excel sheet.

Seem to remember a more generic version of that from way-back-when but can't find it.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#184

Post by chasing »

Artistry121 wrote: post #166
chasing wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Voluntary giving and charity and voluntary communal groups could easily grow. The notion that taxes are the only way to spread wealth is flawed. Except now you've created a situation where only the wealthy get to choose society's direction. We need taxes so that even those without financial resources can have a say in what our collective money funds. This is made even more extreme if only a small part of the popula…

You've actually created a situation where only those who provide value to others get to choose society's direction - and only in non-coercive ways. Thought leaders, religious leaders and other individuals can all have power as well - although non-violent power. In a heavy tax-scenario those who get to choose society's direction can do so with military level force and attain power through politics and favor trading un…

> You've actually created a situation where only those who provide value to others get to choose society's direction...

"Providing value to others" does not necessarily equal "Earning enough money to be able to give away significant amounts voluntarily."

Plenty of people are wildly underpaid given their contribution to society.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#185

Post by jaffeee »

WalterBright wrote: post #127
turnip1979 wrote: post #80

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.

And for every 'Harry Potter' there are a hundred more books that barely break even or lose money for publisher. For eaxh of those there are a hundred more manuscripts sitting in slush piles or desk drawers that will never see the light of day.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#186

Post by mcv »

paulhauggis wrote: post #55
ryandrake wrote: post #22

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery becau…

This sounds great, but you still need money to survive. This would mean that the few that did work would essentially be supporting the rest of society. Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from me by the government to support people that didn't need to do anything?? You don't have to get a crappy job and work for someone you hate for the rest of…

> This sounds great, but you still need money to survive.

Yes, but why should people do totally useless work to get it?

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#187

Post by DougWebb »

alayne wrote: post #171
DougWebb wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why are your comments in this thread so rude?

I'm rude? WalterBright is being rude and dismissive to everyone who must work at a job that consumes all of their time and energy just to survive, saying that they should just go ahead and quit and start their own business, because it's so easy and you can do it with nothing. His statements are ridiculous, completely ignoring the need for income or pre-existing savings to eat and live while trying to create a business that can be self-supporting.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#188

Post by seanmcdirmid »

_dark_matter_ wrote: post #155
vidarh wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are free to pick black berries in much of Friday Harbor and the rest of the San Juans (and they are everywhere). Many people hunt shrooms in national forests, and then there is the sea. The Pacific Northwest is a nice place for these kinds of things.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#189

Post by DougWebb »

tim333 wrote: post #175
DougWebb wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

JK Rowling was basically on social security payments from the government which paid for accommodation, food and the like. I'm not sure that would normally be considered capital.

It's income without the need to work for it, which is basically the same thing as having an investor or being able to live off savings, in the sense that it allowed her the time and opportunity to write. If she didn't have those social security payments, she would have had to get a job, and she probably wouldn't have had the time and energy to create the vast amount of wealth she was able to create.

This is a great argument in support of Basic Income. How much wealth is currently not being created because the people who would create it are trapped scraping a living from useless low-pay work?

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#190

Post by zo1 »

klunger wrote: post #140
vishnugupta wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that "one-in-ten-thousand" (or whatever) will need to be taxed very heavily so the wealth can be spread I think this is always going to be problematic because once wealth gets concentrated it's going to be very hard to redistribute it, short of some revolution or coup. And I sense that this is going to be especially hard in democratic countries where there's a very close nexus between elected representatives an…

Don't forget: 10. Wal-Mart and Friends: Paying your employees an extremely low wage with unpredictable shifts (so they can't get a second job). The end result being that your employees need food stamps to survive, so your profits are ultimately subsidized by tax payers.

Everyone loves the low-prices of WalMart, but they then turn around and bitterly complain about the low-wages that WalMart pays their employees.

Even if these employees could get a second job, what makes you think they will be able to find one? Unemployment is sky-rocketing in the US.

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