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On July 01 2014 12:15 screamingpalm wrote:
I'm a bit biased, as my father worked for GSA as a COBOL programmer, giving me a very comfortable childhood and one where I got to actually see and know the ol' man. Big difference from the blue collar jobs I worked where getting time off was like pulling teeth, if you were lucky enough to have a job to come back to- and that was time off that was earned.
GSA government jobs are like the anti-Christ for the political right, and are probably few and far between these days, but as jobs they were awesomesauce. A lot of goofing around, playing cards at the office etc, but not everyone knew how to program in COBOL back then when it came time to do actual work. Socially, it gave me, and certainly a large number of other families, a good life. I owe my childhood to it.
Mostly agree with points in the OP, but things will not change short of a mass overhaul of public opinion. Ironically, it is right wing policies that could make this happen- at least more likely than a left wing socialist utopia. Sort of why I think of politics as more circular rather than linear. "Imperialism, the Eve of the Socialist Revolution of the Proletariat" and all that. As I've stated before, no matter how useless you, I, or anyone else deems a job to be, it still serves a purpose. Even if sometimes only political. Certainly the status quo or current political power in office doesn't want to deal with staggering unemployment numbers, not even the Tea Party.
Our governments are really adept at creating bullshit jobs. I don't think that your father's work was as useless as you claim, but jobs that are created by the government have a tendency to be a bit iffy. I know that there are a lot of slackers who have free market jobs too, but it's what they do when they're not slacking off that is bringing in money to the company that hired them. This is why the free market is superior. If you work in marketing for Samsung and you're unable to market their products to create enough sales to justify your salary, you get sacked, and if you're an engineer or a designer, and your new product ideas or your improvements of old products doesn't lead to enough profit, then you get sacked.
Ppl who are not qualified or who serve a purpose that is out of date, tends to lose their job sooner or later, atleast if they work on the free market.
Jobs that are supported by the government don't need to be profitable, because the government is not interested in profit. If the government lose money, they just increase the taxes, or if you're Obama, you loan money. If our governments shrunk in size, and they let us handle our money ourselves, rather than letting them squander our taxmoney, then the living standards would increase all across the board, except maybe for ppl who right now have jobs paid by the government, that wouldn't have an actual demand on the open market, but this is a good thing, because it would force these ppl to find jobs that actually helps our society prosper.
The government is very inefficient, and even leftists would know this if they looked at the government objectively, but they don't see it, because they don't want to realize that the government might be the villain, because the government is necessary, in order to distribute wealth from the hard working and the brilliant, to the lazy and the stupid.
The british coal miners controversy is a good example of how illogical the leftist point of view is. When our society started to favor other resources to create energy, because coal was ineffective and dirty, the british government realized that the government-owned coal mining industry was a money sink. So they cut it off, and they got a lot of flack for it from leftists. Why? Why should the tax payers pay for an industry that isn't sustainable, that isn't needed? The only thing that the leftists could see was that a lot of ppl lost their jobs, and noone denies that fact, but you need to look at the bigger picture. Rather than carrying on and leeching off of tax money, society benefited from shifting this workforce to other areas, where there was actually a demand.
So, the government can do the right thing too and get rid of jobs that are more costly than they're productive, but the problem is that when they do it, leftists go nuts about it. This is another reason why the government should not own companies, nor should they fund jobs, because even if they manage to figure out that a job is inefficient or doesn't serve a purpose, the moment that they start sacking ppl, leftists will riot about it, and then they will lose voters.
You can talk all you want about creating a society where we can automatically create things that covers the basic living standards, but the thing is, we have to work 8 hours a day so that we can produce all the necessities, AND also produce things like cars, iphones, computers and TVs, and if the average working day went down to 4 hours, then the amount of produce that our society could create would be halved. That means that cars would be twice as rare. Everything, including food would be twice as rare (which basically would mean that we would have to shift a lot of workers over to food production), which would hurt the production of luxury items even more. Just try working half-time today and see how it would affect your living standards. That is what reality looked like for full time workers, like 70 years ago. The reason why we have increased the living standards so much is because of the inventions of the 1%. This is why they're the 1%.
All this talk about, if you remove all the uneccessary jobs, it wouldn't actually hurt the production, that's just nonsense. Anyone who isn't economically illiterate knows that it's nonsense. All jobs that exists on the free market have a purpose. The ppl who have these jobs may not always be as productive as they should be, but they tend to be more productive than those who work for the government, because there's more pressure on them to perform, and in the end, them slacking off just nets their employer less profit, which means less salary for themselves, so if they're slacking off they're just shooting themselves in the foot. But no matter what, they're always serving a purpose. You know this by the mere fact of their existance. Company owners are greedy, and they would never pay for someone who don't carry their own weight.
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On July 01 2014 12:53 Artisian wrote:
I suspect having even 40% of the world population on 15 hour work weeks would be more catastrophic than any amount of psychological damage the current system is inflicting. Your average person isn't motivated enough to really produce anything amazing (not that they can't, or don't have the talent), just look at how we spend a freetime now. I could be building something, or painting, or finishing that Python project I started 3 months back, but instead I'm discussing jobs that shouldn't exist with people I haven't met.
Case and point, retired people. Especially the ones that sit around watching tv all day. They have literally all the free time, and they often spend it unproductively. They stop moving, and die. I've yet to see someone live long after retirement if they couldn't motivate themselves to actually do something at least vaguely useful.
haha man you sound really like a good work slave
you adopted all the mantras and dogmas of todays economy
1. all people are lazy, they would do NOTHING if not forced
2. people have to be productive in an economic sense, like building, creating something that has a worth on the market
3. and if you dont, you probably are not worth anything yourself, you know like trash, longtime unemployed people, freeloaders or whatever you wanna call them
just imagine 2000 years ago some lazy freeloaders like aristoteles and platon would have just done something productive .. sitting there all day talking about this and that .. letting slaves do their work.
you really should overthink your picture of humans
only cause you and many others are condemed in todays society to work form 8 to 4 doesnt mean humanity is born to work from 8 to 4.
thats like black slaves would have thought black people are born to be slaves and never can do anything else.
and just look at my day
talked to someone about human life and that it can be way more than beeing "productive" (whatever that means for you but i guess nothing good)
now im going to listen to some records for some hours
and later im going to watch the world cup
love that day in my opinion really productive, i worked quite hard to make the most out of this day, just have to do it for the approx. following 18.000 days also. i think this will be quite hard
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While the need for certain types of jobs may have subsided, the need for a certain level of income hasn't.
Our economy was never set up to give people 15 hour workweeks and a reasonable wage. More realistically, you'd have a few people worked just as hard with insane levels of unemployment...
People find niche, "bullshit jobs" because they need money to survive. And as long as they can convince someone their jobs produce some level of value, they get paid. Whether or not it's rational in the large big picture view of things... Sure, we don't need a massive service/admin sector in the economy. But people need to get paid to eat/survive.
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A set amount of productivity is required but it is nowhere near what it is now. Examples of useless apparels abound, cheap goods which are built to break after a set amount of cycles or uses, only to ensure that you end up buying another one and justify mass production.
Changes are indeed going through albeit at an agonizing pace. If economy was as liberal as we pretend there would´nt be so much opposition to legislation or means of living promoting substainability.
The expression "simplicité volontaire" comes to mind, maybe someone can chime in with the english equivalent (living with simple means...?).
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Fun fact: It is actually quite possible to only work 15 hours/week. You just don't get as much stuff as if you work 40 hours/week. Apparently, most people choose stuff over time. You think they should choose time over stuff. Feel free to do so, but don't think everyone else should do the same.
I am pretty sure you can easily achieve the living conditions of a 19th century factory worker who worked 14hours/day on 14 hours/week nowadays.
There is no big conspiracy. People just prefer stuff over time to some degree.
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"Jobs that are supported by the government don't need to be profitable, because the government is not interested in profit." What planet do you live on?
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There's this thing called a budget line by the way. In a perfect world, people ''choose'' time over money or money over time accordingly. You want 20 hours of free time every day? Fine, you get paid €50,- a day. Sadly that doesn't work that way completely with unemployment etc, but it is still true to a big extent.
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On July 01 2014 23:15 phil.ipp wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2014 12:53 Artisian wrote:
I suspect having even 40% of the world population on 15 hour work weeks would be more catastrophic than any amount of psychological damage the current system is inflicting. Your average person isn't motivated enough to really produce anything amazing (not that they can't, or don't have the talent), just look at how we spend a freetime now. I could be building something, or painting, or finishing that Python project I started 3 months back, but instead I'm discussing jobs that shouldn't exist with people I haven't met.
Case and point, retired people. Especially the ones that sit around watching tv all day. They have literally all the free time, and they often spend it unproductively. They stop moving, and die. I've yet to see someone live long after retirement if they couldn't motivate themselves to actually do something at least vaguely useful. haha man you sound really like a good work slave you adopted all the mantras and dogmas of todays economy 1. all people are lazy, they would do NOTHING if not forced 2. people have to be productive in an economic sense, like building, creating something that has a worth on the market 3. and if you dont, you probably are not worth anything yourself, you know like trash, longtime unemployed people, freeloaders or whatever you wanna call them just imagine 2000 years ago some lazy freeloaders like aristoteles and platon would have just done something productive .. sitting there all day talking about this and that .. letting slaves do their work. you really should overthink your picture of humans only cause you and many others are condemed in todays society to work form 8 to 4 doesnt mean humanity is born to work from 8 to 4. thats like black slaves would have thought black people are born to be slaves and never can do anything else. and just look at my day talked to someone about human life and that it can be way more than beeing "productive" (whatever that means for you but i guess nothing good) now im going to listen to some records for some hours and later im going to watch the world cup love that day in my opinion really productive, i worked quite hard to make the most out of this day, just have to do it for the approx. following 18.000 days also. i think this will be quite hard
To be fair, Plato and Aristotle was both teaching and publishing just like any professors and teachers do today. You should really back off on your use of analogies and comparisons as they're hardly convincing, more comical having to bring up slaves.
Also, humanity isn't born to be in a shelter, have readily access to vast quantities of food, clean running water, security, and other life amenities either, but guess how humanity are granted those?
In my point of view, your day consisted only of talking, listening to music, and watching TV. In my opinion, that's nowhere productive in industrial, educational, nor health sense. Good luck on trying to be that "productive" for 18,000 days or so, you're going to have to finance it somehow...by being productive.
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On July 01 2014 20:56 L1ghtning wrote:
Our governments are really adept at creating bullshit jobs. I don't think that your father's work was as useless as you claim, but jobs that are created by the government have a tendency to be a bit iffy. I know that there are a lot of slackers who have free market jobs too, but it's what they do when they're not slacking off that is bringing in money to the company that hired them. This is why the free market is superior. If you work in marketing for Samsung and you're unable to market their products to create enough sales to justify your salary, you get sacked, and if you're an engineer or a designer, and your new product ideas or your improvements of old products doesn't lead to enough profit, then you get sacked.
Ppl who are not qualified or who serve a purpose that is out of date, tends to lose their job sooner or later, atleast if they work on the free market.
Jobs that are supported by the government don't need to be profitable, because the government is not interested in profit. If the government lose money, they just increase the taxes, or if you're Obama, you loan money. If our governments shrunk in size, and they let us handle our money ourselves, rather than letting them squander our taxmoney, then the living standards would increase all across the board, except maybe for ppl who right now have jobs paid by the government, that wouldn't have an actual demand on the open market, but this is a good thing, because it would force these ppl to find jobs that actually helps our society prosper.
The government is very inefficient, and even leftists would know this if they looked at the government objectively, but they don't see it, because they don't want to realize that the government might be the villain, because the government is necessary, in order to distribute wealth from the hard working and the brilliant, to the lazy and the stupid.
The british coal miners controversy is a good example of how illogical the leftist point of view is. When our society started to favor other resources to create energy, because coal was ineffective and dirty, the british government realized that the government-owned coal mining industry was a money sink. So they cut it off, and they got a lot of flack for it from leftists. Why? Why should the tax payers pay for an industry that isn't sustainable, that isn't needed? The only thing that the leftists could see was that a lot of ppl lost their jobs, and noone denies that fact, but you need to look at the bigger picture. Rather than carrying on and leeching off of tax money, society benefited from shifting this workforce to other areas, where there was actually a demand.
So, the government can do the right thing too and get rid of jobs that are more costly than they're productive, but the problem is that when they do it, leftists go nuts about it. This is another reason why the government should not own companies, nor should they fund jobs, because even if they manage to figure out that a job is inefficient or doesn't serve a purpose, the moment that they start sacking ppl, leftists will riot about it, and then they will lose voters.
You can talk all you want about creating a society where we can automatically create things that covers the basic living standards, but the thing is, we have to work 8 hours a day so that we can produce all the necessities, AND also produce things like cars, iphones, computers and TVs, and if the average working day went down to 4 hours, then the amount of produce that our society could create would be halved. That means that cars would be twice as rare. Everything, including food would be twice as rare (which basically would mean that we would have to shift a lot of workers over to food production), which would hurt the production of luxury items even more. Just try working half-time today and see how it would affect your living standards. That is what reality looked like for full time workers, like 70 years ago. The reason why we have increased the living standards so much is because of the inventions of the 1%. This is why they're the 1%.
All this talk about, if you remove all the uneccessary jobs, it wouldn't actually hurt the production, that's just nonsense. Anyone who isn't economically illiterate knows that it's nonsense. All jobs that exists on the free market have a purpose. The ppl who have these jobs may not always be as productive as they should be, but they tend to be more productive than those who work for the government, because there's more pressure on them to perform, and in the end, them slacking off just nets their employer less profit, which means less salary for themselves, so if they're slacking off they're just shooting themselves in the foot. But no matter what, they're always serving a purpose. You know this by the mere fact of their existance. Company owners are greedy, and they would never pay for someone who don't carry their own weight.
I want to frame everything about this post.
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If our governments shrunk in size, and they let us handle our money ourselves, rather than letting them squander our taxmoney, then the living standards would increase all across the board, except maybe for ppl who right now have jobs paid by the government, that wouldn't have an actual demand on the open market, but this is a good thing, because it would force these ppl to find jobs that actually helps our society prosper.
This in particular I don't really agree with, as without a government to regulate and keep an eye on the private sector, you will just simply increase profit margins for the few. I should also note, that once my father retired from the GSA (basically nudged out with compensation during cutbacks :D) he did quite well as a contractor- especially during the Y2K scare. At one time we both worked for the same company in the late 80's. He was contracting for something like $80/hr while I was a grunt working graveyard for $8/hr. Is this the living standards you are referring to that will help society prosper? No demand for government workers in the private sector? Well..
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Bullshit Jobs come from bullshit regulation from the bullshit monstrous growing much too large state machinery no one needs...
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On July 02 2014 00:33 Thalandros wrote:
There's this thing called a budget line by the way.
No there isn't. It only exists in a simple mathematical theory that for some strange (mostly political) reason is called classical economics.
As you said most people have no fine control over how much they work, certainly not in the short term. And money is not the only thing you get out of work, there is social prestige, improved resume/work experience, social capital, etc.
The classical model is not just slightly inaccurate. It's basically meaningless and you might as well forget it after you passed your intro to microeconomics exam.
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On July 01 2014 23:15 phil.ipp wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2014 12:53 Artisian wrote:
I suspect having even 40% of the world population on 15 hour work weeks would be more catastrophic than any amount of psychological damage the current system is inflicting. Your average person isn't motivated enough to really produce anything amazing (not that they can't, or don't have the talent), just look at how we spend a freetime now. I could be building something, or painting, or finishing that Python project I started 3 months back, but instead I'm discussing jobs that shouldn't exist with people I haven't met.
Case and point, retired people. Especially the ones that sit around watching tv all day. They have literally all the free time, and they often spend it unproductively. They stop moving, and die. I've yet to see someone live long after retirement if they couldn't motivate themselves to actually do something at least vaguely useful. haha man you sound really like a good work slave you adopted all the mantras and dogmas of todays economy 1. all people are lazy, they would do NOTHING if not forced 2. people have to be productive in an economic sense, like building, creating something that has a worth on the market 3. and if you dont, you probably are not worth anything yourself, you know like trash, longtime unemployed people, freeloaders or whatever you wanna call them just imagine 2000 years ago some lazy freeloaders like aristoteles and platon would have just done something productive .. sitting there all day talking about this and that .. letting slaves do their work. you really should overthink your picture of humans only cause you and many others are condemed in todays society to work form 8 to 4 doesnt mean humanity is born to work from 8 to 4. thats like black slaves would have thought black people are born to be slaves and never can do anything else. and just look at my day talked to someone about human life and that it can be way more than beeing "productive" (whatever that means for you but i guess nothing good) now im going to listen to some records for some hours and later im going to watch the world cup love that day in my opinion really productive, i worked quite hard to make the most out of this day, just have to do it for the approx. following 18.000 days also. i think this will be quite hard
Wow, I just skimmed through this thread and this and other posts of you are a lot of BS.
You know why Plato and Aristoteles could afford being "freeloaders"? They were born to wealthy families with a lot of political influence. I would bet a month wage on them actually letting slaves do most of their work. Slaves were common at that time, especially in rich families.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato#Early_life
Little can be known about Plato's early life and education due to the very limited accounts. The philosopher came from one of the wealthiest and most politically active families in Athens.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle
His father Nicomachus was the personal physician to King Amyntas of Macedon. Although there is little information on Aristotle's childhood, he probably spent some time within the Macedonian palace, making his first connections with the Macedonian monarchy.
Anyways, the whole shift in the market comes from globalization and the resulting need for more communication. Back then, a steel mill had 1000 workers, but the 1000 workers had nothing to say anyways, so there wasn't much communication and coordination needed. You needed a little administrative staff to pay wages and talk to the transport companies.
With the shift to service industries due to the increased wealth of everyone, e.g. noone needed a cable technician or a cable hotline to call back then on account of TV not being invented yet, came globalization. Companies now have offices in 15 different countries in 30 different locations speaking 10 different languages. That requires a ton of communication, which means "managers". Even with all those managers, the main complaint I still hear from all levels is "lack of communication" because there still aren't enough managers coordinating everything. Something like the “East Coast strategic vision coordinator” might sound pretty much useless, but what people like that do is help coordinate those different offices. Yes, it involves plenty of meetings, some of them seemingly useless, but they all have that one important purpose: Communication. The need for it wasn't there a 100 years ago because everything was slower and simpler, but it is here now and even if those jobs might seem useless to you, they are still absolutely necessary, they are all wheels in the huge machine that is globalization.
As for why we don't work 15 hours a week... well, there is an infinite amount of work to be done because the work we can do is only limited by our imagination, so no matter how much we work, we won't ever do enough of it and there won't ever be enough manpower to do all of it. That is why claims like "we'll work only 15 hours a week in 100 years" are pretty stupid. For every job that gets removed by technology, a new job gets invented. A 100 years ago we didn't need programmers. Now I'm writing source code 40 hours a week because the bosses always have new ideas on what our website should do. Even if I would finish everything they imagined until now by tomorrow, they would have new ideas and so my job would still be necessary and full time.
I could write a dozen pages on this topic, but I get the feeling my words are wasted anyways.
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everyone from private corporations to the government would be competent enough to want to do what they want minimizing the costs. so if its actually cheaper to automate the process, it would have already been done. if not, the jobs are absolutely necessary, so whats the problem there? if some random person can truly identify jobs as "worthless", they would have been eliminated a long time ago by people in corporations who spend 40 hours a week researching this kind of stuff.
and no the 15 hour a week thing is ridiculous, time in this case is a resource, the amount of work to be done is only limited by people's wants, which is basically infinite. so if you can produce the same stuff in 15 hours vs 40 hours before, you should be working 40 hours now to produce 105 hours of stuff back then, not working 15 hours and do nothing the other 25.
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With a 15 hour "official" work week you could spend more time doing unofficial work like tailoring your own clothes, tending your children or elderly, growing your own veggies, and so on.
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I couldn't help but think of this in a SC2 analogy.
The two camps are basically 1v1ers/FFAers vs arcaders
One group looks at the world like a giant 1v1 or FFA where one is to gather as much resources and turn them into units and buildings you want so you can be victorious over your opponent. The units and buildings generally stay the same but every once in a while a new thing is created by the people at the top (occasionally inspired from those on bottom) and the FFAers can either integrate the new product into their desires or not.
The other group looks at the world like a giant Arcade map, mixed with some map editor. WE control the point of the game, not the game makers. We can have a game where we scramble for resources and try to beat each other (FFA) or we can create a new game where the only losers are the ones who quit. New aspect are constantly added by
Currently the game is set up like the FFA but the only thing stopping us from changing the point of the game, is us.
One camp likes the way it is (think they can still win/do better than someone) and one camp would like to change the game so that either we all win or only quitters lose.
The resistance to change is common in both. If you play nothing but 1v1's /ffa's you're less likely to embrace arcade games and vice versa
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if we can probably produce similar amount compared to 2000 years ago working like 1 hour a week, should we take 39 hours off? what about 5 hours weeks for production levels of 1000 years ago? 10 hour weeks for 100 years ago? why arbitrarily draw the line at 15? its pretty illogical to purposely not try and maximize the current production power since that essentially is what improves the standard of living. of course Im not saying it should exactly be 40, but 40 has generally been accepted as the amount of time a person can reasonably devote to something in the long term.
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On July 02 2014 04:36 LingsAreBunnies wrote:
if we can probably produce similar amount compared to 2000 years ago working like 1 hour a week, should we take 39 hours off? what about 5 hours weeks for production levels of 1000 years ago? 10 hour weeks for 100 years ago? why arbitrarily draw the line at 15? its pretty illogical to purposely not try and maximize the current production power since that essentially is what improves the standard of living. of course Im not saying it should exactly be 40, but 40 has generally been accepted as the amount of time a person can reasonably devote to something in the long term.
The problem is when people work 50 hours a week when the actual useful part of their work could be done in 20 or less. But if they weren't burdened by useless stuff (e.g reports that nobody reads, complying with unnecessary regulations, etc.) then they might get it into their head that they want to work for 40 hours for twice as much pay. At which point a large part of society would be priced out of the market, which would create social upheaval.
This is happening anyway, but slower than it would otherwise if we were more efficient.
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On July 02 2014 04:50 hypercube wrote:Show nested quote +On July 02 2014 04:36 LingsAreBunnies wrote:
if we can probably produce similar amount compared to 2000 years ago working like 1 hour a week, should we take 39 hours off? what about 5 hours weeks for production levels of 1000 years ago? 10 hour weeks for 100 years ago? why arbitrarily draw the line at 15? its pretty illogical to purposely not try and maximize the current production power since that essentially is what improves the standard of living. of course Im not saying it should exactly be 40, but 40 has generally been accepted as the amount of time a person can reasonably devote to something in the long term. The problem is when people work 50 hours a week when the actual useful part of their work could be done in 20 or less. But if they weren't burdened by useless stuff (e.g reports that nobody reads, complying with unnecessary regulations, etc.) then they might get it into their head that they want to work for 40 hours for twice as much pay. At which point a large part of society would be priced out of the market, which would create social upheaval. This is happening anyway, but slower than it would otherwise if we were more efficient.
of course some inefficiencies do happen to some extent, but its either in the minority, or something to be changed in the near future. no corporations, especially privately owned ones would be willing to pay for work if they are really that blatantly unnecessary if they were to be competitive. its really not a matter of what the worker or what the corporation wants in terms of price, so twice as much pay is pretty irrelevant here. The equilibrium price is generally determined by everyone as a collective. floor is often times used to also guarantee some level of standard of living.
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On July 02 2014 04:36 LingsAreBunnies wrote:
if we can probably produce similar amount compared to 2000 years ago working like 1 hour a week, should we take 39 hours off? what about 5 hours weeks for production levels of 1000 years ago? 10 hour weeks for 100 years ago? why arbitrarily draw the line at 15? its pretty illogical to purposely not try and maximize the current production power since that essentially is what improves the standard of living. of course Im not saying it should exactly be 40, but 40 has generally been accepted as the amount of time a person can reasonably devote to something in the long term.
Maximizing current production power means different things to different people.
For instance China would say that in the US our people don't work nearly enough. 40hrs is lazy, they should be working 80+.
Despite laws to the contrary China regularly expects people to work 6-7 days a week with a minimum of a 12 hour shift. And people do... Of course they tend to threaten to leap off the building, so they install catch nets (that wouldn't actually work) to deter people from doing so. Or they just die from exhaustion/poor conditions/poor diet/etc... But hey, it's a lot more productive to just have people who live past 40ish just die instead of creating a safety net or providing adequate living/working conditions.
What stops us from spending every waking moment working instead of pursuing pleasure is just that we would suck as a workforce. We don't have the luxury of pursuing passions because of the 40 hr work week. We have a 40 hr work week because regularly expecting people to work more than that results in diminishing returns (mostly as a result of having to pay overtime) and that they aren't motivated to stay alive. Also we don't have a "USA" to sell the stuff we would be making in slave conditions to.
Our productivity is always balanced with why we bother to live(we could work more['maximize production power'], but that generally means living less).
I hate how things are currently set up in a lot of ways but I can't help but appreciate how beautiful the systems self reinforcement mechanisms are.
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EPT
