91–100 of 187 posts
Why assume we can either work or do nothing? Of course doing nothing sucks! What about doing something instead?
Could the problem be that most people have been trained to do what they're told, instead of being creative?
I really enjoyed reading this article. I've been thinking quite a bit about work recently. I'm just about to turn 29, and by all accounts I'm fairly successful: I graduated college with a worthless liberal arts degree just as the Great Recession was beginning. After an unsuccessful attempt at copywriting for a couple years, I managed to learn programming. A few years after that and I'm the leader of the engineering t…
The key to a happy and successful life is to find meaningful ways to spend your time. Meaningful to you, of course. Because of the monetary system we live in, usually a large chunk of our time needs to be devoted towards earning money, or at least finding a way to eat, live comfortably, and reproduce (too scientific sounding?). Buddhist monks will be able to show you other ways to enjoy life outside that system, howe…
Where am I to look for jobs where I have agency in the choice of technology and the direction of the product, a group of intelligent and supportive peers, and a product that directly improves the lives of others? These types of jobs seem to be a vanishingly small percentage of those that are available (not even accounting for the further filtering that happens: skill match, inteviewing, salary requirements, etc).
I really enjoyed reading this article. I've been thinking quite a bit about work recently. I'm just about to turn 29, and by all accounts I'm fairly successful: I graduated college with a worthless liberal arts degree just as the Great Recession was beginning. After an unsuccessful attempt at copywriting for a couple years, I managed to learn programming. A few years after that and I'm the leader of the engineering t…
This. Basic income would pay for basic needs, and let people devote "free time" to more personally-satisfacting-activities: open-source programming, studiyng new interesting fields, etc... The mere fact that in today's professional career there is little oportunity for a 40-50years to work on a completely-new-unexperienced-field is an clear example. There is a point in time after which a job converts from ilusion-and…
Basic income is a great idea, but something that is actually politically workable and a lot smaller in scope is needed. It is constantly advocated around here with no real evidence that it is workable at scale.
I really enjoyed reading this article. I've been thinking quite a bit about work recently. I'm just about to turn 29, and by all accounts I'm fairly successful: I graduated college with a worthless liberal arts degree just as the Great Recession was beginning. After an unsuccessful attempt at copywriting for a couple years, I managed to learn programming. A few years after that and I'm the leader of the engineering t…
> I'm trading in the best years of my life, my focus, my attention, my time, my life for money. That's the nature of this transaction. I'm trading in this short life I get for cash. I feel like a prostitute. Money is unavoidable, so if you're going to be unhappy about earning it, you're going to have an unhappy life no matter what . I kind of doubt money is the issue...you might just be looking for inspiration. Maybe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A world without work was a pretty common vision in the 1960s. And the 1860s But humanity has a remarkable capacity to invent new outlets to fill our waking hours as we redeploy resources used to make stuff to make other stuff or sell stuff. We didn't have (or foresee!) social media managers or video game designers in the 1960s. And software doesn't just make our production efforts scale, it makes our consumption scal…
In the USA, male participating in the wage economy has been in the decline since the 1940s: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LNS11300001 For women, the peak was in 2000: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USALFPWNA Wages for men have been in decline since 1973, which demonstrates one of the obvious ways people deal with declining opportunities: lower wages. In the 1800s Western nations conquered…
If you look at this example, it'll show overall labour force participation actually rose between 1960 and 2000 for employees of every age under 60 http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/09/art3full.pdf Admittedly that trend is unlikely to have continued through the last recession, but it's pretty hard evidence against the doom-mongers of the 1960s at least. And it's remained resilient against a number of trends other than automation, not least a marked tendency to export jobs rather than unemployment to the developing world.
Manchester cotton might not have been welcomed by India's textile manufacturers, but I'm baffled by the suggestion that the British decimated the Indian steel industry (I mean, quite apart from everything I've ever read on the subject suggesting Indian steel production vastly increased in the 19th century - railways being more steel-intensive than ceremonial sword production - an Indian family conglomerate now owns the British steel industry!)
I find it presumptuous that the authors lay depression and so forth at the feet of unemployment and not the obvious: poverty. If folks could live, unemployed, receiving mincome that supported a reasonable quality of life, is there a reason to believe these various effects would still be a major issue?
Does having a mincome stop you from stressing over the guy across the street who has a bigger one and a better looking wife? Maybe it does, but I don't think the mincome or quality of life is the biggest driver for that. The biggest driver is freedom (Do I truly believe I have every opportunity to become what/WHO I want to be?) Can we really achieve that freedom for everyone in the real world? Is getting close good e…
>Does having a mincome stop you from stressing over the guy across the street who has a bigger [house] and a better looking wife?
Well, no, however neither does almost anything else. It seems cultural, and is almost certainly psychological. The classic idiom, "the grass is always greener on the other side" illustrates this pretty well. Even with the wealth, whatever form it may take, to get the bigger house, the better looking wife, the whatever problems still arise. The neighbor with the smaller house, with more time for xyz, with a car they don't need to fret over because it cost 1/50 as much as yours.
Those aren't notions of freedom, their ideas of competition. Why can't I be /happier/ than the other guy? Freedom comes as much from being able to have a bad day as having a good one.
"Work" connotes a class distinction. Class is part of this. Subjugation of workers and caste are the origin of the current system. Who owns the machines? Who owns the land? Does a human being have a natural right to live? To own his own small plot of land? Are humans just like common animals, to be yoked or corralled? Fundamentally the intellectual framework is driven by patronage of the highest caste which cannot he…
I'm interested in your view concerning one of the axioms that I infer underlies your political thinking. What do you consider equality, and what do you consider the reasoning behind considering it a desirable goal?
Owning a huge plot of land or controlling access to another person's minimum necessities is unequal.
The alternative is the default, primitive, animal that must fight to survive. Until this supposition that we must prove our right to exist falls from popularity, civilization is a myth.
The underlying assumption is the understanding that human is greater than base animal, starting with comprehension of the noosphere and what that entails.
I really enjoyed reading this article. I've been thinking quite a bit about work recently. I'm just about to turn 29, and by all accounts I'm fairly successful: I graduated college with a worthless liberal arts degree just as the Great Recession was beginning. After an unsuccessful attempt at copywriting for a couple years, I managed to learn programming. A few years after that and I'm the leader of the engineering t…
Stop blaming work, which for thousands of years has been endurable and honorable for humans. Study philosophy seriously, and avoid philosophical paths that manifestly cause depression.
I really enjoyed reading this article. I've been thinking quite a bit about work recently. I'm just about to turn 29, and by all accounts I'm fairly successful: I graduated college with a worthless liberal arts degree just as the Great Recession was beginning. After an unsuccessful attempt at copywriting for a couple years, I managed to learn programming. A few years after that and I'm the leader of the engineering t…
I was feeling like that a few years ago. I stopped, thought about what was wrong, and took a different path. Now I'm making much less money, I'm not working in things I don't believe in and I interact with people I like. Much better than before.
I've had friends lose jobs in Amazon warehouses over their aggressive research and development of an all-machine packaging line. They do work now that requires the precision of a human hand and eye, but that job may also go the way of the assembly line. His only hope is that custom carpentry's demand by rich celebrities wanting the "premium" afforded by the work of a Human over the static of a machine. When I look ba…
A world without work was a pretty common vision in the 1960s. And the 1860s But humanity has a remarkable capacity to invent new outlets to fill our waking hours as we redeploy resources used to make stuff to make other stuff or sell stuff. We didn't have (or foresee!) social media managers or video game designers in the 1960s. And software doesn't just make our production efforts scale, it makes our consumption scal…