Yep. Doesn’t even have to be a group of armed people doing “maybe illegal” things. It can be a single person doing absolutely illegal and horrific things…like Uvalde.

I don’t care about that so much as the hyper specificity of not only “you have to be on the political left here” but “being to the left isn’t enough, you need to be this far left, and hold these specific views on politics, technology, etc.”.

And the community that is here is, amazingly, somehow even worse than Reddit, on average, when it comes to being a hive mind that is wildly intolerant of any disagreement.

Not only that, but there’s a 100% chance they sell this shit to you as a forever mouse, then in a few years if it’s not making them money hand over fist, they’ll discontinue it and keep your money.

You said, and I quote:

if they gave me a lump sum

That’s payment. For your work.

It doesn’t change that fact whether they are paying you before the work is done or after. It’s still a transaction. You contribute time and effort to them, they contribute compensation to you for that time and effort.

And everyone needs money, it’s just that some have more than others.

If you hit the lottery tomorrow and won 500 million dollars, maybe not immediately, but you would almost definitely not continue to work at your job volunteering your time and labor to help them make money (and if you would, you shouldn’t, because that devalues the labor of your coworkers and everyone else in your field).

Mind you, I’m not at all saying this is a bad thing. If anything, it’s a good thing. I’m not sure why you seem to feel the need to make yourself an exception, but really, the only people I’ve encountered who are an exception to this rule are people who are both working in a field where the labor itself is intrinsically rewarding (teachers, caregivers, medical professionals, artists, chefs, brewers, etc.) and would be financially supported by another when the pay stopped (usually a spouse but sometimes wealthy parents, etc.).

And in those cases, it’s really not even an exception so much as it is splitting the circumstance across two people, because even then, they’re just getting a free ride to do what they want and ignore the need for money that drives the labor market.

I’m also certainly not saying “everyone hates their job”. Lots of people enjoy their work and that’s great! But for the vast majority of people, if they were no longer to receive a paycheck from their employer, they’d do something else. Either because they needed money, or because there are things they’d enjoy even more than their job that they can do with that time. It’s not a criticism, just an observation.

That’s a very creative and roundabout way of saying you do expect to be paid for your work and would quit your job if they quit paying you.

So if your job sent you an email tomorrow that said they were going to stop paying you from here on out, indefinitely, you’d quit working for them and do something you wanted to do instead, even if it was broadly similar to what you are currently doing for them?

Thanks, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.

I feel like the only way to respond to that shit is with a simple, “Nobody has wanted to work ever.”

If either: people had the option to get paid at their current rate but not have to do their current job at all anymore…or the opposite, that they were expected to keep working at their current job but were told they’d no longer receive any pay for it ever again…how many do you think would still keep working at that job?

Way less than 1%.

Because (very nearly) nobody wants to work. They want money, and the most common way of getting money is… you guess it…to work.

The whole point of employment is that you’re performing a task that nobody is going to just do for free because they like it…so whomever wants that task to be done has to offer an incentive to get people to do it instead of literally anything else.

It also wouldn’t cover a meal from Uber Eats.

Definitely worse than nothing.

Some of the sudden.*

But you’re working in that scenario because you’re being paid.

If you had that job where your employer only had a say in what you deliver (ignoring the obvious pitfalls of that arrangement), and they suddenly stopped paying you, or started only paying you half…would you still be okay with it?

If not, then you’re working because you like being paid, not because you want to work.

On the flip side: if you had some sort of situation where you got paid a comfortable living that allowed you to cover all your expenses, indulge some luxury, and save…and you got this money no matter what, just for waking up…would you still work every day? Or work until your employer was satisfied with your output each day/week/pay period?

Some might…most specifically (I would think) people whose jobs provide some sort of personal fulfillment like teachers, caregivers, etc. but I think the vast majority of people would take the money and live lives that offered personal enjoyment and fulfillment, doing what they wanted to do, not what an employer (who at that point isn’t their source of pay) would like them to do.

But let’s say you could also make that living wage just by existing. In a world where you wake up each day and a day’s worth of your living wage was automatically deposited into your account whether you worked a job you liked or even if you went out for a walk in the park…would you still choose to work every day?

Right?

“Nobody wants to work anymore!”

Like no shit man.

News Flash: nobody has wanted to work ever. They work because the compensation lets them live the lives they want outside of work. If nobody wants to work for you, it’s because you either aren’t willing to compensate them enough to do that, or your job makes them so miserable that it’s not worth it for them to trade away that much happiness for the compensation.

Or both. In lots of cases it’s both.

The more the old lies are proven as lies, the closer we get to the truth:

Just as important as “getting the job done” is the notion among many employers that they truly believe that with their payroll they are buying human lives and happiness. That if they are paying a worker for their time and labor that they are entitled to also dictate how that person feels about it…and if that worker is not sufficiently miserable, then they can be squeezed further.

I used to think that it was purely about money…that the idea was that if a worker ever got “all caught up” and had free time, then they should be generating more wealth for their employer in some other way…but then we had the pandemic.

The pandemic where lots and lots of workers had to suddenly do the whole work from home thing. And in that time, these employers were thrilled to go along with it, since it meant continuing to make money. And in that time, most office workers eventually turned out to be happier and even more productive.

…yet in the wake of the pandemic, many of these employers have chosen less productivity in exchange for bringing their employees back to offices. The only explanation for bringing employees back in who were happier and more productive from home is that these employers value the image of control and the ability to make their workers unhappy more than they value productivity and money.

Ignoring, for a moment, the inherent and fundamental differences between an individual and a state…

…in my late 20s and early 30s I bought a new car.

At the time, that car cost more than I had in my accounts plus my other possessions at the time. In fairness, my annual income was more than the total cost of the car, buuuut I also was carrying tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt as well, meaning my overall total debt was significantly higher than my annual income, or my “personal GDP” if you will.

Yet when I applied for my car loan, it came through with easy approval and I even qualified for the best possible interest rate.

Why? Because I’ve always paid on my debts adequately and promptly.

Nobody bats an eye when a couple buys a house that costs more than what they can cover with their combined income in one year. Why? Because that’s an arbitrary and unrealistic yard stick of comparison and nobody expects them to pay off a house in a year. They’re able to buy their house and live in it immediately, and pay for it incrementally, over time, as they earn over the coming years because of debt. And the bank is willing to lend the money because they’ll make money in the long run through interest.

Similarly, it’s unreasonable to imply that the US shouldn’t carry more debt than it’s GDP because the two metrics aren’t directly linked in any way. And since the US has excellent credit worthiness, that debt is far safer than the bank’s loan to the homebuyers. And the US gains access to borrowed funds by setting it’s own interest rates through the Fed, which tells lenders exactly how much they’ll make in interest if they let the US government borrow some of their money.

And since the US is a safer bet than homebuyers, that’s why home interest rates are higher than the rate at the Fed: if they were equal, banks would never lend to homebuyers since they could get the same return by lending to the government. So instead, they set their own, higher rates for homebuyers, to account for the higher risk of lending to a party who has a much higher likelihood of default.

I went from IE to Firefox back in that same timeframe, then by the time Chrome came out, my Firefox just had too much clutter and Chrome was way faster.

Within the past year, Chrome managed to enshittify itself enough that I’ve gone back to Firefox on PC (still using chrome on mobile) and it’s the same sort of “lighter, faster” feel that I got years ago when I left it for Chrome.

There’s also the whole ad blocker bullshit too, of course. YouTube ads were the last straw for me.

This

And when I run into issues, I would rather be using the OS that is the most common so that I have more options to get good info for a fix. I don’t want problems that nobody’s ever encountered, or for which the fix is beyond my limited technical ability.

It’s somewhat amusing when I see people on Lemmy proselytizing for Linux and literally while laying out their points to convince someone how easy it is, they’ll talk about doing shit that is already beyond my ability. And I’m not some 90 year old who struggles to turn it on. I’m just a user that doesn’t care to use any OS that I’ll need to take time to learn to figure out how to use it.

When I start a Windows machine I just do what I need to do.

When even a Linux cheerleader is trying to convince someone how easy it is, they’re already indicating more effort than I want to put into it.

“Intuitive” is basically telling you what you want and being right about it.

The opposite of telling you what you want isn’t being intuitive, it’s being flexible and customizable.

He’s nasty!

The only cure for “unable to eat diarrhea” is to put the patient into an induced comma.