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Overworked? Everyone is overworked. We live in a post scarcity industrial world, or very very close to it, and bad actors have gobbled up the spoils of the hug
by simplemath 11y ago
Overworked?
Everyone is overworked. We live in a post scarcity industrial world, or very very close to it, and bad actors have gobbled up the spoils of the huge gains in productivity in the last 50 years.
How much of the entire economy is predicated on grey money? How much of your time is indirectly consumed by this leviathan?
The more I think about it, the more i want to opt out of the entire fucking thing.
- static_noise 11y agoThe cancer has befallen the whole planet. Everything will be made to money. The whole world is becoming one big machine.
- wrong_variable 11y agoDamn, glass half empty much ?
- sunnybythesea 11y agowhat glass?
- rbanffy 11y agoA bank owns the glass. You just rent it.
- losteric 11y agoWe're seeing the rise of humanity's vile offspring (to borrow from Accelerando)... ethereal ideas birthed from greed and made corporeal by law, financial machines beyond the power or comprehension of individuals.
- sanderjd 11y agoAt this point, I'm honestly not sure if this thread is a series of extremely pessimistic people, or a fairly clever riff on Lovecraftian doom writing.
- StavrosK 11y agoLooks more like Kafka to me. Not enough "horror" and "unspeakable" to be Lovecraft.
- sanderjd 11y agoNah, Kafka is more banal.
- EC1 11y agoWhat part of it isn't true though? Don't look at how it reads, just read the words. I feel the same way, like you're being stomped in the face every day by an invisible boot except nobody knows who's wearing it, but we all feel it. We are collectively losing our identities and blending into one due to how hyper connected we are and how available cheap forms of entertainment are. It's all quite eerie. I still haven't really found a way to articulate it but I'd love to chat with someone more in depth about it.
- mikekchar 11y agoEarlier someone said that they want to opt out of the whole thing. Although I'm not you and I can't know precisely what you are feeling, I'm going to make an educated guess that this is the key to your freedom. This invisible boot is an illusion. I once read an article on privilege. The idea is that if you were a slave owner, you could "promote" some of your slaves to be "head slaves". This privilege creates a kind of vacuum. Instead of wanting to be free, slaves compete to become "head slave". If you randomly promote some every once in a while, it erases the idea that slaves should want to be free. Even without some tinfoil hat inspired cabal, you can probably imagine how we have managed to enslave ourselves. If you make or have a lot of money, you can use it for privilege. People compete for this privilege instead of considering if they would rather be free. A small proportion of people become rich -- through hard work, or luck (it doesn't actually matter), keeping the system going. I don't recommend quitting society altogether :-) You don't need to indulge in some self-sufficiency, neck beard fantasy, but I recommend making something entirely from scratch. See if you can borrow some land for a season and grow a garden, or make beer, or sew something... whatever. The closer to scratch you can do it, the better, but don't stress about it. Then, once you have something nice, wander over to your neighbours and give it to them. Keep doing that. It helps to get good at only one thing so that you don't get overwhelmed. Next, look at how much money you spend. Try to challenge yourself to see how little money you could spend and still be happy. We're trying to break the weird "obvious" rules that everybody else lives by, so try not to accumulate too much money. The more you can shrink the amount you need, the easier it will be to be happy with the amount that you have. At the same time, stop reading the newspaper and watching TV news programs. Instead, challenge yourself to think about, "What is actually important to me. Do I care that North Korea is creating missiles. Even if I do, is there anything I want to do about it?". Keep trying to shrink the amount of useless drama in your life. Find ways to be alerted to the things that you care about and that you want to act on. It's best that the number of those kinds of things are very small because otherwise you will wear yourself out. Try your best to actually do something positive about those very small number of things. After that, I think you will find that you are no longer being stomped in the face every day. At worst, some clueless people are tripping over you every once in a while. It hurts sometimes, but it's not something that has to trouble you too much. Yes, you have to pay taxes and yes, evil people are spending that tax money on things you don't like. But, unless this is the one thing that you want to fix in your life, it's just useless drama. Give them the damn money -- you don't need it anyway. Yes, you have to obey laws, even the ones you don't agree with. Fight the bad ones that you need to fight and save your strength wrt to ones you don't need to fight. Yes, there are jerks everywhere you look -- even your neighbours. But the more you get to know your neighbours, the easier it will be to create a mini society where everyone is reasonably friendly and occasionally people drop by to give you home made jam. In other words, just step off the escalator to weird-ville. It doesn't have to be eerie.
- imtringued 11y agoWe fear superhuman AI yet we don't realise we already are that hypothetical paperclip maximiser.
- arcanus 11y agoReminds me of the quote from the game Deus Ex: The checks and balances of democratic governments were invented because human beings themselves realized how unfit they were to govern themselves. They needed a system, an industrial-age machine. Without the use of computing machines our ancestors had to arrange themselves in crude structures that formalized decision-making. Now are merely developing a decision-making system that does not involve organic beings.
- refurb 11y agoHow much of your time is indirectly consumed by this leviathan? If you're talking about taxes, I'm right there with you!
- 6t6t6 11y agoSo, you took the red pill?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- aninhumer 11y agoJust so you know, while it's a complete misappropriation of the reference, "the red pill" is a term associated with a particular group with strong opinions on gender politics: https://www.reddit.com/r/theredpill https://www.reddit.com/r/theredpill
- simplemath 11y ago>TRP... "strong opinions" You spelled misogyny weird. TRP is a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
- aninhumer 11y agoI tend to find TRP more pitiful than anything else.
- nibs 11y agoAlso can be appropriately used to describe a counter-cultural enlightenment of any variety. Red pill = painful truth, blue pill = comfortable falsehood.
- 6t6t6 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_and_blue_pill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_and_blue_pill In this context, I thought it was obvious that I was talking about this red pill.
- golergka 11y agoI really hope you're talking about taxes. That's where half of my salary is going to, not to some mythical "evil rich", but to pay for beurocracy and welfare programs.
- etherael 11y agoPor que no los dos? One is the hand, the other the wallet.
- dragonwriter 11y agoYou see the part of your salary that goes to taxes; less visible is the share of the economic gain produced by your work that doesn't make it into your salary I the first place. The GP was referencing the latter.
- golergka 11y agoMy salary is negotiated on open, highly effective market. Share of my work that goes to the company shareholders represents their investment. If the company fails, I don't risk anything, but they will lose the money they put into the company in the first place. Naturally, if the company succeeds, they have to get capital gains on that investment. The fact that I will be able to get any salary from this company at all will be a direct consequence of a risk that they took upon themselves, not me.
- refurb 11y agoWhy do you assume that an economic gain would automatically be added to someone's salary? Salary is based on supply and demand, not the value you create. That's why an assembly worker building a $20K Ford makes about the same as one building a $100K SUV.
- Tsagadai 11y agoFord makes $776,348 per employee. I will take a stab in the dark and say that the assembly worker is making substantially less than that regardless of whether it is $20k or $100k car while still producing far more value than the cost of either vehicle. http://csimarket.com/stocks/singleEfficiencyet.php?code=F http://csimarket.com/stocks/singleEfficiencyet.php?code=F
- golergka 11y agoI really hope you're talking about taxes. That's where half of my salary is going to, not to some mythical "evil rich", but to pay for beurocracy and welfare programs.
- dota_fanatic 11y agoImagine if all the 10x and 100x engineers were all on the same team. Keep competition, but play for the same team. The losers are losers because they didn't create the best solution, but the losers are winners because they get to enjoy the spoils, since they're on the same team. Isn't status everything, after a point? Why can't the United States actually be united? Develop universal human code, highly vetted, secure, and performant code; employable by everyone to satisfy the tedious data management and automation of everyday needs that arise as a consequence of our biology and community structure, like health care, administration, maker technology, infrastructure, education, and the creation of art. The amount of mediocre code getting created, and relied upon, is atrocious, and often the highest quality, most valuable software is completely inaccessible except for by some very small subset of the global population! It's some kind of collective insanity. > bad actors have gobbled up the spoils of the huge gains in productivity in the last 50 years. I would say the worst of the present are written deeply into the structure of our societies, iterative processes spanning a very, very long time. These non-friendly, non-cooperative entities are very self-protective. It is only recently that it has been able to reap such unimaginable power. How much harder does it become to create a better form of government, the longer this goes on? Our existing governments clearly can't handle current problems in any kind of respectable schedule, much less the ones that will result from the increasing acceleration of technological change. Perhaps whatever comes after human is already here, and it's eating us.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- yongelee 11y agoWhat an interesting and revolutionary idea! That could actually change the world.
- darkr 11y agoI think you've just described a modern version of the socialist utopia from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_from_Nowhere https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_from_Nowhere
- jes5199 11y ago
- im3w1l 11y agoWanna think of something scary? A post-work world with scarcity.
- dragonwriter 11y agoThat's rapidly approaching (and, arguably, already here for a growing number of people.)
- simplemath 11y agoYes, that's true. And appalling.
- dragonwriter 11y agoWe do not live in a post-scarcity world, and to say that we do shows a failure to understand the economic concept of scarcity. If goods aren't scarce, they have no opportunity cost -- anyone in such a society could get as much, e.g., filet mignon as they want without sacrificing their ability to get quality healthcare, education, or consumer electronics. Greater overall and per capita productivity isn't, and doesn't even approximate, post-scarcity conditions. If we lived in a post-scarcity economy, "You Need A Budget" would fail, because you wouldn't.
- simplemath 11y agoWe're close to post industrial, at least in the 1st world. We're close. We certainly don't need to live in a world where millions die for lack of will, or failing that, where trillions of dollars of value are siphoned off of the working class in an upwards waterfall.
- dragonwriter 11y agoPost-industrial is here, or near, in much of the developed world, sure, but that just means that the economy has shifted from producing tangible goods to services and intangible goods, and importing tangible goods from elsewhere. That's just a shift in comparative advantage in an economy with scarcity, not a shift to or toward post-scarcity.
- simplemath 11y agoI would say that the part of post-scarcity that's actually cogent to my orginal comment is that we are already, via largely and increasingly automated means, cheaply producing vast quantities of consumer goods with decreasing amounts of human intervention. I didn't mean to credulously insinuate that we are approaching the utopian ideal of a post-scarcity world, as any cursory glance at reality would readily indicate that we are not living in a utopia. But my comment was lazy as it says exactly that, without further qualification, so i deserve the pedantry.
- 11y ago
- sbank 11y agoWhere do you live? Because if you live in the western world and in a country with a reasonable amount personal and financial freedom, you are out of your freaking mind.
- simplemath 11y agoI make 6 figures in the Western US.
- anon4 11y agoIt's called Shadowrun. You're living it. The only thing missing is corporation-states and those are coming fast.