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greed corruption uneducated lazy. if all crimes are legal, there’s nothing stopping an easy fix. lawyers run cover by dragging things out for fees. the mad plumber would work for free if he didn’t have bills to pay.
@Five this is fascinating. I’m sure I’m not alone in this: even just the internal bureaucracy and culture within a company suppresses (smothers) people, and, in some cases, deliberately prevents them from doing what they’re best at. I’m sure the theoretical free plumber you mentioned would be seen as a threat to the livelihoods of 50 different hedge fund backed outfits here in Las Vegas (Goettl for example…🖕you Goettl).
Sounds nice, how does it work in reality?
I work at a tiny 10 person non-profit. I am by far the most computer literate person here by an order of magnitude, given my completely wasted software engineering degree. I offered in my downtime at work to fix a bunch of laptops used by our kids in the after school program that were malfunctioning in some way or another.
I was told to stick to my job description by our Executive Director, and that they’d contact an external IT person to deal with it. I’m an Admin Assistant, which TBH kind of means I wear many hats anyway so my job description is very broad…
So here I am, twiddling my thumbs, posting on Lemmy instead.
Its not only giant corporations. Its infected every modern manager/executive brain. And I want to say, the executive director at my work I consider “one of the good executives”. At least by comparison.
(My immediate superior I like… less. She’ll do something wrong, I’ll try to fix it, and I’ll get reprimanded for trying to fix it.)
one of the good executives
…
10 person non-profit.
This sounds incredibly top-heavy for such a small company. The fact that you got micro-managed like that in such a rediculously small outfit is kind of unheard of, frankly. Usually small companies are the exact opposite, where there’s one owner/operator, the job titles are largely made-up, and everyone just gets everything done because there’s usually not enough expertise-hours to go around to solo every task.
I meant executives in general, not specifically at my workplace. There is only 1 person with the title “Executive” and shes generally pretty decent.
My immediate boss is the Youth (After School) Program Director and they don’t have true executive powers, they just have basic supervisory powers.
I will say, before the Youth Director was hired though, we all generally operated fairly autonomously and without issue, things went smoothly. Since my boss was hired, two separate youth counselors quit, one because her hours were cut (One of the few decisions I found pretty dumb by the executive director) and another specifically because she found my immediate bosses decision making actively hampered the quality of our program and she wasn’t working there for the money.
I was once told I should apply for my bosses position and at the time I found the idea completely unattractive. I now regret not applying given who has ended up there.
If i had to guess they contract work out or just redirect that money
(My immediate superior I like… less. She’ll do something wrong, I’ll try to fix it, and I’ll get reprimanded for trying to fix it.)
Because it’s fucked exactly how she likes it, you trying to unfuck it messes up her whole system ;)
Most people quite literally think they are above admin assistants.
Imagine the cleaning lady rolls up and fixes the bug you spent hours on in a few seconds.
I worked at a company where the cleaning lady was considerably more intelligent than most of the managers. But you was held back because her English wasn’t really very good yet so she had to take what work she could.
Meanwhile the managers would rock in at 11:30 and immediately go on an hour lunch break. Usually they would then demand a meeting in the afternoon so they could get up to speed with what everyone was doing which was only necessary because they have been AWOL for the past 4 hours.
The problem is that a system like that would benefit a lot of people instead of just the parasitic owner class.
We can’t just go around, doing stuff, without our
evildivine overlords earning their share! It simply wouldn’t be fair to our corporate slave-owners.I think it’s moreso that a system like that would ultimately remove the ability for the parasite class to exist. Can’t keep everyone tied to your goods and services if they are entirely capable of producing them themselves.
And every single one of them would have a YouTube channel.
I invent utility and design patents, but am on disability and can’t afford to patent them open-source. My brain and body won’t let me have a regular job, but I could do this all day long if the social infrastructure was there
I’m a big fan of the concept of an universal basic income. Where everyone gets ~1000€ every month from the government. For children, the parents get the money.
And I mean everyone. Every legal resident. Including billionaires.
To finance it I would tax both income and capital gains at ~50%. From the very first € you earn.
The net tax load on most people would not actually change much. But it completely gets rid of situations where if people work more, loose their benefits and end up with less.
1000€ should be just about enough to life a frugal lifestyle. A flat with a partner or flatmate in a small town. Produce to cook a flexitarian diet. A public transport pass and a bicycle. A Samsung Galaxy A17 with an internet plan. And all those other real necessities of life.
If people want luxuries, they will still have to work. Someone still has to produce those consumables after all. But everyone should be able to get all of their basic necessities covered.
Billionaires should not exist and their existence should not be tolerated.
Yes. If someone has a million times the median wealth, there’s something wrong with the system.
But how is that relevant here?
And I mean everyone. Every legal resident. Including billionaires.
That statement is just about how there’s no means test.
Im already taxed like 20% in the US and see nothing for it. May as well do 50 and actualy get something of value for society
it’s a good idea but it requires that costs don’t adapt. that 800€ apartment you wanted? well since you’re already getting a subsidy it’s now 1600€. after all, if you discount the subsidy it’s cheaper!
Exactly. What’s to keep the sellers from just jacking everything up?
College was expensive, but affordable, until the government made it easier to get student loans. Colleges responded by wildly jacking up their prices, and now you literally have to voluntarily take on a lifetime of debt to get a college degree for a job that probably won’t cover the cost of your loan. And what did the government do? They went right along with it, and demand repayment before anything else.
They recently started a benefit program with Medicare that gives you some money each month to buy health related items in drugstores and such, and they responded by jacking up the prices in Walgreens and CVS.
I’m all for UBI as well, but it has to comes with price controls so the corporate parasites don’t just take it all. UBI Gouging has to be a harshly enforced crime.
What we need is to jail people who do exploitive shit like this. Just like any other harmful acticity we jail people for.
Or maybe jusr, OP’s 50% tax deal ramps up the more acxumulated wealth and property you have. Tonstrongly discourage that practice. Like sure, you exploited your rent holdings and you are a ten millionaire. But now we are taxing you at 100% so we can bump people’s UBI subsidy up enough to account for your exploitation.
Good job, you accomplished nothing in the end.
We can’t jail them without a law that makes it illegal.
And if we introduce rent control, we need to replace it with other incentives to build new apartment buildings. Ideally ones that create a slight oversupply of housing. Otherwise, in a decade or so, you get cheap rent but tons of homeless people because the supply is insufficient.
The incentive is that its what is good for society and good for everyone. The ince tive is doing good. Because people need places to live.
Needs of the many vs needs of the few and all that.
Laws can be made. Laws are all made in the first place.
Building apartments currently cost about a quarter million per unit. Plus interest on the mortgage. Most potential landlords don’t just have millions in liquid funds.
Nobody will be taking out loans like that if they won’t even earn their investment back if everything goes to plan.
well that’s a uniquely us problem which doesn’t really apply to the rest of the world.
I don’t doubt that. In America, our government encourages the Sociopathic Oligarchs to exploit us. That’s why they love it so much here.
Yes, it definitely has to be recalculated frequently. If it doesn’t, it will be about as useful as the US minimum wage after some time.
But as I said, most people wouldn’t have significantly more or less money than they do today. At least I carefully calculated those numbers so that most people would have pretty much the same, for Germany in 2019. So I don’t really expect prices to go up drastically.
It’s not that people suddenly have 1000€ extra. Either their unemployment benefits get replaced by that UBI, or they now have to pay an extra 1000€ in taxes.
it’s not even supposed to be an “extra 1000€ in taxes”, it would just be gradually eaten up by taxes the more you make.
the big problem is, a lot of people on long-term sick pay who are not allowed to work would get less from this system. there needs to be something to deal with that.
Currently the tax rate is progressive. In the future it wouldn’t be anymore. But because those progressive taxes only apply to income over a certain threshold, people with lower incomes would profit more.
This system would not replace social security. If you get a pension due to age or sickness or in your first year of unemployment, you would still be covered by your mandatory insurance. Same with your mandatory health insurance. And you’d still have to pay for it on top of your taxes. The employee and the employer pay 20% of the gross income each.
it’s my understanding that the system would replace social security. the savings from slimming down the systems responsible for payout would be part of what made the entire thing possible.
It would replace long term unemployment benefits. And minimum pension. The benefits that are paid directly by the government, not mandatory insurance.
It would be mostly financed through getting rid of progressive taxes.
isn’t a progressive taxation system meant to ramp up as you earn more, not down? that would lose you money by getting rid of it.
Which is why UBI should be coupled with UBS (universal basic services). In this context, at the very least there would exist also a rental board (like Quebec’s existing Regie du Logement). If you’re more ambitious, housing would be a universal service and taken out of the market altogether. And don’t forget that that 1600E income of the landlord would be also taxed.
More generally: https://ubiadvocates.org/inflation-and-ubi-separating-fact-from-fiction/
If UBI is financed through measures that inject new money into the economy, such as deficit spending or monetary expansion, the risk of inflation may be heightened. This is because the increase in the money supply outpaces the economy’s capacity to produce goods and services, leading to a general rise in prices.
Conversely, if UBI is funded through redistributive measures, such as progressive taxation or cuts in inefficient spending, the inflationary pressures can be mitigated. By targeting resources from high-income individuals or unproductive sectors of the economy, such funding mechanisms redistribute existing wealth rather than injecting new money into circulation.
This ensures that the overall level of demand remains relatively stable, thereby limiting the potential for inflationary spirals.
I’m a big fan of it in concept, but TBH the pandemic made me think twice about it. By that I mean, I watched quite a lot of people get put on furlough, so essentially having their needs met while not having to work, and they went fucking crazy, like screaming fights in the shared hallway over literally nothing at 6am crazy. And it happened really fast too. I think a lot of people are so indoctrinated into the concept of having to show up to work and be told what to do that they kind of short-circuit when left to work it out for themselves.
Not that I think we shouldn’t do it necessarily, and I’d hope over time it would even out as people got used to it, but it would need to be done very carefully I think. Even if the math and the politics of it make sense, you also have to sort of account for the irrationality of people as well, which I don’t often hear a lot of discussion about.
we need time to collectively un-domesticate our thinking, and to basically recover enough of our lost human identity to even have bandwidth to imagine some way of life other than wage-slavery. It won’t be easy or quick to undo generations worth of programming, but the disruption is coming either way, AI and the looming collapse demand it.
Covid also woke lots of people up. Suddenly families had time to spend together (including dysfunctional ones), suddenly normies realised that maybe giant pharmaceutical companies actually don’t care about the population’s health so much. It showed people that governments can and will drastically intervene in their lives (including by making money rain from the sky) when there is some threat of elite interests actually being effected. It was a huge, scary and unprecedented event, so it makes sense that people would freak the fuck out. You’ll notice i didn’t even get into mandates or the insane mania our media pushed during the period.
IDK there was more going on than just ‘people suddenly had free time again’. But you’re right lots of people are already so conditioned that the thought of having the ability to spend their own limited earthly time however they wish literally scares them. These people have been separated from their own humanity, and even if the work is painful they deserve to be recovered as anyone else.
Many people also go crazy like that right after they retire. At least for a while. Structure is important for humans, and many find it difficult to create structure themselves.
But an UBI wouldn’t mean that people would suddenly be out of work. They 'd still have to work to keep their lifestyle
Just to put my 2 cents on the plate, it seems like a lot of people are stuck in living arrangements they don’t actually want to be in, purely for economic reasons. Lots of personality mismatch in close quarters, work is an escape. UBI would probably break apart lots of lives, but hopefully people will build back better.
In respect to being paid to work on hobbies, a lot of the tech sector was furloughed as well. FOSS projects massively improved, seemingly overnight. I’ve dabbled with Linux on and off during the 2010s, 2021 felt like the year where everything finally clicked together, now I run Linux and FOSS on everything where possible. I’m not sure how to find data to dispute or support that link tho, might just be me.
People need cars to live where I am. There is no public transportation and cycling is far too dangerous, no one even tries. They give up their homes before their cars. Tons of people living on UBI would be living in their cars.
In a political climate where you could actually implement UBI, you would also be able to implement walkability policies.
Also, e-bikes. E-bikes is where it’s at.
Yeah e bikes aren’t even allowed on the roads for now. The walkability problem is a matter of the billions and billions of dollars it would take to essentially redo every road in the county. Some zoning changes could help a little but we’re generations of work away from being walkable
The trick is to implement temporary measures at first. Like turning a lane into a sidewalk and a bike lane, by placing planters. Then when it’s time to renew the road anyway, the status quo only has one car lane in each direction.
In that situation there will be both the money and the will to build a grade separated sidewalk and bike lane.
I’m being speculative, right?
In a political climate where you could actually implement UBI, you would also be able to …
Yeah not in rural areas, we need cars.
Now, im all for banning bro trucks and crossovers over 3500 lbs. If you cant get by with a miata or a wagon, you have to get a special license for a bigger vehicle and pay more because youre damaging the road and endangering others 10x more in your 10,000lb f350 diesel.
Rural areas, sure. Suburban and urban where the majority of humans live, no.
UBI is a billionaire slop ideology to defuse political tension with gifts, accelerating capital accumulation in the process. It places the 99% as clients of a power-holding elite. It’ll produce a few generations of hapless losers, who’ll be utterly incapable of defending their rights when they eventually roll a cruel patron that decides to take it away.
Statistically, university students, part-time employees and non working people in single income households are the most active in protests. They have the time, the means and the education to do so.
Wage slaves don’t have time. And if they unionize they might get fired and not have anything anymore. So they don’t.
A UBI means everyone is capable of protesting. Why would that produce hapless loosers?
Exactly. UBI is a reactionary socialist concept. It is a bandage for a bigger issue, meant to appease so as not to incite revolt. However the real issue is a commodity economy / money. Its really hard to get the masses on board with abolishing that without global revolution.
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Then buy a different 200€ phone?
Iphone SE3 is like $130 refurbished, if you’re into iPhones. My partner has it and they have no complaints.
Kinda similar. I work in HVAC-R. There are a ton of times where I’m working on a system where I would love to just spend a few more hours making part of it better and then another few hours streamlining things to make future work on it easier. But we charge $200 per hour so no customer wants me to spend 12 hours making their system perfect; they want me to spend 2 hours and just get it functional. If I didn’t have to charge money for my time then not only would every system I touch run like a dream, but they would also be beautiful. As it is people more frequently wind up with duct taped functional travesties and then refuse any follow up work to fix it properly.
Not that I’ve had much luck with this, but I have tried to explain to customers/managers that the work is like to do is preventative.
Sure it’s “expensive” now, but this reduces potential failures AND reduces maintenance time in the future.
This means we spend $ now, but save $$ later 🤷🏻♂️
Unfortunately there’s never time to do it right and always time to do it twice
Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of the cure
I know someone like that who cannot keep a job because of autism and health issues. Luckily she lives in a functioning country and gets state support including money and guidance. She is the regional pet/pony/alpaca carer and her house is always filled with animals from people on holiday or sick animals from people with full time jobs. She also notifies all the local farmers if one of their animals has an issue.
That’s awesome! And I can entirely relate but my ADHD / autism isn’t so bad I can’t keep a job, but now with hindsight if could choose career path again I would leave the tech world of computers to work with animals. Instead I keep working in tech to afford filling my house with animals (at least as I work remotely I can spend a lot of time with them). Dogs, cats, fish, snakes, amphibians, parrots, …
🥹
I would literally be the jack of all trades
I’d happily do something completely different every couple of weeks
Not very practical with a 3 month notice period IRL
… And yeah the whole needing to work to not die thing
Im 51. I’ve done this my entire life. My resume is vast and strange.
What’s this gap in your resume? Oh, that’s the two years I was a jeweler. What about this one? That time I managed a retail store. But you’re applying for a manufacturing position sir. Yes, that’s why I only left the relevant bits on the resume, otherwise it would be 7 pages long and you wouldn’t be seeing me now.
You sound like Adam Savage
I’ve done this but staying roughly in the same field while changing roles. So it looks like I had a career!
I’m more or less a professional handyman, it can be done
Hey can you come over and install smart switches in my house, figure out what 6 light switches that control nothing are connected to, and find out where the 24 cut ethernet cables in my garage go? I’ll pay you in setting up a home server, playing video games with you, or letting you pet my cat.
Lol, I have rejiggered a mess of Ethernet cables in my lifetime for sure
Ah ‘rejiggered’. The man knows what he’s talking about about.
It’s the only way to handle something thats gone squeehawed or, Satan forbid, cattywampus.
That’s what I do for my friends. But finding out where wires go sucks.
Ah, anarchism
Don’t forget to take your medication today.
So the capitalist masters can keep me contained‽
3 month? Wtf?
Pretty standard where I live, for my job
It’s crazy how spot on this guy actually is, this wild dude honestly unclogs drains for the love of it: https://youtu.be/95ATNSkGF3Y
Sounds a bit naive on paper.
But thinking about it, I want to fact-check wikipedia sources for a living. Also make tools to automate shit. Also I fucking love assembling and fixing furniture so I could do that too.
No need to even pay. As long as I am not homeless or starving to death I would be happy and fulfilled doing those kind of work.
Tho I do think doctors and teachers etc should still make some extra money for the years of expertise before even starting the work.
It’s one of those things I’d love to see done as an experiment as long as it could be done ethically. Build a little town somewhere and have no prescribed jobs, just let everyone do what they want and see how it pans out.
Another one I’d like to see is to have two areas as identical as possible - same geography, climate, resources etc. and populate one fully with left-wing people and one with right-wing people and see which one does better. Unfetterd Socialist Utopia vs Unrestricted Ayn Rand Libertarian Boot-strappery or whatever. Settle it once and for all lol.
It’s one of those things I’d love to see done as an experiment
I believe you’ve got a fantastic idea here, not only to see how this one idea pans out, but to learn how we might build a better society. There’s little reason we couldn’t simultaneously have multiple test centres, each using a different system. Scientific method 101.
China famously began its modern transformation in the 80s by creating Special Economic Zones. These were cities where many of the economic rules for the rest of the country wouldn’t apply, and where new theories could be tested. There’s no need to agree with the goals China was pursuing, and for-better-or-for-worse have subsequently achieved, to acknowledge the method is brutally effective.
It’s a good thing I’m a wage slave, because otherwise, I’d build the Omnissiah.
Your kind cling to your flesh as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude Biomass you call a Temple will wither and you will beg my kind to save you.
This is me but obsessively analyzing the artistic merits of low brow mediums like animation and video games
You are not wrong. But I wish you were.
Japan sort of has that thing going.
Ningen Kokuhō or Living National Treasures get paid by the government just to keep doing something culturally significant. Like making clay pots or arrows using traditional techniques. Preserving Kabuki or performing arts.
Honestly it’s amazing to recognize the significance oby supporting masters of certain crafts. Otherwise some might not find it financially sustainable and cut corners, well this allows them to keep traditions and preserve valuable techniques.
Can we do this for Primitive Technology guy so he can go make iron in the woods full time?
he would be forging steel already, if not for the need to get out of the woods to make money
Love that kids videos, I am trying his wood ash into portland cement method here as soon as it is warm enough. Mix ash with water, roll into balls, fire until glowing, then drop in water while hot, the fast temp change calcifies something and makes a product identical to portland cement. At which point you mix with aggregate like broken ceramics or gravel. I do maple ayrup, and have a woodstove I just put in so I have a ton of woodash.
I obsessively/compulsively update and optimize computers. I see a missing driver or BIOS update not installed? A dusty CPU Fan? A security alert? I fix. I literally just went to bed after running “sudo dnf update -y && Sudo flatpak upgrade -y” on my wife’s laptop that she doesn’t even use! Thankfully, my work lets me tinker on machines all day, every day, and nobody cares if a side project shows up on the bench every now and then. I would do it for free if I didn’t need the money. When I’m not at work, I do IT for family, and I volunteer at the library. I don’t even game anymore, I self host and tinker. Hell, I spend more time mucking with Jellyfin than watching media. There are people like that. We exist.
I was like this, it eventually got kind of boring, now I’m learning beekeeping and old clock repair in the 7.5 hours a day leftover now that I’ve automated my job. Sorry “waiting for a maintenance window to do a server migration” or whatever it is people think I do.
Can you tell Me why Jellyfin keeps playing media with black bars across the screen? Every time I start playback, it’s a die roll whether I get a black screen, horizontal stripes, vertical stripes, a grid of black lines, or a perfectly ordinary video. I usually have to start and stop a video two or three times at the beginning to get good playback. The problem seems to get worse when My root partition is more full.
That’s a surprisingly complicated question! If you post the playback info, that might help. Also, what are you hosting Jellyfin on, what OS, environment, gpu? Do the same videos pay back clean in VLC? Does the computer posting back the media have scaling, or a weird OS? I have my Jellyfin in a Proxmox container and had all kinds of issues when passing a (very old) GPU through, but without it I can’t get 4k. I have more than a few movies where I manually re-encoded them before putting them on Jellyfin and kept the source file zipped up for storage.
Thanks for helping! I’m both hosting and playing it on a CachyOS (Arch) KDE machine with an Intel i5 and NVIDIA RTX, and the videos are fine on VLC, Haruna, and mpv.
I love customizing the art and movie ratings on my jellyfin
