r/antiwork - Yes, it's exactly what it sounds like.

[Canoodler]

I don't get these antiwork types, I have a job and it's not so bad.

 

[Lobster Cult High Priest]

I don't get these antiwork types, I have a job and it's not so bad.

Cause they work shit jobs like Fast food and retail with a bunch of High schoolers

 

[Fanatical Pragmatist]

We arguably are at post-scarcity right now, but it isn't the luxury gay space communism Reddit wants. Except for remote parts of the Third World, pretty much everyone could have free access to water, food, electricity, and libraries (and in some Western countries, does). But the thing is, nobody wants a lifestyle of living in a sparse apartment, wearing dull used clothes, eating shitty offbrand food, and taking public transit to the library or other venues for entertainment even though it could be given for free to billions of people in the world. Even though Reddit loves public transit and welfare, they don't want to actually live on it,

A lot of the post-scarcity meme comes from a statistic that basically boils down to using calories produced as a proxy for food produced.

Now obviously its retarded because it ignores the logistics of shipping food, and that food expires, etc. but its also dumb because calories =/= food.
You can't feed a village on high-calorie salad dressing, yet the production of food-related products like sauces, cooking oils, condiments, desert foods, cheap snacks, etc. all go into said statistic. I went into a deeper debunk a few months back ripping on some self-identified "global south" leftoid, but I don't feel like digging it up through Discord chat logs.

TL;DR: In terms of food we aren't actually a post-scarcity world.

they want to eat avocado toast

Its ironic because avocado toast can be done at home for much cheaper.
Avocados run for $0.78 - $1 depending on season & breed, a loaf of bread usually runs from $2.49 - $4 depending on brand & type. Realistically you could make 4 decent servings (2 slices per serving) for about $5, which is $1.25 per serving and a whopping ~5-10min of labor/cooking time which is pretty basic-level cooking skill.

Yet people pay anywhere from $12 to $21 for fucking avocado toast. It would be one thing to pay that much for lets say Eggs Benedict, which requires more ingredients and more cooking skill to prepare & create, or paying that much for a full meal with 2 waffles, bacon, sausage, eggs, hashbrowns and a drink, but the fact they are willing to pay such overinflated prices for something so simple and easy to make demonstrates their financial illiteracy.

 

[Shaka Brah]

Avocados run for $0.78 - $1 depending on season & breed, a loaf of bread usually runs from $2.49 - $4 depending on brand & type. Realistically you could make 4 decent servings (2 slices per serving) for about $5, which is $1.25 per serving and a whopping ~5-10min of labor/cooking time which is pretty basic-level cooking skill.

Yet people pay anywhere from $12 to $21 for fucking avocado toast. It would be one thing to pay that much for lets say Eggs Benedict, which requires more ingredients and more cooking skill to prepare & create, or paying that much for a full meal with 2 waffles, bacon, sausage, eggs, hashbrowns and a drink, but the fact they are willing to pay such overinflated prices for something so simple and easy to make demonstrates their financial illiteracy.

And if they owned a garden in the sticks instead of embracing the Great Reset cosmopolitan philosophy and living in bugpod apartments in Los Angeles, avocados would be free after 3-5 years of tending the sapling. Fruiting plants grow so many fruits one family can't eat them all, you need to give them away to neighbors. In Hawai'i the old neighborhoods are all like this, and people grow one kind of thing (lilikoi, avocado, bananas, papaya, guava, lychee) and share with their neighbors just to make sure it doesn't go to waste.

 

[Lobster Cult High Priest]

And if they owned a garden in the sticks instead of embracing the Great Reset cosmopolitan philosophy and living in bugpod apartments in Los Angeles, avocados would be free after 3-5 years of tending the sapling. Fruiting plants grow so many fruits one family can't eat them all, you need to give them away to neighbors. In Hawai'i the old neighborhoods are all like this, and people grow one kind of thing (lilikoi, avocado, bananas, papaya, guava, lychee) and share with their neighbors just to make sure it doesn't go to waste.

Even in the Midwest small towns / semi rural. Where people would share items from the garden. This comedy video from Charlie Berens is good for illustrating the Amerikaner way of life.

Midwest Horror Film

Cripes who's scared? 🔪Featuring Joshua Burstein and Kristin BreyFollow Josh at https://www.youtube.com/user/jburst7Follow me at these places: Twitter: @Char...

youtu.be

 

[Grub]

 

[Shaka Brah]

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/r/thathappened

 

[The B-52's]

Never got the "abortion is okay if you're poor" argument, I grew up poor as shit and am still happy to be alive...

 

[eternal dog mongler]

Never got the "abortion is okay if you're poor" argument, I grew up poor as shit and am still happy to be alive...

Reddit has a weird obsession with never having kids unless you're making like six figures, but also I think that's just a cover for the fact that they don't want the responsibility of having a kid. Cuts in to your funko pop budget.

 

[registered 2 hide avatars]

I "get" anti-work but what I don't understand is how people actually believe that there's so many useless jobs out there. For what purpose? Even in big corporations, why would managers go through the trouble of hiring and training and managing people (and justifying that decision and its KPIs to leadership) if these jobs weren't actually necessary?

 

[Shaka Brah]

I "get" anti-work but what I don't understand is how people actually believe that there's so many useless jobs out there. For what purpose? Even in big corporations, why would managers go through the trouble of hiring and training and managing people (and justifying that decision and its KPIs to leadership) if these jobs weren't actually necessary?

I know why. Bureaucratic inertia.

Think about it: How many HR "managers" do you genuinely need? I know for a fact the number is less than the amount your company has. Or how about Vice Presidents of X, or Data Entry Specialists (people who punch in numbers manually into Excel), or other dinosaur jobs from the pre-digital era? The amount of bloat in white-collar work is more than trivial, it represents in many cases millions of dollars per year in expenses.

Why is this? Because once a department exists, it wants to get more responsibility and more funding. It doesn't like losing either.

 

[Lupin The Turd]

I'm a little more sympathetic to their feelings on working given how fucked things have become. For reference, my grandpa was a grocery store butcher and could afford a home, cars, raise 2 kids and put one through college while my grandma only worked for her own frivolous spending. My dad, the one who didn't go to college, worked fulltime as a line cook for the majority of my youth, my mom also worked fulltime for various low end jobs. With their combined income the most they could do is rent modestly sized homes. Now there's me, I only recently got a decent job within the past 6 months, it pays a dollar above leafland min wage and it's fulltime. I have to split rent between myself, my fiance and a rando we met through Kijiji to afford a cubicle apartment.
So I can understand why people would like completely demoralized towards working given that the benefits can no longer be reaped. Say what you will about 'unskilled jobs', but your working cattle needs a pen and feed.
It's incredibly idealist to believe, as I know a lot of people would use it to just be layabouts and smoke weed, but I do feel a shift towards UBI would actually entice people to work more if they could actually afford nice things through their labor, not having to worry about struggling for rent or food. I also feel it would provide people the freedom to work on themselves and their skills, creating a more overall skilled population. I also feel that automation is inevitable, and eventually a lot of people are gonna be out of work whether they want to be or not.

 

[TurdFondler]

That's exactly the sentiment. Nowadays most of us at least know a young professional who can't afford to rent a real place. It's insane that a trades person or white collar worker has to have roommates or live in a Dickensian hovel.

So many, maybe even the majority, of office work is busywork. There just isn't 8 hours of something to do, and it's bullshit that you can't leave when you're done. You finished your work, you go home. But you have to sit around wasting your life because you're paid hourly not based on output.

 

[eternal dog mongler]

Why is this? Because once a department exists, it wants to get more responsibility and more funding. It doesn't like losing either.

Most often their job is "cost cutting" as well. Who are they going to fire? Themselves? Fat chance.

Middle management bloat in medicine is insane. Upper level administrative staff at a hospital make more than hospitalists but you better fucking believe they're going to fire RNs in order to cut costs and save money rather than deal with their own $250k salaries. It's such a huge problem.

 

[DemonicMustache]

It's incredibly idealist to believe, as I know a lot of people would use it to just be layabouts and smoke weed, but I do feel a shift towards UBI would actually entice people to work more if they could actually afford nice things through their labor, not having to worry about struggling for rent or food. I also feel it would provide people the freedom to work on themselves and their skills, creating a more overall skilled population. I also feel that automation is inevitable, and eventually a lot of people are gonna be out of work whether they want to be or not.

At least in the United States, if you used disability payments*, SNAP benefits, and gofundmes as proxies for UBI, you're basically wrong. The folks who get that stuff now are not using it to make art and make the world a beautiful, better place. They ARE laying about and whining that they don't have enough money, that the government sucks, that they are in PAIN (and need more opiates,etc).

This is a harsh take, but it's true. The reason it's harder for average or below people, especially white men*, to make a living these days is because there is more competition.
Few examples -
1. There are more people alive today than in 1975.

2. White Men no longer hold a monopoly on the professions. Women and minorities can compete now.

3. Outsourcing - The last 30 years were a great boon for outsourcing the jobs traditionally held by average people - manufacturing, IT etc. (i.e. competition from other countries).

4. In-sourcing - Companies brought in more non-white, males to take jobs in IT or software (for example). There is a reason women had more computer science degrees in the 1980s, than now. There are few jobs for women in IT/Computer fields now. Indian men get those jobs.

5. Credentialism - Companies put more emphasis on degrees. A job that could easily be done by a high school graduate (paralegals, for example) now requires a bachelors and a paralegal certificate UNLESS you plan to make 10 per hour for the rest of your life.

*I'm not making a value call on white or Indian men, just pointing it out.

 

[TurdFondler]

It's not a fair comparison though it is a valid point. There are so many other factors with welfare recipients that comparing them to a typical person isn't a good metric.

That being said, unless you could fundamentally change human nature UBI will not usher in a utopia. People always want more, and they are never happy with what they have. UBI in the context of current consoomer culture is doomed to fail.

 

[Lupin The Turd]

The biggest hurdle is that leftists don't want to admit that mass immigration does devalue labour, and drive up the cost of goods. While I do think there's a disgusting amount of food/resource waste in the world from corporations, there's still only so much that can go around and artificially increasing populations will have an objective affect on those things.

 

[Lobster Cult High Priest]

The biggest hurdle is that leftists don't want to admit that mass immigration does devalue labour, and drive up the cost of goods. While I do think there's a disgusting amount of food/resource waste in the world from corporations, there's still only so much that can go around and artificially increasing populations will have an objective affect on those things.

Having worked in the food service industry at a banquet hall the amount of food waste is insane. And I guarantee that most of the customers are on the left. I’ve always been told to finish what is on your plate and that’s exactly what I do. Don’t overload your plate but sure to not waste anything

 

[TurdFondler]

Stores throwing out unsold but edible food instead of giving it away or doing literally anything with it is insane. I understand giving it away devalues the product they sell, but surely something can be done.

The amount of water wasted at a typical restaurant is almost beyond imagining. Letting taps run for hours to defrost meat, using gallons and gallons to cool down pasta, all of it going down the drain.

 

[Shaka Brah]

Stores throwing out unsold but edible food instead of giving it away or doing literally anything with it is insane. I understand giving it away devalues the product they sell, but surely something can be done.

The amount of water wasted at a typical restaurant is insane. Letting taps run for hours to defrost meat, using gallons and gallons to cool down pasta, all of it going down the drain.

Primarily this is due to government regulations and civil court liability on past-date and unsold/finished food, not any genuine desire to waste product. Because any volume a grocery store doesn't sell is a flat loss.