this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Meanwhile I want us to work on things that are actually personally fulfilling, instead of earning imaginary money for rich assholes to abuse and hold us down with.
If we were working on what we wanted to do, we’d do it as much as we had energy for. That might be once a week, or it might be every waking hour for 6+ months.
The important bit is “days per week” would be 0+. This is what I want for everyone. It’s why I fully support a UBI, along with socialized healthcare and housing.
You want to spend your time doing nothing but raise your kids? Great, do that super well and don’t worry about the “lost” income. You want to make art? Awesome, do it! You want to engineer a bridge, teach, be a doctor or nurse, grow crops, etc? We need that too, and in addition to your base UBI money you get extra for doing a socially needed job. Good for you!
If I didn't have to work, I'd probably end up doing the same job I am now but for schools and local government, rather than for large companies. And I'd also be doing things like building and maintaining community gardens, or teaching anyone who wanted to learn what I know, because then there's more people to help me out and I can relax more.
Personally I’d love to help with community gardening initiatives… sort of.
I’m presently working on an indoor root crop system for urban dwellers, just as a hobby. I don’t actually want to profit off it, I want to develop it to help fix the world, but with the present system, I feel the absolute need to monetize it in some way, which is anathema to how I want to exist and it being low cost and accessible for low income households.
Capitalism hinders progress. It’s really sad and demoralizing.
I’m going to release it for free anyway when it’s done - when it’s a reproducible system and not just an interdependent idea - but it’s never going to benefit me, and that sucks because I’m poor lol
You could release the ideas and techniques but patent it to protect from commercial theft. then sell licensing and expertise while making it easy for lower income people to utilize what you make.
That’s something I’ve thought about, as well as making a companion cooking series (recipes to use what you grow sort of thing), or hands-on/ongoing troubleshooting..
I just barely have the energy to make and test the thing in the first place, after years of planning out how to optimize it and testing lesser variations (which means if I get the last iteration balanced, it will work for anyone with minimal input. I’m super irresponsible. I do have a few more responsible testers lined up, however. For reproducibility.) and I definitely don’t know where to go for help that won’t screw me over for a fee I can’t afford 😅
You can check out online legal services! They might be able to help you a bit more with the process without breaking the bank.
That’s a good idea, thanks :)
I love this community. Thank you all for not being cooperate assholea
This does sound pretty cool
If you like what you hear, you should look into, and support, politicians who support a UBI (universal basic income) in your region!
But bear in mind that a UBI alone isn’t enough; because capitalism encourages greed, we also (regardless where you live) need socialized housing so landlords don’t just eat the full entitlement, and socialized healthcare so people can keep themselves healthy to do the things they want without going bankrupt. Those are by far the biggest spends for most people, and if we could get that in check, a UBI is a great equalizer, and could pull millions of households out of the worst of poverty.
It’s good for disabled people, so they can be much more independent, it’s good for retired people, so they can retire without worry, it’s good for parents, so they don’t have to choose between supporting the family and actually raising the family, and it’s good for society as a whole because those “nonproductives” now have economy stimulation power by not being flat broke.
You don't want to collect trash off the streets? Well, looks like our city will look like shit forever. You don't want to work as a cashier? Well, looks like our supermarkets will remain closed.
Most jobs are not fulfilling and would never be done voluntarily (at a relevant scale).
That’s why they pay above the UBI.
The UBI (universal basic income) is intended to meet basic needs, it’s not intended to give a lavish life. If you want more than the basic, you need to work a bit for it.
What it would do for work is to make it optional and more flexible. If your employer isn’t paying you enough to be there, you don’t keep working there. You find a different job. You have the security to quit with nothing lined up. Because nobody has to be there to meet their basic needs, employers have to actively make you want to work there for your extra wants to be met.
That means maybe a store clerk gets a discount on goods in addition to their flexible hours per week.
But ultimately a shift to UBI plus socialized housing and socialized healthcare would lead to a shift in society such that we don’t have the bullshit jobs we do now, and a lot more people would probably be happy to do menial society supporting labor as part of a rotation. Idk, frankly I’ve met people, they don’t mind doing grunt work if it’s appreciated and valued.
If my bills were paid and I had to cashier or collect trash 2 days a week to keep society running (and for some extra spending, like for electronics or games or whatever) I would totally do so. It’s not my full time occupation, which makes it infinitely more desirable.
I can’t really capture an entire economic shift in one digestible comment, but a lot of stuff would necessarily change to accommodate this shift. It’s not a business as usual proposal, so you can’t really apply a business as usual mindset to it.
While I think UBI is a good direction for us to head towards as a society, I have a feeling megacorps would just skyjack the prices of pretty much everything to negate the benefits of UBI (look what happened during the pandemic). We would need some kind of legislated regulatory shift as well that would inhibit price gouging just for because there is more money floating through the economy.
You are probably correct in that racketeering would need to be reigned in, but I don’t really think it’s all that impactful over housing and medical.
We already have what you are using as a worst case, it’s just fully legal and uncontrolled. Rent and medical has been inflating for years for no reason. Because the proletariat can handle it (even though we can’t).
Literally because they aren't treated with respect in our society, while actively keeping our society functional. Cashier's are Literally in the process of becoming obsolete in our Modern Society. Wake up! Ding dong! Ding Dong!
Fwiw, I’d love to see cashiering eliminated as a position. We have the tech for it already and honestly only keep humans doing it because we need to keep human labor up (capitalism and “reasons”).
There is no reason whatever to keep that position huminated (as opposed to automated), other than driving up employment. And maybe reducing loss through theft, but if there was less meaningless junk everywhere that would be less of an issue overall.. plus people wouldn’t be destitute and could pay for it..
Citation needed.
We voluntarily do plenty of distasteful tasks, even without any expectation of a non-economic reward. Lemmy moderation is a salient example.
I've got other gripes about UBI, and especially about pinning the hopes of a "purely voluntary (but with asterisks)" workforce onto it... but there really is no telling how we would behave if we tried this experiment.
For every study suggesting that Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" is actually a legit thing (even though Hardin was later exposed as an academic fraud who fabricated his theory because of his white supremacist, eugenicist political agenda), there is another study suggesting that we're actually historically really, really good at managing commons and that perhaps capitalist framing only gets in the way of the cooperation that we're predisposed toward.
There's even one that came to mind specifically about sanitation workers: https://youtu.be/fe-SZ_FPZew?t=2403
There's also not any evidence that we settled into our modern capitalist model due to any sort of societal optimization. All of the theoretical reasons why an economic abstraction may be an advantage over a social gift economy don't really hold up when you look at historical or contemporaneous accounts of actual gift economies. It seems like the only reason we ended up with this model is because it was advantageous for several waves of wealthy rulers who needed ways to translate their violence-based power into legal power or else lose it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/fe-SZ_FPZew?t=2403
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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