alt Hacker NewsWho produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you airily define ‘productivity’ as reading the classics and spending time with friends?
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By that logic someone working in a care home is worth less than someone building a gambling app. There's little relationship between salary and what people deserve, it's mostly just luck to have skills that happen to be in short supply.
> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc.
The able do. The disabled would love to work hard and earn a nice paycheck. It's a privilege to be able to work and be in good health. Hopefully you don't have to learn that the hard way.
I know who some of them are. I'm sure as hell that you weren't one of them.
Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you post this comment?
Does it matter? In the US, we send a sizable portion of our paychecks to the government's Social Security program so it can provide for us in this exact scenario. The government dictated the terms and we upheld our end of the contract on pain of incarceration. Now it's time for the government to uphold their end.
Stephen Hawking wouldn't exist in our society if we didn't care for people like him.
> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc
You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.
At least for food, we went from 80% 500 years ago to about 1-5% now. Maybe less, soon, when fruit picking robots come online. Work is not destiny.
Is the majority of jobs that are related to this space and most people do here productive, by this definition? I would say it is destructive even.
At least what OP says produces no harm at worst.
Billionaires, evidently. Why else would they deserve a million times what you make in your entire lifetime, weren't for the fact they're a million times more productive than you? In fact, if one were to die tomorrow that'd be like the loss to the world of a million of you, whereas were you to do the same, that'd be a loss of only one of you. This is also why you can be downsized without that impacting anything important, while downsizing a single billionaire would be a global tragedy.
Or at least, that's the logical consequence of that line of reasoning. If that's incorrect, where's the error in the reasoning?
People who the current system fully agrees should be paid like dirt while others party, that's who.
Many places around the world, we work for what is needed, not for hitting it big.
But since you ask, also many victims of late stage capitalism explored in modern forms of slavery without work rights, so that richer nations can enjoy cheap electronics and clothing.
What a tone deaf comment.
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3rd world sweatshop workers who are exploited by filthy rich.
We have enough excess in society that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves.