Meanwhile I want us to work on things that are actually personally fulfilling, instead of earning imaginary money for rich assholes to abuse and hold us down with.
If we were working on what we wanted to do, we’d do it as much as we had energy for. That might be once a week, or it might be every waking hour for 6+ months.
The important bit is “days per week” would be 0+. This is what I want for everyone. It’s why I fully support a UBI, along with socialized healthcare and housing.
You want to spend your time doing nothing but raise your kids? Great, do that super well and don’t worry about the “lost” income. You want to make art? Awesome, do it! You want to engineer a bridge, teach, be a doctor or nurse, grow crops, etc? We need that too, and in addition to your base UBI money you get extra for doing a socially needed job. Good for you!
If I didn’t have to work, I’d probably end up doing the same job I am now but for schools and local government, rather than for large companies. And I’d also be doing things like building and maintaining community gardens, or teaching anyone who wanted to learn what I know, because then there’s more people to help me out and I can relax more.
Personally I’d love to help with community gardening initiatives… sort of.
I’m presently working on an indoor root crop system for urban dwellers, just as a hobby. I don’t actually want to profit off it, I want to develop it to help fix the world, but with the present system, I feel the absolute need to monetize it in some way, which is anathema to how I want to exist and it being low cost and accessible for low income households.
Capitalism hinders progress. It’s really sad and demoralizing.
I’m going to release it for free anyway when it’s done - when it’s a reproducible system and not just an interdependent idea - but it’s never going to benefit me, and that sucks because I’m poor lol
You could release the ideas and techniques but patent it to protect from commercial theft. then sell licensing and expertise while making it easy for lower income people to utilize what you make.
That’s something I’ve thought about, as well as making a companion cooking series (recipes to use what you grow sort of thing), or hands-on/ongoing troubleshooting…
I just barely have the energy to make and test the thing in the first place, after years of planning out how to optimize it and testing lesser variations (which means if I get the last iteration balanced, it will work for anyone with minimal input. I’m super irresponsible. I do have a few more responsible testers lined up, however. For reproducibility.) and I definitely don’t know where to go for help that won’t screw me over for a fee I can’t afford 😅
You can check out online legal services! They might be able to help you a bit more with the process without breaking the bank.
That’s a good idea, thanks :)
I love this community. Thank you all for not being cooperate assholea
This does sound pretty cool
If you like what you hear, you should look into, and support, politicians who support a UBI (universal basic income) in your region!
But bear in mind that a UBI alone isn’t enough; because capitalism encourages greed, we also (regardless where you live) need socialized housing so landlords don’t just eat the full entitlement, and socialized healthcare so people can keep themselves healthy to do the things they want without going bankrupt. Those are by far the biggest spends for most people, and if we could get that in check, a UBI is a great equalizer, and could pull millions of households out of the worst of poverty.
It’s good for disabled people, so they can be much more independent, it’s good for retired people, so they can retire without worry, it’s good for parents, so they don’t have to choose between supporting the family and actually raising the family, and it’s good for society as a whole because those “nonproductives” now have economy stimulation power by not being flat broke.
You don’t want to collect trash off the streets? Well, looks like our city will look like shit forever. You don’t want to work as a cashier? Well, looks like our supermarkets will remain closed.
Most jobs are not fulfilling and would never be done voluntarily (at a relevant scale).
That’s why they pay above the UBI.
The UBI (universal basic income) is intended to meet basic needs, it’s not intended to give a lavish life. If you want more than the basic, you need to work a bit for it.
What it would do for work is to make it optional and more flexible. If your employer isn’t paying you enough to be there, you don’t keep working there. You find a different job. You have the security to quit with nothing lined up. Because nobody has to be there to meet their basic needs, employers have to actively make you want to work there for your extra wants to be met.
That means maybe a store clerk gets a discount on goods in addition to their flexible hours per week.
But ultimately a shift to UBI plus socialized housing and socialized healthcare would lead to a shift in society such that we don’t have the bullshit jobs we do now, and a lot more people would probably be happy to do menial society supporting labor as part of a rotation. Idk, frankly I’ve met people, they don’t mind doing grunt work if it’s appreciated and valued.
If my bills were paid and I had to cashier or collect trash 2 days a week to keep society running (and for some extra spending, like for electronics or games or whatever) I would totally do so. It’s not my full time occupation, which makes it infinitely more desirable.
I can’t really capture an entire economic shift in one digestible comment, but a lot of stuff would necessarily change to accommodate this shift. It’s not a business as usual proposal, so you can’t really apply a business as usual mindset to it.
While I think UBI is a good direction for us to head towards as a society, I have a feeling megacorps would just skyjack the prices of pretty much everything to negate the benefits of UBI (look what happened during the pandemic). We would need some kind of legislated regulatory shift as well that would inhibit price gouging just for because there is more money floating through the economy.
You are probably correct in that racketeering would need to be reigned in, but I don’t really think it’s all that impactful over housing and medical.
We already have what you are using as a worst case, it’s just fully legal and uncontrolled. Rent and medical has been inflating for years for no reason. Because the proletariat can handle it (even though we can’t).
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Its barely an inconvenience. And no job should be undesirable in a society that values the labor that it runs on.
yeah but realistically no one is ever going to be leaping for joy about cleaning toilets
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Literally because they aren’t treated with respect in our society, while actively keeping our society functional. Cashier’s are Literally in the process of becoming obsolete in our Modern Society. Wake up! Ding dong! Ding Dong!
Fwiw, I’d love to see cashiering eliminated as a position. We have the tech for it already and honestly only keep humans doing it because we need to keep human labor up (capitalism and “reasons”).
There is no reason whatever to keep that position huminated (as opposed to automated), other than driving up employment. And maybe reducing loss through theft, but if there was less meaningless junk everywhere that would be less of an issue overall… plus people wouldn’t be destitute and could pay for it…
Citation needed.
We voluntarily do plenty of distasteful tasks, even without any expectation of a non-economic reward. Lemmy moderation is a salient example.
I’ve got other gripes about UBI, and especially about pinning the hopes of a “purely voluntary (but with asterisks)” workforce onto it… but there really is no telling how we would behave if we tried this experiment.
For every study suggesting that Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” is actually a legit thing (even though Hardin was later exposed as an academic fraud who fabricated his theory because of his white supremacist, eugenicist political agenda), there is another study suggesting that we’re actually historically really, really good at managing commons and that perhaps capitalist framing only gets in the way of the cooperation that we’re predisposed toward.
There’s even one that came to mind specifically about sanitation workers: https://youtu.be/fe-SZ_FPZew?t=2403
There’s also not any evidence that we settled into our modern capitalist model due to any sort of societal optimization. All of the theoretical reasons why an economic abstraction may be an advantage over a social gift economy don’t really hold up when you look at historical or contemporaneous accounts of actual gift economies. It seems like the only reason we ended up with this model is because it was advantageous for several waves of wealthy rulers who needed ways to translate their violence-based power into legal power or else lose it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/fe-SZ_FPZew?t=2403
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
You don’t want to collect trash off the streets? Well, looks like our city will look like shit forever. You don’t want to work as a cashier? Well, looks like our supermarkets will remain closed.
Every time I read this I just hear loud licking sounds.
How about paying those people enough that they want to do those jobs?
What is “enough”?
In many countries, your basic needs are already fully met no matter which job you do.
E.g. in Germany working minimum wage full time gets you way more money than you need.
Minimum wage full time gets you about 2160€ before tax, which will be about 1650€ after tax (and healthcare etc.).
You can easily pay for your basic needs for less than half of that (even when living alone). The rest you can use to buy upgrades, like a new phone etc.
Minimum wage workers in Germany are already wealthy.
But of course, if you’d ask the average German minimum wage worker, they’d claim to be poor.
They claim to be poor because they can not afford modern luxury. They can not afford to pay for expensive brands, they can not afford to eat in expensive restaurants.
They can not afford to be lavish.
Now imagine if every person in Germany could afford twice as much (something that happens multiple times in a lifetime). Would they stop considering themselves poor? No, their entitlement would simply rise accordingly (as we’ve seen again and again throughout the thousands of years of history).
You can not pay people “enough”. People do not care about their individual wealth. They only care about how wealthy they are compared to others.
The majority of people can never be wealthy, because people only consider themselves wealthy if they have someone (or rather many) to look down upon.
What is “enough”?
You’re demanding an exact boundary while offering nothing in return but an avalanche of vague imprecise claims with no sources cited.
You can not pay people “enough”. People do not care about their individual wealth. They only care about how wealthy they are compared to others.
The majority of people can never be wealthy, because people only consider themselves wealthy if they have someone (or rather many) to look down upon.
Speak for yourself and only yourself. You don’t speak for me. You don’t speak for the people I call friends. You only speak for a narrow “keeping up with the Joneses” sort of American asshole that is actually getting a bit rarer as boomers slowly die off and not enough young people echo that ideology to sustain it.
Save your “all human beings are exactly the same way, therefore capitalism good” naturalistic bullshit claims for
and for that matter save your bootlicking apologia for there, too.Lastly, what are you arguing for? That it’s cool and good to underpay people that do the most unpleasant (and in many cases, most important for society’s ongoing functioning) tasks because of some biotruthy sophistry about how no amount of pay would be enough therefore underpaying them is good? Or extending your argument to its conclusion, if it’s just “how much compared to everyone else” that matters, you are seriously arguing for everyone to get paid less if they aren’t in some exclusive very special secret club of very special elite people (that you probably include yourself into)? Fuck that.
As cited above, the GDP per capita in Germany doubles every few years.
How many times more do you think it has to be doubled until you and your friends deem themselves wealthy.
They never will. Because you, too, define wealth as being able to look down on others (in your social environment).
A large part of the world’s population would consider themselves extremely wealthy if they had even near the income of a German worker earning minimum wage.
On a global scale, German minimum wage workers are very, very wealthy.
The only reason you’d ever consider German minimum wage to be too little is if you’re used to extreme excess, if you’ve lived in a hyper wealthy environment all your life.
You’re so used to extreme wealth, that you deem slightly less extreme wealth to be poverty. You consider it to be poverty, because the people surrounding you are even wealthier. You consider it poverty, because you can not look down on them.
Oh, so you’re one of those smug (ethno)nationaist chuds that think that people in the United States that are one missed paycheck from homelessness, or are already homeless and are in physical decline from exposure and preventable illness are actually spoiled because some numbers on a screen say that that homeless person is actually a recipient of extreme wealth due to location while completely ignoring cost of living expenses because it doesn’t fit the numbers you want.
You’re way too far up your own ass to argue with, and you probably have goosestepping lessons to keep up with for the big plans you and yours have for your glorious fatherland in the future.
Most jobs are not fulfilling and would never be done voluntarily (at a relevant scale).
What is your glorious German superiority proposal for those “not fulfilling” jobs, then? Slavery? The US prison system might excite and thrill you if you look into it.
What is your glorious German superiority proposal for those “not fulfilling” jobs, then?
The current system.
ignoring cost of living expenses
I don’t have detailed knowledge of the US economy, which is why I keep using Germany as an example.
In Germany you are never one paycheck away from being homeless unless you’re actively wasting money. As said before, 800€ is more than enough to live alone in an apartment. And you make more than double that (in the worst case).
The days I want to work in a month🖕
You want to work??
Yes. I want something to do routinely otherwise I’ll go crazy. I want to contribute to society’s production and do my part. I want to put my time and effort into inventing, creating, and generally making life better for everybody. I don’t want to have to do it under threat of starvation, and I damn sure don’t want to do it for some asshole who just wants to watch number go up.
Yes, I want to contribute to a project, a product, a group. Every week, and most days of that week.
I don’t want to sit around in leisure often, just sometimes.
Be clear, I didn’t say I want to further corporate profits, necessarily.
Hell yeah! Nothings better than a hard days work and keeping the profit I created. Working is great! Being exploited by corporations is not great, it is bad and why we correlate work with being bad, because we correlate work with being Exploited. It doesnt have to be this way.
We can discuss semantics all day long (like antiwork vs work reform) but the 4 days week is by no means revolutionary. You do something fulfilling, then the number doesn’t count; you have a minde numbing job than any number is too much.
you like doing stuff, making things, and helping people; not work
Or some combination of these things, and you may even like doing them an amount that most people would consider to be absurd overworking, but hey, you do you
Basically none of us should need to toil like how basically all of us are made to in order for society to meet the needs of the people and keep things turning, keep the lights and wifi on. We could do 2 or 3 days a work easy and be fine, because most of this shit is pointless, could be automated, or is actively unproductive (insurance, etc). 4 isn’t the end goal, its an incredibly basic demand, slightly beyond raising the minimum wage, but certainly nothing liberating
Add to that people who really love to work a whole lot and actually get mad if they can’t work, will do their things
It’s really interesting for me coming into threads like this. The vast majority of people that I see discussing these things seem to have office jobs consising of largely arbitrary objectives and deadlines. And for these people it would almost certainly be true that society could get by with minimal change if they only worked 2 or 3 days a week. It’s an interesting perspective to me because I work in a veterinary medicine where (just the same as with human medicine) long weeks and long hours are practically a necessity. Very, very rarely do I find myself doing anything that is an unnecessary task, something that could be done later, or something that could be automated. While it would technically be possible to just hire more people and rotate shifts through the hospital to allow shorter work days for everyone, cutting days decreases the consistency of care (i.e. increases the number times a patient is transferred between doctors) which dramatically increases the chances for medical errors. Plus that doesn’t even take into account that there is a dramatic hiring shortage so good luck ever finding enough people to make that work in the first place.
While I agree that a lot of people work jobs that have more hours than things to do during them, I notice all the time in these threads people claiming that “no one ever needs to work more than a handful of days a week” while not acknowledging that a lot of jobs exist where that just isn’t possible.
Well that’s because those jobs are managed and staffed for “capitalist efficiency” if we had more people with access to veterinary training we would have WAY more vets than just those who can afford the schooling, and I assume, low pay. then you could work 2 or 3 days a work on shifts with 2 or 3 times as many coworkers and support staff
It’s the whole rotten system that makes things shitty for those of us with actually important meaningful jobs, but it doesn’t have to be that way
Did you read my comment at all? There are a lot of reasons beyond “capitalist efficiency” that a 2 or 3 day work week is impractical in a medical field. I even brought up a major one that you conveniently ignored.
I’m not at all trying to say that there aren’t problems with work culture, especially in medicine. I’m simply pointing out that the claim “no one ever needs to work more the 2 or 3 days without capitalism” falls apart when you start looking at jobs outside of pencil pusher desk jobs.
oops, sorry, I did miss that part of your comment accidentally. You’re definitely not wrong about that part not being as simple as availability of skills
It could at least be alleviated by having some sort of rotation system where you get extended periods of lighter duty or time off so you aren’t just ground into dust. I didn’t mean to make it seem like I was saying categorically no one will work more than 2 or 3 day weeks, but a similar effect could be worked towards. Basically, I’m just saying shit doesn’t have to be fucked.
I should also mention, I also work a job that even in an ideal communist space future, I would still probably work 4 or 5 days a week by necessity, my life just wouldn’t be hellish
100% the problems in our society start to make alot more sense, when you ask yourself if removing the profit motive would solve the problem
keeping the profit I created.
you mean the 1% of it that your boss will pay you?
You missed the point of my comment, what I was trying to convey was that work is only good when you are not being robbed of your labor by your boss.
The amount of days the proletariat wants to work in a week is zero, with work abolished and labor becoming life’s prime want.
I want to work 7 days a week. But not to make profit for some corporation, but to be an active part in a community (Volunteering in my local maker space)
I don’t want to work. I want to do things I would do anyway without getting paid. It’s annoying that we have to go through the steps of automating all jobs and then a revolution to get to the phase where this is recognized as the natural way things should go.
Dale didn’t take that curve too early, that curve took Dale too early
More like 👊
Who is this guy and why are there so many memes with him now?
That’s Dale Earnhardt a NASCAR driver that died in 2001 in a crash while racing.
I don’t know why he’s popping up in memes now though.
I just want AI/climate change to wipe us out so evolution can go back to the drawing board.
We aren’t happy, the owners aren’t happy as they always want more, the natural world and ALL THE OTHER BEINGS THAT LIVE HERE have had our leg pushing down on their throats since industrialization.
Lets just call it, and hope the dolphins evolve into something a little less… fucking terrible.
Turns out statistically intelligence as a trait in animals also fosters cruelty!
Dolphins are notoriously evil. Corvids are known for their mischief too. Octopi are fine but their lifespans are so short they do not have time to develop cruelty. Many primates are not nice either.
There’s a clear correlation between social intelligence and needless cruelty in species.
Sorry man, but I can’t stop laughing at you calling an entire animal species ‘evil’. Not only that, but ‘notoriously evil’. Like there’s a chapter in the Bible devoted to the tale of a dolphin riding Jesus up his dead arsehole.
@GelatinGeorge @Sheeple, a crocodile chokes you before eating you, a big cat, a lion, suffocates you or breaks your neck, before eating, a hyena begins to eat your guts even though you are still alive, you die while he eats you. Is this more cruel? No, he lives in a pack where everyone is hungry and wants to eat right away, they don’t have time to kill you first.
Cruelty is a purely human concept.Okay, if we’re getting serious about it, I’m not sure I agree cruelty scales up alongside intelligence. It’s an interesting take, but, as you say, it’s an entirely human concept which doesn’t really exist outside of our own conceived morality and can’t be applied to beings which aren’t capable of understanding it.
Put it this way: a cat batting a mouse around isn’t considering its actions cruel or even considering its actions in a wider context at all. A human doing the same would be doing both. However, by that logic, animals aren’t capable of any other abstract thought such as compassion, empathy and altruism. We are. It might be the case that everything abstract scales up with intelligence which, yes, leads to concepts such as ‘cruelty’ but also all the other amazing shit humans are capable of.
@GelatinGeorge, Animals may very well show empathy, altruism and compassion, as shown in countless cases (hippos helping a young zebra cross the river full of crocodiles, a bear saving a crow from drowning in a river, elephants obviously in mourning contemplations in front of skeletons of their species, etc.). This is not the difference, it is cruelty against one’s own or other species for pure fun and even sport, this is properly human behavior.
@Sheeple @AllonzeeLV, Human cruelty and stupidity is what differentiates us from animals, apart from the iPhone.
Animals only act in accordance with survival in their corresponding environment. In nature there is no evil, only the motto: Survive as you can or know how, or die.
Im happy
If there is hope, it lies with the proles.
I wish a robot would work my Mondays and Fridays.
Isn’t that basically the selling point the pigs used in animal farm before slowly increasing the workload while nobody paid attention
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LIES! comunism is a good idea: HOWEVER its leaders are ALWAYS dictators.
No shit Sherlock, communism is quite literally a dictatorship of the Prolitariat.
