There are people whose work directly enables your survival, and that of everyone else’s around you, as well as their own.
Food production, mining, logging, maintenance of infrastructure, just to stay basic.
These people need to be compensated too, and they can’t just opt out. Cause if enough of them do, or if the ones who don’t are just not performing well enough, everyone is fucked.
This fixation that we don’t need to work to live is moronic, just because your job is not essential doesn’t mean no job is.
At its most basic level work is about portioning scarcity. You work to be assigned a smaller amount of the hardship pie on your society. Thankfully western society has a very small pie to dole out, comparatively.
Uhh… I know? I literally just said we need to decouple it. This isn’t an argument, dude. This is like me saying “we need to abolish slavery” and you saying “but… we have slavery”.
There are people whose work directly enables your survival, and that of everyone else’s around you, as well as their own.
Okay? No one wants critical work to stop, especially those doing it.
Food production, mining, logging, maintenance of infrastructure, just to stay basic.
Yep.
These people need to be compensated too
This is what I’m talking about. Everyone deservers a good standard of living regardless of the work they do. Stop thinking “work = living”. Stop operating under the principle of “no work, no food”.
and they can’t just opt out
??
Cause if enough of them do, or if the ones who don’t are just not performing well enough, everyone is fucked.
This is a needless concern. There will always be people who want to do the “dirty” work. You truly underestimate peoples’ ability to find satisfaction in necessary work.
This fixation that we don’t need to work to live is moronic
Ha. I have a quote for exactly this sentiment:
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller
just because your job is not essential doesn’t mean no job is.
Excuse me? Truly, honestly, what? Who is saying any job is not essential? Did you really think I was saying “we need to stop working”, or that “work is not necessary”? Surely, surely not?? What I’m saying is we need to remove the requirement of work for a good life. Work should enhance your life, not enable it.
At its most basic level work is about portioning scarcity.
No, no it’s not. Work is doing stuff that needs to be done. Work is producing and reproducing what is necessary for society. Portioning scarcity? Some say money does that, but even that isn’t true; at least, it doesn’t do it well. And, depending on the goods, scarcity is barely a concern: housing and food exists far in excess of what we need.
You work to be assigned a smaller amount of the hardship pie on your society
Yikes. Big oof, my dude.
Thankfully western society has a very small pie to dole out, comparatively.
Depends what you’re comparing it to. Maybe the poverty stricken third world, but that’s a very low standard to have. Compared to what we are capable of, though, with our level of technology and infrastructure, we’re doing pretty poorly.
And my point is that you can’t make it decoupled any more that you can make breathing decoupled from survival.
Stop operating under the principle of “no work, no food”.
What the fuck are you talking about? Where the fuck does food come from in your mind? The fucking aether? Food is a product of people working. Arguably, the most important product that all other products stem from.
Until we figure out full automation that will always be the case, and even with full automation there will be a need of human supervision to an extent.
There will always be people who want to do the “dirty” work. You truly underestimate peoples’ ability to find satisfaction in necessary work.
Sure buddy, that’s why the soviet union had work camps, because people were volounteering to move to Siberia to do dirty work.
But jokes aside, that’s only demonstrably true if the alternative is not an option.
We have absolutely no idea what the world would look like if people didn’t need to work, because some people have always needed to work, namely farmers, and thus everyone else had to work in turn to earn the cost of the farmers’ labour.
The reality is that your thesis that “people would still perform backbreaking thankless labour on a scale sufficient for all of society for free” is not only ridiculous on its face, but conveniently unfalsifiable, because until non-people exist to do that, that will literally never happen.
Though we did have times where slaves, people who were not considered people, were forced to perform this necessary labour, and you didn’t see a lot of slave owners working the fields for free or otherwise so, again, no dice.
You truly underestimate peoples’ ability to find satisfaction in necessary work.
You truly underestimate the amount of labour necessary for the scale of production we need as a society to maintain this standard of living, and given your later comments about hardship I don’t assume you want to go back to medieval standards of diet variety and such.
Work should enhance your life, not enable it.
What should be is not a factor, what is is what matters.
Some people’s work enables your life. Without their work, you don’t eat. Not some amorphous “people don’t eat”, you. You don’t. And neither does everyone else.
Did you really think I was saying “we need to stop working”, or that “work is not necessary”? Surely, surely not?
Oh, but you are saying that. The fact that you don’t understand that is the fundamental issue with your argument.
Tell me, how much food does one person produce if they "go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”?
That’s not your problem, though, is it? You get to go back to school, someone else will work so you can faff about studying underwater basket weaving or some other world shatteringly important topic.
And who’s gonna fix the roads, so the trucks that move the food can deliver it? Someone else who is not going to school, and instead is inhaling toxic fumes so you, your majesty, can “think about whatever it was [you] were thinking about” which, I am sure, was tremendously important, which is why you are currently developing it into some revolutionary solution to one of mankind’s greatest problems.
Work is doing stuff that needs to be done. Work is producing and reproducing what is necessary for society.
No, work is using personal energies and resources to do that.
There are people doing this and not using their time sitting with their thumb jammed up their asses, who very often would rather be doing anything else. I know because my father happens to have done sto for 40 fucking years before he got to retire, and he was doing a relatively cushy job in the essential production fields.
These are people whose lives are shortened and made harder by their work even after they retire, and who literally only do it because it’s the best value for money they can achieve.
In some cases that is still woefully little, which is an extra level of travesty when it’s confronted with some spoiled asshole like you acting like anyone would be or should be doing those jobs for free, no less.
Portioning scarcity? Some say money does that, but even that isn’t true; at least, it doesn’t do it well.
Money is literally a proxy for work, at its most basic.
The fact that 500 years ago the Dutch invented finance to gamble on economies doesn’t change this basic point that, for the vast majority of humanity, money is a “work done well enough token” you can exchange for food and comforts.
Yikes. Big oof, my dude.
Heckin chonker pupperino, etc.
Compared to what we are capable of, though, with our level of technology and infrastructure, we’re doing pretty poorly.
I’m sure when everyone works for free you’ll see a great deal of work being done in the expensive drudgery of repairing and maintaining infrastructure for this hypothetical ceiling you still have only asserted exists with no evidence.
But, then again, by having a cursory look at your comment history you’re an anarchist, so you’re no stranger to believing hilariously stupid shit with no evidence.
It’s ok, kid. We’ve all been there, I was an AnCom in highschool, too.
See you in 10-15 years once you work for a living and have figured out why people have to pay for you to do it.
I think you’re vastly misunderstanding what I’m saying.
I’m not saying everyone should stop working! I’ve said that a dozen times now.
Stop. Take a breath. And try again, kid.
Once you realise I didn’t say food can pop into existence without work, we can talk.
I’ll try and explain it one more time for your feeble mind to understand:
People should not need to find employment to be deemed deserving of basic necessities. They should not be allowed to starve simply because they can’t or won’t stack shelves or flip burgers. They should be offered basic necessities regardless of their employment.
If you disagree, go ahead and tell me why. But I’m not entertaining your delusions that I’m saying everyone should stop working. Studied have already been done in this area proving it is entirely feasible. Stop fighting your own liberation.
I’m not saying everyone should stop working! I’ve said that a dozen times now.
It’s not a matter of what you say, it’s a matter of the inevitable consequences of the arrangement you propose.
People should not need to find employment to be deemed deserving of basic necessities.
In most western countries, the ones wealthy and well run enough to have such a system, that’s already the case. You need to look for employment, strive to be useful to society, not actually succeed.
They should not be allowed to starve simply because they can’t stack shelves or flip burgers.
can’t
Yeah, that’s not what you’ve been arguing for, and you know it. Nowhere in your prior post does it mention being unable to work.
You’ve done nothing but arguing that people should not need to work to live regardless of ability.
They should be offered basic necessities regardless of their employment.
But not regardless of their willingness to be employed.
You can’t find a job? Cool. If the state comes around and tells you there’s roads to tar, you’ll tar roads. That would be a fair arrangement.
If there’s literally no work left to do for you there shouldn’t be a gun to your head, I agree.
However that isn’t, wasn’t, and likely will never be the case.
But I’m not entertaining your delusions that I’m saying everuone should stop working.
No, what you’re saying is everyone should have the option not to work (which they already do, if they can afford it) with no drawbacks whatsoever, making work completely optional for the individual, which it de facto isn’t for the collective as a whole.
Since, as you already conceded, food does not manifest out of thin air decoupling individual survival from labour, when collective survival is very much not decoupled from labour, creates a tragedy of the commons of catastrophic proporions.
Which means that unless some people decide to work for no reason other than funzies, or worse an understanding that they must take responsibility for no reason other than altruism, a lot of essential work just won’t get done.
I know for a fact i’m not getting up at 4-5 AM to tend to a farm and, for that matter, neither will you, mr “think about whatever it was”, but if society is not to collapse after this systemic change, someone will, and you are not entitled to their labour any more than your boss in real life is entitled to yours.
Salaries and tying able-bodied people’s quality of life to labour are ways to ensure not only that the work that needs doing gets done, they’re there to ensure it gets done consistently and to the required scale.
What the baseline quality of life should be is a matter of debate but if live in the west with the possible exceptions of US and maybe the UK, you’re absolutely fucking fine at the baseline. I should fucking know, I was there for years.
Work must happen so someone must do the work. Saying no individual person must, doesn’t mean someone won’t have to at some point, and the reality is that this work needs to be consistent and reliable enough to be essentially taken for granted for society to function (something we’ve clearly achieved given your worldview), which means it fundamentally can’t be done on a volunteer basis.
It’s a responsibility that must be dealt with at all times.
So if some people must work, who gets not to, in your world? Who gets to opt out of the must clause?
How do you divide those who must work and those who can just exist?
We used to have that distinction once upon a time, it was called slavery, or indenture, or serfdom.
If you are to be delivered your beets and vodka ration every month, someone has to make them.
If someone makes them they are expending their labour, paying for at least part of your existence.
And you know what?
Not only would it not work.
Not only is that fundamentally parasitic (which makes me realise you’re probably not a communist, as those guys are very not in favour of leeches usually).
But, frankly? You don’t deserve that.
I’d rather the person making your food get to take an extra day off than you living for free for no reason other than leaving your mother’s cunt because, ultimately, it doesn’t take all that much not to be a useless sack of shit, and you’re not even doing that, in this scenario.
Studied have already been done in this area proving it is entirely feasible.
UBI pilot studies are fundamentally flawed because they inject wealth into a specific subset of the population (the people in the test group) instead of absolutely everyone up to and including the primary and secondary sector.
If a handful of farmers happens to slow production down because they are in that one pilot progam, that won’t impact worldwide or even nation-wide production, if every farmer, trucker, etc. in the world were to do that at the same time without improving per-hour productivity, there’s absolutely no guarantee you wouldn’t see food scarcity rise.
As it is now, testing UBI is the same as a few people winning the lottery. Not a valuable test of a systemic change.
Meanwhile every country that has tried giving universal basic necessities without means testing or other counterbalances has failed horrendously unless they were autocracies with command economies, in which cases they were just dystopic hellholes, instead of starving dystopic hellholes.
Stop fighting your own liberation.
It’s my turn to post a quote this time:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
You’re literally just spouting neoliberal, bourgeois ideology. Try looking through human history sometime. You’ll see this way of thinking only emerged a few hundred years ago. People work because they want to, they don’t have to be forced.
Good luck in life, though, my naive child. Maybe someone will reward your desire to serve masters :)
Such a rigid view of life man
Here’s a crazy idea: decouple work from personal survival. People will work just as much, and live easier.
But it isn’t decoupled.
There are people whose work directly enables your survival, and that of everyone else’s around you, as well as their own.
Food production, mining, logging, maintenance of infrastructure, just to stay basic.
These people need to be compensated too, and they can’t just opt out. Cause if enough of them do, or if the ones who don’t are just not performing well enough, everyone is fucked.
This fixation that we don’t need to work to live is moronic, just because your job is not essential doesn’t mean no job is.
At its most basic level work is about portioning scarcity. You work to be assigned a smaller amount of the hardship pie on your society. Thankfully western society has a very small pie to dole out, comparatively.
Uhh… I know? I literally just said we need to decouple it. This isn’t an argument, dude. This is like me saying “we need to abolish slavery” and you saying “but… we have slavery”.
Okay? No one wants critical work to stop, especially those doing it.
Yep.
This is what I’m talking about. Everyone deservers a good standard of living regardless of the work they do. Stop thinking “work = living”. Stop operating under the principle of “no work, no food”.
??
This is a needless concern. There will always be people who want to do the “dirty” work. You truly underestimate peoples’ ability to find satisfaction in necessary work.
Ha. I have a quote for exactly this sentiment:
― Buckminster Fuller
Excuse me? Truly, honestly, what? Who is saying any job is not essential? Did you really think I was saying “we need to stop working”, or that “work is not necessary”? Surely, surely not?? What I’m saying is we need to remove the requirement of work for a good life. Work should enhance your life, not enable it.
No, no it’s not. Work is doing stuff that needs to be done. Work is producing and reproducing what is necessary for society. Portioning scarcity? Some say money does that, but even that isn’t true; at least, it doesn’t do it well. And, depending on the goods, scarcity is barely a concern: housing and food exists far in excess of what we need.
Yikes. Big oof, my dude.
Depends what you’re comparing it to. Maybe the poverty stricken third world, but that’s a very low standard to have. Compared to what we are capable of, though, with our level of technology and infrastructure, we’re doing pretty poorly.
And my point is that you can’t make it decoupled any more that you can make breathing decoupled from survival.
What the fuck are you talking about? Where the fuck does food come from in your mind? The fucking aether? Food is a product of people working. Arguably, the most important product that all other products stem from.
Until we figure out full automation that will always be the case, and even with full automation there will be a need of human supervision to an extent.
Sure buddy, that’s why the soviet union had work camps, because people were volounteering to move to Siberia to do dirty work.
But jokes aside, that’s only demonstrably true if the alternative is not an option.
We have absolutely no idea what the world would look like if people didn’t need to work, because some people have always needed to work, namely farmers, and thus everyone else had to work in turn to earn the cost of the farmers’ labour.
The reality is that your thesis that “people would still perform backbreaking thankless labour on a scale sufficient for all of society for free” is not only ridiculous on its face, but conveniently unfalsifiable, because until non-people exist to do that, that will literally never happen.
Though we did have times where slaves, people who were not considered people, were forced to perform this necessary labour, and you didn’t see a lot of slave owners working the fields for free or otherwise so, again, no dice.
You truly underestimate the amount of labour necessary for the scale of production we need as a society to maintain this standard of living, and given your later comments about hardship I don’t assume you want to go back to medieval standards of diet variety and such.
What should be is not a factor, what is is what matters.
Some people’s work enables your life. Without their work, you don’t eat. Not some amorphous “people don’t eat”, you. You don’t. And neither does everyone else.
Oh, but you are saying that. The fact that you don’t understand that is the fundamental issue with your argument.
Tell me, how much food does one person produce if they "go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”?
That’s not your problem, though, is it? You get to go back to school, someone else will work so you can faff about studying underwater basket weaving or some other world shatteringly important topic.
And who’s gonna fix the roads, so the trucks that move the food can deliver it? Someone else who is not going to school, and instead is inhaling toxic fumes so you, your majesty, can “think about whatever it was [you] were thinking about” which, I am sure, was tremendously important, which is why you are currently developing it into some revolutionary solution to one of mankind’s greatest problems.
No, work is using personal energies and resources to do that.
There are people doing this and not using their time sitting with their thumb jammed up their asses, who very often would rather be doing anything else. I know because my father happens to have done sto for 40 fucking years before he got to retire, and he was doing a relatively cushy job in the essential production fields.
These are people whose lives are shortened and made harder by their work even after they retire, and who literally only do it because it’s the best value for money they can achieve.
In some cases that is still woefully little, which is an extra level of travesty when it’s confronted with some spoiled asshole like you acting like anyone would be or should be doing those jobs for free, no less.
Money is literally a proxy for work, at its most basic.
The fact that 500 years ago the Dutch invented finance to gamble on economies doesn’t change this basic point that, for the vast majority of humanity, money is a “work done well enough token” you can exchange for food and comforts.
Heckin chonker pupperino, etc.
I’m sure when everyone works for free you’ll see a great deal of work being done in the expensive drudgery of repairing and maintaining infrastructure for this hypothetical ceiling you still have only asserted exists with no evidence.
But, then again, by having a cursory look at your comment history you’re an anarchist, so you’re no stranger to believing hilariously stupid shit with no evidence.
It’s ok, kid. We’ve all been there, I was an AnCom in highschool, too.
See you in 10-15 years once you work for a living and have figured out why people have to pay for you to do it.
Or not, and not, up to you.
I think you’re vastly misunderstanding what I’m saying.
I’m not saying everyone should stop working! I’ve said that a dozen times now.
Stop. Take a breath. And try again, kid.
Once you realise I didn’t say food can pop into existence without work, we can talk.
I’ll try and explain it one more time for your feeble mind to understand:
People should not need to find employment to be deemed deserving of basic necessities. They should not be allowed to starve simply because they can’t or won’t stack shelves or flip burgers. They should be offered basic necessities regardless of their employment.
If you disagree, go ahead and tell me why. But I’m not entertaining your delusions that I’m saying everyone should stop working. Studied have already been done in this area proving it is entirely feasible. Stop fighting your own liberation.
It’s not a matter of what you say, it’s a matter of the inevitable consequences of the arrangement you propose.
In most western countries, the ones wealthy and well run enough to have such a system, that’s already the case. You need to look for employment, strive to be useful to society, not actually succeed.
Yeah, that’s not what you’ve been arguing for, and you know it. Nowhere in your prior post does it mention being unable to work.
You’ve done nothing but arguing that people should not need to work to live regardless of ability.
But not regardless of their willingness to be employed.
You can’t find a job? Cool. If the state comes around and tells you there’s roads to tar, you’ll tar roads. That would be a fair arrangement.
If there’s literally no work left to do for you there shouldn’t be a gun to your head, I agree.
However that isn’t, wasn’t, and likely will never be the case.
No, what you’re saying is everyone should have the option not to work (which they already do, if they can afford it) with no drawbacks whatsoever, making work completely optional for the individual, which it de facto isn’t for the collective as a whole.
Since, as you already conceded, food does not manifest out of thin air decoupling individual survival from labour, when collective survival is very much not decoupled from labour, creates a tragedy of the commons of catastrophic proporions.
Which means that unless some people decide to work for no reason other than funzies, or worse an understanding that they must take responsibility for no reason other than altruism, a lot of essential work just won’t get done.
I know for a fact i’m not getting up at 4-5 AM to tend to a farm and, for that matter, neither will you, mr “think about whatever it was”, but if society is not to collapse after this systemic change, someone will, and you are not entitled to their labour any more than your boss in real life is entitled to yours.
Salaries and tying able-bodied people’s quality of life to labour are ways to ensure not only that the work that needs doing gets done, they’re there to ensure it gets done consistently and to the required scale.
What the baseline quality of life should be is a matter of debate but if live in the west with the possible exceptions of US and maybe the UK, you’re absolutely fucking fine at the baseline. I should fucking know, I was there for years.
Work must happen so someone must do the work. Saying no individual person must, doesn’t mean someone won’t have to at some point, and the reality is that this work needs to be consistent and reliable enough to be essentially taken for granted for society to function (something we’ve clearly achieved given your worldview), which means it fundamentally can’t be done on a volunteer basis.
It’s a responsibility that must be dealt with at all times.
So if some people must work, who gets not to, in your world? Who gets to opt out of the must clause?
How do you divide those who must work and those who can just exist?
We used to have that distinction once upon a time, it was called slavery, or indenture, or serfdom.
If you are to be delivered your beets and vodka ration every month, someone has to make them.
If someone makes them they are expending their labour, paying for at least part of your existence.
And you know what?
Not only would it not work.
Not only is that fundamentally parasitic (which makes me realise you’re probably not a communist, as those guys are very not in favour of leeches usually).
But, frankly? You don’t deserve that.
I’d rather the person making your food get to take an extra day off than you living for free for no reason other than leaving your mother’s cunt because, ultimately, it doesn’t take all that much not to be a useless sack of shit, and you’re not even doing that, in this scenario.
UBI pilot studies are fundamentally flawed because they inject wealth into a specific subset of the population (the people in the test group) instead of absolutely everyone up to and including the primary and secondary sector.
If a handful of farmers happens to slow production down because they are in that one pilot progam, that won’t impact worldwide or even nation-wide production, if every farmer, trucker, etc. in the world were to do that at the same time without improving per-hour productivity, there’s absolutely no guarantee you wouldn’t see food scarcity rise.
As it is now, testing UBI is the same as a few people winning the lottery. Not a valuable test of a systemic change.
Meanwhile every country that has tried giving universal basic necessities without means testing or other counterbalances has failed horrendously unless they were autocracies with command economies, in which cases they were just dystopic hellholes, instead of starving dystopic hellholes.
It’s my turn to post a quote this time:
~C. S. Lewis.
You’re literally just spouting neoliberal, bourgeois ideology. Try looking through human history sometime. You’ll see this way of thinking only emerged a few hundred years ago. People work because they want to, they don’t have to be forced.
Good luck in life, though, my naive child. Maybe someone will reward your desire to serve masters :)