YHK - yet another hacker news clone

A typical tech job requires far more than 40 hour work weeks.

Some are filling hours with more work however it seems like many are not increasing work volume, just quietly reducing the amount of labor.

A ruler will always prefer to rule over 100 wretches, than be an equal with 100 peers. And people all over the world have been bred to submit by relentless head stomping by family, school and media.

But the current order will end without violence and be forgotten as foolishness, just like the spell of the feared Soviet terror regime ended as if people woke up from a dream. Just like the strangle grip of popes, priests and monks ended and is now the source of ridicule. Our children's children will look with nothing but disgust at how the current population worship "governments", "authorities" and so on - all of these illusions made up of some of the least admirable people alive.

1. Boyce, Brown & Moore (2010), “Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction”

But if machines produce more, couldn't the state provide free services rather than cash? In kind provision could be less dependent on wages than taxation is.

Then couldn't we divide the monetary system further — not as banknotes, but by subdividing it? Would the administrative system be too difficult after all?

In other words, if the problem is that only the "wage" earned for participating in production grants the right to consume, then shouldn't tickets to the means of production also be distributed?

Still, no matter how I think about it, in the end it comes down to the problem of distribution. The OP also gives capital ownership as an example, but...

If automation can enable substantial production without human labor, then what on earth is the reason we should keep demanding that humans do wage labor for survival? I find myself thinking about this a lot these days.

Someone who did not participate in production can consume the product because they own capital. Then what is the basis on which that right arises?

In fact, economic logic, when you think about it, seems to be mostly a kind of circular reasoning. It says "capital's share equals its marginal contribution," but that market itself is ultimately something created by power.

Sometimes I have thoughts like this. In fact, the core of capitalism is the ownership of the means of production, and such ownership will keep accumulating ever-widening disparities. If automation keeps advancing, humans will eventually become unnecessary — and then how will the market be maintained? We cannot give everyone a claim on automated production. In the end, a ruling class and a ruled class will inevitably exist, and the question becomes how the ruling class can rule entirely with the consent of the ruled. Lately, it seems this principle no longer works in capitalism.

If 2 people both need something to survive, then collectively the group needs to produce 2 of those things. But if 1 of them demands 1000 of that thing, then collectively they need to produce 1001 of that thing to satisfy the demand.

The problem is that the demand for the extra 999 is given equal weight and competes for production resources vs the 2 that are actually needed instead of explicitly prioritizing the 2 and then letting the 999 come from a secondary pool of post-needs-fulfillment labor. Right now if you produce only the 2, then most of the time the person who only wants the 1 that they need won't get anything at all, and in many cases that means they starve and die.

When the consequence of collectively producing less than the total sum demanded by the wealthy is that some people will then starve and die, that hangs like an inverse sword of damocles over the heads of the poor and middle class, always threatening those who can't just buy their way out into laboring more than would be otherwise needed.

The very obvious to me solution is to structurally prioritize meeting everyone's common needs for food/water, shelter, and medical care first before then satisfying the desires of the rich who want more. That way rich people can still get all their private jets and fancy cars, but they'll need to pay more to convince people that the loss of their leisure time is worthwhile instead of everyone in the underclass living under constant threat for survival.

Personally I think the constant political drumbeat to have more jobs instead of literally anyone trying to maximize collective leisure time is the greatest tragedy of modern capitalism. It's always jobs jobs jobs instead of needs and rest.

Also has to do with demand for savings. The US has a bunch of mostly accidental policies that juice that demand.

The fact that we can do in 16 hours what we used to in 40 doesn't suddenly mean that people are only willing to work 16 hours.

But let's say I decide that I'd be happy with my life at 50% of my current pay, and I want to do 50% less work in exchange. 20 hours per week instead of 40. If you're in the kind of job that makes enough for this to work, you probably can't do it. 20 hours per week is for crappy jobs in retail and food service. It's very unlikely that you'll find a tech job willing to employ you part time at any pay level.

So even if I, personally, am sufficiently productive and sufficiently compensated that I could afford to work a lot less than people did 50 years ago, I can't do it. At least, I can't do it on a rolling basis. The closest I can come is to retire early. Or maybe take some years off in the middle of my career, but that's extremely risky. I definitely can't cut my hours and pay in half over a week, or month, or even year.

We aren't competing with workers from 1973, we're competing with other workers leveraging the same accelerated efficiency.

The additional compensation is a statistical artifact that accounts for air conditioning, iPhones, reliable cars that last 20 years, the Internet, etc.

Some people are working hard. The growing demographic is the retired, the trust-funded and those NEET-ing around on various forms of subsistence income. Another few years we'll be back to post-war levels ~%58 of participation, where two-parent homes prevailed, and one stayed home.

it's strange that all these articles about how much we're working don't even peek into the history of how our current structure was formed

the current productivity gains have mostly been captured by the richest, and everyone else is competing against each other for the scraps... if you choose to work less, you are out-competed and lose your status (guess what kind of groups can help avoid this!)

"I think the problem we've had is, people decided they didn't want to work so much anymore. (...)

We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. (...)

So it's a dynamic that has to change. We've got to kill that attitude, and it's go to come through hurting the economy, and that's what the whole world, the governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, to get that to some sort of normality."

-Tim Gurney

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJHP0VfeOrU&t=12s

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Someone from the shadow wizard money gang will have to chime in and explain how this is all actually a good thing ;)

We still work hard and will continue to do so because we are conditioned for the first 21 years of our lives to work hard at school.

21 years is a third of your productive life, a time when you body still works reliably, can repair itself rapidly, you have very little responsibilities and thus can take more risk and explore the frontiers of possibility.

The math teacher tells you to write out twenty tables of addition, so you do it.

The chemistry teacher tells you to balance out fifty chemical equations, so you do it.

The English teacher tells you to write out 500 word essays to explain why Sherlock was not a villain but just misunderstood, so you do it.

If you question why, you fail.

If you question is there's a better way to demonstrate the understanding, you fail.

If you refuse to do these assignments and start a lemonade stand, you fail.

Thankfully working hard is getting disrupted. An LLM doesn't sleep, take breaks, fall asleep after three 6 hour shifts or take sick leave. Nothing works as hard as an LLM and even basic LLMs that can run on commodity GPUs with 6GB of VRAM can write out twenty tables of addition, balance out fifty chemical equations and argue both for and against why Sherlock was a villain.

People will argue that balancing out fifty chemical equations and writing out twenty tables of addition is necessary to gain the foundation necessary to do more abstract tasks. That to be an effective Front End developer you need to code in x86 assembly. I would like to save those debates for another day.

We're very good at absorbing productivity improvements. Hell that's the whole goal of software – make things faster then eat the edge by making them faster for everyone.