"A Better Way to Look at Most Every Political Issue"

[Calandale]

No. The reason they are wealthy is because they have productive surpluses which have very
little to do, today, with how many paper pushers and burger flippers there are. The same
jobs can largely be eliminated or replaced with automation.  Of course, it also has to do
with consumerism - but that's a self-destructive tendency which needs to be replaced.

[Jack]

It's complete crap to say the vast majority of a country can live a life of leisure. There's no way a society can just sit around, without every public need falling to pieces; healthcare, education, transportation, utilities, the whole infrastructure. It might work in the short term, but a society requires a sizable workforce to function or otherwise will decay.

[Gopher Gary]

The point is that jobs mainly exist for people's psychological 'need' to work in places where the birth rates have declined anyhow.


The vast majority of the population could lead a life of leisure, if resources in such wealthy societies were allocated reasonably.

I'm also content to let others do all the work and support my lifestyle of reasonably allocated leisure. 

[Calandale]

It's complete crap to say the vast majority of a country can live a life of leisure. There's no way a society can just sit around, without every public need falling to pieces; healthcare, education, transportation, utilities, the whole infrastructure. It might work in the short term, but a society requires a sizable workforce to function or otherwise will decay.

Most people with jobs work in service, in the more modern countries. The infrastructure is still going to shit, even with fairly high employment percentages, in the US. The vast majority of jobs being done are really not necessary. Those that are don't get
adequately funded. And nearly all of it could be done without large numbers of humans performing the 'work'.


Of course, in a consumerist economy, it's necessary to keep the engine running, even if what it stands on is falling apart.
How to move out of that cycle is the problem. The gentle path - creeping socialism - seems to have proven to be incapable,
imposing its own redundant bureaucracy. Too, there is backlash against anything threatening the value system which
underlies the consumerism. Something which shouldn't be necessary if people actually enjoyed the work they did, instead
of lying about it.

[Lestat]

Depends on the person and the work as to enjoyment. You know what they say, 'if you love your line of work then you'll never work a day in your life'.

Hell, work as a freelance chemist, that suits me down to the ground. And even any holes that end up burnt or corroded into bits of the backyard at times (I put that down to 'shit happens, but it happens more to my back yard than to most for some quirk of fate making me a spazz destined to end up a freelance chemist' )

And hell life would be a bit more boring if there wasn't the occasional willy pete fireball that ends up first sterilizing a patch of ground and some radiating spoke-patterns in what used to be grass and soil, and then come months later, the grass is regrown but so super-lushly due to the additional phosphate 'applied' after hydrolysis of the phosphorus pentoxide acid-smog released by the fireball and spitting trails of luminescent, dripping pyrophoric 'oh fuck!' that even months later, after the ground looks normal and there is grass growing on the lawn again where it went up and took off and the outlying  collateral damage areas one can still tell where ground zero was, and even where the drips fell, when bits of WP went flying whilst molten and dripping a trail along the way, long after there were even bits of glass that still smoked more than weeks later if picked up with pliers and the surface of the inside face rubbed with a twig or a bit of metal to scratch away any muck that somehow managed to preserve a thin surface layer of WP on the glass. (although that reminds me...I still need to buy myself a new alembic-style retort. I might buy a few of them actually, given what happened to the last one. Or shell out for a fused quartz one with a 24/40 ground glass joint at the back, like the old glass one that died a heroic death, albeit one that involved dying screaming in the middle of a greenish-white glowy incandescent bolt of liquid, acid smoke-billowing flame.)

(yes, admittedly at the time, I did, whilst it was actually happening, think 'hoolee--shiii-IT!!' and 'fuck, I only have one alembic ' but it WAS spectacular to watch, and it certainly made my heart race with more adrenaline than a cardiovascular system is meant to take

Like fireworks, only without a fuse that needs to be lit, and full of a mixture of inert gas and several hundred grams of boiling, refluxing orangey-colored white phosphorus.  (although the inert gas was rendered pointless when the alembic suffered a catastrophic failure that caused a crack to propagate round from a fault line or other weak-point and the entirety of both the liquid white phosphorus, the P2 vapor plus a few bits of RP still floating in a slick of molten WP that hadn't converted by the point the distillation went south, and for that matter, pretty much every other cardinal direction on a compass bar hitting me, thanks to protective gear and setup barring the way to having it melt in one side of me and out through the other.]

Although I do my best to avoid them, and such occasions are as rare as I can make them be, its possible for even the best prepared to suffer the same end result as the worst, I don't claim to BE the best, not by far, but I'm far from being the worst either. And some of them, depending on what happens, do have the ability to be visually speaking, and/or auditorily spectacular, and one can in a manner of speaking, still admire a good ol' stygian, abyss-beshitten stench, not because its NICE, but just for the sheer impact it has when it kicks you in the nostrils with a pair of cloven hooves hard enough to send you reeling

More a matter of a stink's talent at being, well, stinking, than actually pleasant to experience. But in its own perverse way, still possible to enjoy a good acrid, and/or fishy or chalcogen-laden reek from hell that manages to make rotting dairy or seafood smell like prize-winning roses. Although I reckon a chemist probably needs a tad of autism in them (and I figure a lot of them likely do, and all the more so for the self-employed or the hobbyist, thats the kind of thing that attracts auties like dimethyl di/trisulfide attracts blowflies [whilst simultaneously repelling everybody else once the concentration exceeds a part per trillion or so in the latter case])

But as far as repetitive, mind-numbingly dull hell-jobs go, I figure an awful lot of it could be automated. You don't need a piece of meat to flip a burger aside from the piece that goes between two slices of cheese and halves of a bread bun. If a robot can laser-cut and spot-weld cars together, and we can work out the trajectory and velocity of an object in outer space accurately enough to land a probe on it (even if that probe did bounce feet out of the intended landing site on contact and suffer some damage, it still transmitted some data back to us) then surely, it cannot be beyond us to build robots that flip burgers and clean toilets and corridors etc.

IMO power generation itself, is probably the main area that human oversight is required, even despite a high level of automation where needed, for safety reasons. Concentrate on that, and have the robots pick the fruit, flip the burgers and clean the shit stains out of the urinals in the dive bars. It'd save a lot of people a lot of work. That could be devoted to both science, art by those so inclined and generally kicking back and doing what we enjoy best. That and of course the artisanal type produce that isn't really amenable to a robot servitor, and hey, people that do that kind of thing are likely, IMO to actually enjoy carrying on such traditions. Its one thing to say, ferment a carbohydrate source and fractionate the methanol off for solvent and fuel uses then fractionate the ethanol from the fusel oils, and determine the concentrations via automated mass spectrometry, but another for somebody to take pride in generations of say, whiskey or ale brewing knowledge handed  down a family line, or winemaking, even if I personally can't stand wine or whiskey (although I'll not say no to a good ale/craft beer or unorthodox 'wines' that don't come from grapes, like cherry wine.) But I can't see a robot being ideally suited to developing both a nose (itself easy enough, technologically speaking) AND the wit to use it in such a manner as to produce the ideal beverage that'll get you pissed and taste best doing it. And we'd need to in some ways, limit the participation of AIs in some scientific fields. Because  as both common sense and many a sci-fi movie tells us, the last thing we want, and if it were allowed to happen, probably also the last thing we as a species would ever get, other than completely fucked, is a smart AI with any but the most rudimentary ability for self improvement. in any but a completely isolated system with no capacity for the AI to build anything physical for itself or anyone or anything else. Because once that happens, its 'terminator' minus the hero, at least any that don't simply die heroically trying and failing.

[Calandale]

It doesn't depend. When people who say they love their work will feel somehow cheated
by the idea that others don't have to work, then they are revealing that they're doing
it because of the money.

[Lestat]

What about when somebody's primary motivation FOR the work, IS the work.

Or (or both) when someone does something that they love that they decide also to bend towards making money and help fund their doing it? Essentially working to fund their work, turning a loved hobby into something that helps pay for itself.

Thats me, with my chemistry. SOME of what I make goes to helping pay rent when I get work that pays, or buying myself treats outside the scope of new glassware and reagents and electronic lab equipment. I was born loving science more or less-teaching myself to read with mycology and botany/botanical chemistry textbooks at a few years old. My first primary school actually thought, that I COULDN'T read, was retarded or something. In actuality, I remember it clearly. They kept trying to hand me 'books' intended for NT children with pages so thick they were almost wooden, and with huge print, a few words a slab (I wouldn't insult literature by calling one a 'page' ) and most being a picture. When I WANTED to bring along my copy of Phillips et. al. and learn more about fungi to further my huntings and munchings and bagging any 'shrooms I encountered. (had my first trip though in my first secondary spazz school, on psilocybin mushrooms, my having first although non-ingestion experience by means of Fly agaric mushroom, and bringing forth the deep cobalt-glass hued Amavadine as a cationic derivative in solution, and being puzzled about what in the devil's own name could turn a calcium salt (they are colorless unless there is some charge-transfer state going on in there with an atypical anion or as an electride, where the solvated electrons give a blue color to blue-indigoish black-ey) into something that gave a vivid blue in something as simple as an acid-base reaction. That first attempt to isolate the active psychotropic principle in Amanita muscaria at a few years old, it just got me hooked on chemistry. So I figure I was pretty much born for it, and where I can turn the hobby I love into something that, even if not refunding me the full cost of all I've spent on the lab over a lifetime, including having to reconstruct it from scratch after pigs destroyed it, then still helping put some luxuries to the reagent storage space, buy me more lab-toys and at least help lessen costs. Although some work pays better than others and makes me a profit if I get lucky enough to be hired for more profitable work.

So what about cases like that, where someone turns what they'd already do for recreation and study into something that puts some pictures of the Queen's noggin in their wallet?

[Minister Of Silly Walks]

It doesn't depend. When people who say they love their work will feel somehow cheated
by the idea that others don't have to work, then they are revealing that they're doing
it because of the money.

Universal Basic Income. Would solve many of these types of issues in a society with a falling demand for human labour.

I don't believe it will happen though.

[Jack]

It's complete crap to say the vast majority of a country can live a life of leisure. There's no way a society can just sit around, without every public need falling to pieces; healthcare, education, transportation, utilities, the whole infrastructure. It might work in the short term, but a society requires a sizable workforce to function or otherwise will decay.

Most people with jobs work in service, in the more modern countries. The infrastructure is still going to shit, even with fairly high employment percentages, in the US. The vast majority of jobs being done are really not necessary. Those that are don't get
adequately funded. And nearly all of it could be done without large numbers of humans performing the 'work'.


Of course, in a consumerist economy, it's necessary to keep the engine running, even if what it stands on is falling apart.
How to move out of that cycle is the problem. The gentle path - creeping socialism - seems to have proven to be incapable,
imposing its own redundant bureaucracy. Too, there is backlash against anything threatening the value system which
underlies the consumerism. Something which shouldn't be necessary if people actually enjoyed the work they did, instead
of lying about it.

The vast majority simply isn't true; the medical industry employs a tenth of the population alone. Don't understand how you can acknowledge the vast majority of people work to keep the gears of social infrastructure moving, yet say it's unnecessary. The reality is, if people sit and do nothing then nothing will be achieved, and a society which the vast majority cant or don't work is a one that craps in holes and potentially eats old people sandwiches.

[Calandale]

What about when somebody's primary motivation FOR the work, IS the work.

Or (or both) when someone does something that they love that they decide also to bend towards making money and help fund their doing it? Essentially working to fund their work, turning a loved hobby into something that helps pay for itself.

There certainly ARE people who love their work. Such are usually not too worried about whether someone else
is able to achieve some proportion of their standard of living by sitting on their duff...or creating art. The work
is enough pleasure that they'd do it whether they got paid or no.


My own situation is a pretty good example of why we shouldn't just let people get free rides though.
I'm happier doing my work than otherwise, but there's no way I'd've gotten into this if I wasn't
getting paid. It also probably keeps me from using the same knowledge in ways that would actually
be counter-productive to society: idle hands and all. Hmm...then again, I DO work for the forces of evil,
so maybe I'm still doing more harm than good.


I'm not sure how prevalent my circumstances are though. Most people actually seem to want to do things.

[Calandale]

It's complete crap to say the vast majority of a country can live a life of leisure. There's no way a society can just sit around, without every public need falling to pieces; healthcare, education, transportation, utilities, the whole infrastructure. It might work in the short term, but a society requires a sizable workforce to function or otherwise will decay.

Most people with jobs work in service, in the more modern countries. The infrastructure is still going to shit, even with fairly high employment percentages, in the US. The vast majority of jobs being done are really not necessary. Those that are don't get
adequately funded. And nearly all of it could be done without large numbers of humans performing the 'work'.


Of course, in a consumerist economy, it's necessary to keep the engine running, even if what it stands on is falling apart.
How to move out of that cycle is the problem. The gentle path - creeping socialism - seems to have proven to be incapable,
imposing its own redundant bureaucracy. Too, there is backlash against anything threatening the value system which
underlies the consumerism. Something which shouldn't be necessary if people actually enjoyed the work they did, instead
of lying about it.

The vast majority simply isn't true; the medical industry employs a tenth of the population alone.

Medicine is a service industry. Much is bureaucratic paper pushing. Diagnostics have been shown to be better
handled by expert systems. Surgery will likely soon be better done with robotics (even if, like diagnostics, insurance
issues keep it from ever happening). Care that was once provided in the home, by family with less disposable time
mind you, is now hired out to low wage butt wipers, many of whom hate their work, and care little for their charges.

Don't understand how you can acknowledge the vast majority of people work to keep the gears of social infrastructure moving, yet say it's unnecessary.

Because the system is designed that way. Jobs which people are unnecessary for due to automation are kept
in inefficient human hands precisely because we demand people must work to be valuable - but, of course, we
give them an income which is lower than the price of the automation. There is something sick about this. The
developing world is different, of course.

The reality is, if people sit and do nothing then nothing will be achieved, and a society which the vast majority cant or don't work is a one that craps in holes and potentially eats old people sandwiches.

We could vastly reduce the number of people working, perhaps at some cost to the wealthiest, and still keep the elderly alive.
And THIS is the great opportunity: if we acted on it, we could (maybe?) get our over expanding population under control. Worse
health care, and old people sandwiches would help too.

[Gopher Gary]

Will my reasonably allocated lifestyle of leisure still include hockey tickets? 

[Calandale]

Rodents are food.

[Lestat]

I don't know as you'd have a very large consumer market for old people sandwiches. The sense of taste, excluding fundamental tastes like salt, sweet, sour, umami, bitter and hot/spicy is based on olfaction, and old people smell iffy as fuck.

They've already gone off. They'd have to be the only food put on the market with a sell-by and use-by date in negative numbers

[Calandale]

Feed 'em to the rodents! Somtin's gotta fatten THEM up.