I left a job where I was basically paid to be the other guy with a heartbeat who knows Smalltalk. I did nothing but browse all day, and it was soul crushing. (Also responsible for a significant chunk of my HN karma.)
A nation of slaves
121–130 of 258 posts
Re: A nation of slaves
#122An 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 e…
As far as I know, everyone has a baseline amount of money in our society -- it's just that it comes from a lot of disparate sources. Some people get their baseline from a combination of housing vouchers, food stamps, medicaid, and other entitlements; others get their baseline from working 2 McJobs; others have good jobs that provide way beyond the baseline.
If the baseline is provided in a more straightforward way (and, presumably, taxes on above-baseline amounts are raised accordingly) there may be very little economic distortion from the present state.
Re: A nation of slaves
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Family? At least that's what all those disgruntled workers keep saying. :P Life is meaningless. People just tend to disagree at what existential level it begins to become meaningless. But right now is not meaningless - we can choose to enjoy it. Whether that is by telling ourselves that we have a purpose and acting upon it, or by playing amateur tennis - what's the difference? In the grand scheme of things. Doctors h…
Life is meaningless to you... That's a whole another can of worms but a very interesting one nevertheless. While watching a documentary recently, I realized that my existential angst wasn't nearly as pronounced or debilitating when I was struggling to live day to day. Work sucked, really sucked, to the point that some days I'd almost wish I'd rather fallen gravely ill or died rather than go to work. But that was only…
> Life is meaningless to you... That's a whole another can of worms but a very interesting one nevertheless.
Can of worms? You seem to imply that I find it depressing, while really it's quite the opposite. Spare me your projections.
Re: A nation of slaves
#124There is a big fallacy in the article: Namely, that the amount of work that can be done has an upper bound. In fact, the amount of work that can be be done is infinite and with higher productivity other things are done (= can be done economically) than before, for example: Cleaning the streets, painting your house white, keeping your nearby river clean, build tanks & guns, maintaining bureaucracy, helping people you…
The complementary fallacy also in the article: the amount of work required has a lower bound of zero.
Survival isn't free. We consume (destroy) just to maintain a lowest-common-denominator status quo. The Red Queen was right: we need to run (work) hard just to keep up with staying where we are (98 degrees F). To keep two people at that state of basic survival while one does nothing to produce whatever's needed to maintain their fair share, the other has to work twice as hard - and without some suitable incentive, the one working will lose interest in doing so.
Yes, we're in a wealthy society. We're at this level because everyone, on the whole, works hard and pitches in. If a growing subset decide to just bask in the luxury, it's all going to come crashing down. As tax season approaches, I'm reminded of how much is taken from me - making it hard to do what I consider essential for my family, and making me reconsider my role in society; take enough from me, and I can go "off grid" pretty fast. Remember the goose who laid golden eggs.
Re: A nation of slaves
#125If you're feeling unbiased enough to try and ignore what certain words mean to use today, you may want to ready Oscar Wilde's take on these things from a 19th century point of view. If the words "Socialist" or "Marxist" mean something much more livid to you than " Romanticism" or "Postmodernism," you are not allowed to read the linked article^ http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-m... ^I was con…
Speaking as an American, I cannot see anything much more livid than "Romanticism", except "Postmodernism".
Re: A nation of slaves
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you seen the improvements to garbage collection? A giant mechanical arm grabs a specially designed trash bin and tips it into the open top. The garbage man doesn't even need to get close to the bin. Hell, he barely has to get out of the heated truck (in northern Canada). The abundance of cheap labour just delays the implementation of "leisure-efficient" technology. Here's a video of the truck in action: http://w…
The local trash company (Winder, Georgia) switched to these recently. As much as I like new tech, I wonder about the two guys who used to run off to each side of the road to grab cans. Did they find new jobs?
So much for minimum wage. Cost of automation was cheaper than hiring two guys to do the same. Ask 'em if they'd have taken a pay cut to not have their jobs cut.
Re: A nation of slaves
#127The 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…
It's something of an efficiency fallacy that keeping all resources (people and/or machines, etc) 100% occupied is the best way to get highest system productivity. Unfortunately, the assumption is baked-in to a lot of our work culture.
Regarding people, good reading in this concept is Goldratt's, "The Goal"[1]. There are more technical approaches of the concept. But, the novel is great in terms of getting a visceral feel of why there are busy resources, but at the same time you need idle resources within the same pipeline for good system performance.
Re: A nation of slaves
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basic income mean huge changes: For example, salary may still be partially driven by necessary education / experience, but physical, tiresome or stressfull works would requireask for way higher salaries (because you get up at 4AM to collect garbage when you have no other choice, or when you think it really is worth it, and those jobs would still be necessary) The same way, some companies will have huge problems filli…
"Basic income mean huge changes" I have to admit this alone is enough to give me pause. The logic goes something like: "Our current social system has produced astonishing wealth. We can therefore take this to change our current social system and distribute the wealth more widely. Hooray, we fixed things!" But this amounts to a rewriting of the social system. We have no guarantees that the next social system will prod…
> "Our current social system has produced astonishing wealth. [...]"
In Europe the main problem in agriculture is overproduction so farmers sometimes get payed to leave some land uncultivated and hard limits are imposed on the production of milk and on the import of bovine meat. This is not a place where we'll starve because everybody will start painting and sculpting all of a sudden.
Re: A nation of slaves
#129If you're feeling unbiased enough to try and ignore what certain words mean to use today, you may want to ready Oscar Wilde's take on these things from a 19th century point of view. If the words "Socialist" or "Marxist" mean something much more livid to you than " Romanticism" or "Postmodernism," you are not allowed to read the linked article^ http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-m... ^I was con…
Speaking as an American, I cannot see anything much more livid than "Romanticism", except "Postmodernism".
OK. You have permission to read Oscar Wilde.
Re: A nation of slaves
#130One 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…
work provides purpose and dignity, and without work, you have no purpose, and therefore, you are a failure Regardless of age, I guess most people feel this way (not just the previous generations - even the people in their 20's and 30's today). What is the alternative to this? If not work - what is important? what makes one person a success and another a failure, and what gives purpose and dignity to life, in your opi…
Those are the classic middle class values. I guess as the west keeps getting richer the middle class will move more into upper class ethics. I m not upper class so I don't know how they occupy their minds, but in the 19th century they used to bother with traveling, archaeology, nature, science, philosophy, writing, and having affairs.