5 ms·
It's a wonderful piece. One wonders if the experience of the machine would change much if it awarded 6 pennies a second, though. The purpose of the performanc
by patio11 14y ago
It's a wonderful piece. One wonders if the experience of the machine would change much if it awarded 6 pennies a second, though. The purpose of the performance is that the labor is soul-crushingly pointless, right? And that anyone who turns the crank is seen as engaged in soul-crushingly pointless work, right? Those both strike me as true even if you're using my 1% Machine.
- IheartApplesDix 14y agoWith a 1% machine, you can pull the lever for a few months then use the earnings to go recuperate and start something wonderful. The longer you pull the lever on the minimum wage machine, the more you have to rely on it since you'll never have a buffer large enough to go do something else and improve your situation. The common pattern is you'll work overtime then end up wasting the money on conveniences make up for lost time sleeping/eating. The only escape is to work at a grueling pace and starve until you have a large enough buffer that you can look for other opportunities, but this is destroyed the moment anything unexpected happens or the energy spent looking is not fruitful. If the 1% machine monkey is not fruitful in his attempt to escape the crank, he's still going back to that 7 cents a second. (or maybe 4 cents if his name was in the news)
- oh_sigh 14y agoJump to conclusions much? You aren't hell banned.
- IheartApplesDix 14y agomy mistake
- ctdonath 14y agoI could get thru a LOT of audiobooks while pulling that lever.
- JulianMorrison 14y agoThat's because the lever doesn't contain the shitty working conditions, danger, pressure, back-to-back shifts, forced overtime, and the knowledge that even that pitiful machine can be snatched away from you at the whim of bastards, and society will blame it on you.
- ctdonath 14y agodemocraticunderground.com is thataway. This is ycombinator.com, where people know they can improve their working conditions and get rich even if they are in rough conditions. Grimy work, risks, pressure, 100 hour weeks (making "overtime" laughable), and knowing it could/will all come crashing down - and all with society blaming you - is what you make of it.
- JulianMorrison 14y agoImagine society as being like an array of arrays of humans. There's lots of levels, but there's a clear trend where low numbered arrays are large and high numbered arrays are small. Some of the arrays aren't full, and there's an operation where you can swap up to the array above you if there's a gap. And it's theoretically true for a number of swaps to carry you all the way up to the very short arrays up top. But there is no particular operation to grow the width of an array, in fact the high numbered ones have been getting more cramped. So the trajectory of any one human might end right the top, and you can guarantee some humans definitely will, but the expected trajectory of a human is stagnation in the low numbered arrays. This should make you understand why the American Dream is a cruel and manipulative lie on the population level, even as it's undeniably true on the individual level. Also note: the only thing meritocracy adds to the above is competition for the level swaps. Assuming it works perfectly, it becomes a bubble sort, where the humans with most merit semi-randomly bubble up into the highest numbered arrays. The arrays do not become larger. And now you've told the people in the low numbered arrays that they deserve all the crap they're getting.
- pretoriusB 14y ago