Yeah, a lot of why the people in the west work so much, is because they consume so much. The lifestyle in the west is, on average, extremely extravagant. And before anyone gets defensive, yes much of this is systemic, but acting like its inescapable is defeatist. I guarantee if you live in the west you could spend way less money and still get by just fine. I know because I've been on the brink of homelessness before, and it teaches you a lot of how to save money. Much of the western working class is too caught up in the allure of consumption to realize the thing keeping them unhappy in many cases is that very consumption. It's a temporary solution to a permanent emotional problem. You don't need more things. You need human connection. I'm not saying it will solve all your problems but I guarantee you could find things to stop spending money on that you don't really need. There is an endless amount of free digital entertainment for example. Why would you pay for digital entertainment? Substitute one meal per day for rice. Learn to fix your devices instead of buying new ones. etc.

And we only live once. And our lives fucking suck because of a greedy few. Our short time alive is being wasted so some piece of shit can make billions or conquer 20 countries or any other pathologically despicable goal like that. And I mean pathological. These people are not sane, and society glorifies their mental illness.

Yep. I'm a communist but let's be fair, this is not even a problem with capitalism. It's not a win-lose situation where the oligarchs make money off of your misery. It's a lose-lose where your misery causes lower productivity and the only thing that fuels it is a shitty, psychotic culture of dominance, obedience and puritan values.

Because the billionaires captured the government. AI is being used as a pretext to force many workers into a 996-style grind rather than freeing them. At the very worst, the techbros want to manufacture consent for eugenics, and reduce the population to 1 billion or less.

Educated and wealthy people don't want to live in these places. I think that's obvious.

I agree.

Planning policies that promote lower cost housing.

I like the idea of condos which are exclusively owner occupied. Like renting to a tenant for more than 3 months or something is prohibited.

Also developments exclusively for tiny homes.

Also I feel as though, in the era of work-from-home, small country towns where land is as cheap as dirt, should be more desirable.

I think there's a lot of scope the build out the lower end and take the heat out of the upper end.

The business owners are all globalists and keep comparing citizens in advanced western countries to starving kids in somalia.

The beatings will continue until we throw the globalists to the curb.

It's starting to come to everyone. Wait a few years while the true sleeping giant, the people, start to churn inside while waking up.

It’s amazing how much you can get by with very little and TBh how nice it actually is. Add in a few renewables to a home and a few other sustainable measures and it can be incredibly peaceful.

Same with repairing items. I recently replaced my vacuum motor. I was pretty pleased with myself.

The amount of people I know who are buy stuff after stuff just to feel something…anything; is crazy. As proud as I feel about my steps there are so many wasteful and handful people around me. It can feel frustrating.

With my socialist European collective bargaining agreement I would only be working 5 months in a year if that was my usual workweek

I know a guy who lives in a condo like that in Seattle, apparently the building is managed as a co-op. I think it's a model that has promise in urban settings or in more remote work zones, an idea I really like by the way. As soon as remote work started to become feasible at scale I started asking myself when you'd start to see a flight from cities.

I think a lot of people are really set in the mindset of wanting to live where stuff happens, but I could see a case for housing developments in cheaper areas geared more towards young parents - build what they need and maybe a train into town, and there's no reason it couldn't work. People still want to have kids, but it has to be made more economically realistic.

Combine that with tiny houses, wind and solar development, all mixed in with allotments, and I think you could make a case for that as a development model that works. It'd be really spread out, but it's hardly as if a place like Australia lacks room. Run trains and trams through it, and you'd hardly need that many roads even.

We know you're more productive with less hours. That's been tested and studied. But the rich also can't stand you having fun and being in control of your own life.

Yup, that point was reached when we started using fossil fuels. You can't eat information so we're way past the point of why we don't already have a leisure society.

Humans are physically mammals, but mentally we're more like eusocial insects with specific subtypes of individuals.

Once you learn how to live comfortably on a small amount of solar it's fucking life changing tbh. It very much depends on the SIZE of your space, but if you live in a small travel trailer for example you can be very comfortable with like 800W of solar. And can get by with even like 200-400W if frugal. It makes you think about the electricity you use. Microwaves are great for example because they can heat things quickly. So you don't waste energy cooking for long periods to get something hot enough. And you can cook so much in a microwave if you get a reusable steamer. They even make special grill plates for inside them. Some brussel sprouts, white rice, and tilapia is a very healthy meal and can all be cooked easily in just a microwave for example.

Even something as simple as lighting can make a big difference. If you get some NiMH AA batteries and some puck light LEDs you can have lights at night for so little power it won't even be a concern.

Something something capitalism

I didn't know we had time travelers from the 1920s on Lemmy!

Like everybody else, they don't want to live in ghettos. If there are no ghettos, nobody has to.

Ghettos are not built, they are a result of segregating poor/uneducated/... people into certain areas. If there is no segregation and people from all demographics live in the same area, ghettos do not form and everybody can live in a nice neighborhood.

You don't do segregation at all, it's that simple.

UK council houses, until the 1950s when they started building ghettos basically, were just interspersed into the middle of normal housing estates, completely indistinguishable, like 1 in every 10 houses

Billionaires are OCD patients with Financial Hoarding Disorder. They have no need that for that much money, and no amount will EVER satisfy their mental illness. They will literally kill millions in order to accumulate more.

They need to have their hoard confiscated, and given mental health treatment, and if they don't respond to the treatment, then they need to be institutionalized for being a danger to society.

I've had three days off this past year besides weekends, only one sick day

I'm still poor

It doesn't mean anything to be more or less productive doing more or less hours.

They see it this way: if you are 100% effective for 30 hours and then 20% effective for the other 10 hours, that's still overall more than if you would just do the 30 hours.

There was a joke post (I hope) about some CEO giving people a 4 day work week and productivity went up. They then cancelled the 4 day work week because "imagine what they could do with 5 days", using the experiment as a baseline for producitivity.

I have read that with our current productivity we should have a 4-day workweek and much higher salaries. But all the gains go straight to the top.

If we reset this thing to fair you would probably have less than you do today

This is very unlikely to be true just from a pure physical reality stand point. Like, if global communism or socialism or whatever was implemented but otherwise retained the logistics and infrastructure of the previous system, its genuinely likely the "fatter" cats would have better lives. Materially? Probably the same at worst. Psychologically? A million times better just because we'd have a "floor". We'd have better healthcare, housing availability/city & town planning, and transportation as well. The only thing we'd maybe lose is cheap trinkets, giant trucks, and 20+ variations of cheese puffs. Shit that doesn't matter.

God this is tedious.

If you spread the houses around and make them normal houses then they're no longer low cost houses, they're just houses.

We can't build a free house for everyone because of the reasons already stated.

As I said in my other comment:

God this is tedious.

If you spread the houses around and make them normal houses then they're no longer low cost houses, they're just houses.

We can't build a free house for everyone because of the reasons already stated.

Put a few 20 somethings in a sunny sea side town with free power and cheap home ownership and things will start to happen in that town.

I've been arguing this for years. I'm 10x minimum more efficient since I got into IT almost 2 decades ago, there is no end in site, no slowdown. Just more work work work. So much shit is instant and only takes a few moments when it's not. No way we need to work this much.

As we all know, after the horse was replaced by the widespread adoption of motorized vehicles, it was free to roam the greenest plains with whichever herd they wanted, with the motorized vehicles serving them for a change, and all the feeding and stable infrastructure remaining in place to serve their needs.

People say they plan revolutions to eat the rich, but because they only ever inherently meant the rhetoric to serve themselves, they will only end up carrying out revolutions to eat themselves.

I believe it's already possible with a 20 hour work week.

Capitalism

I would argue that you're not thinking about working hours at a high enough level. The notion that someone can tell you that the negotiation for labor exchange is hourly is just simplifying the negotiation. For example, I make $70 an hour after you calculate it annually, but I'm not an hourly employee. I also work from home, which is a net positive because I'm a more laborious worker when I do this which is a benefit to the employer, and it's a stress reducer for me, which is a benefit to me, the employee.

But there's a secondary aspect of this situation which is that I do not have someone else "watching" me and making sure I'm working all the time. That concept is antiquated. It isn't that there's X amount of hours of work to do in a day, it's that there's Y amount of labor that needs to be done, but we don't know what that Y variable is. We fundamentally understand the overarching goal - it might be something like, how can we increase efficiency? But it's a problem solving concept where we need to utilize time (labor) to think up strategies to how we can solve that problem while connecting objective information to those strategies so we can better understand how they can even be implemented.

After all, if I can increase my own efficiency by 5% but doing so requires 6 months of my time, that isn't going to have a payoff for many years and is likely not in the best interest of either myself or the business.

In addition, working more hours doesn't correlate to more work getting done. One man might push a boulder up a hill in 8 hours while another might be able to do it in 6, or even 4. Do you want to pay them both the same amount? Would you want to be paid the same amount if you were the man pushing the boulder in 4 hours as the man pushing in 8? Of course not.

And do you always receive additional reward each time your labor correlates to some kind of improvement? Well no, of course not. Sometimes you do, and sometimes you can go years without seeing anything outside of your salary. The reason is simply because life and human relationships and interactions are complicated and there's a lot more going on than you're going to give credit for.

I make a decent income, but I also have to prove my value to my company. What I do can be in no small part measured, so if I'm not producing value, the business won't want to keep me on the payroll, and if someone cheaper - thus, less credentialed/experienced - can do much of, or even all of the value I can provide, they will just swap me out for that person, and rightly so. Wouldn't you leave a company who's only paying you $40 an hour for work that another would pay you $70 for?

Most of the people complaining about why we still have to work so much isn't seeing the bigger picture, and likely works a shitty job where the average employee needs to be monitored and probably doesn't have the expertise to be doing anything that isn't more or less transactional (meaning, you are asked to specifically perform very informed tasks like on a conveyor line). This is just a byproduct of people without high-level modern skills complaining that they're sick of pushing boulders up hills all day every day.

I mean, I haven't pushed boulders up hills for 20 years.

Strawman: Nobody is asking for free houses for everyone.

The point in the OP is: In the past we were able to house n% of the population while working less and with much worse technolgoy. So why can't we house more than n% now if we work more and have much better technology?

There are obviously multiple factors here. More people want to live in big cities, which can only expand so much. Living standards have increased, so building new houses is more expensive.

But investors are also expecting more profits from their housing investments. I don't know the situation in Australia, but in Germany the largest owners of big city houses barely build anything. They buy existing houses, which are often many decades old, and raise the rent. They make double digit profits with that business model while adding zero value to society.

This means tenants often need 50% or even more of their income for rent while building the exact same houses was payed for with only 30% of their tenants income. There are well-off people who could afford new, big houses in the country, but because they live in the city they qualify for social benefits so they can pay rent.

If you spread the houses around and make them normal houses then they're no longer low cost houses, they're just houses.

Again, ghettos are not defined by building quality. If only poor people live in a neighborhood of premium houses, you still have a ghetto. And if a diverse group of people from all demographics live next to each other, you won't have a ghetto even if they all live in budget houses.

Yes, it’s antiquated because we used to be factory workers, where we’d just have a start-stop time because we weren’t automatons that could work anytime. The factory had a beat because product Z takes N steps.

But a cashier is basically in a sales factory; they mediate sales between shoppers and the department store. So, your “antiquated” is just a privileged perspective.

No, the horses were sent to WW1 and it wasn’t pretty.

Yes, decoupling healthcare would be a stark change, which is scary so we can’t do that. Also, it would nuke the Ritchie Riches’s hold on competitive hiring so … more propaganda.

Why would they surrender the power to have any vacation they want at nearly anytime and buy our politicians to push whatever narrative they like? They are dragons, and they live for status and power — the rest of us be damned.

Karl Marx observes in Das Kapital the capitalist always seeks to capture government and undo taxation and regulation. And as profits trickle towards the capitalist their influence on officials increases, accelerating the flow of gains, which grows at an exponential rate.

A lot of that extra hours is because of planned obsolescence. If products lasted longer, if products were repairable, less would need to be manufactured. If less needed to be manufactured, the less work we need to do.

Yes, because feudalism was famous for its short work weeks.

capitalism is an advanced form of feudalism

Exactly what I've been saying as nauseum. It's a supply problem that can't be fixed with money.

The rise of steam power during the industrial revolution didn't just result in people working fewer hours. Workers were much more productive than before, but they didn't automatically get shorter work weeks.

Getting an 8-hour work day required the workers to form powerful unions and go on strike. Those strikes were broken up by private security and cops. People were killed. But, eventually, decades later, the rich people with power were forced to negotiate and 8 hour days were the norm.

I have known individual workers who had skills that were in high demand which gave them leverage. They negotiated deals like 4 day work weeks, or 30 hour work weeks because they could.

But, for the average worker to get a shorter work week, it's going to take collective action. It's probably also going to require that blood be spilled. Unless people are angry enough to getting beaten or maybe killed, nothing's going to change. Step 1 is joining a union.

Yes, basically all of these missives and thought experiments implicitly exclude retail while studiously avoiding admitting that this is the case. Retail stores need to be open a sufficient number of hours at the right time(s) of day to capture their potential customers. Unless you're not able to handle your checkout line or your restocks for whatever reason, "efficiency" doesn't really enter into it. Not in the sense of employee time, anyway. Maybe the world's best 7-11 clerk could check out a thousand customers in an hour but just because he can that doesn't mean it makes sense to close the store at 4:00 PM or only keep it open three days out of the week.

Edit: And to add to this before anyone pops out of the woodwork to state the obvious, this does not preclude the store from having more employees who work shorter shifts. In fact, this is often already the case not for any altruistic reason (to put it mildly) but rather to prevent anyone from achieving full time status such that the company would then owe them benefits.

Now tell them about the light bulb cartel and planned obsolescence.

I fail to see where the original comment highlights that feudalism is the next best option? Unless they edited their comment?

I just commented something similar. These are the fruits of capitalism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

(or the grapes of wrath, as it were)

Sure, just like wood is an advanced form of metal.

They're not just low cost, they're none-profit, that's the point

The only thing is that if you get too much income, they'll kick you out and pass it on to someone who needs it more

Well, they used to, then Thatcher introduced "Right to Buy", as a way to destroy the council housing system cause she was Tory scum, which is "if you live in a council house for 10 years you may buy it"

Capitalism is feudalism with more math.

The end goals and results are the same. That's what matters.

And that will always be true by necessity for capitalism, it is the inevitable end result, it will always end the same way and it will always end the same. With implosion.