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Honestly, if I was given time for it and a wage where I wouldn’t have to worry at all, I would probably be building drywalls.
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.
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.
It’s a good thing I’m a wage slave, because otherwise, I’d build the Omnissiah.
This is why a ubi is so essential when society evolves to a post scarcity state.
I’d recommend reading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin if you’re interested in an in-depth depiction of how an egalitarian stateless society could function without money.
Thank you for the rec I’ll check it out!
UBI? You mean Unstoppable Bot Invasion?
🤣😆🤣🤣😆😂😂
Agree, we should exploit autistic people’s hyperfixations for profit 🥀
I think the OP way is still ways better than what we are currently doing. And done right it wouldn’t be any more exploiting than what we are doing to neurotypicals. Everyone needs to feel valuable and that they have a purpose. I for one feel most alive when my skills are put to good use
No, both ways are completely shit - monetizing a hobby or a hyperfixation is the fastest way for it to burn out and make one hate it, speaking from experience. Companies as of “late” have been using this horseshit to get more out of young and impressionable people as well, by working them to the bone and “giving them purpose”, making them burn out then throwing them away for the new generation.
That’s not to mention the other issues if it worked as “intended” without burnout, such as increased competition depressing wages and creating more poverty since that’s how capitalist mode of production works. The only way out is to abolish the present state of things, including wage labor so we make things for their use value, not profit.
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.
I love customizing the art and movie ratings on my jellyfin
I’m a pipefitter and I can guarantee all my peers would do if not a wage slave is percocets. Definitely not electively fixing pipes.
Wikipedia editors
People who create and upload torrents
I mean sure it’s illegal, but it’s a hell of a lot of unpaid work for an uncaring and often ungrateful consumers. You have to rip the Blu-ray, compress it to a standardized size, package it with file lists in some cases, put the appropriate metadata in the torrent and filename, then seed it for years at great personal risk.
I know much of that can be automated, but still…
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?
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.
Comrades, we have to be comfortable calling capitalists “larcenists/thieves/robers/stealers” so folks actually get the problem.
Great insight.
We need UBI (Universal Basic Income). People should have the choice to work, if they want more money or love their job. Not being forced: a choice.
If someone wants to follow a path that is not financial viable - be it art or just a hobby - that should be possible, too.
Life would become better for nearly everyone. Art would get a new golden age, people would no longer fear financial ruin, happiness and personal fulfillment all around.
Also paying people starvation wages or treating them badly would no longer work. Employees would have to be treated well or they would simply leave. Great wages and good conditions more or less guaranteed. People could support a big family and a nice house on a single wage again.
The only persons not happy would be the ultra rich, the exploiter, the CEOs. Because this would only work if everyone pays their due and the 1% no longer hoard the wealth.
I think this could create the best possible future, an utopia - if only our politicians were not bought and paid for. But sadly they are - and wealth only goes towards the rich, while we get poorer every generation.
I hope I live to see the day when the people notice that the rich rigged the game and react accordingly.
UBI is not the solution, ending the capitalist system is.
All UBI does is lessen the suffering slightly, why not just directly meet people’s needs without the middleman.
UBI is not the solution, but a great first step towards a better system.
To make it work well, you need strong regulations on a lot of systems: banks, utilities, corporations.
At some point it will be easier to just give the state control of everything concerning basic needs. Then to control institutions that ‘fight back’ the most against regulations, like banks and mega corporations.
You see where this might lead?
It’s a slow way towards a better economic system without the need for a revolution.
Your analysis is too light. The state isn’t some magical benevolent entity which is somehow “on the wrong path”. The state is an instrument of domination driven by the dominating class: the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is against everything you cited. It will not slowly act against its own interest, willingly lose power and dominance. It will always fight for, at the minimum, keeping power.
That is why historically the only way to have changes that contradict the dominating entity’s interest is for the dominated entity to band together. It’s the only way anything ever changes: the balance of forces moves in the interest of the dominated. Women didn’t earn the right to vote because men were nice, but because women fought for it. Social progress never happens because the bourgeoisie is nice (that’s a very nice propaganda trick) but because the bourgeoisie has to compromise.
Waiting/wishing/hoping for the state to be nice, which is what asking for ubi is, and the “revolution without violence” the socdem has pushed about, never works. As long as the people who are legitimate are dominated, it will not happen.
Let’s stop dreaming in idealistic what-ifs and act in materialist actions. The material conditions define our existence. Let’s set our material conditions of existence, without asking nicely, and the balance of power will force the dominating power to compromise.
It’s a slow way towards a better economic system without the need for a revolution.
We’ve had 100 years of unopposed reformism, and look where we are 🥀
The state isn’t some friend that exists for the public good, it literally dances to bourgeois private interests by design. There will be no UBI or better healthcare or whatever unless material conditions and bourgeois interests necessitate it (to prevent a proletariat revolution is one example). There’s a reason why it’s called a dictatorship of the bourgeois.
If we got UBI today, the majority of people would stop pushing for the better system and would be content with “better than they had”.
Effectively setting back liberation by centuries and perpetuating suffering, meanwhile it would always be a sword of damocles dangling above the peoples head with fear of it being withdrawn or diminished by future conservative governments at any minutes notice.
And frankly arguing for it is a terrible idea on principle, it’s like haggling and starting from the middle instead of the lowest.
Ubi would never happen, and if it did they would constantly remove people from the roles until it was a subsidy to their supporters, a patronage.
Looking at medicaid and food assistance, I do not see how anyone could think it would not be ratfucked if it got through in the first place.
You support UBI because it would create an utopia
I support UBI because it would literally destroy the economy
We are not the same
I would implement an Universal Wage Cap, and Universal Basic Products and Services.
The first doesn’t allow to earn above certain point, everything beyond that gets taxed.
The second one ensures that people don’t need to pay for their most basic needs.
Paying people starvation wages, healthcare tied to employment; treating people badly- these are the type of thing that people fighting against UBI really actually like. Like enthusiastically want.
Yeah, to get a bunch of the working class to vote against their interests you need to give them somebody to look down on.
They don’t just want to look down on someone, they’re so propagandized to by the ultra wealthy they do it for free.
Ultimately getting people to vote against their best interest is quite common, maybe even more common that voting in their best interest because of all the compromise with capitalists stuff. Wanting to address affordability but not addressing capitalism is like bargaining with a virus.
I totally agree. There needs to be some financial mechanisms for keeping people from becoming insanely wealthy coupled with financial mechanisms preventing people from becoming impoverished. The obvious solutions are taxes that increase with income and wealth along with UBI that someone can reasonably live off of. All of this requires regulation and strict enforcement of tax laws, especially for the most wealthy. The rich know this and actively work against it. Probably the most effective method has been for them to buy up all the mass media and pump out capitalist and anti-intelectualist propaganda. We can’t change anything if half the people drank the coolaid and actively fight against their own interests and for the interests of the rich. I don’t know how bad things will have to get for those people to wake up. Hopefully not much worse but at this point I’m afraid it might take a real civil war for things to change, at least in the USA. Possibly even a world war with how things are going. We’re already barreling towards that cliff with the federal governments foot on the gas… I just hope I live through it.
All we have to do is make better kool aid to give them… Electric kool aid acid.
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.
I’ve done this but staying roughly in the same field while changing roles. So it looks like I had a career!
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’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.
That’s what I do for my friends. But finding out where wires go sucks.
Ah, anarchism
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.
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
Idk, man. This reads like something I’d get from a Homeschool Mom who thinks her kids are being held back by their schools’ demand to learn advanced literacy and mathematics and physical sciences, instead of numerology and automatic writing. You do, in fact, want people to work outside their comfort zone. Especially when they’re young and everything is outside their comfort zone.
Like, you don’t actually want a guy with an obsessive desire to fix your plumbing to start work on something they’re going to forget about in an hour after they fixate on something new. This is how you get half the plumbing in the neighborhood disassembled while the guy doing the work has gone into a shame spiral and won’t leave the house.
You can argue about the merits of the Apprentice / Journeyman / Master system, but every project really does need a certain level of experienced skill involved. Working with a collection of amateur hobbyists gets you predictably amateur results. That’s before you even get into what happens when your enthusiast plumber declares a jihad on imperial units and tries to covert half the pipes on the block to metric measures.
We don’t need wage labour in order to have experts.
I’ve done a fair bit of DIY stuff in my home including various plumbing projects and it’s all been doable with just reading manuals, watching videos and spending time thinking things through. That said blow torches scare me and I did everything with pipe cutters and sharkbite connectors and such, but it works, and I did what I could to make sure it was done well/correct because I need my plumbing to work.
My experience with commercial plumbers, mostly from when I was renting, is overall pretty bad and that they are mostly unwilling to think at all beyond the immediate billable job. There was a whole ordeal where water backing up from the drain kept flooding one of the rooms in my apartment from under the walls, and while fortunately my landlord was honest enough to call plumbers when this happened, just about every time they would use a drain snake, claim the problem was fixed without really checking, and then it would just happen again later. It ultimately turned out to be a problem with the pipes not being connected to the sewer where they met the street, and was finally fixed with city involvement, but it took a hell of a lot of advocating for myself and pushing back on bullshit explanations to get to the point where the real problem was even identified or acknowledged.
I am 100% convinced that just about any anarchist system of plumbing would be a significant improvement, though maybe the plan described in the OP image should be adjusted a bit away from hobbyist plumbers going around taking responsibility for the critical systems in other people’s homes and towards a network of free expert advice, guidance, and tools to help people maintain their own living spaces, which they will naturally understand and care about on a level people who don’t live there won’t.
Anarchist plumbing is a terrifying concept.
and spending time thinking things through
Ah, you nailed the secret in the first sentence!
That is one huge advantage I bet you’d see in this anarchist plumbing system. The people would be self-selected to actually care about the thing they’re doing.
That doesn’t mean they’re all going to be rational analytical thinkers tackling your problem from first principles, but it would be a big step up from how we do it now.
No doubt there’s some mediocre professionals. But as a home owner myself the last twelve years, I’ve found at least as many professionals who were worth their weight. Meanwhile, the time I spend on YouTube DIY videos plus the actual home repairs rarely feels worth the effort.
I had to redo the master bath a few years back and I can’t even dream of doing that alone, much less with my own inexperience.
But nobody would be motivated to work if they grow up in a world where the broken ppl fixed everything so nobody becomes broken enough for their trauma to motivate them to obsessively fix the things that caused their trauma! We’d all die! Civilization would collapse! We need to traumatize ppl so they’d have ambition.
Realists be like
