This is what I mention when I'm covertly pushing "radical" ideas such as 4 day work weeks. We have all of these technological advancements - Why can't the workers see some of those benefits instead of them being funneled to the top in the form of extra profits?
Try 30 hour week. It’s superior to 4 “days” of random length. I had a couple of Philippines based contractors on my team who had 4 day weeks, but they still needed to work 40 hours
The goal was never leisure. The goal was always profit. And so we feed the profit machine, and when we run out of resources, we’ll start throwing in sacrifices.
If chatGPT was marketed towards workers filing reports for idiot bosses that won’t know the difference it would have been made illegal within the month
Honestly I just like the idea of it because if someone decides they really want to grind for a bit they can now take up a second up to full time job without worrying about most of the shit employers will give you for that.
What I think should be the standard is a “full time” job being 18 hours in a week of work time, including commuting, with any time above every additional multiple of 18 immediately paying out as 2.5x the pay that’s been earned so far. Doesn’t just give people their free time back in spades, it also significantly discourages extorting workers for overtime instead of staffing adequately because now it’s literally more expensive to pay out any overtime at all than it would have been to just hire the additional worker at equal pay, and that effect ramps up exponentially too, by the time you’re at the soul grind of a 40 hour week you’ve already tapped your employer so hard it would have been cheaper to hire 5 additional workers than it was to make you work that 40 hour week.
My organisation does 4 day work weeks. But we chain our staff so only some of us have a 3 day weekend. My day off is usually either Tuesday or Wednesday (by choice, I could take Monday if I wanted).
It works for me because I have a normal weekend with my friends and family to do weekend stuff, and then my day off doesn’t really feel like a true weekend so I use it to catch up on errands, housework, medical appointments, etc. Meaning unlike most of my peers who have to do it all on the weekend, my real weekend is pure fun. I don’t do any serious housework on my weekend, I have a weekday where I work on myself and my home.
To be fair 1/3 of women don’t die in childbirth, 1/2 of children don’t die before they are ten, we have weed and booze they could never have dreamed of, freaken chocolate and aspirin, and you are highly unlikely to become a sex slave. It was paradise for a very small fraction of the population and rape/slavery/castration for the rest.
Still I could go for an orgy and some figs if anyone is in the mood.
This actually points to the root of the problem. You couldn’t do that kind of retail subscription nonsense in ancient times because the bookkeeping, identity management, and fraud prevention would have been a nightmare. Since we found out how to automate all of those problems away, here we are.
Sort of, my point is really that there are new kinds of work that were not really conceivable at the time, most of which has no direct influence on whether you’re fed, clothed, housed, and healthy. (Indirectly is another matter, North Korean’s wisest minds centrally decide what really matters and look where that gets them… Not a 3 day work week)
Shit should be free, or cheaper at least, if you’re poor, trying to draw blood from a stone is how the poor stay poor and the elite fall to pieces and lose their entire hierarchy
That’s actually exactly why it took the Romans so long to technologically advance. “The slaves do the job well enough”.
The idea of water powered mills and general aqueducts were mind-blowing to them and took a while to catch on. It seemed utterly unfathomable when everyone relied so much on slaves
Which is similar to my theory of why the industrial revolution took place in the west. High populations in the east meant that labor was always cheaper and more efficient than trying to get compliacted machinery to do the job. It’s why a lot of manufacturing still happens in the east, because machines can’t do everything and the best robot is still a human being with a good jig.
And within the West it was in the places without slavery. As countries gave up their colonial slaves, serfs, peasants, etc. they started advancing. The countries that reverted back via fascism and the like saw themselves broken.
A slave works to the point where they are no longer whipped. An employee, in theory at least, is rewarded with higher pay for being more productive. Sometimes I wonder if anyone has researched the industries that pretty much pay everyone the same minimum wage and their output over time. I go to client sites and some of them everyone is paid terribly and the efficiency is staggering low.
When I went freelance, it was hard not having a boss at first, now I’m totally into it. It took around a year for me to get everything to where I felt good about it. I think a lot of people don’t realize that the uncomfortable feeling of not having a boss usually doesn’t last forever. The people who liked working from home probably get it. We are taught to have bosses from a very early age.
Also was a freelancer. I felt like I had more bosses. Instead of one person to keep happy it was an entire client staff to keep happy. I gave it up for a lot of reasons and went back to corporate.
And there are five of us who can afford figs for everyone forever, but decided to use that money to lure underaged teens for orgy outside in some secluded islands.
Yes? If it’s below freezing every winter night, if not all day, you get used to it. -5C (or windy) and the gloves and hat come out. -10C is genuinely cold. It’s all a matter of what you’re used to. There’s no universal, global answer to what is cold and what is hot, it all depends on what’s normal where you live/you’ve lived.
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