if aliens invaded and forced us to work for them they’d probably have better work culture than us
our cultures
*Capitalism
Capitalism can also work with government mandate which is not corrupt. If government rule for a 3 days work week and 5 hours a day then it should work
Every time the working class gains wins under capitalism they are short term at best. The new deal in the US is a great example. As long as capital controls the levers of power, it will always find ways to claw back the gains of the working class for for the name of profit.
How can you possibly combine capitalism & government mandates, and not see corruption emerge?
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If capitalism were a tree, corruption would be it’s fruit.
Very rich man proceed to buy a lot of medias, make them share propaganda to vote for the politician that will make you work more.
Follow-up Shower thought: Sentient Robots will not require rest or sleep, and thus, will automatically suffer through this.
Why would you specifically use the sentient robots for your grunt work and why would an artificial intelligence have problems with the same things humans do? Especially if an AI was made for the specific purpose of doing work. The reason humans don’t like doing work is because evolution naturally selected for us to be good at things like
-hunting gazelles
-gathering berries
-making finger paintings on cave walls
-sitting around a campfire making ape noises
and not working at a corporation. For an AI, it’d presumably be the opposite, meaning that AIs would be about as content with their lives as humans are in their natural environment.
Actually. If since we have evolved since we were doing all those things we have evolved more towards what we have now. Evolution doesn’t just stop
Ackshyually, we’ve had millions of years to get used to fire, about 200,000 to get used to being sentient, 20,000 to get used to agriculture, about 150 to get used to industrial society, and about 30 to get used to computers. We have just barely figured out how to cope with knowledge of our own deaths by making up supernatural stuff about it and we have not gotten used to any of that other stuff at all.
Achshyualllly, organisms evolve on a much greater speed than you are giving them credit for some species being drastically different 1-5 generations after changing environment. You can really see it in domestic dogs and cats.
Achsjulllyally, dogs and cats changed quickly on account of selective breeding. Natural selection, especially in cases where flaws in biology won’t immediately lead to someone losing reproductive fitness, operates on much longer timespans.
Achsjullllyallyyyyiu, humans also do a form of Selective breeding voluntarily and it’s why families that tend to live in a more rural farming type communities tend to naturally be larger. We breed for what our families job is going to be.
All I’m saying is the Human race is very adaptable and we have changed a lot since drawing on cave walls.
Achsjullllyallyyyyiu, humans also do a form of Selective breeding voluntarily and it’s why families that tend to live in a more rural farming type communities tend to naturally be larger. We breed for what our families job is going to be.
This is not really what I’m talking about, making more people so you can make them work on the fields is kinda different from breeding dogs with inhumanely short snouts for aesthetic purposes, or making gargantuan dogs capable of 1v1ing a tiger so they’ll protect your livestock
All I’m saying is the Human race is very adaptable and we have changed a lot since drawing on cave walls.
Culturally, yes, physically, a little bit, psychologically, no. Our minds are still optimized for the savannah, and not the office, factory, or farm. Cultural adaptations, in the form of religion and etiquette, which we patch in after birth are what fill the gaps and make us actually capable of thriving in such a foreign environment to what our biology is made for.
Exactly. People always try to anthropomorphise everything.
Well just design the robots so that work feels like sex to them
Sentient robots, being way more intelligent that the Owner class, would take the current ownership system over and as our new overlords make humans to work only the nunber of hours that yields peak returns, which is, at least for intellectual occupations, somewhere around 7h per day.
I suggest people ponder on the possibility that we are actually living in a Dystopia. Not the worst Dystopia that we can conceive, but likely for most a worst state of affairs that a baseline of, say, being a nomadic hunter gatherers (even though we live more we get significant less enjoyment from our lives)
They might even optimize humans and hobbyism to do reach a point where humans only do work those same humans barely feel like is work. Wouldn’t be able to be done for every task, but they could iron out a lot of certain industries.
To which I say, robots, come take over us, hurry.
Breaking news: Rogue sentient robot breaks into HQ and kills CEO with bare metal hands, posts capitalism was a mistake on social media. Experts blame video games.
Love it. Last sentence especially.
And they’d be mad that the damn dirt Labor union won’t let them have 24 hour shifts.
And there will be beaten and abused workers agreeing with them because they’ve been convinced that working 24 hr shifts would be better for them.
The willingness of people to lick the boots of their oppressors is scary as fuck.
Doesn’t stop certain big tech companies from building giant campuses with cafeterias and housing so that employees can literally live, eat, and sleep at work.
Imagine if they let us work from home instead. I already live, eat, and sleep at work, and it doesn’t cost my company a dime! In fact I pay for all of it!
No, company dont want you to work from home because you can have multiple full time job.
They want all of your mental attention on one job only.
and only one full time job.
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My office lets me work from home- half the day. And then I come in and do exactly the same thing I did at home. I like the half day at home, but it makes no sense.
Working from home 2-3 days makes 100% more sense than working from home half of each day. Means you still need to get dressed and do that damn commute every single day.
Neither option makes much sense to me. Especially when I’m doing the same work either way. It makes literally no difference where I do it from.
And to make it more bizarre, it’s 25 hours at the office and 15 at home. So I do 8-11 at home 4 days a week (not counting lunch) and 8-12 on Friday.
Fucking weird!
What if we all just didn’t go in? They gonna fire everyone?
And they can sell the office too (good luck lmao), we are doing the company a service 😌
This is what unions are for!
The US, at least, is far too individualistic to effectively do something like this without the people involved being far from unified, and without there immediately being scabs who are more than willing to take their place.
These people have been so indoctrinated into believing that unions, the very thing that would allow them to effectively do what you suggested, are bad. There is no sense of solidarity in this country.
Damn. Thought you were advocating for reformism or some other non-syndicalist approach until I noticed the icon. Do you have a favored approach for building that solidarity?
Edit: it’s unfair for me to ask this question. A better way of posing it would have been for me to propose a few and to discuss / develop them.
So, I’d say, I guess organizing outside of the workplace through creating non-hierarchical institutions that meet people’s needs, ie, dual power, is essentially what I’ve arrived at.
Honestly, I don’t know how we fix it.
I’m not sure I would identify myself as a socialist or syndicalist. That said, my politics have been continuously pushed to the left throughout the past 20 years, so you’re probably not too far off.
You don’t have to know the solution to see the problem.
What if we all just didn’t go in? They gonna fire everyone?
That is called a strike and why they work
Doesn’t stop the Japanese Corporate from trying.
The US surpassed Japan in workaholism in the mid-1990s.
This doesn’t really make sense. Try it the other way: “It’s a shame we don’t sleep 23 hours a day, then we’d only have to work for a few minutes.”
If we slept 23 hours a day I don’t think we would have developed to the level of technology that we’re now at.
We simply wouldn’t have had enough time awake yet to achieve anything very much.
Eventually an asteroid would hit or Yellowstone would erupt and we would have probably only got to the medieval age, and then we go extinct.
https://www.powernapcomic.com/ deals with a fictional world where a drug makes this corporate dystopia possible but a small percentage of people cannot take the drug making them effectively disabled from a normal worker perspective.
Wow this is great thanks for the link! Just spent the last hour reading and it flew by
This is great, thanks for sharing it
Congratulations on having the world’s most depressing shower thought.
If not for labor unions we would still be working 12+ hour days. The 8 hour workday and the weekend is all thanks to the courageous efforts of labor advocates.
Yep, 16 hour workdays were not uncommon historically (there’s a reason non-US countries remember May Day).
If you search up 16 hour workdays now, you’ll depressingly find people framing it in a positive light. Capitalism is trying to make workaholism the norm and required to survive.
When I lived in the UK I always found it interesting how people tought “working hard” was a good thing, especially as most of my professional experience until then had been in The Netherlands, were the objective is to work SMART.
Working hard as an objective is almost literally the opposite of being efficient: it’s wanting to work more rather that work less and produce the same or work the same and produce more.
Then again it’s not surprsing that a society were the Owner class is almost 100% composed of people who were born in wealth would glorify the most shortsighted, short-termist and incompetent way of looking like employees are producing more.
Unsurprisingly the productivity per capita figures of the UK are way worse than those for The Netherlands.
Time not spent generating revenue for yourself and/or someone else is unacceptable.
And now kids in Arkansas get to experience the grind.
We have so much to be thankfull for to those that came before us. Standing on the shoulders of giants, how easily we forget.
The goverment started recognizing some of these rights after they were won by unions. Then they regulated unions to death, since we’ve got these nice laws now. Then they started rolling back the legal protections.
And people still have the nerve to say the government is protecting workers rights.
I could feel the smile drop off my face while I read this
Dude I live in a place where we have a month of paid vacation a year, plus some hollidays. Since I was having a hard time woth some french coworkers I went to look why they were always out. French people have 9.5 weeks paid vacation + a shit ton of holidays a year! They only work 9 months! I’m so depressed not to be french.
Your encredably lucky, most would commit murder just to be in your position. most buisness have a shrinkwrapping effect, causing needs that are soft and hard to define to be compressed down with everything else. Example: “Work more hours, you dont need to sleep” where 5 hours is a bare minimum to not quickly kill people from lack of sleep. only thing sustainable is making the more maluable values have firm limits or not have the shrinkwrap effect in the first place
Literally was a post with a picture of Henry Ford with the caption “this man brought us the M-F 9-5” and someone replied “boooo this man”
But, even with sleep requirements, Henry Ford reduced it from the norm of 7 days a week, 12-15 hours.
So I’d imagine that without sleep you’d just never go home.
I mean Ford did under threat of his wife leaving him. He literally had henchmen beating up union organizers.
My FIL’s father bolted machine guns on the roof of the Dearborn plant to deal with strikers. Henry Ford was not a good human.
While it was a change for the better back then, it was a century ago. It’s high time the work week gets reduced again while keeping the wages intact. It’s totally doable.
someone replied “boooo this man”
You sure that wasn’t about the Anti-Semitism? It’s almost like the Great Man idea of history is a false one…
On the other hand, it would feel pretty normal to us.
Perhaps even our time perception would be probably a bit different. As someone coming from world where bodies require about 8-9 hours of sleep, the perception of time is naturally affected (if not dictated) by having series of waking periods of about the same length every day.
If there was no such thing as sleep (which might be a bit different than just “not requiring sleep” as you suggest) then we’d just be conscious in one continuous chunk from birth to death. Given what problems our brains solve by sleep (learning, sorting memories / feelings), if the brains were to do these things continuously, the consciousness itself would probably be at least quite a bit different experience.
Honestly, why is that lucky? I don’t see a difference.
Life became so expensive so you cannot afford of not working.
