Minotaur

Yes!

(I get the jest that he did not personally take 34 billion out of his venmo account, but this is about as close as it comes to a president personally funding something)

((Also turns out it’s more like 37 billion.))

Yeah, but I bet you work 8 hours a day don’t you?

Just joshing. You have me there that constructions a bit of a tricky one just because it is so boom/bust and area dependent. I do some work with my local Habitat for Humanity and good lord we can’t find a single qualified contractor for some general purpose construction to save our hides. In other areas, very different.

The point being, obviously we’re driving towards a society where UBI is needed and in on the whole people can work a bit less - but when people on Lemmy seem to go “working is bullshit! I could be at work half as long and nothing would go bad!”, that’s sometimes frustrating to me. As I know that is deeply not the case for many fields. Same goes for people who simply cannot conceptualize taking pride in one’s work as a real thing and not just “capitalist propaganda.”

To put it in dork terms, there’s a very thin line between a utopia like Star Trek and one like Wall-E. I want the former… I think many people want the latter.

I never said you don’t have the right to complain. I made a general statement that computer programmers don’t have it as bad as some other types of workers and you came out of the woodwork to scream at me about how much your life sucks, actually.

Okay, that’s fine too. And I agree with you there. But the only solutions there are:

1. Many of the disaffected computer programmers and office workers become nurses, builders, etc. Like, a large percentage of them.

2. We completely decide to stagnate as a society to approximately the year 2018.

Neither of these are great solutions.

Obviously in some far off future we can hypothetically get to the point where so much work is automated that work becomes more (but never completely) optional, but until we get to that point there are absolutely 8+ hours of work to be ton in a ton of fields.

Yeah that’s fine, and completely true. I think people on Lemmy sometimes just get confused by the stat and don’t realize like… how hard most every generation before them also had to work (at least before 1970 or so). Like, on average, much harder than today.

People see the whole productivity rise and people who are maybe not exactly lateral thinkers think that means the average employee literally works so much harder compared to the “comparatively easy” lives of before.

It just ends up creating really… strange dynamics

Because - and this might shock you, civilization requires goods and services to be manufactured and performed.

I know it’s really easy to picture “everyone can just work a little less!” But remember… that’s not just you in your office tower. That’s nurses, and construction workers, and HVAC technicians, and builders, and farmers.

So you can have your vision where no one has to work 8 hours a day… but that also means housing will be even more scarce and expensive and the wait time for your mom to get into the ER goes from one hour to five…

It’s really really easy to say “we can just seize the means of production and everyone in the country will work less” when you don’t work in a vital industry. Things get a lot more complicated once you do.

That’s fine enough, but you realize people are still going to have to do 8~ hours of work a day under such a system, correct?