6 ms·

Speaking as an American, I don’t give a shit if it increases productivity or not. Productivity has gone up exponentially with technological advancement since th

Speaking as an American, I don’t give a shit if it increases productivity or not. Productivity has gone up exponentially with technological advancement since the advent of the 5 day work week. We, as a species, should be minimizing work to 3 or 4 days a week with equal overall pay. Corporations should be fined heavily for contacting an employee after working hours. On call should require corporations to pay hefty overtime. This is a compromise because really and truly corporations should be illegal. Employee owned co-ops are more humane.

christophilus 4mo ago
That would be ok in a non-globalized world. In our world, any country that implements those laws will see a lot more offshoring.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- idle_zealot 4mo ago
  Hey, if fuel gets expensive enough this will be much less of a problem! Let's all thank Trump and Iran for their great work on bringing the four day work week closer to fruition. This isn't how I would've imagined bringing industry back to the States, but it's a promise made, promise kept.
  - paulryanrogers 4mo ago
    Has the promise been kept? Is industry on-shoring in any significant sense? Or just making photo ops for Trump and fam, then slow walking the implementation until it's quietly canceled or scaled back to a token effort?
    - idle_zealot 4mo ago
      The joke is that onshoring will be forced to occur when global trade becomes prohibitively expensive for most goods. A promise kept despite not planning to, and with catastrophic consequences.
- danaris 4mo ago
  Not if that country also legislates heavy penalties for companies that produce their goods in countries with worse labor laws.
  - nickff 4mo ago
    The economic motive for offshoring would remain (though slightly mitigated), unless that country’s demand (in each regulated sector) was much more than rest of the world’s. I personally doubt that most places are even willing to implement such legislation, given that they’re not even willing to protest PRoC’s use of slave labor and prison camps.
  - anomaly_ 4mo ago
    You're just going to Galapagos your economy. Consumers won't put up with high prices and inferior goods. Unless you want to restrict internet/information access so your consumers don't know what they are missing out on.
    - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
      I dunno. Consumers put up with a lot. Why can't I buy a cheap Chinese EV again?
      - Avicebron 4mo ago
        Well the short version is that Robert Rubin and company sold our industries for parts years and years ago. And now we have to rebuild the industrial base from scratch
        jfengel 4mo ago
        That should make it possible to buy a cheap Chinese EV. You can't because they didn't sell out completely. In fact they still have some power to protect the companies from foreign products. The result is a mishmash of protectionism and globalization.
- xg15 4mo ago
  So then all the productivity improvements are nothing more than boosting the hashrate of your crypto miner? You have to do it to not fall behind, but once everyone has done it, we all end up back in the same spot where we started?
  - amazingamazing 4mo ago
    Unironically, yes. One saving grace is in some ways, such as medicine and technology, more will be available to you, but not for less effort.
    - xg15 4mo ago
      It's kind of understandable then that parts of the younger generations aren't motivated to continue that system? (Not just in the West, also in China, see "lying flat")
  - archagon 4mo ago
    Normal people, yes. The oligarchic class gets more and more bloated as you can plainly see.
- jmyeet 4mo ago
  This has the same energy as "if we tax the billionaires, they'll leave". That statement and yours are wrong. Why? Because if it was profitable, they would've done it already. Pretty much any employer would use you as fertilizer if there was an uptick in the stock price. But let's say it's true. Great. Punish them with tariffs. They also have diminished political power because they're no longer a local employer. We are colletively at a breaking point as a society where people legitimately can't afford to exist in a society that will soon mint its first trillionaire. This is beyond even French revolution levels of wealth inequality.
  - FridgeSeal 4mo ago
    Fully agreed. “Oh but businesses will leave” Yeah so what, if they do, we either didn’t want them, or they _actually won’t_ despite the squealing, or they will go, and if their segment of the market is useful, will get snapped up by new/local versions which do respect local constraints from the get-go. All of these are better outcomes than not doing anything because “what if”.
    - eudamoniac 4mo ago
      That only works with tariffs, which are widely considered evil apparently.
  - azan_ 4mo ago
    > We are colletively at a breaking point as a society where people legitimately can't afford to exist in a society Aren't poverty rates being reduced basically everywhere and people getting richer across all deciles? The truth is that even if 90% tax rate was enforceable it would not change much - many problems plaguing societies right now are due to bad legislation and NIMBYs, with housing being the prime example. Somehow people want at same time: more houses, cheaper housing and as little new housing development as possible.
han1 4mo ago
Do workers really care about productivity? As long as I get paid that's what matters.
- idle_zealot 4mo ago
  I like to feel that I'm spending my time productively, yeah. Not all of my time, mind you. People generally like to feel their work impacting their environment. Many consider it the most fulfilling part of their lives. Working purely for compensation is a great way to kill most positive energy for a solid half of your waking hours most days. People react differently, of course. For some the knowledge that they're making money alone provides the psychological reward, others find enjoyment in the moment-to-moment of things, even if they're not part of a meaningful goal, and yet others offset the meaninglessness of their work with a fulfilling home life or hobbies. On the whole though, I'd say yes, people do care about productivity so long as they feel it's connected to their world and oriented in the right-ish direction.
  - han1 4mo ago
    I work remotely at companies until they fire me for doing the minimum. I still get paid for the two to three weeks, so I couldn't care less because the money goes towards my hobbies.
    - idle_zealot 4mo ago
      Do you feel like maybe we could do a better job of constructing a world where people don't feel they need to do this objectively worthless activity?
      - han1 4mo ago
        It is meaningless, yes. It's not any more meaningful than trading crypto or betting on whether the basketball player will tie his shoe.
    - losvedir 4mo ago
      This is why we can't have nice things.
amazingamazing 4mo ago
This will never happen for the simple reason that there are some countries whose members are poor and so they are rightfully ready to work harder and longer for opportunities. A more important point is why is it that Americans objectively are richer yet feel poorer?
- pixelatedindex 4mo ago
  > A more important point is why is it that Americans objectively are richer yet feel poorer? I thought about this a lot. Some of it is expectation wrapped up in the American Dream. You work hard, and get those rewards. But that isn’t true because life isn’t fair and capitalism isn’t particularly humane or ethical. Some of it is perceived. The people who strike gold without hard work expect to keep striking more gold, and when the yield shrinks you’re appalled because that’s not how things should be. US is a deeply individualistic society, now more so than ever. We don’t always sacrifice for the common good, because they’re supposed to work hard just like me. Anyway if you read all that, thank you.
  - FpUser 4mo ago
    >"You work hard, and get those rewards." For a relatively short period it was true. Now majority works hard, lives from paycheck to paycheck and can not even own a house. Most results of what they produce goes to feed ever growing appetites of Musks
- micromacrofoot 4mo ago
  on the whole, most americans are not being compensated for the amount of value their work produces
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- stavros 4mo ago
  But, if there exist poorer countries, why is there a five-day work week instead of a seven-day one? Why aren't we all just working 24/7?
dabluecaboose 4mo ago
[flagged]
abcde666777 4mo ago
This all sounds great until you've actually had your own small business and experienced things from the other side. Employees are expensive, good employees are hard to find, and sometimes things need to be fixed outside 9-5 to avoid having an angry client on your hands.
- sensanaty 4mo ago
  You should hire people to cover those hours outside of the 9-5 then. Or do you expect your employees to slave away for your benefit without getting anything but the bare minimum from you?
azan_ 4mo ago
People should realise that they will be the ones paying for it. Prices will increase a lot. People need to be aware of that. Personally I'm okay with that trade-off. Also corporations - when checks and balances work properly, which is frequently not the case unfortunately - are great and net benefit for humanity.
- nonfamous 4mo ago
  >> Prices will increase a lot. Citation needed. Very little of what we buy today as a consumer are commodities whose price is determined primarily by the cost of production — and even then labor costs are rarely the most significant cost. Most things we buy are priced according to what the consumer is willing to pay for it, and the balance sheet of the companies that sell most of the things we buy show there’s a lot of wiggle room there.
  - azan_ 4mo ago
    > Citation needed. Very little of what we buy today as a consumer are commodities whose price is determined primarily by the cost of production — and even then labor costs are rarely the most significant cost. Services and goods where lots of human labor is required get much more expensive with larger cost of labor. E.g. fast-food, food delivery. And there's nothing wrong with that of course - I'd rather pay 2x more for delivery than have people working on wages that are not enough to even feed them.
    - paulryanrogers 4mo ago
      If labor costs are so high and such a large portion of production then how can companies afford to funnel so much money to executives? Hundreds and even thousands of times more than their cheapest workers? Often to the tune of millions and now billions? Surely there is more slack in the system than the Epstein class wants to openly admit.
      - azan_ 4mo ago
        If you don't want discussion to turn into cesspool, I suggest not using terms like "Epstein class".
stanac 4mo ago
> Employee owned co-ops are more humane Speaking as someone born in Yugoslavia. That's almost how it was in Yugoslavia. Companies where "owned by society", but workers had voting rights. Whenever there was a vote to decide whether extra profit should be used for capital investments and/or operational improvements or assigned to salaries budget, everyone voted to increase their salaries. Not every employ should be a co-owner, or at least not everyone should have voting rights.
- mohamedkoubaa 4mo ago
  Did you know that public market shareholders almost always vote for stock buybacks
- teaearlgraycold 4mo ago
  You still need free market economics. If consumers have enough choices then the company with comfortable employees that refuse to invest profits into their operation will lose to the better organized competitor prioritizing a balance between the two.
- coredog64 4mo ago
  An employee-owned co-op results in extremely high risk concentration. If your co-op experiences a downturn, you are likely to lose your job and see the value of your share of the co-op decrease. There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell
losvedir 4mo ago
Lot of shoulds, oughts, etc. How about this: do whatever you want. Nothing is stopping you from setting up a 3 day workweek co-op. More power to any group that wants to. There are a number out there already. But it's worth considering why it hasn't totally taken over "naturally".
- anonymars 4mo ago
  How did the 40-hour workweek come about? (Certainly not "naturally")
  - bigiain 4mo ago
    Unions.
    - baylisscg 4mo ago
      More completely the 8 hour work day movement. Loosely, 8hrs each for work, sleep, and everything else with everything else often being called recreation. Add in a 5 day work week and 40hrs. There's monument in Melbourne commemorating stonemasons winning an 8 hour work day in 1856 but they were working 6 days a week.
    - antisthenes 4mo ago
      More specifically than Unions, it was the threat of violence (in extreme cases) and work stoppage by workers against the ownership class. E.g. the Russian Revolution (one of the main workers' requests in the events leading up to the Revolution was the 40 hour work week and fair treatment). The unions were just a symptom to mediate the threat of violence in exchange for a larger share of the added value generated by the worker.
  - farnell 4mo ago
    Labor unions and henry ford
- tsimionescu 4mo ago
  This is absurdly ahistorical. Corporations take as much as they can. If there were no law limiting work to 40 hours / week, they would demand far more - as they had before massive workers' protests forced the current limits.
schappim 4mo ago
Speaking as an Australian, our productivity has been lagging[1] compared to the US, largely due to the availability of cheap labour (attributed by economists to foreign students)[2]. I heard one economist on the ABC give the example of carwashes[2]. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, car washes in Australia were largely automated and hand-wash car washes were relatively uncommon. However, the abundance of cheap labour has since led to a proliferation of hand-wash car washes. 1. https://files.littlebird.com.au/SCR-20260525-ietj.png https://files.littlebird.com.au/SCR-20260525-ietj.png 2. https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/abc-news-daily/the-productivity-problem-with-car-washing/105678114 https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/abc-news-daily/the-pr...
- gsinclair 4mo ago
  The car wash example is interesting, as something I’ve seen and experienced but never thought about in that way. I wonder how it truly factors into productivity, though. How is productivity measured, and does that measurement capture what is true? You mention automated car washes as a baseline. I never used those in the past because I figured they’d be rubbish or would scratch the car or whatever. So I’d occasionally wash the car myself, and that’s it. Now that we have manual car washes available, I use them from time to time. They clearly (I assert) do a better job than anything automated. And they do it inside and out. So I find the comparison interesting, but in need of elaboration.
  - card_zero 4mo ago
    It's a tautology, if productivity is measured as GDP per worker. Productivity, so defined, is down because each worker is moving money around less, although there may be more workers. Which is the same thing as them being paid less. Question is, if they accept that, and cars still get washed, does it matter?
  - ikr678 4mo ago
    Cheap labour is one part of it, but also if you were a wealthy foreigner looking to get residency/citizenship, there are a few visa classes for 'business owners' who met certain job creation/investment thresholds. Car washes were a popular vehicle for this.
MattDamonSpace 4mo ago
Someone doesn’t understand why we have nice things. “Increased productivity”, the thing you don’t give a shit about, is the only reason you’re not living in the dirt and dying of a tooth infection before 35. If you wanted to live with a QoL of the 1940s you could do so today working 2 days a week. Of course you’d have no air conditioning, shitty food, no running water, etc etc. You don’t have to LIKE corps but you should at least understand your world before calling for the guys with guns to get involved.
- Marsymars 4mo ago
  I'd pretty happily work e.g. a 4-day work week for the QoL of 20 years ago - but I can't actually do so, it's not a option with most employers.
senectus1 4mo ago
Speaking as an exhausted Australian... I would love a three day weekend every weekend. in fact I'd even "pay" for that (My father used his LSL one day a week every week.. a genius idea imho). But I dont see it happening any time soon.
tomhow 4mo ago
Grandiose, ideological declarations like this are antithetical to HN’s ethos of curiosity. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to participate here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
xnx 4mo ago
We need mutual disarmament

christophilus 4mo ago

That would be ok in a non-globalized world. In our world, any country that implements those laws will see a lot more offshoring.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
idle_zealot 4mo ago
Hey, if fuel gets expensive enough this will be much less of a problem! Let's all thank Trump and Iran for their great work on bringing the four day work week closer to fruition. This isn't how I would've imagined bringing industry back to the States, but it's a promise made, promise kept.
- paulryanrogers 4mo ago
  Has the promise been kept? Is industry on-shoring in any significant sense? Or just making photo ops for Trump and fam, then slow walking the implementation until it's quietly canceled or scaled back to a token effort?
  - idle_zealot 4mo ago
    The joke is that onshoring will be forced to occur when global trade becomes prohibitively expensive for most goods. A promise kept despite not planning to, and with catastrophic consequences.
danaris 4mo ago
Not if that country also legislates heavy penalties for companies that produce their goods in countries with worse labor laws.
- nickff 4mo ago
  The economic motive for offshoring would remain (though slightly mitigated), unless that country’s demand (in each regulated sector) was much more than rest of the world’s. I personally doubt that most places are even willing to implement such legislation, given that they’re not even willing to protest PRoC’s use of slave labor and prison camps.
- anomaly_ 4mo ago
  You're just going to Galapagos your economy. Consumers won't put up with high prices and inferior goods. Unless you want to restrict internet/information access so your consumers don't know what they are missing out on.
  - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
    I dunno. Consumers put up with a lot. Why can't I buy a cheap Chinese EV again?
    - Avicebron 4mo ago
      Well the short version is that Robert Rubin and company sold our industries for parts years and years ago. And now we have to rebuild the industrial base from scratch
      - jfengel 4mo ago
        That should make it possible to buy a cheap Chinese EV. You can't because they didn't sell out completely. In fact they still have some power to protect the companies from foreign products. The result is a mishmash of protectionism and globalization.
xg15 4mo ago
So then all the productivity improvements are nothing more than boosting the hashrate of your crypto miner? You have to do it to not fall behind, but once everyone has done it, we all end up back in the same spot where we started?
- amazingamazing 4mo ago
  Unironically, yes. One saving grace is in some ways, such as medicine and technology, more will be available to you, but not for less effort.
  - xg15 4mo ago
    It's kind of understandable then that parts of the younger generations aren't motivated to continue that system? (Not just in the West, also in China, see "lying flat")
- archagon 4mo ago
  Normal people, yes. The oligarchic class gets more and more bloated as you can plainly see.
jmyeet 4mo ago
This has the same energy as "if we tax the billionaires, they'll leave". That statement and yours are wrong. Why? Because if it was profitable, they would've done it already. Pretty much any employer would use you as fertilizer if there was an uptick in the stock price. But let's say it's true. Great. Punish them with tariffs. They also have diminished political power because they're no longer a local employer. We are colletively at a breaking point as a society where people legitimately can't afford to exist in a society that will soon mint its first trillionaire. This is beyond even French revolution levels of wealth inequality.
- FridgeSeal 4mo ago
  Fully agreed. “Oh but businesses will leave” Yeah so what, if they do, we either didn’t want them, or they _actually won’t_ despite the squealing, or they will go, and if their segment of the market is useful, will get snapped up by new/local versions which do respect local constraints from the get-go. All of these are better outcomes than not doing anything because “what if”.
  - eudamoniac 4mo ago
    That only works with tariffs, which are widely considered evil apparently.
- azan_ 4mo ago
  > We are colletively at a breaking point as a society where people legitimately can't afford to exist in a society Aren't poverty rates being reduced basically everywhere and people getting richer across all deciles? The truth is that even if 90% tax rate was enforceable it would not change much - many problems plaguing societies right now are due to bad legislation and NIMBYs, with housing being the prime example. Somehow people want at same time: more houses, cheaper housing and as little new housing development as possible.

han1 4mo ago

Do workers really care about productivity? As long as I get paid that's what matters.

idle_zealot 4mo ago
I like to feel that I'm spending my time productively, yeah. Not all of my time, mind you. People generally like to feel their work impacting their environment. Many consider it the most fulfilling part of their lives. Working purely for compensation is a great way to kill most positive energy for a solid half of your waking hours most days. People react differently, of course. For some the knowledge that they're making money alone provides the psychological reward, others find enjoyment in the moment-to-moment of things, even if they're not part of a meaningful goal, and yet others offset the meaninglessness of their work with a fulfilling home life or hobbies. On the whole though, I'd say yes, people do care about productivity so long as they feel it's connected to their world and oriented in the right-ish direction.
- han1 4mo ago
  I work remotely at companies until they fire me for doing the minimum. I still get paid for the two to three weeks, so I couldn't care less because the money goes towards my hobbies.
  - idle_zealot 4mo ago
    Do you feel like maybe we could do a better job of constructing a world where people don't feel they need to do this objectively worthless activity?
    - han1 4mo ago
      It is meaningless, yes. It's not any more meaningful than trading crypto or betting on whether the basketball player will tie his shoe.
  - losvedir 4mo ago
    This is why we can't have nice things.

amazingamazing 4mo ago

This will never happen for the simple reason that there are some countries whose members are poor and so they are rightfully ready to work harder and longer for opportunities. A more important point is why is it that Americans objectively are richer yet feel poorer?

pixelatedindex 4mo ago
> A more important point is why is it that Americans objectively are richer yet feel poorer? I thought about this a lot. Some of it is expectation wrapped up in the American Dream. You work hard, and get those rewards. But that isn’t true because life isn’t fair and capitalism isn’t particularly humane or ethical. Some of it is perceived. The people who strike gold without hard work expect to keep striking more gold, and when the yield shrinks you’re appalled because that’s not how things should be. US is a deeply individualistic society, now more so than ever. We don’t always sacrifice for the common good, because they’re supposed to work hard just like me. Anyway if you read all that, thank you.
- FpUser 4mo ago
  >"You work hard, and get those rewards." For a relatively short period it was true. Now majority works hard, lives from paycheck to paycheck and can not even own a house. Most results of what they produce goes to feed ever growing appetites of Musks
micromacrofoot 4mo ago
on the whole, most americans are not being compensated for the amount of value their work produces
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
stavros 4mo ago
But, if there exist poorer countries, why is there a five-day work week instead of a seven-day one? Why aren't we all just working 24/7?

dabluecaboose 4mo ago

[flagged]

abcde666777 4mo ago

This all sounds great until you've actually had your own small business and experienced things from the other side. Employees are expensive, good employees are hard to find, and sometimes things need to be fixed outside 9-5 to avoid having an angry client on your hands.

sensanaty 4mo ago
You should hire people to cover those hours outside of the 9-5 then. Or do you expect your employees to slave away for your benefit without getting anything but the bare minimum from you?

azan_ 4mo ago

People should realise that they will be the ones paying for it. Prices will increase a lot. People need to be aware of that. Personally I'm okay with that trade-off. Also corporations - when checks and balances work properly, which is frequently not the case unfortunately - are great and net benefit for humanity.

nonfamous 4mo ago
>> Prices will increase a lot. Citation needed. Very little of what we buy today as a consumer are commodities whose price is determined primarily by the cost of production — and even then labor costs are rarely the most significant cost. Most things we buy are priced according to what the consumer is willing to pay for it, and the balance sheet of the companies that sell most of the things we buy show there’s a lot of wiggle room there.
- azan_ 4mo ago
  > Citation needed. Very little of what we buy today as a consumer are commodities whose price is determined primarily by the cost of production — and even then labor costs are rarely the most significant cost. Services and goods where lots of human labor is required get much more expensive with larger cost of labor. E.g. fast-food, food delivery. And there's nothing wrong with that of course - I'd rather pay 2x more for delivery than have people working on wages that are not enough to even feed them.
  - paulryanrogers 4mo ago
    If labor costs are so high and such a large portion of production then how can companies afford to funnel so much money to executives? Hundreds and even thousands of times more than their cheapest workers? Often to the tune of millions and now billions? Surely there is more slack in the system than the Epstein class wants to openly admit.
    - azan_ 4mo ago
      If you don't want discussion to turn into cesspool, I suggest not using terms like "Epstein class".

stanac 4mo ago

> Employee owned co-ops are more humane Speaking as someone born in Yugoslavia. That's almost how it was in Yugoslavia. Companies where "owned by society", but workers had voting rights. Whenever there was a vote to decide whether extra profit should be used for capital investments and/or operational improvements or assigned to salaries budget, everyone voted to increase their salaries. Not every employ should be a co-owner, or at least not everyone should have voting rights.

mohamedkoubaa 4mo ago
Did you know that public market shareholders almost always vote for stock buybacks
teaearlgraycold 4mo ago
You still need free market economics. If consumers have enough choices then the company with comfortable employees that refuse to invest profits into their operation will lose to the better organized competitor prioritizing a balance between the two.
coredog64 4mo ago
An employee-owned co-op results in extremely high risk concentration. If your co-op experiences a downturn, you are likely to lose your job and see the value of your share of the co-op decrease. There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell

losvedir 4mo ago

Lot of shoulds, oughts, etc. How about this: do whatever you want. Nothing is stopping you from setting up a 3 day workweek co-op. More power to any group that wants to. There are a number out there already. But it's worth considering why it hasn't totally taken over "naturally".

anonymars 4mo ago
How did the 40-hour workweek come about? (Certainly not "naturally")
- bigiain 4mo ago
  Unions.
  - baylisscg 4mo ago
    More completely the 8 hour work day movement. Loosely, 8hrs each for work, sleep, and everything else with everything else often being called recreation. Add in a 5 day work week and 40hrs. There's monument in Melbourne commemorating stonemasons winning an 8 hour work day in 1856 but they were working 6 days a week.
  - antisthenes 4mo ago
    More specifically than Unions, it was the threat of violence (in extreme cases) and work stoppage by workers against the ownership class. E.g. the Russian Revolution (one of the main workers' requests in the events leading up to the Revolution was the 40 hour work week and fair treatment). The unions were just a symptom to mediate the threat of violence in exchange for a larger share of the added value generated by the worker.
- farnell 4mo ago
  Labor unions and henry ford
tsimionescu 4mo ago
This is absurdly ahistorical. Corporations take as much as they can. If there were no law limiting work to 40 hours / week, they would demand far more - as they had before massive workers' protests forced the current limits.

schappim 4mo ago

Speaking as an Australian, our productivity has been lagging[1] compared to the US, largely due to the availability of cheap labour (attributed by economists to foreign students)[2]. I heard one economist on the ABC give the example of carwashes[2]. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, car washes in Australia were largely automated and hand-wash car washes were relatively uncommon. However, the abundance of cheap labour has since led to a proliferation of hand-wash car washes. 1. https://files.littlebird.com.au/SCR-20260525-ietj.png https://files.littlebird.com.au/SCR-20260525-ietj.png 2. https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/abc-news-daily/the-productivity-problem-with-car-washing/105678114 https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/abc-news-daily/the-pr...

gsinclair 4mo ago
The car wash example is interesting, as something I’ve seen and experienced but never thought about in that way. I wonder how it truly factors into productivity, though. How is productivity measured, and does that measurement capture what is true? You mention automated car washes as a baseline. I never used those in the past because I figured they’d be rubbish or would scratch the car or whatever. So I’d occasionally wash the car myself, and that’s it. Now that we have manual car washes available, I use them from time to time. They clearly (I assert) do a better job than anything automated. And they do it inside and out. So I find the comparison interesting, but in need of elaboration.
- card_zero 4mo ago
  It's a tautology, if productivity is measured as GDP per worker. Productivity, so defined, is down because each worker is moving money around less, although there may be more workers. Which is the same thing as them being paid less. Question is, if they accept that, and cars still get washed, does it matter?
- ikr678 4mo ago
  Cheap labour is one part of it, but also if you were a wealthy foreigner looking to get residency/citizenship, there are a few visa classes for 'business owners' who met certain job creation/investment thresholds. Car washes were a popular vehicle for this.

MattDamonSpace 4mo ago

Someone doesn’t understand why we have nice things. “Increased productivity”, the thing you don’t give a shit about, is the only reason you’re not living in the dirt and dying of a tooth infection before 35. If you wanted to live with a QoL of the 1940s you could do so today working 2 days a week. Of course you’d have no air conditioning, shitty food, no running water, etc etc. You don’t have to LIKE corps but you should at least understand your world before calling for the guys with guns to get involved.

Marsymars 4mo ago
I'd pretty happily work e.g. a 4-day work week for the QoL of 20 years ago - but I can't actually do so, it's not a option with most employers.

senectus1 4mo ago

Speaking as an exhausted Australian... I would love a three day weekend every weekend. in fact I'd even "pay" for that (My father used his LSL one day a week every week.. a genius idea imho). But I dont see it happening any time soon.

tomhow 4mo ago

Grandiose, ideological declarations like this are antithetical to HN’s ethos of curiosity. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to participate here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

xnx 4mo ago

We need mutual disarmament