this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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Antiwork

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This is always a contentious topic. I am Always met with resistance to my main arguments. So without further adieu let us delve into why this is aweful and will only get worse. I see gold hitting $3500-4000 by the end of this cunt’s second term. His first term saw the largest growth of gold price / decrease in usd value of any sitting POTUS from $1200 to just over $2000 which is a 66% fluctuation whereas with biden it went from $2000 to $2700 which is 35% increase.

Anyway lets get into this. For the first 172 years of the history of the USD as a standardized currency the price of gold held strong only increasing ≈85% from $19 to $35. But since 1971 when nixon ended the gold standard the price has ballooned ≈8000% from $35 to $2800 today.

Gold has always been considered an inflation proof asset. It retains its value better than any other commodity subject to the rules of supply and demand markets. Gold was the first currency used outside of traditional barter and trade economics and its value is still intrinsically tied to the value of every circulating currency in existence. If you calculate the exchange rate between any two currencies you’ll quickly see that they all add up to good perfectly. But that’s basic and should go without saying.

Ever wonder why at the time of American history portrayed as the era of American working class prosperity (the mid forties till the mid seventies) one working adult making minimum wage could afford to raise a family of four with enough surplus to send their two children to college, save for retirement (if they weren’t part of the 50% of workers that had a pension around this time) and go on a modest yearly family vacation? Meanwhile today even a family with only one kid is struggling to make it by on two salaries totaling $100,000 after taxes?

Now this may just be conjecture on my part but I believe the reason for this massive flip in working class power dynamics over the lasy 54 years was intentional. Sometime after Kennedy was assassinated wall street corporate interest had for all intents and purposes captured our political process and instructed their employees (our alleged representatives) to enact legislation that would effectively eradicate all the progress made by the labor and civil rights movements of the 40’s 50’s and 60’s as well as FDR’s new deal policies which stood as a foundation for the progress that came after. They were successful meanwhile the corporate executive class adequately adjusted their compensation to counteract the intended results of these policies.

In 1938 after conservative policies had been doubled down on which led to the gilded age and left us with the great depression. FDR finally began to repair the damage with common sense fixes that the robber barrons had fought at every opportunity available. 1938 is when the fair labor standards act was passed. This legislated many common sense socialist protections for workers protecting them from ruthless exploitation by profits at all cost models of capitalism. Such as; child labor laws, federal holidays, weekends, the 40 hour 5 day work week and most importantly, minimum wage.

Minimum wage on a federal level in the 87 years since its introduction has been adjusted 22 times with most adjustments occurring within a year of the previous one. Today the last adjustment of federal minimum wage was 16 years ago. And for the 30 year period of 1938 to 1968 7 adjustments were passed after first being set at 25¢ per hour or 14.9 ounces of gold per year at a full time schedule($41,000 today or about $19.50/hour) The 3 most impactful adjustments were in 1950, 1956 and 1968 where minimum wage was respectively raised to 75¢, $1 and finally $1.60 per hour. St the time that ranged from 45 ,60 and 95 ounces of gold annually.

Today the highest minimum wage in the country of $20/hour for some California fast food workers barely produces more than 15 ounces of gold for a full time year of work. And federal minimum wage is approximately 5.5 ounces. So thats a loss in value of 94-85%

And here many people will try to convince you that “the price of gold isn’t an accurate measurement for inflation statistics” but this is incorrect. But go ahead and believe the world bank, international monetary fund and Wall Street’s cooked books. These institutions have no issue committing fraud and them footing the bill to the rest of the world but sure lets pretend they are telling us the truth about something so important as how badly the socio political and socioeconomic policies they’ve supported the last 5-6 decades have brought the rest of the world as well as america into a state of austerity for the working class while they put around in their new yachts supercars and private jets that burn anywhere from $7,000 to $40,000 worth of fuel per trip. They definitely seem credible 🥴

But anyway lets look at the basis of their inflation models. The inflation models peddled by these fine and proper institutions snd definitely not rotting fraud filled pus buckets of society. They are based almost entirely upon a metric known as “consumer price index” or CPI. And cpi is flawed for several reasons but the biggest of those is that CPI does not account for the devaluation of a currency due to the increase in circulating currency supply. Such as what happens when a governing body prints money out of thin air and increases the national debt over 50 times in the last 6 decades. Now if we contrast cpi to the price of gold we will see where cpi fails is where gold excells. The main driving point in gold’s price increase is economic worry caused by poor policy the most common of which being irresponsible and unrestrained Fiat currency printing. Now lets look at currency printing in the last 54 years. There are plotted graphs that solidify my point and you’re free to look them up. Now by the end of 1979 the price of gold had alrrady increased by 2000% to just over $700 and in less than 2 years by 1981 the US had finished printing the first one trillion dollars into circulation adding to the national debt substantially. Fast forward today and the last i checked the us debt was somewhere around 36 trillion dollars and we currently print one trillion dollars every 3 to 4 months which is driving the price of gold through the roof due to decreasing USD value and market worry about the stability of the US dollar in modern times.

So why could someone working a minimum wage job from 1945 up until the mid 70’s support a family of four? Because money was worth far more and leftist organizing held the feet of the wealthy legacy families in wall street to the flames (these fsmilies all had supported Hitler so blatantly in the 1930’s they held a rally for him at madison square garden and made him person of the year on Times magazine’s cover in 1938) lets do some math here. To earn equal value to 1950’s minimum wage you would need to make the equivalent of 45 ounces of gold which today is worth $126,000 or $60.57 per hour. In 1956 it was 60 ounces or $168,000/ $80.76 then for 3 years before nixon shock was put in motion by withdrawing from the bretton woods agreement, arguably the worst financial policy the us has ever made, us minimum wage peaked at $1.60 which produced 95 ounces of gold or $266,000 or $127.88/hour.

To come anywhere near this both adults need to work 80 hours a week with overtime at a base pay of $20 just to reach $208,000 before taxes. And yes you can live better than a majority of people on thst wage and even $120,000/yr is decent but with 4 kids good luck saving anything meaningful and living anywhere but highly undesirable urban areas in super red states.

So these are facts that i know at least several will comment to debunk on this post. But the facts I’ve mentioned remain. None more so telling than the reality that the rich who are well versed in the markets of investment banking, have always considered gold to be an inflation proof asset that is not just a status symbol or a usefull material for technological applications but also a store of wealth in chaotic economic times.

anyone saying or asking why would they lie to us about this? I mean, are you not paying attention? If they told us the truth, that someone making quadruple federal minimum wage today is making 20% of minimum wage just 54 years ago then people would see the root of their economic frustrations in life and be much closer to starting the class warfare our society so desperately needs.i and others before me who have done the math have also figured out that the minimum wage workers of today are payed less than it cost to purchase and maintain enslaved people under chattel slavery. But since we have this illusory sense of choice, that we could just quit at anytime we are delusional to believe in our freedom under democracy (which is in reality class dictatorship) so from 1950 till today the share of wealth has gone from the top 20% having 10% of the wealth to the top ten percent having 66% and the top 20 having 74% while the bottom 60% have less than the 3 wealthiest men who collectively control $1,000,000,000,000 in assets.

The American working class have been robbed before their very eyes to the point where we are just glorified slaves. Many millennials snd gen z will have to work till we are to sick to do so or have to clock in on the day we expire. Many will never own a home snd have to hope that social security isn’t completely gutted in the next 25-50 years but i am not hopeful.

Have a good weekend regardless. Plan a boycott and some strikes and lets at least try and make things better than they are as dauntingly impossible as it may seem

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[–] Snapz 26 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Typically more people will buy into your point, or at least give you the time to consider, if you don't have a typo in the title...

I'm going to leave this up for now, but please keep discussion to Antiwork relevant impact on wage value and potential impacts to the working class.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It was late and i was pretty much passing out when I wrapped this up. Thanks for the proof reading comrade.

Also this is relevant. Knowing how severely our currency has been intentionally devalued is an important thing to understand. If people knew that minimum wage has decreased in value from 84-94% i have a hunch that more people would be far less willing to participate in wage slavery than the current number of those who continue to participate despite the decreasing returns.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's bravely hopeful of a gen pop that resembles Wall-E's bait-fed leftovers more and more every year.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think thats also a result of nixon shock policies. Namely the cutting of education funding and standards that was doubled down by Reagan under the influence of advisor Roger A Freeman who is quoted as saying that an educated proletariat was a real threat to the society they were working to create. Leftism was far more popular in the 60’s and 70’s as a result of the higher education standards we had after the end of the second world war. Then leftism was smothered in the 80’s and 90’s and now what many people consider “left” is just right leaning centrist neo liberalism. True leftism has pretty much been wiped from the chat since then.

Today education centers are just there to condition workers to be smart enough to run the machines that generate profit for those with capital but not smart enough to understand how ruthlessly exploited they are. After Reagan the working class in the US were turned into low paid service industry wage slaves almost overnight after Reagan’s cafta turned to nafta under clinton and all the high paying manufacturing jobs that gave many Americans an unprecedented amount of prosperity/ quality of life were sent to the third world so corporations could reduce labor costs by 90-95%+ all while our currency was being intentionally devalued to reduce labor costs to all the jobs that couldn’t be outsourced to the third world

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[–] BananaTrifleViolin 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

So I agree with a lot of what you say about the dismantling of the US state and unravelling of labour protections, and failures around minimum wage.

However i think you're overestimating the accuracy of gold as a measure or inflation or as a currency. The price of gold was effectively heavily regulated up until 1971 due to the gold standard / bretton woods system.

After the gold standard was dropped, gold no longer reflects the value of money and instead reflects the supply and demand of gold.

Gold is invested in because its seen as a safe harbour investment, and also paradoxically because its value keeps going up (so to an extent it is also a speculative investment). There are also many more people investing in gold now while the supply hasn't changed as much.

A large part of the value of gold reflects the supply and demand of gold itself, rather than a pure measure of inflation. Inflation is definitely a factor in the relative price of gold to the dollar, but its not the only factor in its price and value.

So I think a lot of what you said has merit but I think youre over relying on the value of gold as a metric of inflation - there are lots of other factors impacting its value and it's not an accurate surrogate measure for inflation.

Minimum wage has not kept up with inflation, although measuring it against the price of gold is inaccurate as the price of gold has diverged more in value than just inflation; its actual value has gone up due to supply and demand, including ephemeral demand like people seeing it as a good investment in its own right.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (10 children)

Gold is no more important than any other commodity.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (23 children)

Why the fuck would gold be "the true measure of inflation"? What year is it?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Interesting. I always know that CPI is a bad model and is worse yet at viewing the purchase power change of our currency. Especially since it leaves out some very important items like you know: Real estate, energy costs, insurance, etc and the fact that there are new standards of living which includes additional utilities and commodity items.

I'm not entirely sure gold is the best way to measure it but it's not exactly an unhelpful tool in observing the loss of purchase power of the dollar. As we have absolutely lost our ability to do more than purchase the decorations for our cages.

As an aside, my father works with a guy who does weekly trips down to his favorite fishing hole in Texas from the northeast Atlantic area, he flies via private chartered plane each time. This means he spends about $2 million dollars a year just to travel to go fishing not including other expenses or trips. He complains he isn't making as much as he wants.
The wealth gap is horrendous.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Especially since it leaves out some very important items like you know: Real estate, energy costs, insurance, et

CPI includes all those things.

. . . there are new standards of living which includes additional utilities and commodity items.

Which is why CPI is tweaked regularly to match what people actually buy.

There have been various other ways to measure inflation that have popped up over the years, such as the MIT Billion Prices Project. Nothing ever matches perfectly, but they show the same overall trends that CPI does.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Not the core number that is often quoted.

And it still only contains a small amount of items that I understand are selected to try and provide a random blind representation of inflation of costs of purchased goods.

Sure. It tracks retail item prices. But it's not amazing it's mostly a scatter plot with a general trend so it feels impartial but isn't. And as I specifically said it's really bad as a representation for purchasing power or the effectiveness of wages.

They even swapped home prices to rent because it "better represents the average American" it removes anything considered investments, which is major component of what made the American middle class and society.

It's fine on a technicality of what it measures it measures, but it's not a useful tool.

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[–] Kyrgizion 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I saw this coming in 2019 with the advent of Corona.

I promptly cleaned out my meagre savings and bought gold.

"But muh bitcoins". Well, we'll talk again in a year or 5, see how that went ;)

[–] Snapz 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Will ask you to elaborate what you mean by the "advent of Corona"?

[–] Kyrgizion 2 points 1 week ago

End of 2019, start of 2020 when it was starting to look likely we would get lockdowns. There is no greater indicator for instability.

And now with Trump, the instability just keeps coming, which will drive more and more people away from fiat currency to both crypto and physical wealth. Both are educated guesses at best but the pattern is quite obvious by now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Advent means: the act of coming upon a scene

So pretty sure it's just "the coming upon of the scene of COVID-19"
just with slang as the name for the virus as basically every group hated calling it the same thing to some of our annoyance.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Bitcoin definitely was the better buy. Gold really is not a good investment. Its value doesn't exponentially increase. Its not a speculative asset. Gold only maintains its value. So you ensured you didnt loose value, you just protected your wealth. But if you bought bitcoin you would have multiplied your wealth by 3500% i told my family to buy bitcoin at the outset of the pandemic when it was around $3000 or so. I told my mother to empty her 401k/IRA take the tax hit and buy bitcoin. i was pretty much laughed at. But now i bring it up all the time and I laugh about it. I didn’t have the money to do it myself since i live in abject poverty but i still saw what was coming a mile away. Bitcoin is ultimately the future of money. Banks already digitized currency decades ago and the numbers on the screen that represent your bank account have no concrete backing. It’s just as funny as funny money can get. Whereas bitcoin and legitimate cryptocurrencies have blackchain/ distributed ledger technology(it was designed to be a peer to peer distributed decentralized currency/ banking system. And people like Jamie Dimon (one of the biggest fraudsters in modern times and someone who’s hands were covered in some of the most blood after the 08 collapse of MBS bonds/ the housing market) tell us that bitcoin is a ponzi scheme and is valueless meanwhile behind the scenes all these big banks are investing billions in developing their own blockchain technology which shows they are full of shit and just saying whatever they can in order to perpetuate ideas that serve to protect the financial interests of western capitalist hegemony.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I told my mother to empty her 401k/IRA take the tax hit and buy bitcoin. i was pretty much laughed at. But now i bring it up all the time and I laugh about it.

Of fucking course they wouldn't risk their future on an extremely speculative investment. That could go up and up, or suddenly crash at any time. That would be an incredibly stupid investment.

It's honestly pretty damn rude to taunt your mother because of your own poor financial advice.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Lmao, would have had fuck you money unlike the results she has had giving 3 decades to employers who treat her like shit. But sure, whatever you say. Bitcoin is where it is because its the future of money. Jamie dimon and all the other fraudsters on wall street say its a ponzi scheeme and other illegitimate smears against stablecoins while they pour billions Of dollars into the development of their own block chain tech behind the scenes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

That's very easy to say in hindsight.

They could also have lost all of their money.

[–] Kyrgizion 2 points 1 week ago

Yup. I made 3k off bitcoin in 2018 and sold off then, thinking it would crash soon. I didn't buy the gold with the intent to "get rich quick", just as a store of value. Added reasons are that I don't trust banks. I graduated in 2008. I haven't forgotten how, for example, the people of Cyprus were literally robbed from part of their savings by their government to pay for the crisis. For the record, at this point the only way to get rich off bitcoin is to create shitcoins and rugpull or be a whale, both are forms of degenerate gambling the likes of which should stay limited to wallstreetbets.

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