Why do people waste so much time at work?

> There is no right or wrong.

So I guess 2 + 2 makes whatever the hell you want it to?

> he articulates them well and can back them up by showing his thought patterns

What if his thought patterns are all fucked up, and completely detached from reality? Wouldn't it be better to change your views based on reason, logic and evidence?

I'll be throttled again real soon, if I can even post this one anymore, so I'll paste a reply that was meant for another comment of yours.

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> As I suspected you have never experienced any financial hardship. This is fine in itself but is very telling in how you perceive the world.

Having experienced it wouldn't change anything about what's rational and objective though.

> It's easy to calculate the value of something that has no direct value to you. It's called a cost benefit analysis and it is the corner stone of any business education but is applicable in many fields beyond business.

I can't help but wonder if you're trolling me, but here goes..

Since value is subjective, it cannot be calculated, because calculations require units, and there's no unit for how much you happen to want something at a particular moment. It also can't be measured or represented externally, outside of your mind.

If you're engaging in a cost / benefit -analysis, that implies that you do perceive value in something. That would be the "benefit" part. But you still can't put exact, objectively accurate numbers on the benefit.

You can, however, decide how many dollars you're willing to lose through a course of action, and you can expect to gain a number of dollars from it. But that only represents your subjective evaluation of how much something is worth to you, in terms of monetary units.

> It is however impossible to do this accurately if you are incapable of any thinking apart from ego-centric thinking.

That's insulting, especially coming from someone who's woefully unequipped to correct me on economic matters.

> If you do understand the difference then you are purposefully corrupting the discussion. Please stop doing this.

Yet another wild-ass accusation. Could you please stop?

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Indeed. Things used to be more delightful, because we could, we had the time. Elaborate festivals and parties are a great example. It is a great loss.

There was a human touch to so many of things that surrounded us. People wore beautiful clothes, tended to their houses, put effort in the elaborate rituals of the domestic and public sphere.

I always have to think of that walking around older southern cities in the US. From dainty modest shotguns to gingerbread victorian family homes, to stately mansions, each of them were carefully crafted, using materials pleasant to the touch and sight, with ornamentation that arose naturally, and even though sometimes elaborate, never garrish, always human. And this extended from the large architectural features - the columns and turrets - all the way down to the doorknobs and furniture. I imagine this architecture as an physical manifestation of daily life.

(I could pick any time & place to illustrate this, just nothing after WW1 in the West, when the machine aesthetic took over).

Well-tended gardens, week long festivals and carnivals, washing and mending your Sunday clothes on a lazy Saturday evening, shopping for fresh ingredients and preparing multi-course meals for the family ... These things take time. It requires human effort, something a machine can never replicate, time that somehow we don't have any more, even though productivity is so much more higher than it used to be. Perhaps we are wasting that time doing the ritual of work.

One could argue that the current economic system has shifted to increasingly taking labor from the vast majority of producers while providing a minimal amount of compensation, all while a tiny slice get a vast amount of compensation.

Because most producers simply don't get enough of a margin above subsistence, a wide range of society dosen't have the resources to make investments in new businesses (or new personal investments) and our economic potential suffers. If too much of the economic excess is concentrated into too few hands we end up with an inefficient command economy.

What the BBC article describes to us should strongly hint to us that the current work arrangement is a local maxima in the efficiency of our social/economic system, and that other arrangements should be looked at to yield better social and economic benefits. And honestly, I think that labels such as "Socialism" and "Capitalism" have done a lot of damage in the short-circuiting of analysis of economic systems (ie. in the vein of "This is socialism" we we know that doensn't work...). We really have to move beyond classifying into those broad categories and deciding policy based upon what broad camp one believes in.

So what you are saying is, you want other people to fund your "basics" so you can go camping and do other stuff you enjoy. Wow, nice for you.