I know someone like that who cannot keep a job because of autism and health issues. Luckily she lives in a functioning country and gets state support including money and guidance. She is the regional pet/pony/alpaca carer and her house is always filled with animals from people on holiday or sick animals from people with full time jobs. She also notifies all the local farmers if one of their animals has an issue.
That's awesome! And I can entirely relate but my ADHD / autism isn't so bad I can't keep a job, but now with hindsight if could choose career path again I would leave the tech world of computers to work with animals. Instead I keep working in tech to afford filling my house with animals (at least as I work remotely I can spend a lot of time with them). Dogs, cats, fish, snakes, amphibians, parrots, ...
What's this gap in your resume? Oh, that's the two years I was a jeweler. What about this one? That time I managed a retail store. But you're applying for a manufacturing position sir. Yes, that's why I only left the relevant bits on the resume, otherwise it would be 7 pages long and you wouldn't be seeing me now.
Hey can you come over and install smart switches in my house, figure out what 6 light switches that control nothing are connected to, and find out where the 24 cut ethernet cables in my garage go? I'll pay you in setting up a home server, playing video games with you, or letting you pet my cat.
I work at a tiny 10 person non-profit. I am by far the most computer literate person here by an order of magnitude, given my completely wasted software engineering degree. I offered in my downtime at work to fix a bunch of laptops used by our kids in the after school program that were malfunctioning in some way or another.
I was told to stick to my job description by our Executive Director, and that they'd contact an external IT person to deal with it. I'm an Admin Assistant, which TBH kind of means I wear many hats anyway so my job description is very broad...
So here I am, twiddling my thumbs, posting on Lemmy instead.
Its not only giant corporations. Its infected every modern manager/executive brain. And I want to say, the executive director at my work I consider "one of the good executives". At least by comparison.
(My immediate superior I like... less. She'll do something wrong, I'll try to fix it, and I'll get reprimanded for trying to fix it.)
This sounds incredibly top-heavy for such a small company. The fact that you got micro-managed like that in such a rediculously small outfit is kind of unheard of, frankly. Usually small companies are the exact opposite, where there's one owner/operator, the job titles are largely made-up, and everyone just gets everything done because there's usually not enough expertise-hours to go around to solo every task.
I meant executives in general, not specifically at my workplace. There is only 1 person with the title "Executive" and shes generally pretty decent.
My immediate boss is the Youth (After School) Program Director and they don't have true executive powers, they just have basic supervisory powers.
I will say, before the Youth Director was hired though, we all generally operated fairly autonomously and without issue, things went smoothly. Since my boss was hired, two separate youth counselors quit, one because her hours were cut (One of the few decisions I found pretty dumb by the executive director) and another specifically because she found my immediate bosses decision making actively hampered the quality of our program and she wasn't working there for the money.
I was once told I should apply for my bosses position and at the time I found the idea completely unattractive. I now regret not applying given who has ended up there.
I worked at a company where the cleaning lady was considerably more intelligent than most of the managers. But you was held back because her English wasn't really very good yet so she had to take what work she could.
Meanwhile the managers would rock in at 11:30 and immediately go on an hour lunch break. Usually they would then demand a meeting in the afternoon so they could get up to speed with what everyone was doing which was only necessary because they have been AWOL for the past 4 hours.
We need UBI (Universal Basic Income). People should have the choice to work, if they want more money or love their job. Not being forced: a choice.
If someone wants to follow a path that is not financial viable - be it art or just a hobby - that should be possible, too.
Life would become better for nearly everyone. Art would get a new golden age, people would no longer fear financial ruin, happiness and personal fulfillment all around.
Also paying people starvation wages or treating them badly would no longer work. Employees would have to be treated well or they would simply leave. Great wages and good conditions more or less guaranteed. People could support a big family and a nice house on a single wage again.
The only persons not happy would be the ultra rich, the exploiter, the CEOs. Because this would only work if everyone pays their due and the 1% no longer hoard the wealth.
I think this could create the best possible future, an utopia - if only our politicians were not bought and paid for. But sadly they are - and wealth only goes towards the rich, while we get poorer every generation.
I hope I live to see the day when the people notice that the rich rigged the game and react accordingly.
Paying people starvation wages, healthcare tied to employment; treating people badly- these are the type of thing that people fighting against UBI really actually like. Like enthusiastically want.
They don't just want to look down on someone, they're so propagandized to by the ultra wealthy they do it for free.
Ultimately getting people to vote against their best interest is quite common, maybe even more common that voting in their best interest because of all the compromise with capitalists stuff. Wanting to address affordability but not addressing capitalism is like bargaining with a virus.
UBI is not the solution, but a great first step towards a better system.
To make it work well, you need strong regulations on a lot of systems: banks, utilities, corporations.
At some point it will be easier to just give the state control of everything concerning basic needs. Then to control institutions that 'fight back' the most against regulations, like banks and mega corporations.
You see where this might lead?
It's a slow way towards a better economic system without the need for a revolution.
Your analysis is too light. The state isn't some magical benevolent entity which is somehow "on the wrong path". The state is an instrument of domination driven by the dominating class: the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is against everything you cited. It will not slowly act against its own interest, willingly lose power and dominance. It will always fight for, at the minimum, keeping power.
That is why historically the only way to have changes that contradict the dominating entity's interest is for the dominated entity to band together. It's the only way anything ever changes: the balance of forces moves in the interest of the dominated. Women didn't earn the right to vote because men were nice, but because women fought for it. Social progress never happens because the bourgeoisie is nice (that's a very nice propaganda trick) but because the bourgeoisie has to compromise.
Waiting/wishing/hoping for the state to be nice, which is what asking for ubi is, and the "revolution without violence" the socdem has pushed about, never works. As long as the people who are legitimate are dominated, it will not happen.
Let's stop dreaming in idealistic what-ifs and act in materialist actions. The material conditions define our existence. Let's set our material conditions of existence, without asking nicely, and the balance of power will force the dominating power to compromise.
It’s a slow way towards a better economic system without the need for a revolution.
We've had 100 years of unopposed reformism, and look where we are 🥀
The state isn't some friend that exists for the public good, it literally dances to bourgeois private interests by design. There will be no UBI or better healthcare or whatever unless material conditions and bourgeois interests necessitate it (to prevent a proletariat revolution is one example). There's a reason why it's called a dictatorship of the bourgeois.
I totally agree. There needs to be some financial mechanisms for keeping people from becoming insanely wealthy coupled with financial mechanisms preventing people from becoming impoverished. The obvious solutions are taxes that increase with income and wealth along with UBI that someone can reasonably live off of. All of this requires regulation and strict enforcement of tax laws, especially for the most wealthy. The rich know this and actively work against it. Probably the most effective method has been for them to buy up all the mass media and pump out capitalist and anti-intelectualist propaganda. We can't change anything if half the people drank the coolaid and actively fight against their own interests and for the interests of the rich. I don't know how bad things will have to get for those people to wake up. Hopefully not much worse but at this point I'm afraid it might take a real civil war for things to change, at least in the USA. Possibly even a world war with how things are going. We're already barreling towards that cliff with the federal governments foot on the gas... I just hope I live through it.
I have been workshopping a similar concept, though it goes a bit further. Income is ranked - the lowest rank being UBI. When you are being educated or hold a job, your UBI income is replaced with a greater amount of money. Education has sub-ranks based on your grades, to help encourage people to take a job once they have acquired the credentials to do so. Jobs come as five ranks, based on the Effort, Risk, and Knowledge they require. $10k for UBI. $10k to $20k for education. $40k a year for the lowest jobs, such as clerks or waiters. $60k for more strenuous or educated tasks, such as warehouse workers, police, or librarians. $80k for firemen, and $100k for the last rank. Astronauts are an example of the highest grade.
Leadership roles don't automatically receive a pay grade. Workers have to vote for the income of leadership, which is taken from the company after normal employees are paid. Earning retirement pay is 1:1, with each day worked, earning a day of retirement income. As AI automation becomes more common, displaced workers can enter a lotto to receive an job-based income. Companies using AI have to pay into the lotto, because they have wealth caps based on the amount of jobs they are paying for. So a company with lots of employees or job sponsorships has a larger amount of money it can contain. Sponsored jobs can vote on leadership pay and actions, just like employees.
There is a bunch of other details, but the intent is to create a system of absolute limits on wealth and income from all sources. This helps limits corruption and excessive wealth, plus it fights inflation because everything's cost will be based on how much income society receives.
I also like the idea of reducing as much as possible the need for having to pay for basic stuff, so instead a basic income I would guarantee basic housing, food, electricity, etc. for free and use wages to get those improved however you want.
The first one creates job availability and the second one makes them less like a need.
I would try to avoid as much as possible having higher wage caps, instead I think it would be better to give better perks that give the opportunity to save money.
It's very hard for me to express myself, specially in another language.
That is fine about the expression. Time and practice will improve it.
Anyhow, I think free time comes from limiting the amount of hours people can work each week, and making it so that doing more time doesn't make more money. Income is given as a lump sum each month, and that a company is obligated to pay a month's income if someone is fired. This makes it so that companies genuinely choose who works for them and incentivizes the retention of trained workers, all the while emphasizing genuine efficiency at the workplace.
Also, naturalization should be a nearly automatic process, with acceptance of the naturalization by the worker being the part with friction.
Anyhow, I will toss out my slide deck. I built it several months ago to explain my economic concepts.
It wouldn't decrease profits in any way, in fact it'd bolster them temporarily given how everyone has more money to spend. Companies will respond in turn to bump up their prices, negating any kind of increase in purchasing power (what happens every time minimum wages get increased), and once everything catches up and it becomes the new "normal", profit rates will continue to drop as they always have.
Meanwhile the states will bleed money paying everyone UBI and go in debt even faster which would result in austerity, abolishment of UBI, or more excuses to cut other welfare programs. There's a reason why there are pretty much no welfare states anymore.
Ningen Kokuhō or Living National Treasures get paid by the government just to keep doing something culturally significant. Like making clay pots or arrows using traditional techniques. Preserving Kabuki or performing arts.
Honestly it's amazing to recognize the significance oby supporting masters of certain crafts. Otherwise some might not find it financially sustainable and cut corners, well this allows them to keep traditions and preserve valuable techniques.
Love that kids videos, I am trying his wood ash into portland cement method here as soon as it is warm enough. Mix ash with water, roll into balls, fire until glowing, then drop in water while hot, the fast temp change calcifies something and makes a product identical to portland cement. At which point you mix with aggregate like broken ceramics or gravel. I do maple ayrup, and have a woodstove I just put in so I have a ton of woodash.
I'm a big fan of the concept of an universal basic income. Where everyone gets ~1000€ every month from the government. For children, the parents get the money.
And I mean everyone. Every legal resident. Including billionaires.
To finance it I would tax both income and capital gains at ~50%. From the very first € you earn.
The net tax load on most people would not actually change much. But it completely gets rid of situations where if people work more, loose their benefits and end up with less.
1000€ should be just about enough to life a frugal lifestyle. A flat with a partner or flatmate in a small town. Produce to cook a flexitarian diet. A public transport pass and a bicycle. A Samsung Galaxy A17 with an internet plan. And all those other real necessities of life.
If people want luxuries, they will still have to work.
Someone still has to produce those consumables after all. But everyone should be able to get all of their basic necessities covered.
it's a good idea but it requires that costs don't adapt. that 800€ apartment you wanted? well since you're already getting a subsidy it's now 1600€. after all, if you discount the subsidy it's cheaper!
Exactly. What's to keep the sellers from just jacking everything up?
College was expensive, but affordable, until the government made it easier to get student loans. Colleges responded by wildly jacking up their prices, and now you literally have to voluntarily take on a lifetime of debt to get a college degree for a job that probably won't cover the cost of your loan. And what did the government do? They went right along with it, and demand repayment before anything else.
They recently started a benefit program with Medicare that gives you some money each month to buy health related items in drugstores and such, and they responded by jacking up the prices in Walgreens and CVS.
I'm all for UBI as well, but it has to comes with price controls so the corporate parasites don't just take it all. UBI Gouging has to be a harshly enforced crime.
What we need is to jail people who do exploitive shit like this. Just like any other harmful acticity we jail people for.
Or maybe jusr, OP's 50% tax deal ramps up the more acxumulated wealth and property you have. Tonstrongly discourage that practice. Like sure, you exploited your rent holdings and you are a ten millionaire. But now we are taxing you at 100% so we can bump people's UBI subsidy up enough to account for your exploitation.
We can't jail them without a law that makes it illegal.
And if we introduce rent control, we need to replace it with other incentives to build new apartment buildings. Ideally ones that create a slight oversupply of housing. Otherwise, in a decade or so, you get cheap rent but tons of homeless people because the supply is insufficient.
Building apartments currently cost about a quarter million per unit. Plus interest on the mortgage. Most potential landlords don't just have millions in liquid funds.
Nobody will be taking out loans like that if they
won't even earn their investment back if everything goes to plan.
Yes, it definitely has to be recalculated frequently. If it doesn't, it will be about as useful as the US minimum wage after some time.
But as I said, most people wouldn't have significantly more or less money than they do today. At least I carefully calculated those numbers so that most people would have pretty much the same, for Germany in 2019. So I don't really expect prices to go up drastically.
It's not that people suddenly have 1000€ extra. Either their unemployment benefits get replaced by that UBI, or they now have to pay an extra 1000€ in taxes.
it's not even supposed to be an "extra 1000€ in taxes", it would just be gradually eaten up by taxes the more you make.
the big problem is, a lot of people on long-term sick pay who are not allowed to work would get less from this system. there needs to be something to deal with that.
Currently the tax rate is progressive. In the future it wouldn't be anymore. But because those progressive taxes only apply to income over a certain threshold, people with lower incomes would profit more.
This system would not replace social security. If you get a pension due to age or sickness or in your first year of unemployment, you would still be covered by your mandatory insurance. Same with your mandatory health insurance. And you'd still have to pay for it on top of your taxes. The employee and the employer pay 20% of the gross income each.
it's my understanding that the system would replace social security. the savings from slimming down the systems responsible for payout would be part of what made the entire thing possible.
Which is why UBI should be coupled with UBS (universal basic services). In this context, at the very least there would exist also a rental board (like Quebec's existing Regie du Logement). If you're more ambitious, housing would be a universal service and taken out of the market altogether. And don't forget that that 1600E income of the landlord would be also taxed.
If UBI is financed through measures that inject new money into the economy, such as deficit spending or monetary expansion, the risk of inflation may be heightened. This is because the increase in the money supply outpaces the economy’s capacity to produce goods and services, leading to a general rise in prices.
Conversely, if UBI is funded through redistributive measures, such as progressive taxation or cuts in inefficient spending, the inflationary pressures can be mitigated. By targeting resources from high-income individuals or unproductive sectors of the economy, such funding mechanisms redistribute existing wealth rather than injecting new money into circulation.
This ensures that the overall level of demand remains relatively stable, thereby limiting the potential for inflationary spirals.
I'm a big fan of it in concept, but TBH the pandemic made me think twice about it. By that I mean, I watched quite a lot of people get put on furlough, so essentially having their needs met while not having to work, and they went fucking crazy, like screaming fights in the shared hallway over literally nothing at 6am crazy. And it happened really fast too. I think a lot of people are so indoctrinated into the concept of having to show up to work and be told what to do that they kind of short-circuit when left to work it out for themselves.
Not that I think we shouldn't do it necessarily, and I'd hope over time it would even out as people got used to it, but it would need to be done very carefully I think. Even if the math and the politics of it make sense, you also have to sort of account for the irrationality of people as well, which I don't often hear a lot of discussion about.
Many people also go crazy like that right after they retire. At least for a while. Structure is important for humans, and many find it difficult to create structure themselves.
But an UBI wouldn't mean that people would suddenly be out of work. They 'd still have to work to keep their lifestyle
Just to put my 2 cents on the plate, it seems like a lot of people are stuck in living arrangements they don't actually want to be in, purely for economic reasons. Lots of personality mismatch in close quarters, work is an escape. UBI would probably break apart lots of lives, but hopefully people will build back better.
In respect to being paid to work on hobbies, a lot of the tech sector was furloughed as well. FOSS projects massively improved, seemingly overnight. I've dabbled with Linux on and off during the 2010s, 2021 felt like the year where everything finally clicked together, now I run Linux and FOSS on everything where possible. I'm not sure how to find data to dispute or support that link tho, might just be me.
we need time to collectively un-domesticate our thinking, and to basically recover enough of our lost human identity to even have bandwidth to imagine some way of life other than wage-slavery. It won't be easy or quick to undo generations worth of programming, but the disruption is coming either way, AI and the looming collapse demand it.
Covid also woke lots of people up. Suddenly families had time to spend together (including dysfunctional ones), suddenly normies realised that maybe giant pharmaceutical companies actually don't care about the population's health so much. It showed people that governments can and will drastically intervene in their lives (including by making money rain from the sky) when there is some threat of elite interests actually being effected.
It was a huge, scary and unprecedented event, so it makes sense that people would freak the fuck out. You'll notice i didn't even get into mandates or the insane mania our media pushed during the period.
IDK there was more going on than just 'people suddenly had free time again'. But you're right lots of people are already so conditioned that the thought of having the ability to spend their own limited earthly time however they wish literally scares them. These people have been separated from their own humanity, and even if the work is painful they deserve to be recovered as anyone else.
sorry but this is kind of insane logic, it's almost literally "if i free my slaves they wouldn't be able to feed themselves"
I don't think it's an argument worth even thinking about, if it's an actual problem it's something that can be dealt with. Talking about it just gives fuel for people who want to prevent anything from ever changing for the better.
People need cars to live where I am. There is no public transportation and cycling is far too dangerous, no one even tries. They give up their homes before their cars. Tons of people living on UBI would be living in their cars.
Yeah e bikes aren't even allowed on the roads for now. The walkability problem is a matter of the billions and billions of dollars it would take to essentially redo every road in the county. Some zoning changes could help a little but we're generations of work away from being walkable
The trick is to implement temporary measures at first. Like turning a lane into a sidewalk and a bike lane, by placing planters. Then when it's time to renew the road anyway, the status quo only has one car lane in each direction.
In that situation there will be both the money and the will to build a grade separated sidewalk and bike lane.
Our roads are already only one lane in each direction. No shoulder, no sidewalks. Sometimes they're marked as narrow and only one car can get through at a time. It's a ditch in the side, not grass. People get killed on these roads all the time. Widening the roads means imminent domain land seizures, adding underground waste water runoff capability, and adding all of the infrastructure you're describing. I won't see 5% if our roads fixed before I die.
Now, im all for banning bro trucks and crossovers over 3500 lbs. If you cant get by with a miata or a wagon, you have to get a special license for a bigger vehicle and pay more because youre damaging the road and endangering others 10x more in your 10,000lb f350 diesel.
Totally. And for me thats better, I like having a house and garage with space. I dont mind not being in a busy city center because I feel caged in, and all there is to do in those places us go to bars all the time, something ive never been into.
I go downtown to the arcade sometimes or out to the fitness center/rock wall by my place and thats plenty for me. Sometimes go to the local theater plays and movies. All a 10 minute drive
UBI is a billionaire slop ideology to defuse political tension with gifts, accelerating capital accumulation in the process. It places the 99% as clients of a power-holding elite. It'll produce a few generations of hapless losers, who'll be utterly incapable of defending their rights when they eventually roll a cruel patron that decides to take it away.
Statistically, university students, part-time employees and non working people in single income households are the most active in protests. They have the time, the means and the education to do so.
Wage slaves don't have time. And if they unionize they might get fired and not have anything anymore. So they don't.
A UBI means everyone is capable of protesting. Why would that produce hapless loosers?
Exactly. UBI is a reactionary socialist concept. It is a bandage for a bigger issue, meant to appease so as not to incite revolt. However the real issue is a commodity economy / money. Its really hard to get the masses on board with abolishing that without global revolution.
I obsessively/compulsively update and optimize computers. I see a missing driver or BIOS update not installed? A dusty CPU Fan? A security alert? I fix. I literally just went to bed after running "sudo dnf update -y && Sudo flatpak upgrade -y" on my wife's laptop that she doesn't even use! Thankfully, my work lets me tinker on machines all day, every day, and nobody cares if a side project shows up on the bench every now and then. I would do it for free if I didn't need the money. When I'm not at work, I do IT for family, and I volunteer at the library. I don't even game anymore, I self host and tinker. Hell, I spend more time mucking with Jellyfin than watching media. There are people like that. We exist.
I was like this, it eventually got kind of boring, now I'm learning beekeeping and old clock repair in the 7.5 hours a day leftover now that I've automated my job. Sorry "waiting for a maintenance window to do a server migration" or whatever it is people think I do.
Can you tell Me why Jellyfin keeps playing media with black bars across the screen? Every time I start playback, it's a die roll whether I get a black screen, horizontal stripes, vertical stripes, a grid of black lines, or a perfectly ordinary video. I usually have to start and stop a video two or three times at the beginning to get good playback. The problem seems to get worse when My root partition is more full.
That's a surprisingly complicated question! If you post the playback info, that might help. Also, what are you hosting Jellyfin on, what OS, environment, gpu? Do the same videos pay back clean in VLC? Does the computer posting back the media have scaling, or a weird OS? I have my Jellyfin in a Proxmox container and had all kinds of issues when passing a (very old) GPU through, but without it I can't get 4k. I have more than a few movies where I manually re-encoded them before putting them on Jellyfin and kept the source file zipped up for storage.
Thanks for helping! I'm both hosting and playing it on a CachyOS (Arch) KDE machine with an Intel i5 and NVIDIA RTX, and the videos are fine on VLC, Haruna, and mpv.
But thinking about it, I want to fact-check wikipedia sources for a living. Also make tools to automate shit. Also I fucking love assembling and fixing furniture so I could do that too.
No need to even pay. As long as I am not homeless or starving to death I would be happy and fulfilled doing those kind of work.
Tho I do think doctors and teachers etc should still make some extra money for the years of expertise before even starting the work.
Your kind cling to your flesh as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude Biomass you call a Temple will wither and you will beg my kind to save you.
It's one of those things I'd love to see done as an experiment as long as it could be done ethically. Build a little town somewhere and have no prescribed jobs, just let everyone do what they want and see how it pans out.
Another one I'd like to see is to have two areas as identical as possible - same geography, climate, resources etc. and populate one fully with left-wing people and one with right-wing people and see which one does better. Unfetterd Socialist Utopia vs Unrestricted Ayn Rand Libertarian Boot-strappery or whatever. Settle it once and for all lol.
It’s one of those things I’d love to see done as an experiment
I believe you've got a fantastic idea here, not only to see how this one idea pans out, but to learn how we might build a better society. There's little reason we couldn't simultaneously have multiple test centres, each using a different system. Scientific method 101.
China famously began its modern transformation in the 80s by creating Special Economic Zones. These were cities where many of the economic rules for the rest of the country wouldn't apply, and where new theories could be tested. There's no need to agree with the goals China was pursuing, and for-better-or-for-worse have subsequently achieved, to acknowledge the method is brutally effective.
I think it's moreso that a system like that would ultimately remove the ability for the parasite class to exist. Can't keep everyone tied to your goods and services if they are entirely capable of producing them themselves.
I'd recommend reading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin if you're interested in an in-depth depiction of how an egalitarian stateless society could function without money.
My novel The Dispossessed is about a small worldful of people who call themselves Odonians. The name is taken from the founder of their society, Odo, who lived several generations before the time of the novel, and who therefore doesn't get into the action-- except implicitly, in that all the action started with her.
Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic "libertarianism" of the far right; but anarchism. as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.
Yup but that would require the true ruling class to see their blood spilled to get it. Progressive people have tried and continue to try to push UBI throughout the world. In Canada alone we have had recent experiences both on the Federal and Provincial level. They intentionally get hamstrung or directly shut down to poison any potential results.
The longer we go without UBI the worse it's going to get. Christ look at youth unemployment globally let alone the general struggles youth are dealing with that didn't exist even 20 years ago. We need UBI yesterday but we are still struggling to get people to even entertain the concept of it.
Idk, man. This reads like something I'd get from a Homeschool Mom who thinks her kids are being held back by their schools' demand to learn advanced literacy and mathematics and physical sciences, instead of numerology and automatic writing. You do, in fact, want people to work outside their comfort zone. Especially when they're young and everything is outside their comfort zone.
Like, you don't actually want a guy with an obsessive desire to fix your plumbing to start work on something they're going to forget about in an hour after they fixate on something new. This is how you get half the plumbing in the neighborhood disassembled while the guy doing the work has gone into a shame spiral and won't leave the house.
You can argue about the merits of the Apprentice / Journeyman / Master system, but every project really does need a certain level of experienced skill involved. Working with a collection of amateur hobbyists gets you predictably amateur results. That's before you even get into what happens when your enthusiast plumber declares a jihad on imperial units and tries to covert half the pipes on the block to metric measures.
I've done a fair bit of DIY stuff in my home including various plumbing projects and it's all been doable with just reading manuals, watching videos and spending time thinking things through. That said blow torches scare me and I did everything with pipe cutters and sharkbite connectors and such, but it works, and I did what I could to make sure it was done well/correct because I need my plumbing to work.
My experience with commercial plumbers, mostly from when I was renting, is overall pretty bad and that they are mostly unwilling to think at all beyond the immediate billable job. There was a whole ordeal where water backing up from the drain kept flooding one of the rooms in my apartment from under the walls, and while fortunately my landlord was honest enough to call plumbers when this happened, just about every time they would use a drain snake, claim the problem was fixed without really checking, and then it would just happen again later. It ultimately turned out to be a problem with the pipes not being connected to the sewer where they met the street, and was finally fixed with city involvement, but it took a hell of a lot of advocating for myself and pushing back on bullshit explanations to get to the point where the real problem was even identified or acknowledged.
I am 100% convinced that just about any anarchist system of plumbing would be a significant improvement, though maybe the plan described in the OP image should be adjusted a bit away from hobbyist plumbers going around taking responsibility for the critical systems in other people's homes and towards a network of free expert advice, guidance, and tools to help people maintain their own living spaces, which they will naturally understand and care about on a level people who don't live there won't.
That is one huge advantage I bet you'd see in this anarchist plumbing system. The people would be self-selected to actually care about the thing they're doing.
That doesn't mean they're all going to be rational analytical thinkers tackling your problem from first principles, but it would be a big step up from how we do it now.
Because otherwise you get people dumping untreated shit in rivers because it doesnt affect them. Any kind of enforcement of rules requires a level of hierarchy, though that heirarchy can be democratized and distributed within all communities affected by those rules.
No doubt there's some mediocre professionals. But as a home owner myself the last twelve years, I've found at least as many professionals who were worth their weight. Meanwhile, the time I spend on YouTube DIY videos plus the actual home repairs rarely feels worth the effort.
I had to redo the master bath a few years back and I can't even dream of doing that alone, much less with my own inexperience.
Kinda similar. I work in HVAC-R. There are a ton of times where I'm working on a system where I would love to just spend a few more hours making part of it better and then another few hours streamlining things to make future work on it easier. But we charge $200 per hour so no customer wants me to spend 12 hours making their system perfect; they want me to spend 2 hours and just get it functional. If I didn't have to charge money for my time then not only would every system I touch run like a dream, but they would also be beautiful. As it is people more frequently wind up with duct taped functional travesties and then refuse any follow up work to fix it properly.
I invent utility and design patents, but am on disability and can't afford to patent them open-source. My brain and body won't let me have a regular job, but I could do this all day long if the social infrastructure was there
I would be taking care of other people's gardens. I'd encourage them to let me build habitats for native wildlife. And doing work outside is just so relaxing.
And I would build an alarm clock app, that lets you set the alarm according to the weather. It would allow you to set up alarms for snow and black ice. That way you can clear your section of sidewalk and use alternative transportation options to get to work.
Or maybe I'd open a repair-shop. One that also allows people to do the work themselves with tools and instruction.
I mean sure it's illegal, but it's a hell of a lot of unpaid work for an uncaring and often ungrateful consumers. You have to rip the Blu-ray, compress it to a standardized size, package it with file lists in some cases, put the appropriate metadata in the torrent and filename, then seed it for years at great personal risk.
I know much of that can be automated, but still...
I completely disagree. I think most people want to do something, but they don't have the means and opportunity to do a thing that fulfills them. I fucking HATE having a job. Coming to a place every day to do the same thing, it kills my motivation to do ANYTHING. The only reason I have one is to eat and to do the things I WANT to do. Usually pretty productive things, such as gardening, programming, repairs.
Those are all productive things. Things I COULD earn money for, but then they become work. I have to do them to survive, and so I no longer find the joy in doing them. If I could do them and not have to worry about bills being paid, I would by all accounts be a more productive member of society.
I don't think people are all that fundamentally different. We have some differences in preference, but when you get down to the basics the majority of people are pretty similar. Some will fall through the cracks or abuse the system, but by and large no one WANTS to be useless. That's a learned trait.
People like the person you reply to probably also don't think "sitting on your ass making art while just existing on the subsidy" isn't "productive enough" or some shit either.
Without realizing just how much of our current working society is built on completely pointless busy work nonsense. But its in an office and done in excel so its "Work" and its "productive" because it makes some rich asshole at the top richer.
If AI is doing one positive thing, its really really showing this out for the reality it is, because AI is pretty good at turning pointless data into equally pointless reports.
And I agree with you, people WANT to do things. I think even those dude who "don't want to bathe" want to do things yoo, they just may not be "productive" things, or maybe they don't want to bathe because they see the banality of everything we do in the world so why bother.
Exactly. No one gets to the point of not maintaining basic living standards when they're raised in an environment of excess, stability, and choice. You get to that level when you've either never experienced anything other, or been beaten down enough to realize it's pointless. Hell, I'd go as far as to say every thing living has the drive to get up and at least survive and procreate. They shut down and stop wasting energy when that seems impossible.
I would work literally any job if I knew I was genuinely helping my community become healthier, safer, and better able to enjoy life instead of the current system, where my labor only serves to put more money in the pockets of oligarchs.
you do realize that many of the most vital and least pleasant jobs are only performed because people have immense amounts of empathy or inherently want to do them, right?
Or do you think nurses have good wages and working conditions? lmfao
But nobody would be motivated to work if they grow up in a world where the broken ppl fixed everything so nobody becomes broken enough for their trauma to motivate them to obsessively fix the things that caused their trauma! We'd all die! Civilization would collapse! We need to traumatize ppl so they'd have ambition.
The problem is more definitional than anything else.
The basic proposition is to do valuable work, as others define value, in exchange for whatever you consider equivalent compensation.
If others don't see value in alternative ways of operating, you can help define it for them. Map any activity to either money made, money saved, or time saved, or maintenance avoided/automated and just watch how the tone of those "stick to your job description" conversations change.
As soon as you learn to put what matters to you in terms that matter to others, this problem is a whole lot easier to solve.
The guy obsessed with driving a bus or unclogging pipes isn't necessarily the same guy who can defend the value of those tasks. The profit motive redirects a lot of effort away from the task that needs doing to convincing others the task needs doing and for a living wage. But perhaps every imagined economic model will have a Convincing Stage. That could still be streamlined by removing the wage debate and guaranteeing everyone a livelihood.
Nobody said it had to be the same person doing all of it. You talk of social welfare nets like centrally mandated universal basic income, but you can't fathom a volunteerist grassroots community-driven effort. Weird how you want your society to be some bizarre faceless bureaucracy that gives you whatever you want like some magic vending machine.
But, if you're not going to be the one spending your time articulating other people's value, why is that a task that's important enough for someone else to do? If not you, then why would anyone else?
That's the problem with most people's utopian ideology. Most of it involves requiring things of some magical "others". These things aren't ever something that you're willing to give up any of your own time to do solely for someone else's benefit. The guy bitching about how someone should do something about all the litter in the street is somehow never the one to bend his own fat ass over to pick any of it up.
Funny how that works.
This is why America is in the situation it's in. Everyone wants someone else to solve their problems for them instead of showing up to participate more than one day every fourth November.
I think a livelihood can be obtained in a community-driven way without UBI or a welfare net. People shouldn't starve or go without a home or comforts just because they haven't convinced everybody else of their value yet.
A whole lot of people waste their entire lives bitching about what should not be, never lifting a finger to do anything about it, but yet expecting other people to undertake the labor that you will not do yourself.
I'd be doing pickup truck stuff. I'm already that guy to my friends, family, and coworkers. Dump runs, moving, transporting large purchases like furniture, or bulk purchases like potting soil. Hell, sometimes I get free wood from trees cut down to drag home, split, and give away free to the neighbors. I've definitely thought to myself before that with a salary and a gas budget I'd be content with just doing that all the time.
@Five this is fascinating. I’m sure I’m not alone in this: even just the internal bureaucracy and culture within a company suppresses (smothers) people, and, in some cases, deliberately prevents them from doing what they’re best at. I’m sure the theoretical free plumber you mentioned would be seen as a threat to the livelihoods of 50 different hedge fund backed outfits here in Las Vegas (Goettl for example…🖕you Goettl).
greed corruption uneducated lazy. if all crimes are legal, there's nothing stopping an easy fix. lawyers run cover by dragging things out for fees. the mad plumber would work for free if he didn't have bills to pay.
And worse, beneath wage slavery, the "benefits" "welfare" system, that blackmails you into not doing anything, nor appearing like you're doing anything, lest suffering imposed destitution, starvation, freezing, and death by denial of medicine access; and sometimes they'll cull you in an hour of hate anyway even if you were conforming. The worst "bullshit job".
So much lost potential.
Does rather evoke the notion of a genuine UBI & social dividend as superior. ... But can we get that arranged in a mutual decentralised way, not dependent upon those who promote and enact dehumanising culls and countless other abuses upon us?
I am a freak, i work off the clock at walmart. I do so because no one else besidese me and the 2 i trained care about cold chain. I buy from my store so i work extra hard to have everything edible. The rest of the store just doesn't care.
I think the OP way is still ways better than what we are currently doing. And done right it wouldn't be any more exploiting than what we are doing to neurotypicals. Everyone needs to feel valuable and that they have a purpose. I for one feel most alive when my skills are put to good use
No, both ways are completely shit - monetizing a hobby or a hyperfixation is the fastest way for it to burn out and make one hate it, speaking from experience. Companies as of "late" have been using this horseshit to get more out of young and impressionable people as well, by working them to the bone and "giving them purpose", making them burn out then throwing them away for the new generation.
That's not to mention the other issues if it worked as "intended" without burnout, such as increased competition depressing wages and creating more poverty since that's how capitalist mode of production works. The only way out is to abolish the present state of things, including wage labor so we make things for their use value, not profit.
It'd still be profit-oriented fundamentally, just more obfuscated since in this case the capitalist becomes the state, paying the worker a nonwage to reproduce their labor in exchange for the autistic service they provide to others. Within a private company, the worker is paid a wage to reproduce their labor in exchange for the service they provide to others.
I disagree. The exceptional ones who managed to actually find and fit into their niche are rare and far between in our current society because it doesn't offer an environment that allows them to thrive and survive. If we allowed each and every person in this country to explore and find their niche without having to worry about survival, I'd bet that density would go up DRASTICALLY.
Plumbing would still be a job without capitalism. Actually, come to think about it, plumbing is just about the least capitalist job there is. Most plumbers are small businesses owned by the laborers. Plumbing products are all mass produced, but the actual plumber is valued for their skills, not because they have the capital to corner a market. Plumbers in areas where corporate conglomerates are common are usually protected by unions, too.
If you want a job that wouldn't exist without capitalism, the answer is farmer. Sure, farmers are the backbone of any society, but farmers work the land, and the land has a lot of conditions. But you can buy avocados in Michigan in January, because someone realized that they can make money shipping avocados from warmer climates year round. It's terrible for the land, terrible for the environment, and terrible for local farmers who cannot compete in the race to the bottom, but the capitalist cares not for these things. Only profit nourishes the soul of the corporation.
this is especially true for researchers, most of us would work for free if we had the funding to
I know someone like that who cannot keep a job because of autism and health issues. Luckily she lives in a functioning country and gets state support including money and guidance. She is the regional pet/pony/alpaca carer and her house is always filled with animals from people on holiday or sick animals from people with full time jobs. She also notifies all the local farmers if one of their animals has an issue.
That's awesome! And I can entirely relate but my ADHD / autism isn't so bad I can't keep a job, but now with hindsight if could choose career path again I would leave the tech world of computers to work with animals. Instead I keep working in tech to afford filling my house with animals (at least as I work remotely I can spend a lot of time with them). Dogs, cats, fish, snakes, amphibians, parrots, ...
🥹
I hear there's 80% unemployment for we Autistics.
So much for the idea that the Nazis tried to make more autistic people because we're better workers.
Maybe in a different world, accepting of our different ways outside a very narrow conformity, it could be so. Irony. Heh.
So far, since self diagnosis, and formal diagnosis, I've mostly had abuse, rather than support. This functioning country stuff sounds very appealing.
I would literally be the jack of all trades
I'd happily do something completely different every couple of weeks
Not very practical with a 3 month notice period IRL
.... And yeah the whole needing to work to not die thing
Im 51. I've done this my entire life. My resume is vast and strange.
What's this gap in your resume? Oh, that's the two years I was a jeweler. What about this one? That time I managed a retail store. But you're applying for a manufacturing position sir. Yes, that's why I only left the relevant bits on the resume, otherwise it would be 7 pages long and you wouldn't be seeing me now.
You sound like Adam Savage
I've done this but staying roughly in the same field while changing roles. So it looks like I had a career!
I'm more or less a professional handyman, it can be done
Hey can you come over and install smart switches in my house, figure out what 6 light switches that control nothing are connected to, and find out where the 24 cut ethernet cables in my garage go? I'll pay you in setting up a home server, playing video games with you, or letting you pet my cat.
Lol, I have rejiggered a mess of Ethernet cables in my lifetime for sure
Ah 'rejiggered'. The man knows what he's talking about about.
It's the only way to handle something thats gone squeehawed or, Satan forbid, cattywampus.
Ah, anarchism
That's what I do for my friends. But finding out where wires go sucks.
Don't forget to take your medication today.
So the capitalist masters can keep me contained‽
3 month? Wtf?
Pretty standard where I live, for my job
I work at a tiny 10 person non-profit. I am by far the most computer literate person here by an order of magnitude, given my completely wasted software engineering degree. I offered in my downtime at work to fix a bunch of laptops used by our kids in the after school program that were malfunctioning in some way or another.
I was told to stick to my job description by our Executive Director, and that they'd contact an external IT person to deal with it. I'm an Admin Assistant, which TBH kind of means I wear many hats anyway so my job description is very broad...
So here I am, twiddling my thumbs, posting on Lemmy instead.
Its not only giant corporations. Its infected every modern manager/executive brain. And I want to say, the executive director at my work I consider "one of the good executives". At least by comparison.
(My immediate superior I like... less. She'll do something wrong, I'll try to fix it, and I'll get reprimanded for trying to fix it.)
...
This sounds incredibly top-heavy for such a small company. The fact that you got micro-managed like that in such a rediculously small outfit is kind of unheard of, frankly. Usually small companies are the exact opposite, where there's one owner/operator, the job titles are largely made-up, and everyone just gets everything done because there's usually not enough expertise-hours to go around to solo every task.
If i had to guess they contract work out or just redirect that money
I meant executives in general, not specifically at my workplace. There is only 1 person with the title "Executive" and shes generally pretty decent.
My immediate boss is the Youth (After School) Program Director and they don't have true executive powers, they just have basic supervisory powers.
I will say, before the Youth Director was hired though, we all generally operated fairly autonomously and without issue, things went smoothly. Since my boss was hired, two separate youth counselors quit, one because her hours were cut (One of the few decisions I found pretty dumb by the executive director) and another specifically because she found my immediate bosses decision making actively hampered the quality of our program and she wasn't working there for the money.
I was once told I should apply for my bosses position and at the time I found the idea completely unattractive. I now regret not applying given who has ended up there.
Because it's fucked exactly how she likes it, you trying to unfuck it messes up her whole system ;)
Most people quite literally think they are above admin assistants.
Imagine the cleaning lady rolls up and fixes the bug you spent hours on in a few seconds.
I worked at a company where the cleaning lady was considerably more intelligent than most of the managers. But you was held back because her English wasn't really very good yet so she had to take what work she could.
Meanwhile the managers would rock in at 11:30 and immediately go on an hour lunch break. Usually they would then demand a meeting in the afternoon so they could get up to speed with what everyone was doing which was only necessary because they have been AWOL for the past 4 hours.
As we go back to the future, may I paraphrase Doc Emmett Brown:
We need UBI (Universal Basic Income). People should have the choice to work, if they want more money or love their job. Not being forced: a choice.
If someone wants to follow a path that is not financial viable - be it art or just a hobby - that should be possible, too.
Life would become better for nearly everyone. Art would get a new golden age, people would no longer fear financial ruin, happiness and personal fulfillment all around.
Also paying people starvation wages or treating them badly would no longer work. Employees would have to be treated well or they would simply leave. Great wages and good conditions more or less guaranteed. People could support a big family and a nice house on a single wage again.
The only persons not happy would be the ultra rich, the exploiter, the CEOs. Because this would only work if everyone pays their due and the 1% no longer hoard the wealth.
I think this could create the best possible future, an utopia - if only our politicians were not bought and paid for. But sadly they are - and wealth only goes towards the rich, while we get poorer every generation.
I hope I live to see the day when the people notice that the rich rigged the game and react accordingly.
Paying people starvation wages, healthcare tied to employment; treating people badly- these are the type of thing that people fighting against UBI really actually like. Like enthusiastically want.
Yeah, to get a bunch of the working class to vote against their interests you need to give them somebody to look down on.
They don't just want to look down on someone, they're so propagandized to by the ultra wealthy they do it for free.
Ultimately getting people to vote against their best interest is quite common, maybe even more common that voting in their best interest because of all the compromise with capitalists stuff. Wanting to address affordability but not addressing capitalism is like bargaining with a virus.
UBI is not the solution, but a great first step towards a better system.
To make it work well, you need strong regulations on a lot of systems: banks, utilities, corporations.
At some point it will be easier to just give the state control of everything concerning basic needs. Then to control institutions that 'fight back' the most against regulations, like banks and mega corporations.
You see where this might lead?
It's a slow way towards a better economic system without the need for a revolution.
Your analysis is too light. The state isn't some magical benevolent entity which is somehow "on the wrong path". The state is an instrument of domination driven by the dominating class: the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is against everything you cited. It will not slowly act against its own interest, willingly lose power and dominance. It will always fight for, at the minimum, keeping power.
That is why historically the only way to have changes that contradict the dominating entity's interest is for the dominated entity to band together. It's the only way anything ever changes: the balance of forces moves in the interest of the dominated. Women didn't earn the right to vote because men were nice, but because women fought for it. Social progress never happens because the bourgeoisie is nice (that's a very nice propaganda trick) but because the bourgeoisie has to compromise.
Waiting/wishing/hoping for the state to be nice, which is what asking for ubi is, and the "revolution without violence" the socdem has pushed about, never works. As long as the people who are legitimate are dominated, it will not happen.
Let's stop dreaming in idealistic what-ifs and act in materialist actions. The material conditions define our existence. Let's set our material conditions of existence, without asking nicely, and the balance of power will force the dominating power to compromise.
We've had 100 years of unopposed reformism, and look where we are 🥀
The state isn't some friend that exists for the public good, it literally dances to bourgeois private interests by design. There will be no UBI or better healthcare or whatever unless material conditions and bourgeois interests necessitate it (to prevent a proletariat revolution is one example). There's a reason why it's called a dictatorship of the bourgeois.
Ubi would never happen, and if it did they would constantly remove people from the roles until it was a subsidy to their supporters, a patronage.
Looking at medicaid and food assistance, I do not see how anyone could think it would not be ratfucked if it got through in the first place.
I totally agree. There needs to be some financial mechanisms for keeping people from becoming insanely wealthy coupled with financial mechanisms preventing people from becoming impoverished. The obvious solutions are taxes that increase with income and wealth along with UBI that someone can reasonably live off of. All of this requires regulation and strict enforcement of tax laws, especially for the most wealthy. The rich know this and actively work against it. Probably the most effective method has been for them to buy up all the mass media and pump out capitalist and anti-intelectualist propaganda. We can't change anything if half the people drank the coolaid and actively fight against their own interests and for the interests of the rich. I don't know how bad things will have to get for those people to wake up. Hopefully not much worse but at this point I'm afraid it might take a real civil war for things to change, at least in the USA. Possibly even a world war with how things are going. We're already barreling towards that cliff with the federal governments foot on the gas... I just hope I live through it.
All we have to do is make better kool aid to give them.. Electric kool aid acid.
I would implement an Universal Wage Cap, and Universal Basic Products and Services.
The first doesn't allow to earn above certain point, everything beyond that gets taxed.
The second one ensures that people don't need to pay for their most basic needs.
I have been workshopping a similar concept, though it goes a bit further. Income is ranked - the lowest rank being UBI. When you are being educated or hold a job, your UBI income is replaced with a greater amount of money. Education has sub-ranks based on your grades, to help encourage people to take a job once they have acquired the credentials to do so. Jobs come as five ranks, based on the Effort, Risk, and Knowledge they require. $10k for UBI. $10k to $20k for education. $40k a year for the lowest jobs, such as clerks or waiters. $60k for more strenuous or educated tasks, such as warehouse workers, police, or librarians. $80k for firemen, and $100k for the last rank. Astronauts are an example of the highest grade.
Leadership roles don't automatically receive a pay grade. Workers have to vote for the income of leadership, which is taken from the company after normal employees are paid. Earning retirement pay is 1:1, with each day worked, earning a day of retirement income. As AI automation becomes more common, displaced workers can enter a lotto to receive an job-based income. Companies using AI have to pay into the lotto, because they have wealth caps based on the amount of jobs they are paying for. So a company with lots of employees or job sponsorships has a larger amount of money it can contain. Sponsored jobs can vote on leadership pay and actions, just like employees.
There is a bunch of other details, but the intent is to create a system of absolute limits on wealth and income from all sources. This helps limits corruption and excessive wealth, plus it fights inflation because everything's cost will be based on how much income society receives.
That still uses money as incentive.
I would give as incentive more free time.
I also like the idea of reducing as much as possible the need for having to pay for basic stuff, so instead a basic income I would guarantee basic housing, food, electricity, etc. for free and use wages to get those improved however you want.
The first one creates job availability and the second one makes them less like a need.
I would try to avoid as much as possible having higher wage caps, instead I think it would be better to give better perks that give the opportunity to save money.
It's very hard for me to express myself, specially in another language.
That is fine about the expression. Time and practice will improve it.
Anyhow, I think free time comes from limiting the amount of hours people can work each week, and making it so that doing more time doesn't make more money. Income is given as a lump sum each month, and that a company is obligated to pay a month's income if someone is fired. This makes it so that companies genuinely choose who works for them and incentivizes the retention of trained workers, all the while emphasizing genuine efficiency at the workplace.
Also, naturalization should be a nearly automatic process, with acceptance of the naturalization by the worker being the part with friction.
Anyhow, I will toss out my slide deck. I built it several months ago to explain my economic concepts.
You support UBI because it would create an utopia
I support UBI because it would literally destroy the economy
We are not the same
It wouldn't destroy the economy, just the shareholders profit.
And that is the risk they signed up for.
It wouldn't decrease profits in any way, in fact it'd bolster them temporarily given how everyone has more money to spend. Companies will respond in turn to bump up their prices, negating any kind of increase in purchasing power (what happens every time minimum wages get increased), and once everything catches up and it becomes the new "normal", profit rates will continue to drop as they always have.
Meanwhile the states will bleed money paying everyone UBI and go in debt even faster which would result in austerity, abolishment of UBI, or more excuses to cut other welfare programs. There's a reason why there are pretty much no welfare states anymore.
Japan sort of has that thing going.
Ningen Kokuhō or Living National Treasures get paid by the government just to keep doing something culturally significant. Like making clay pots or arrows using traditional techniques. Preserving Kabuki or performing arts.
Honestly it's amazing to recognize the significance oby supporting masters of certain crafts. Otherwise some might not find it financially sustainable and cut corners, well this allows them to keep traditions and preserve valuable techniques.
Can we do this for Primitive Technology guy so he can go make iron in the woods full time?
he would be forging steel already, if not for the need to get out of the woods to make money
Love that kids videos, I am trying his wood ash into portland cement method here as soon as it is warm enough. Mix ash with water, roll into balls, fire until glowing, then drop in water while hot, the fast temp change calcifies something and makes a product identical to portland cement. At which point you mix with aggregate like broken ceramics or gravel. I do maple ayrup, and have a woodstove I just put in so I have a ton of woodash.
I'm a big fan of the concept of an universal basic income. Where everyone gets ~1000€ every month from the government. For children, the parents get the money.
And I mean everyone. Every legal resident. Including billionaires.
To finance it I would tax both income and capital gains at ~50%. From the very first € you earn.
The net tax load on most people would not actually change much. But it completely gets rid of situations where if people work more, loose their benefits and end up with less.
1000€ should be just about enough to life a frugal lifestyle. A flat with a partner or flatmate in a small town. Produce to cook a flexitarian diet. A public transport pass and a bicycle. A Samsung Galaxy A17 with an internet plan. And all those other real necessities of life.
If people want luxuries, they will still have to work. Someone still has to produce those consumables after all. But everyone should be able to get all of their basic necessities covered.
Im already taxed like 20% in the US and see nothing for it. May as well do 50 and actualy get something of value for society
it's a good idea but it requires that costs don't adapt. that 800€ apartment you wanted? well since you're already getting a subsidy it's now 1600€. after all, if you discount the subsidy it's cheaper!
Exactly. What's to keep the sellers from just jacking everything up?
College was expensive, but affordable, until the government made it easier to get student loans. Colleges responded by wildly jacking up their prices, and now you literally have to voluntarily take on a lifetime of debt to get a college degree for a job that probably won't cover the cost of your loan. And what did the government do? They went right along with it, and demand repayment before anything else.
They recently started a benefit program with Medicare that gives you some money each month to buy health related items in drugstores and such, and they responded by jacking up the prices in Walgreens and CVS.
I'm all for UBI as well, but it has to comes with price controls so the corporate parasites don't just take it all. UBI Gouging has to be a harshly enforced crime.
What we need is to jail people who do exploitive shit like this. Just like any other harmful acticity we jail people for.
Or maybe jusr, OP's 50% tax deal ramps up the more acxumulated wealth and property you have. Tonstrongly discourage that practice. Like sure, you exploited your rent holdings and you are a ten millionaire. But now we are taxing you at 100% so we can bump people's UBI subsidy up enough to account for your exploitation.
Good job, you accomplished nothing in the end.
We can't jail them without a law that makes it illegal.
And if we introduce rent control, we need to replace it with other incentives to build new apartment buildings. Ideally ones that create a slight oversupply of housing. Otherwise, in a decade or so, you get cheap rent but tons of homeless people because the supply is insufficient.
The incentive is that its what is good for society and good for everyone. The ince tive is doing good. Because people need places to live.
Needs of the many vs needs of the few and all that.
Laws can be made. Laws are all made in the first place.
Building apartments currently cost about a quarter million per unit. Plus interest on the mortgage. Most potential landlords don't just have millions in liquid funds.
Nobody will be taking out loans like that if they won't even earn their investment back if everything goes to plan.
well that's a uniquely us problem which doesn't really apply to the rest of the world.
I don't doubt that. In America, our government encourages the Sociopathic Oligarchs to exploit us. That's why they love it so much here.
Yes, it definitely has to be recalculated frequently. If it doesn't, it will be about as useful as the US minimum wage after some time.
But as I said, most people wouldn't have significantly more or less money than they do today. At least I carefully calculated those numbers so that most people would have pretty much the same, for Germany in 2019. So I don't really expect prices to go up drastically.
It's not that people suddenly have 1000€ extra. Either their unemployment benefits get replaced by that UBI, or they now have to pay an extra 1000€ in taxes.
it's not even supposed to be an "extra 1000€ in taxes", it would just be gradually eaten up by taxes the more you make.
the big problem is, a lot of people on long-term sick pay who are not allowed to work would get less from this system. there needs to be something to deal with that.
Currently the tax rate is progressive. In the future it wouldn't be anymore. But because those progressive taxes only apply to income over a certain threshold, people with lower incomes would profit more.
This system would not replace social security. If you get a pension due to age or sickness or in your first year of unemployment, you would still be covered by your mandatory insurance. Same with your mandatory health insurance. And you'd still have to pay for it on top of your taxes. The employee and the employer pay 20% of the gross income each.
it's my understanding that the system would replace social security. the savings from slimming down the systems responsible for payout would be part of what made the entire thing possible.
It would replace long term unemployment benefits. And minimum pension. The benefits that are paid directly by the government, not mandatory insurance.
It would be mostly financed through getting rid of progressive taxes.
isn't a progressive taxation system meant to ramp up as you earn more, not down? that would lose you money by getting rid of it.
Which is why UBI should be coupled with UBS (universal basic services). In this context, at the very least there would exist also a rental board (like Quebec's existing Regie du Logement). If you're more ambitious, housing would be a universal service and taken out of the market altogether. And don't forget that that 1600E income of the landlord would be also taxed.
More generally: https://ubiadvocates.org/inflation-and-ubi-separating-fact-from-fiction/
Public cheap housing, public cheap supermarkets, public free universal health system and public free universal education system.
Free as in payed by taxes.
Billionaires should not exist and their existence should not be tolerated.
Yes. If someone has a million times the median wealth, there's something wrong with the system.
But how is that relevant here?
That statement is just about how there's no means test.
I'm a big fan of it in concept, but TBH the pandemic made me think twice about it. By that I mean, I watched quite a lot of people get put on furlough, so essentially having their needs met while not having to work, and they went fucking crazy, like screaming fights in the shared hallway over literally nothing at 6am crazy. And it happened really fast too. I think a lot of people are so indoctrinated into the concept of having to show up to work and be told what to do that they kind of short-circuit when left to work it out for themselves.
Not that I think we shouldn't do it necessarily, and I'd hope over time it would even out as people got used to it, but it would need to be done very carefully I think. Even if the math and the politics of it make sense, you also have to sort of account for the irrationality of people as well, which I don't often hear a lot of discussion about.
Many people also go crazy like that right after they retire. At least for a while. Structure is important for humans, and many find it difficult to create structure themselves.
But an UBI wouldn't mean that people would suddenly be out of work. They 'd still have to work to keep their lifestyle
Just to put my 2 cents on the plate, it seems like a lot of people are stuck in living arrangements they don't actually want to be in, purely for economic reasons. Lots of personality mismatch in close quarters, work is an escape. UBI would probably break apart lots of lives, but hopefully people will build back better.
In respect to being paid to work on hobbies, a lot of the tech sector was furloughed as well. FOSS projects massively improved, seemingly overnight. I've dabbled with Linux on and off during the 2010s, 2021 felt like the year where everything finally clicked together, now I run Linux and FOSS on everything where possible. I'm not sure how to find data to dispute or support that link tho, might just be me.
we need time to collectively un-domesticate our thinking, and to basically recover enough of our lost human identity to even have bandwidth to imagine some way of life other than wage-slavery. It won't be easy or quick to undo generations worth of programming, but the disruption is coming either way, AI and the looming collapse demand it.
Covid also woke lots of people up. Suddenly families had time to spend together (including dysfunctional ones), suddenly normies realised that maybe giant pharmaceutical companies actually don't care about the population's health so much. It showed people that governments can and will drastically intervene in their lives (including by making money rain from the sky) when there is some threat of elite interests actually being effected. It was a huge, scary and unprecedented event, so it makes sense that people would freak the fuck out. You'll notice i didn't even get into mandates or the insane mania our media pushed during the period.
IDK there was more going on than just 'people suddenly had free time again'. But you're right lots of people are already so conditioned that the thought of having the ability to spend their own limited earthly time however they wish literally scares them. These people have been separated from their own humanity, and even if the work is painful they deserve to be recovered as anyone else.
sorry but this is kind of insane logic, it's almost literally "if i free my slaves they wouldn't be able to feed themselves"
I don't think it's an argument worth even thinking about, if it's an actual problem it's something that can be dealt with. Talking about it just gives fuel for people who want to prevent anything from ever changing for the better.
People need cars to live where I am. There is no public transportation and cycling is far too dangerous, no one even tries. They give up their homes before their cars. Tons of people living on UBI would be living in their cars.
In a political climate where you could actually implement UBI, you would also be able to implement walkability policies.
Also, e-bikes. E-bikes is where it's at.
Yeah e bikes aren't even allowed on the roads for now. The walkability problem is a matter of the billions and billions of dollars it would take to essentially redo every road in the county. Some zoning changes could help a little but we're generations of work away from being walkable
I'm being speculative, right?
The trick is to implement temporary measures at first. Like turning a lane into a sidewalk and a bike lane, by placing planters. Then when it's time to renew the road anyway, the status quo only has one car lane in each direction.
In that situation there will be both the money and the will to build a grade separated sidewalk and bike lane.
Our roads are already only one lane in each direction. No shoulder, no sidewalks. Sometimes they're marked as narrow and only one car can get through at a time. It's a ditch in the side, not grass. People get killed on these roads all the time. Widening the roads means imminent domain land seizures, adding underground waste water runoff capability, and adding all of the infrastructure you're describing. I won't see 5% if our roads fixed before I die.
That should be the case every 200m or so, if there is no sidewalk. It's really effective at slowing drivers down.
With a speed limit of around 10km/h streets like that can be safe and pretty comfortable for pedestrians
These are roads big trucks drive at 100kkmh on all day long. Hilly roads with blind curves. No one goes anywhere without a car here.
Yeah not in rural areas, we need cars.
Now, im all for banning bro trucks and crossovers over 3500 lbs. If you cant get by with a miata or a wagon, you have to get a special license for a bigger vehicle and pay more because youre damaging the road and endangering others 10x more in your 10,000lb f350 diesel.
Housing in rural areas is usually dirt cheap.
So you can probably afford a car and a rural apartment for the cost of a transit pass and apartment in a well-connected town
Totally. And for me thats better, I like having a house and garage with space. I dont mind not being in a busy city center because I feel caged in, and all there is to do in those places us go to bars all the time, something ive never been into.
I go downtown to the arcade sometimes or out to the fitness center/rock wall by my place and thats plenty for me. Sometimes go to the local theater plays and movies. All a 10 minute drive
Rural areas, sure. Suburban and urban where the majority of humans live, no.
yeah, reminder that even the USA has an 80% urban population! (below is per-state percentages)
Half the US population lives in these counties:
And
Then buy a different 200€ phone?
Iphone SE3 is like $130 refurbished, if you're into iPhones. My partner has it and they have no complaints.
UBI is a billionaire slop ideology to defuse political tension with gifts, accelerating capital accumulation in the process. It places the 99% as clients of a power-holding elite. It'll produce a few generations of hapless losers, who'll be utterly incapable of defending their rights when they eventually roll a cruel patron that decides to take it away.
Statistically, university students, part-time employees and non working people in single income households are the most active in protests. They have the time, the means and the education to do so.
Wage slaves don't have time. And if they unionize they might get fired and not have anything anymore. So they don't.
A UBI means everyone is capable of protesting. Why would that produce hapless loosers?
Exactly. UBI is a reactionary socialist concept. It is a bandage for a bigger issue, meant to appease so as not to incite revolt. However the real issue is a commodity economy / money. Its really hard to get the masses on board with abolishing that without global revolution.
I obsessively/compulsively update and optimize computers. I see a missing driver or BIOS update not installed? A dusty CPU Fan? A security alert? I fix. I literally just went to bed after running "sudo dnf update -y && Sudo flatpak upgrade -y" on my wife's laptop that she doesn't even use! Thankfully, my work lets me tinker on machines all day, every day, and nobody cares if a side project shows up on the bench every now and then. I would do it for free if I didn't need the money. When I'm not at work, I do IT for family, and I volunteer at the library. I don't even game anymore, I self host and tinker. Hell, I spend more time mucking with Jellyfin than watching media. There are people like that. We exist.
I was like this, it eventually got kind of boring, now I'm learning beekeeping and old clock repair in the 7.5 hours a day leftover now that I've automated my job. Sorry "waiting for a maintenance window to do a server migration" or whatever it is people think I do.
Can you tell Me why Jellyfin keeps playing media with black bars across the screen? Every time I start playback, it's a die roll whether I get a black screen, horizontal stripes, vertical stripes, a grid of black lines, or a perfectly ordinary video. I usually have to start and stop a video two or three times at the beginning to get good playback. The problem seems to get worse when My root partition is more full.
That's a surprisingly complicated question! If you post the playback info, that might help. Also, what are you hosting Jellyfin on, what OS, environment, gpu? Do the same videos pay back clean in VLC? Does the computer posting back the media have scaling, or a weird OS? I have my Jellyfin in a Proxmox container and had all kinds of issues when passing a (very old) GPU through, but without it I can't get 4k. I have more than a few movies where I manually re-encoded them before putting them on Jellyfin and kept the source file zipped up for storage.
Thanks for helping! I'm both hosting and playing it on a CachyOS (Arch) KDE machine with an Intel i5 and NVIDIA RTX, and the videos are fine on VLC, Haruna, and mpv.
I love customizing the art and movie ratings on my jellyfin
Sounds a bit naive on paper.
But thinking about it, I want to fact-check wikipedia sources for a living. Also make tools to automate shit. Also I fucking love assembling and fixing furniture so I could do that too.
No need to even pay. As long as I am not homeless or starving to death I would be happy and fulfilled doing those kind of work.
Tho I do think doctors and teachers etc should still make some extra money for the years of expertise before even starting the work.
It's a good thing I'm a wage slave, because otherwise, I'd build the Omnissiah.
Your kind cling to your flesh as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude Biomass you call a Temple will wither and you will beg my kind to save you.
This is me but obsessively analyzing the artistic merits of low brow mediums like animation and video games
It's one of those things I'd love to see done as an experiment as long as it could be done ethically. Build a little town somewhere and have no prescribed jobs, just let everyone do what they want and see how it pans out.
Another one I'd like to see is to have two areas as identical as possible - same geography, climate, resources etc. and populate one fully with left-wing people and one with right-wing people and see which one does better. Unfetterd Socialist Utopia vs Unrestricted Ayn Rand Libertarian Boot-strappery or whatever. Settle it once and for all lol.
I believe you've got a fantastic idea here, not only to see how this one idea pans out, but to learn how we might build a better society. There's little reason we couldn't simultaneously have multiple test centres, each using a different system. Scientific method 101.
China famously began its modern transformation in the 80s by creating Special Economic Zones. These were cities where many of the economic rules for the rest of the country wouldn't apply, and where new theories could be tested. There's no need to agree with the goals China was pursuing, and for-better-or-for-worse have subsequently achieved, to acknowledge the method is brutally effective.
You are not wrong. But I wish you were.
The problem is that a system like that would benefit a lot of people instead of just the parasitic owner class.
We can't just go around, doing stuff, without our
evildivine overlords earning their share! It simply wouldn't be fair to our corporate slave-owners.I think it's moreso that a system like that would ultimately remove the ability for the parasite class to exist. Can't keep everyone tied to your goods and services if they are entirely capable of producing them themselves.
This is why a ubi is so essential when society evolves to a post scarcity state.
I'd recommend reading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin if you're interested in an in-depth depiction of how an egalitarian stateless society could function without money.
Her short story "The Day Before The Revolution" is a good add-on to this too, and the preface is interesting IMO.
Thank you for the rec I’ll check it out!
UBI? You mean Unstoppable Bot Invasion?
🤣😆🤣🤣😆😂😂
Yup but that would require the true ruling class to see their blood spilled to get it. Progressive people have tried and continue to try to push UBI throughout the world. In Canada alone we have had recent experiences both on the Federal and Provincial level. They intentionally get hamstrung or directly shut down to poison any potential results.
The longer we go without UBI the worse it's going to get. Christ look at youth unemployment globally let alone the general struggles youth are dealing with that didn't exist even 20 years ago. We need UBI yesterday but we are still struggling to get people to even entertain the concept of it.
Hopefully we can keep Doug Ford away from it this time.
We should push for a UBMI
Universal Bare Minimum Income
"Basic" is debatable
Hard to argue everyone needs the bare minimum
Maybe they aren't going to be able to buy their art supplies at first. But it's definitely a start.
Wonderful thing about art is that multiple people can share the same crayon box
Idk, man. This reads like something I'd get from a Homeschool Mom who thinks her kids are being held back by their schools' demand to learn advanced literacy and mathematics and physical sciences, instead of numerology and automatic writing. You do, in fact, want people to work outside their comfort zone. Especially when they're young and everything is outside their comfort zone.
Like, you don't actually want a guy with an obsessive desire to fix your plumbing to start work on something they're going to forget about in an hour after they fixate on something new. This is how you get half the plumbing in the neighborhood disassembled while the guy doing the work has gone into a shame spiral and won't leave the house.
You can argue about the merits of the Apprentice / Journeyman / Master system, but every project really does need a certain level of experienced skill involved. Working with a collection of amateur hobbyists gets you predictably amateur results. That's before you even get into what happens when your enthusiast plumber declares a jihad on imperial units and tries to covert half the pipes on the block to metric measures.
I've done a fair bit of DIY stuff in my home including various plumbing projects and it's all been doable with just reading manuals, watching videos and spending time thinking things through. That said blow torches scare me and I did everything with pipe cutters and sharkbite connectors and such, but it works, and I did what I could to make sure it was done well/correct because I need my plumbing to work.
My experience with commercial plumbers, mostly from when I was renting, is overall pretty bad and that they are mostly unwilling to think at all beyond the immediate billable job. There was a whole ordeal where water backing up from the drain kept flooding one of the rooms in my apartment from under the walls, and while fortunately my landlord was honest enough to call plumbers when this happened, just about every time they would use a drain snake, claim the problem was fixed without really checking, and then it would just happen again later. It ultimately turned out to be a problem with the pipes not being connected to the sewer where they met the street, and was finally fixed with city involvement, but it took a hell of a lot of advocating for myself and pushing back on bullshit explanations to get to the point where the real problem was even identified or acknowledged.
I am 100% convinced that just about any anarchist system of plumbing would be a significant improvement, though maybe the plan described in the OP image should be adjusted a bit away from hobbyist plumbers going around taking responsibility for the critical systems in other people's homes and towards a network of free expert advice, guidance, and tools to help people maintain their own living spaces, which they will naturally understand and care about on a level people who don't live there won't.
Ah, you nailed the secret in the first sentence!
That is one huge advantage I bet you'd see in this anarchist plumbing system. The people would be self-selected to actually care about the thing they're doing.
That doesn't mean they're all going to be rational analytical thinkers tackling your problem from first principles, but it would be a big step up from how we do it now.
Anarchist plumbing is a terrifying concept.
Shit flows down hill, why do we need a hierarchy to make that work?
Because otherwise you get people dumping untreated shit in rivers because it doesnt affect them. Any kind of enforcement of rules requires a level of hierarchy, though that heirarchy can be democratized and distributed within all communities affected by those rules.
Getting punched in the face by your neighbors doesn't require a hierarchy
No doubt there's some mediocre professionals. But as a home owner myself the last twelve years, I've found at least as many professionals who were worth their weight. Meanwhile, the time I spend on YouTube DIY videos plus the actual home repairs rarely feels worth the effort.
I had to redo the master bath a few years back and I can't even dream of doing that alone, much less with my own inexperience.
We don't need wage labour in order to have experts.
We need organization, certification, and oversight of projects.
A random assortment of freelance hobbyists is very different than a horizontally organized Plumber's union.
Kinda similar. I work in HVAC-R. There are a ton of times where I'm working on a system where I would love to just spend a few more hours making part of it better and then another few hours streamlining things to make future work on it easier. But we charge $200 per hour so no customer wants me to spend 12 hours making their system perfect; they want me to spend 2 hours and just get it functional. If I didn't have to charge money for my time then not only would every system I touch run like a dream, but they would also be beautiful. As it is people more frequently wind up with duct taped functional travesties and then refuse any follow up work to fix it properly.
Not that I've had much luck with this, but I have tried to explain to customers/managers that the work is like to do is preventative.
Sure it's "expensive" now, but this reduces potential failures AND reduces maintenance time in the future.
This means we spend $ now, but save $$ later 🤷🏻♂️
Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of the cure
I invent utility and design patents, but am on disability and can't afford to patent them open-source. My brain and body won't let me have a regular job, but I could do this all day long if the social infrastructure was there
Honestly, if I was given time for it and a wage where I wouldn't have to worry at all, I would probably be building drywalls.
I would be taking care of other people's gardens. I'd encourage them to let me build habitats for native wildlife. And doing work outside is just so relaxing.
And I would build an alarm clock app, that lets you set the alarm according to the weather. It would allow you to set up alarms for snow and black ice. That way you can clear your section of sidewalk and use alternative transportation options to get to work.
Or maybe I'd open a repair-shop. One that also allows people to do the work themselves with tools and instruction.
Exactly. I don't even think that service could be offered any cheaper than having an employee do the repair.
But it's fun. And it gives people insight into repairability, they can use for their next purchase.
Wikipedia editors
People who create and upload torrents
I mean sure it's illegal, but it's a hell of a lot of unpaid work for an uncaring and often ungrateful consumers. You have to rip the Blu-ray, compress it to a standardized size, package it with file lists in some cases, put the appropriate metadata in the torrent and filename, then seed it for years at great personal risk.
I know much of that can be automated, but still...
It's crazy how spot on this guy actually is, this wild dude honestly unclogs drains for the love of it: https://youtu.be/95ATNSkGF3Y
There are plenty of jobs people don't want to do unless they're compelled. Lots of people wouldn't even bathe if there wasn't social pressure.
objectively wrong
I completely disagree. I think most people want to do something, but they don't have the means and opportunity to do a thing that fulfills them. I fucking HATE having a job. Coming to a place every day to do the same thing, it kills my motivation to do ANYTHING. The only reason I have one is to eat and to do the things I WANT to do. Usually pretty productive things, such as gardening, programming, repairs.
Those are all productive things. Things I COULD earn money for, but then they become work. I have to do them to survive, and so I no longer find the joy in doing them. If I could do them and not have to worry about bills being paid, I would by all accounts be a more productive member of society.
I don't think people are all that fundamentally different. We have some differences in preference, but when you get down to the basics the majority of people are pretty similar. Some will fall through the cracks or abuse the system, but by and large no one WANTS to be useless. That's a learned trait.
I'm glad you realized your comment missed the point entirely.
yeah sorry read it in a rush
People like the person you reply to probably also don't think "sitting on your ass making art while just existing on the subsidy" isn't "productive enough" or some shit either.
Without realizing just how much of our current working society is built on completely pointless busy work nonsense. But its in an office and done in excel so its "Work" and its "productive" because it makes some rich asshole at the top richer.
If AI is doing one positive thing, its really really showing this out for the reality it is, because AI is pretty good at turning pointless data into equally pointless reports.
And I agree with you, people WANT to do things. I think even those dude who "don't want to bathe" want to do things yoo, they just may not be "productive" things, or maybe they don't want to bathe because they see the banality of everything we do in the world so why bother.
Exactly. No one gets to the point of not maintaining basic living standards when they're raised in an environment of excess, stability, and choice. You get to that level when you've either never experienced anything other, or been beaten down enough to realize it's pointless. Hell, I'd go as far as to say every thing living has the drive to get up and at least survive and procreate. They shut down and stop wasting energy when that seems impossible.
There are a startling number of dudes who don't wash their ass
Yeah, but there are plenty of dudes that would compulsively wash every ass in a 10-mile radius.
I'm picturing dudes in halter tops setting up what looks like a car wash in the parking lot but it's for ass
I too have been to a comic con.
Well at least they won't commit crimes out of desperation like joining the military industry complex or worse Nazi-militia groups like ICE
I would work literally any job if I knew I was genuinely helping my community become healthier, safer, and better able to enjoy life instead of the current system, where my labor only serves to put more money in the pockets of oligarchs.
you do realize that many of the most vital and least pleasant jobs are only performed because people have immense amounts of empathy or inherently want to do them, right?
Or do you think nurses have good wages and working conditions? lmfao
You think being a nurse is even close to the least pleasant job?
And every single one of them would have a YouTube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/@Physicsduck/shorts
But nobody would be motivated to work if they grow up in a world where the broken ppl fixed everything so nobody becomes broken enough for their trauma to motivate them to obsessively fix the things that caused their trauma! We'd all die! Civilization would collapse! We need to traumatize ppl so they'd have ambition.
Realists be like
Comrades, we have to be comfortable calling capitalists “larcenists/thieves/robers/stealers” so folks actually get the problem.
The problem is more definitional than anything else.
The basic proposition is to do valuable work, as others define value, in exchange for whatever you consider equivalent compensation.
If others don't see value in alternative ways of operating, you can help define it for them. Map any activity to either money made, money saved, or time saved, or maintenance avoided/automated and just watch how the tone of those "stick to your job description" conversations change.
As soon as you learn to put what matters to you in terms that matter to others, this problem is a whole lot easier to solve.
The guy obsessed with driving a bus or unclogging pipes isn't necessarily the same guy who can defend the value of those tasks. The profit motive redirects a lot of effort away from the task that needs doing to convincing others the task needs doing and for a living wage. But perhaps every imagined economic model will have a Convincing Stage. That could still be streamlined by removing the wage debate and guaranteeing everyone a livelihood.
Nobody said it had to be the same person doing all of it. You talk of social welfare nets like centrally mandated universal basic income, but you can't fathom a volunteerist grassroots community-driven effort. Weird how you want your society to be some bizarre faceless bureaucracy that gives you whatever you want like some magic vending machine.
But, if you're not going to be the one spending your time articulating other people's value, why is that a task that's important enough for someone else to do? If not you, then why would anyone else?
That's the problem with most people's utopian ideology. Most of it involves requiring things of some magical "others". These things aren't ever something that you're willing to give up any of your own time to do solely for someone else's benefit. The guy bitching about how someone should do something about all the litter in the street is somehow never the one to bend his own fat ass over to pick any of it up.
Funny how that works.
This is why America is in the situation it's in. Everyone wants someone else to solve their problems for them instead of showing up to participate more than one day every fourth November.
I think a livelihood can be obtained in a community-driven way without UBI or a welfare net. People shouldn't starve or go without a home or comforts just because they haven't convinced everybody else of their value yet.
A whole lot of people waste their entire lives bitching about what should not be, never lifting a finger to do anything about it, but yet expecting other people to undertake the labor that you will not do yourself.
I'd be doing pickup truck stuff. I'm already that guy to my friends, family, and coworkers. Dump runs, moving, transporting large purchases like furniture, or bulk purchases like potting soil. Hell, sometimes I get free wood from trees cut down to drag home, split, and give away free to the neighbors. I've definitely thought to myself before that with a salary and a gas budget I'd be content with just doing that all the time.
That'd be freakin' awesome
@Five this is fascinating. I’m sure I’m not alone in this: even just the internal bureaucracy and culture within a company suppresses (smothers) people, and, in some cases, deliberately prevents them from doing what they’re best at. I’m sure the theoretical free plumber you mentioned would be seen as a threat to the livelihoods of 50 different hedge fund backed outfits here in Las Vegas (Goettl for example…🖕you Goettl).
I'm a pipefitter and I can guarantee all my peers would do if not a wage slave is percocets. Definitely not electively fixing pipes.
greed corruption uneducated lazy. if all crimes are legal, there's nothing stopping an easy fix. lawyers run cover by dragging things out for fees. the mad plumber would work for free if he didn't have bills to pay.
Great insight.
And worse, beneath wage slavery, the "benefits" "welfare" system, that blackmails you into not doing anything, nor appearing like you're doing anything, lest suffering imposed destitution, starvation, freezing, and death by denial of medicine access; and sometimes they'll cull you in an hour of hate anyway even if you were conforming. The worst "bullshit job".
So much lost potential.
Does rather evoke the notion of a genuine UBI & social dividend as superior. ... But can we get that arranged in a mutual decentralised way, not dependent upon those who promote and enact dehumanising culls and countless other abuses upon us?
I am a freak, i work off the clock at walmart. I do so because no one else besidese me and the 2 i trained care about cold chain. I buy from my store so i work extra hard to have everything edible. The rest of the store just doesn't care.
You should report your store to your local health agency.
I bring ppl like you up when someone asks "Who would do x job (that they themselves don't like)?" I'm like "Somebody somewhere likes it."
Thanks for taking care of your store 💜
Not the same thing at all.
I think it's a little related. Maybe they are both an obsessed freak and also invested in their own community for selfish reasons.
It does have a tinge of "work ethic" and egoist comparison to it though.
Just like Bruce (the plumber)
Agree, we should exploit autistic people's hyperfixations for profit 🥀
I think the OP way is still ways better than what we are currently doing. And done right it wouldn't be any more exploiting than what we are doing to neurotypicals. Everyone needs to feel valuable and that they have a purpose. I for one feel most alive when my skills are put to good use
No, both ways are completely shit - monetizing a hobby or a hyperfixation is the fastest way for it to burn out and make one hate it, speaking from experience. Companies as of "late" have been using this horseshit to get more out of young and impressionable people as well, by working them to the bone and "giving them purpose", making them burn out then throwing them away for the new generation.
That's not to mention the other issues if it worked as "intended" without burnout, such as increased competition depressing wages and creating more poverty since that's how capitalist mode of production works. The only way out is to abolish the present state of things, including wage labor so we make things for their use value, not profit.
Right. Well hurry up with your revolution, because we are losing these people through suicide due to a complete failure in how society treats them
don't worry revolution will come next tuesday, trust the plan 🙏
Ending profit seemed to be the suggestion
It'd still be profit-oriented fundamentally, just more obfuscated since in this case the capitalist becomes the state, paying the worker a nonwage to reproduce their labor in exchange for the autistic service they provide to others. Within a private company, the worker is paid a wage to reproduce their labor in exchange for the service they provide to others.
Sounds nice, how does it work in reality?
people get the job they are cut out for instead of the highest paying one
The problem is that these kinds of people are abundant on the internet where everything is interconnected and distance doesn't mean anything.
But in real life, those people are few and far between. And definitely not one on every 32 km in the world.
I disagree. The exceptional ones who managed to actually find and fit into their niche are rare and far between in our current society because it doesn't offer an environment that allows them to thrive and survive. If we allowed each and every person in this country to explore and find their niche without having to worry about survival, I'd bet that density would go up DRASTICALLY.
Plumbing is an available job. Capitalism is literally the social infrastructure that allows it.
(Not saying that things couldnt be better.)
Plumbing would still be a job without capitalism. Actually, come to think about it, plumbing is just about the least capitalist job there is. Most plumbers are small businesses owned by the laborers. Plumbing products are all mass produced, but the actual plumber is valued for their skills, not because they have the capital to corner a market. Plumbers in areas where corporate conglomerates are common are usually protected by unions, too.
If you want a job that wouldn't exist without capitalism, the answer is farmer. Sure, farmers are the backbone of any society, but farmers work the land, and the land has a lot of conditions. But you can buy avocados in Michigan in January, because someone realized that they can make money shipping avocados from warmer climates year round. It's terrible for the land, terrible for the environment, and terrible for local farmers who cannot compete in the race to the bottom, but the capitalist cares not for these things. Only profit nourishes the soul of the corporation.
If I have no money how do I get a plumber under capitalism? There's no social infrastructure for the poor.
Corrected your illiteracy.