131–140 of 523 posts
Slavery isn't abolished, you've just stopped recognising it. was an ad for a local SUV over a decade ago. - Spending is good for Capitalism -- Spending on products with short-life is even better --- Everyday dependency on short-life products is a gold-mine. Break nation in to major groups based on colour, religion, language, jobs, social status. Break each group into families, families into nuclear & nuclear into ind…
I think there is absolutely no need every adult person needs to work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week. We might just as well work 4 hours a day or 3 days a week. It seems to me, this is just a matter of how the market pressures people to spend as much time as possible at work vs how much work most people can tolerate. How do I know? There are countries where it is normal that both parents work to provide for their hou…
I don't understand how this supposedly proves that e.g. male single providers could work only 4 hours a day instead of 8. Care to explain? As an argument against both parents working it would make more sense...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is taking care of the children? Who works in the daycares?
They who work in the daycares are not a "serf class", they are paid professionals, and they don't need to have "terrible wages" in a civilized country.
Access to opportunities for more income also didn't exist either. The article specifically references serfs(!!!), possibly the most difficult economic class to escape, as the example. Cars, computers, phones, and health insurance also didn't exist back then, and neither did social mobility. Give people visible improvements to quality of living and also the opportunities to attain them and it seems logical to me that…
> Give people visible improvements to quality of living and also the opportunities to attain them and it seems logical to me that people on average would work more, not less. this is not how it happened and quality of life is not an objective measure. factory owners needed workers so they lobbied to have common land used for grazing and growing crops to be grabbed by land owners and forced people into cities to fill…
Seth said: "Insert tragedy of the commons here."
Natalie put her hands up. "You know, I've heard the term 'tragedy of the commons' like a thousand times and I've never actually looked it up. What is it? Something to do with poor people being tragic?"
"That's commoners," Hubert, Etc said. Something was awake and loose inside him now. He wanted to kick the pizza off the coffee table and use it for a stage. "Commons. Common land that belongs to no one. Villages had commons where anyone could bring their livestock for a day's grazing. The tragedy part is that if the land isn't anyone's, then someone will come along and let their sheep eat until there's nothing but mud. Everyone knows that that bastard is on the way, so they might as well be that bastard. Better that sheep belonging to a nice guy like you should fill their bellies than the grass going to some selfish dickhead's sheep." "Sounds like bullshit to me."
"Oh, it is," Hubert, Etc said. The thing was moving in his guts, setting his balls and face tingling. "It's more than mere bullshit. It's searing, evil, world-changing bullshit. The solution to the tragedy of the commons isn't to get a cop to make sure sociopaths aren't overgrazing the land, or shunning anyone who does it, turning him into a pariah. The solution is to let a robber-baron own the land that used to be everyone's, because once he's running it for profit, he'll take exquisite care to generate profit forever."
"That's the tragedy of the commons? A fairy tale about giving public assets to rich people to run as personal empires because, that way they'll make sure they're better managed than they would be if we just made up some rules? God, my dad must love that story."
Sure, many spend 8 hours at the office. But do they do 8 hours of work? Probably not. There are diminishing returns on time spent working, and it probably starts around the third hour. https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/978019087... Many industries would probably suffer negligible losses (and maybe gains) by transitioning to 20 hour work weeks.
Have you ever actually done any labor work? Probably not.
Meh, I think this lacks perspective. Maybe you 'worked' less in that era in the sense that you provided a smaller portion of your time to a third party for pay. But, you worked more overall. You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner; You probably worked a few hours, then spent the next many hours either harvesting and/or creating all the requirements for life. Maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer,…
(Not that there's anything great to come home dead tired from a 10 hour day at the office + commute, and then have the "amazing" convenience to "order food for dinner").
You can still see it in societies that don't have our lifestyles. Go to a blue zone like in Ikaria (where people live in much longer age than average, often reaching 90-100). People tend to their farms some time of the season, do things leisurely, take noon naps, stay up late with friends to eat and drink (late as in, 2-3 am is not uncommon), and so on. Giving less fucks seems a major factor in those "blue zones" (I've also researched a similar one in Italy).
Heck, several french farmers have told me how their grown children in supposedly fancy city jobs (programming, banking, etc) work twice as much as they ever did, and still have a less enjoyable lifestyle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is taking care of the children? Who works in the daycares?
I live in Germany, both my kids go to public kindergarten/daycare (there is no distinction between the 2 here, it starts when the child is 1 year old) & the kindergarten teachers are mostly German themselves. They don't earn great wages but they are not indentured servants either.