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> policies that push people to work 40 hours a week when there are opportunities to work 70 then quality of life isn't going to go up. Seems like we have very

> policies that push people to work 40 hours a week when there are opportunities to work 70 then quality of life isn't going to go up. Seems like we have very different definitions of quality of life, if you think working 70 hours/week is a path to it. > You should be advocating that they have better opportunities to own and create capital. If labour is at a disadvantage, why encourage people to be labourers? Because labour exists, and a world without it doesn’t. So someone will always be a labouror. All you’re advocating for is more little warlords, instead of a couple kings. Doesn’t sound better to me.

roenxi 3y ago
What happened to being "this rich a nation"? There isn't a reason to have one group called "labour" and one called "capital". The world could be all of one or all of the other. In the bad old days it was 100% labour. In the ideal future it is 100% capital. Capital is just more effective than labour, that is the reason why the capitalists end up having much more wealth. It isn't an exclusive club - everyone should be signing up. That is the type of thinking that leads to stupid legislation like what the article is talking about. Rigid thinking in politics who can't imagine that a vegetable seeder could make a living any way except by going out, seeding vegetables and eventually ruining their bodies. The whole trick to improving their quality of life is finding better work for them to do or convincing them to take ownership of capital. They can't possibly secure a great lifestyle if they keep working as seeders. All the most straightforward scenarios that lead to a step change in their living standard are achieved by them not being seeders - automating the seeding process with them as owners of capital, or upskilling them so that they can find more productive work. Trying to convince the one person in the world who will give them the most money that they need to be payed more is a failed strategy that people have been trying for centuries now with effectively no success.
- kennywinker 3y ago
  > Capital is just more effective than labour At what? Capital doesn’t plant seeds, harvest crops, stock shelves, or cook meals. In a world with perfect 100% automation, yeah - sure, everybody can be a capitalist. In the real world labour is absolutely necessary, and being a capitalist is just exploiting those people that do the actual real work. Your suggestion that everybody should try to be a capitalist is saying everyone should fight like crabs in a bucket to be the top crab crushing all the other crabs. Good plan.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    In the real world, these people work 70 hour work weeks and that is worth less than $30/hr. If the situation is going to change, it makes sense to change it in a direction that deals with the root cause. > At what? Capital doesn’t plant seeds, harvest crops, stock shelves, or cook meals. I'd happily put money on you being completely wrong in the sense that you mean, there are a lot of opportunities for automation now that the vision problem has been solved. And all of those things you list are very capital-intensive activities - farming is highly mechanised and relies on an industrial chemical pipeline. Shopping centres require a lot of capital to set up. Cooking is very capital intensive to if you look around a commercial kitchen. > ...being a capitalist is just exploiting those people that do the actual real work... How many people could survive on earth if all the capital disappeared? The trucking fleets alone disappearing would force mass starvation after about a week. There just isn't a way to move the food from farms to cities. Let alone all the other parts of the production chain. The only difference between 2023 AD and 2023 BC humans is the vast accumulations of capital we have in the modern world. It is making a big difference. > and being a capitalist is just exploiting those people that do the actual real work. Connect the dots. What happens to the people doing the work if they are also capitalists?
    - kennywinker 3y ago
      > The only difference between 2023 AD and 2023 BC humans is the vast accumulations of capital we have in the modern world. Lol whut? Unless you expand the definition of capital to include everything except labour, that’s wrong. Ideas and information are not capital, except maybe for brief periods of time while they are protected by legal systems to make them to act as capital. The periodic table of elements is not capital. It’s information. Democracy is not capital, it’s an idea.
      - roenxi 3y ago
        Say all the capital disappears one day. It's magic. Poof, gone. What can you do that a human couldn't do in 2000BC? The answer you've given is sit around and discuss philosophy. Few people do that willingly. All the knowledge is certainly important, but the practical reason for that is it is all knowledge of what type of capital we need, how to produce it and how to organise ourselves to produce it. Give people democracy, and note that they vote in capitalism. Also, I note with a certain pedantry that you can't transfer complex knowledge without capital. A trivial amount of capital, but we still rely on recording the information on somewhere. In this information age the amount of capital used to record data has actually become quite substantial so the point is less pedantic than it once was.

roenxi 3y ago

What happened to being "this rich a nation"? There isn't a reason to have one group called "labour" and one called "capital". The world could be all of one or all of the other. In the bad old days it was 100% labour. In the ideal future it is 100% capital. Capital is just more effective than labour, that is the reason why the capitalists end up having much more wealth. It isn't an exclusive club - everyone should be signing up. That is the type of thinking that leads to stupid legislation like what the article is talking about. Rigid thinking in politics who can't imagine that a vegetable seeder could make a living any way except by going out, seeding vegetables and eventually ruining their bodies. The whole trick to improving their quality of life is finding better work for them to do or convincing them to take ownership of capital. They can't possibly secure a great lifestyle if they keep working as seeders. All the most straightforward scenarios that lead to a step change in their living standard are achieved by them not being seeders - automating the seeding process with them as owners of capital, or upskilling them so that they can find more productive work. Trying to convince the one person in the world who will give them the most money that they need to be payed more is a failed strategy that people have been trying for centuries now with effectively no success.

kennywinker 3y ago
> Capital is just more effective than labour At what? Capital doesn’t plant seeds, harvest crops, stock shelves, or cook meals. In a world with perfect 100% automation, yeah - sure, everybody can be a capitalist. In the real world labour is absolutely necessary, and being a capitalist is just exploiting those people that do the actual real work. Your suggestion that everybody should try to be a capitalist is saying everyone should fight like crabs in a bucket to be the top crab crushing all the other crabs. Good plan.
- roenxi 3y ago
  In the real world, these people work 70 hour work weeks and that is worth less than $30/hr. If the situation is going to change, it makes sense to change it in a direction that deals with the root cause. > At what? Capital doesn’t plant seeds, harvest crops, stock shelves, or cook meals. I'd happily put money on you being completely wrong in the sense that you mean, there are a lot of opportunities for automation now that the vision problem has been solved. And all of those things you list are very capital-intensive activities - farming is highly mechanised and relies on an industrial chemical pipeline. Shopping centres require a lot of capital to set up. Cooking is very capital intensive to if you look around a commercial kitchen. > ...being a capitalist is just exploiting those people that do the actual real work... How many people could survive on earth if all the capital disappeared? The trucking fleets alone disappearing would force mass starvation after about a week. There just isn't a way to move the food from farms to cities. Let alone all the other parts of the production chain. The only difference between 2023 AD and 2023 BC humans is the vast accumulations of capital we have in the modern world. It is making a big difference. > and being a capitalist is just exploiting those people that do the actual real work. Connect the dots. What happens to the people doing the work if they are also capitalists?
  - kennywinker 3y ago
    > The only difference between 2023 AD and 2023 BC humans is the vast accumulations of capital we have in the modern world. Lol whut? Unless you expand the definition of capital to include everything except labour, that’s wrong. Ideas and information are not capital, except maybe for brief periods of time while they are protected by legal systems to make them to act as capital. The periodic table of elements is not capital. It’s information. Democracy is not capital, it’s an idea.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      Say all the capital disappears one day. It's magic. Poof, gone. What can you do that a human couldn't do in 2000BC? The answer you've given is sit around and discuss philosophy. Few people do that willingly. All the knowledge is certainly important, but the practical reason for that is it is all knowledge of what type of capital we need, how to produce it and how to organise ourselves to produce it. Give people democracy, and note that they vote in capitalism. Also, I note with a certain pedantry that you can't transfer complex knowledge without capital. A trivial amount of capital, but we still rely on recording the information on somewhere. In this information age the amount of capital used to record data has actually become quite substantial so the point is less pedantic than it once was.