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Can we have the day off?

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Re: Can we have the day off?

#151

Post by bruhFaaahNo »

apt-apt-apt-apt wrote: post #108
cattown wrote: post #33

This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive. I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should…

Same answer as for most hope-filled employee questions sadly: You get to keep your job. You agreed to accept X pay for 40 hours, do it or we'll find someone else who will.

Except all the people who drilled such mandates into our heads are dying off. These things persist over time only so long as we keep discussing them.

We're really failing to meet the moment before us by merely repeating the propaganda of elders that glaze over on live TV trying to act authoritative and useful to humanity.

Exploitation of youth is no less ageist than telling gramps look in the mirror.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#152

Post by zdragnar »

aetch wrote: post #96
Cakez0r wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that most people are paid for their time, not for their output. I think most contracts for salaried employees are along the lines of "work n hours a week". If you want to get paid for output, you can't be a salaried employee.

I think it’s the other way around. Hourly wages are paid directly for time at work

At least in the US, there are regulations around what constitutes "full time" employment, and many benefits (such as insurance) are tied into being offered only for full time employees, or at different tiers between part and full time.

As such, you are still expected to work a minimum amount of time. That's what you're signing up for. Fixed deliverable contracts- completing certain objectives- tend to either specify those things as minimum performance expectations, or are for contractors rather than employees.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#153

Post by eulgro »

Unfortunately that's not how it works. Productivity gains have already increased tenfold in the past, yet still all work full time.

It used to be that 80+% of the population worked in agriculture. In developed countries that number is now around 1-2%. Some of the freed labour was funneled into improving living standards, some of it was funneled into new jobs created by the increasingly complex society (the "intermediate economy").

With AI, the same is true: labour is freed by the productivity gains (which I doubt are 10x sustainably but whatever), more labour is needed for power generation, mineral extraction, maintaining this new extra layer of complexity in the intermediate economy, etc. In the end we might see, say, a net 3% increase in global productivity per year over the next 10 years, which will be funneled into increasing living standards and increasing economic inequalities, but not in reducing working hours.

If you accept living below average standards, you could easily work a single day of the week for the rest of your life. But why would an employer hire 5 people working one day a week, instead of one working 5 days a week? They won't, hence we don't see a reduction in working hours.

The alternative is to work full time but retire earlier, much earlier, than you would otherwise, which in the end is the equivalent of having worked one day a week for your whole life.

I highly recommend reading Lean Logic by David Fleming, it explores several of these concepts in a very interesting way.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#154

Post by MichaelZuo »

king_geedorah wrote: post #110
MichaelZuo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? From the data I’ve seen the bottom decile Americans consume significantly more per capita compared to even 2006. e.g. plane travel was completely absent amongst the bottom decile in 2006, like so close to zero mileage per capita per annum it was a rounding error.

Is bottom decile consumption a good measure of economic health? In a way it seems it could signal the opposite, ie in the past the bottom decile was saving that money in an effort to change their economic conditions vs spending it now could indicate a lack of hope for upward mobility. To your example it seems worth noting that the quality of the air travel experience appears to decline over time as well.

Bottom decile consumption is the best measure of economic health for the bottom decile… it clearly cannot be the best measure across the entirety of the population.

Real physical consumption is by far the hardest metric to game or play tricks with.

Yes technically, some probably are trading a bit of their future prospects for a nicer flight schedule, less red-eyes, etc… But I don’t see how that is relevant at all?

Re: Can we have the day off?

#155

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

cm11 wrote: post #111
Cakez0r wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that most people are paid for their time, not for their output. I think most contracts for salaried employees are along the lines of "work n hours a week". If you want to get paid for output, you can't be a salaried employee.

I don't think this is the reality. It is part of it, but people get paid different salaries, why? Some are more productive than others. Aside from leadership's (and society's) biased ability to determine value, these people theoretically get more because they contribute more.

while productivity is correlated with salary, generally the ability to ask for a raise, to defend your pay and office politics navigation would be more impactful on average

Re: Can we have the day off?

#156

Post by bdcs »

"Everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented ... a 15-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For 3 hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!" - Keynes, 1930

Though this was a 100-year prediction so we still got three and half to go!

Re: Can we have the day off?

#157

Post by raincole »

Cakez0r wrote: post #68
cattown wrote: post #33

This article is kind of playful, but I think there’s a serious point here that’s not discussed enough. We’re being asked to usher in huge productivity gains by introducing AI to our workflows, but we’re not asking how does it help us? Not a lot of us stand to directly gain from our employers becoming more productive. I know everybody is afraid of getting fired and replaced with AI or whatever right now. But we should…

The reality is that most people are paid for their time, not for their output. I think most contracts for salaried employees are along the lines of "work n hours a week". If you want to get paid for output, you can't be a salaried employee.

They are paid for what they collectively output. The only reason that people seem to be paid by their time is that it's hard to measure each one's output individually and granularly.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#159

Post by jaggederest »

lostlogin wrote: post #124
calvinmorrison wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my dad grew up in a house without running water in a town where everyone worked in a mine and the lead was everywhere. he hitchiked to alaska for seasonal work in a fish cannery. Yeah I don't know... i think things are better than they were 40 years ago.

> i think things are better than they were 40 years ago. In relative terms, they seem much worse, Americans standing isn’t what it was. In absolute terms, I don’t know. What’s the measure?

I like FSI, which is a dimensionless number taking into account basically the functioning of society and the likelihood for unrest. (Fragile State Index)

It's the highest, at the moment, that it's been since the 1800s. The nadir for the US was in the late 40s early 50s when we had a 92% top marginal tax rate and extremely high social cohesion despite massive WW2 debts. Needless to say the late 40s and early 50s was not exactly utopia, but substantially more stable.

Re: Can we have the day off?

#160

Post by majormajor »

whatshisface wrote: post #148
majormajor wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The "flipping out" aspect is something that does not seem to have a lot to do with technology at this time or in the past. How so? Without technology we wouldn't have a "work week" in the first place and work would be much more directly tied to survival of the community and generally less negotiable in the first place. The "flipping out" came about precisely because technology changed what work was and what the cond…

The past had slaves too. The feudal arrangement of tenant farmers was only one system of labor. I don't think union bargaining was ever tied to specific advances in technology.

Sorry, I'm drawing a blank on much history of slaves in a extremely-low-technological society or how it was imposed or ended in those societies, could you provide some examples of what you're meaning exactly by bringing slavery up? Feudalism or other things happening in those centuries is well into the technological era.

Are you saying you can't think of examples from the past of the introduction of technology changing labor dynamics or organization? Say, mechanical agriculture?

The changes are hardly going to always be good - there's no determinism of "new technology means society will get 'better'". But they've often been periods of change, and such periods are when it's easier to influence the direction if you happen to care about the direction of the change.

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