Taking a valid and correct observation and then strawmanning it with a crappy comic strip does not turn it into a invalid and incorrect observation.
The whole article above reminds me of when my brother went through his "I don't know why everybody works. They are so stupid" phase in late teens. Except this guy never grew out of it and he is now 30-something.
Stuff like this:
> Poverty is not an objective condition, but a relationship produced by unequal distribution of resources. There’s no such thing as poverty in societies in which people share everything.
The problem with this line of thinking is the line of thinking of "poverty exists because rich people exist". It treats the economy as a zero sum game were wealth is determined by access to natural resources and capital. That in order to for some people to be rich they need to restrict access to those productive and natural resource, thus condemning others to poverty.
A better way to think of poverty is 'privation'. Humanity has struggled against privation for as long as humanity has existed.
The natural state of humanity isn't being rich. When everybody had equal access to everything and there was no private property... It was true that everybody was equally wealthy, but they were also impoverished. It just meant that they were equally likely to die from what we would consider now a minor injury or inconvenient disease. It meant that you could starve to death if you badly twisted your ankle or broke your arm.
Poverty is the default. Anything else is a improvement.
It took 10s of thousands of years of struggle and fighting and dying to get to the point were large percentages of the population dying from communicable diseases and starvation wasn't considered a normal cyclical thing that was simply part of the natural order.
This wasn't that long ago.
We are still at the tail end of the moral panic of "People are no longer dying off faster then they can reproduce in the cities. How are we going to feed all these people? Are they not just going to descend onto the fields and consume the world like locusts?" (which is ironically reflected in some of the statements in the above article)
Now I am all for a person who doesn't want to exist as a cog in the corporate machine. I am also on the side of the person who is willing to accept a lower income in exchange for pursuing better personal relationships or gaming or art or whatever. Great. Go for it. You have only one life live how you want to. If you don't need to put in the government-imposed standard of a 40 hour work week... then by all means don't.
But if somebody writes a small book with the premise of "everybody in the world is a idiot except me"... then I have a pretty good idea on the odds of that statement being true. (hint: they are not good}
> If you don't like the modern world, stop being a hypocrite make the first move and throw away the computer and go live in the woods.
You, with derision:
> Taking a valid and correct observation and then strawmanning it with a crappy comic strip does not turn it into a invalid and incorrect observation.
> The whole article above reminds me of when my brother went through his "I don't know why everybody works. They are so stupid" phase in late teens. Except this guy never grew out of it and he is now 30-something.
So... Is it okay to decide to change on a personal level to not work or does that make you a dingus like your brother?
The whole point is that we have achieved insane productivity without the commensurate increase in quality of life and leisure due to the idiotic status quo.
> But if somebody writes a small book with the premise of "everybody in the world is a idiot except me"... then I have a pretty good idea on the odds of that statement being true.
The whole article above reminds me of when my brother went through his "I don't know why everybody works. They are so stupid" phase in late teens. Except this guy never grew out of it and he is now 30-something.
Stuff like this:
> Poverty is not an objective condition, but a relationship produced by unequal distribution of resources. There’s no such thing as poverty in societies in which people share everything.
The problem with this line of thinking is the line of thinking of "poverty exists because rich people exist". It treats the economy as a zero sum game were wealth is determined by access to natural resources and capital. That in order to for some people to be rich they need to restrict access to those productive and natural resource, thus condemning others to poverty.
A better way to think of poverty is 'privation'. Humanity has struggled against privation for as long as humanity has existed.
The natural state of humanity isn't being rich. When everybody had equal access to everything and there was no private property... It was true that everybody was equally wealthy, but they were also impoverished. It just meant that they were equally likely to die from what we would consider now a minor injury or inconvenient disease. It meant that you could starve to death if you badly twisted your ankle or broke your arm.
Poverty is the default. Anything else is a improvement.
It took 10s of thousands of years of struggle and fighting and dying to get to the point were large percentages of the population dying from communicable diseases and starvation wasn't considered a normal cyclical thing that was simply part of the natural order.
This wasn't that long ago.
We are still at the tail end of the moral panic of "People are no longer dying off faster then they can reproduce in the cities. How are we going to feed all these people? Are they not just going to descend onto the fields and consume the world like locusts?" (which is ironically reflected in some of the statements in the above article)
Now I am all for a person who doesn't want to exist as a cog in the corporate machine. I am also on the side of the person who is willing to accept a lower income in exchange for pursuing better personal relationships or gaming or art or whatever. Great. Go for it. You have only one life live how you want to. If you don't need to put in the government-imposed standard of a 40 hour work week... then by all means don't.
But if somebody writes a small book with the premise of "everybody in the world is a idiot except me"... then I have a pretty good idea on the odds of that statement being true. (hint: they are not good}