- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
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I would gladly fix and assemble home appliances as hobby if I didn’t have to worry about money.
Hell, I’d teach for free if I didn’t have to worry about rent.
Yeah, some of that would be amazing!
I’d also happily shovel shit at the local zoo or assist nurses with prepping beds, etc (probably just ending up getting in their way, however!)
I would do basically any job that needed doing if my needs were provided for no matter what.
I would like to do that too but it is so bad in my country.I have to work hard for the university and the job that i don’t even want when you graduate from the university. its soo hard to live properly in a third world country.
Maybe the problem in our society is the people who are only motivated by profit.
Turns out passion, curiosity, and purpose are way stronger motivators than profit ever was 😅
It depends on the person. I’ve known people who are much more motivated by money. Some of them ended up in prison, some are doing quite well, and some are still trying.
Honestly, I sometimes wish I were more money-motivated. I’m very lucky that my passion happens to earn a good salary (for now), but I gave up my business for it.
Everything depends on the person. Hitler could have been a great artist if he wasn’t a genocidal maniac. 🤣
And Trump could have been great… well, person if he wasn’t, eh… Trump. 🤷🏻
Problem being the jobs that don’t inspire passion, curiosity, and purpose, but we still need them to get done.
"Without the fear of poverty, no one would be submissive "
They lock essential things (e.g. food, water, shelter, medical services, etc.) behind a paywall because they know it is not true that people do not always—or even usually—want money.
But people do need essentials to live, and if they’re the only ones who can give you money to get those, then they can order you to do what they want instead.
It’s one of those “every accusation is a confession”. People are thinking about themselves when talking about others.
The fantasy-story of profit motive: Without capitalism, people are just lazy, unproductive and die eventually. But with capitalism, there is great innovation, motivation and excitement.
Cool story, but absolute nonsense.
It’s a few bad players that are extremely greedy who ruin the whole game for everyone else. Most people don’t want to be that rich, they just want to live without starving to death, being healthy and have a roof over their head.Yep, years ago there was a massive jackpot for mega millions or Powerball, I can’t remember. I was hanging out with a buddy and we got to talking about what we’d do if we won. Of course we joked about all the stupid things we’d do, but after that night the thought stayed with me and I’ve put a lot of thought into it.
After years of thinking about it I realized that when I take vacation from work, I stay home but I work on projects I care about. Homelab, open source, animal welfare, ect. I have severe ADHD and can’t stand just laying around, so I know I wouldn’t stop working, I’d just stop working to live.
I even spent one weekend researching and developing a plan for if I actually won and put it all in a folder so I can just open the doc and see my plan, then take that an the spreadsheets to the lawyers, asset manager, and CPA, and protect myself and the money. Definitely not a obsessive ADHD weekend…lol.
As it stands right now I’d take $5 million and live off dividends, each parent gets $5 million, and anything left over goes into a nonprofit foundation I would set up to fund all the open source and nonprofit projects I care about.
When people ask me why I waste money on the lottery, I just say I don’t want the money to be rich, I want the money to be free. Also I only spend $12 a week to play, the only time I buy extra tickets is if I win a few bucks on a ticket, then I just cash it in for some extra draws.
Yeah it is one of my biggest pet peeves when people say capitalism drives innovation. Like, it does help spread technology, and it can cause tech to be refined quickly (e.g. the smartphone), but it is absolutely not what has driven the vast majority of innovation. People just want to solve problems and fiddle with things they find interesting, not make bucketloads of money.
Volunteer firefighters do actually still get paid a lot of the time.
Source: Was volunteer firefighter. Was paid per-call.
Same, 6 years from 2005-2011, $7.50 an hour for a call was great money in 2005. I think we were up to $10 by the time I quit
I was thinking that was shit money, but I was making $2.13 as a waiter in 1999-2000, so that’s about right. I made $5.15 for awhile, then min wage was finally raised to $7.25, where it’s been for almost 20 years.
Thanks for sharing that - out of curiosity, would you still have done it if it wasn’t paid? No judgment, just curious!
Most firefighters in the U.S. are volunteer, and make no money at all. Being paid per call is not the norm.
Hell yeah! I didn’t even know I would be getting paid until I went down to the station to ask how I sign up.
Good for you! Thanks for being a good human <3
Isn’t it just a small stipend? Nothing you could live on, even if houses were burning down 40 hours a week.
The entire fucking internet they use to spread their propaganda runs chiefly on FOSS
Capitalism and so called meritocracy have brainwashed humanity.
Meritocracy is a lie when almost every who wields wealth or power is a white old man. It’s like they have special quota for white men.
I’m convinced people who believe that are some of the biggest shit stains on the planet.
Personally, I was one of the people who used to believe that, because I was born and raised in a society that taught me that since birth. I can totally understand that there are people out there who still believe it, and I do everything I can to try and bring them up to speed. It’s hard to unlearn everything you have learned, especially if you’ve already made big, irreversible decisions in your life based around the lies you believed. I think the key is to try and find common ground, and to empathize with people, even when they’re not acting their best. I believe nearly everyone is redeemable.
So did I, but I’m more referring to the Wall Street and CEO as well Billionaire types who wouldn’t do anything if they didn’t get more out of it.
Yeah, that’s totally valid. There may be some of us who don’t make it, billionaires are probably too far gone, it seems to me that living for long enough surrounded by sycophants and people who can’t say no to you warps your brain and fundamentally robs you of your humanity. In a way, it must be extremely alienating.
My Minecraft survival world is awesome, but I think in this context “productive” is usually referring to, you know, farming and stuff.
Honestly if people didnt need to take the first job they could under threat of homelessness i truly believe enough people will just end up doing everything we need done out of the sheer need to do something
Yeah for sure, it took me a couple decades but i finally got a data job, where i really just enjoy the work, after starting from the bottom minimum wage and working up a bit in two other careers first lol
Finally im somewhere where if i get laid off inwould literally just happily work on a data analysis portfolio while applying to jobs. My two prior careers (law and education) I left them because i just hated the day to day work.
I dream of swimming in data with a few clear questions, a rudimentary sketch of the preferred output format and the side quest to note patterns or things that stick out and offer suggestions for improvement in SHORT FORM (caps needed)
As long as you enjoy data cleanup lol, that’s the unglorious part, getting a shitshow of manually entered data from a few different sources and then answer some clear questions lol. AI helps a lot with that though nowadays, you feed it a bunch of manually entered garbage and it does like 80-90% of the job for you!
Excel helper columns tend to show complexity in data cleanup through their breadth
If I’m 15 columns deep iterating it’s as if you can see the top of the mountain but weather can turn at any moment
I think UBI would give us a lot more artists.
I think it serves as an illustration that people will do difficult and tedious computer work for reasons other than money it specifically being Minecraft isn’t really the point to me
For sure, but people have lots of incentives to do farming and stuff even without the profit motive, otherwise human civilization wouldn’t have made it out of the paleolithic era. Humans are actually the most co-operative species on the planet, it’s biologically hard wired into us to work together to improve our living conditions for our communities and to share what we have with others.
This altruistic instinct rapidly tapers beyond one’s immediate community. Sure, we have the instinct to try helping others, even those who are very distant. But without reinforcement of our good behaviors, any given behavior will peter out.
Like, suppose you are making enough money to live comfortably. You then hear about a charity that builds wells to provide clean drinking water to people in impoverished parts of the world, and decide you can spare $5 per month to help them. So you donate $5. However, this charity focuses entirely on doing the actual charitable work, so you have to remember to donate and manually type in your credit card information each month. And they don’t do any PR. No monthly emails with personal stories about the people they helped or anything like that. Instead, they simply have a publicly accessible spreadsheet that has data on wells built and people served. Almost everyone would stop donating to this charity after a month or two, simply because they would forget or procrastinate until they forget, because our brains don’t assign relevance to things which don’t create an emotional impression on us. Compare this with, say, helping your child and their new partner build a home with your own hands. This kind of project provides lots of positive reinforcement - exercise, time outside, time spent with others, seeing progress being made day by day, the appreciation of others, the knowledge that you have helped someone who is important to you.
Hence why most people find most jobs to be unpleasant in one way or another. Not many people want to spend their days pumping a stranger’s septic system. The unpleasant work (aka, “work”) is what is left over after everyone does the pleasant work for free.
Also, some anthropologists theorize that the beginning of labor intensive agriculture and large permanent settlements was only possible via forced labor, coerced by violent, authoritarian leaders. Evidence shows that early agrarian life was significantly worse in just about every way than nomadic hunter-gatherer life, which explains why hunter-gatherer tribes almost universally fought against or fled from agrarian settlements.
Do you not believe that we can structure society in such a way that our best instincts are leveraged for the benefit of as many people as possible, rather than leveraging our worst instincts for the benefit of a select few?
You managed to cram an impressive amount of false dichotomies and unfounded assumptions into a single sentence.
If you say so! I think the claims implied by my statement are pretty self-evident, but if there’s something specific you take issue with, I’d welcome a discussion on it. I am always more than willing and able to defend my positions.
You might like this initiative: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/uncensored-library
I think the more automated the job is, the easier it is for people to get started. So with better farming technology I would expect more people interested on it.
We already have better farming technology. People prefer to grow gardens in their back yard with compost made from their coffee grounds instead. Iirc, John Green calculated that - even excluding the cost of his own labor - one tomato that he grew in his garden cost him $18.
There are certainly a lot of problems with modern agriculture. But food is far cheaper than it has been for pretty much all of human history, when the collection and preparation of food took up the vast majority of most people’s time.
I think that’s a disingenious estimate to say that food is far cheaper now than it was previously in human history. Before industrialization, growing food did take up a large portion of people’s time but their yearly work hours were much smaller.
As the other commenter said, even if your claim about having more free time is true (I highly doubt it, more likely we simply aren’t counting the various tasks historical peoples had to do which were still “work”, but not their main job, and overcounting the “work” that modern people do when they are actually just scrolling tiktok), as a society we spend far less time making food than we used to. This is obvious by the fact that in the past century, worldwide levels of famine and hunger have dropped lower than they have ever been in recorded history.
What do work hours of people not in the farming industry have to do with the raw costs of food?
The “cost of food” has been abstracted from the “amount people have to pay downstream to afford food” by companies’ desire for profit. One guy can manage acres of land with a few good machines. Food is cheap: that is why people can afford to ship it around the world to be processed in one country and then sold across the ocean in another country. We don’t have to work as many hours as we do to sustain ourselves to the level they did back then. Industrialists have just countered work efficiency improvements with…more work.
Industrialists have just countered work efficiency improvements with…more work.
Yes, exactly. Before industrialisation people worked on average less hours than we do now.
I…what?
In your mind, what happened to the rest of my comment that preceded the literal final line you quoted?
I thought there was a ton of farming in Minecraft
Farming Patreon support for your Minecraft streaming gig.
Is it fair to compare Linux and Windows in this context? 👾
I think that’s a great comparison - and we could broaden the analogy a bit, too. Windows is an example of the means of production being privatized, and Linux is more of an example of a more socially owned means of production (to a certain extent). We see that the development of Windows follows the incentives of shareholders - towards AI, advertisements, dark patterns, data gathering and so on, whereas the development of Linux and open source software follows the incentives of the users and the developers, towards things that actually add value to the lives of the people who use it.
Most creative people don’t profit from their creations. Some do. Most don’t.
Even more powerful examples, despite threat of persecution at the hands of Oligarchs and the state instruments these persist: Sci-hub, Library genesis
