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

[TaimuRadiu]

Can we count Aristotle Onassis as a self made man, since he literally built himself up from being an actual war refugee, got a job as a telephone operator, and became one of the richest men in the world?

 

[TyroneCoalburn]

"What would you do when there wasn't any work?"
"I would finally start an atelier and make wonderful art all day, learn three languages to help my fellow human beings translating stuff, go into computer science to develop good software, learn to weld and construct utilities etc.etc."
"You can do all of that and make a great living out of it right now."
"[angry degenerate bugmen noises]"

 

[Varg Did Nothing Wrong]

"What would you do when there wasn't any work?"
"I would finally start an atelier and make wonderful art all day, learn three languages to help my fellow human beings translating stuff, go into computer science to develop good software, learn to weld and construct utilities etc.etc."
"You can do all of that and make a great living out of it right now."
"[angry degenerate bugmen noises]"

You can't start an atelier without either having seed capital in the bank for it, or having a patron that will support you from the moment you start it to the moment it actually becomes profitable, if ever.

You can't sit around learning three languages at home because you've got to eat stuff and live somewhere and wear clothes. Again, you need material support to do this. Most people that learn three languages learn them while they are children through either cultural osmosis, or directed study, at which time they are being supported by their parents.

You can do all of the things mentioned except for the start your own business one as a "side gig" or in your free time, but doing stuff in your free time is never as productive as if you could devote a full 8 hours a day to doing that thing. Nobody is going to become the next Steve Vai by practicing guitar for 2 hours on the weekends. You get to that level of ability and mastery by practicing for 8 hours a day, every day. You aren't going to be working shifts at McDonalds and then coming home and cracking open those Arabic and Sumerian textbooks for another 8 hours to start learning dead languages in order to help further academic knowledge. Shit just doesn't happen. Because you need to wash your underwear, and do the dishes, and cook yourself something for dinner.

Why were the ancient Greeks able to become mathematicians, invent geometry and philosophy? Because they were free to sit on their ass thinking all day, while their slaves handled the household chores, cooked the food, went to the market, and so on. Plato and Aristotle weren't working 12 hours in the wheat fields and then coming home to figure out epistemological problems.

 

[TenMilesWide]

Can we count Aristotle Onassis as a self made man, since he literally built himself up from being an actual war refugee, got a job as a telephone operator, and became one of the richest men in the world?

Did anyone tangentially related to him touch a dollar bill at any point in his life? If so, not self-made.

 

[Large]

Can we count Aristotle Onassis as a self made man, since he literally built himself up from being an actual war refugee, got a job as a telephone operator, and became one of the richest men in the world?

Self made men are not rare at all.

Deconstructing the Rothschild Conspiracy

Some believe that world governments and economies are secretly controlled by the Rothschild banking family.

skeptoid.com

George Soros - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

John D. Rockefeller – Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia

pl.m.wikipedia.org

Gabe Newell - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos (bike shops aren't extremely lucrative or anything AFAIK)

 

[TyroneCoalburn]

You can do all of the things mentioned except for the start your own business one as a "side gig" or in your free time, but doing stuff in your free time is never as productive as if you could devote a full 8 hours a day to doing that thing. Nobody is going to become the next Steve Vai by practicing guitar for 2 hours on the weekends. You get to that level of ability and mastery by practicing for 8 hours a day, every day. You aren't going to be working shifts at McDonalds and then coming home and cracking open those Arabic and Sumerian textbooks for another 8 hours to start learning dead languages in order to help further academic knowledge. Shit just doesn't happen. Because you need to wash your underwear, and do the dishes, and cook yourself something for dinner.

that's probably what those guys on le reddit tell themselves, too. "unless i can devote my life essence into one thing and become an autistically hyper focused specialist, what's the point of doing anything? muh work holds me back for being the next Einstein maaaaan."
as if everything great was achieved by people who didn't do anything all day erryday but their one profession all their lifes.
protip learn stuff in your free time until you're proficient and then ditch yer day job, like a hundred thousand people did before. if flipping burgers is too exhausting for learning skills afterwards, maybe flipping burgers is just the right job for you.
steve vai had day jobs as a college student, working for other musicians and all that jazz as well. like, working for other people, you know. believe me that he too stood up in the morning sometimes and thought "damn, i just wish i'd be a burger flipper so i dont have to do this anymore".
counting chores as "work" tells me everything i need to know btw.

t. former burger flipper

 

[Rice Is Ready]

I always believed if you can get by without working and just squeeze money out of the guberment, good for you. People call it lazy but I call it smart.

 

[Varg Did Nothing Wrong]

that's probably what those guys on le reddit tell themselves, too. "unless i can devote my life essence into one thing and become an autistically hyper focused specialist, what's the point of doing anything? muh work holds me back for being the next Einstein maaaaan."

You can reduce the argument down to an absurd statement if you want, doesn't change the facts.

as if everything great was achieved by people who didn't do anything all day erryday but their one profession all their lifes.

Most great things were done by people who were devoted to doing that one thing really well. Great artists are known for making great art, not for doing gymnastics and winning bicycle races and solving Rubik's cubes. The exception are people like Leonardo DaVinci who were seemingly great at anything they put their mind to.

protip learn stuff in your free time until you're proficient and then ditch yer day job, like a hundred thousand people did before. if flipping burgers is too exhausting for learning skills afterwards, maybe flipping burgers is just the right job for you.

I don't think the point was "learning skills is too hard". It's that you have a lot less time and effort available to you a priori to put towards learning and improving when you have to waste time and energy doing a job simply to maintain status quo.

counting chores as "work" tells me everything i need to know btw.

t. former burger flipper

Chores are literally work. I don't know what else you are going to call them. Is mopping the floor or washing the dishes leisure activity?

t. have been financially independent and providing material support for a family for the past 10 years.

 

[AmpleApricots]

I disagree. As the wealth of society increases consumption also does. This leads people to hire out services that either they would do themselves or not do entirely. Mo' money mo' jobs essentially. And automation was done for a reason. It's cheaper. this allows people to focus on the jobs we do well and robots don't. This has been the story of technological advancement since the Luddites at least. It's not new or revolutionary at all.

I disagree with your disagreement. More money more jobs yes, but only to a degree. Lets take for example online ordering. Ordering things from home is by no means an invention of the computer age. I don't know how far back it goes and you can probably look it up but I'm aware that it already was a thing in the 50s at least. Everyone above a certain age here probably still remembers these big-ass catalogs you could order things from. In my country at least starting in the 80s you could even send your order online via BTX with some of the big catalog retailers. (don't worry if you don't know btx, it was something germany-specific, you can look it up if you like old tech things) Really bleeding edge starting from 1983. So amazon wasn't even the first big retailer to do online via computer by far.

Everyone who ever did order via catalogs of old also knows that it easily could take three to six weeks from sending/calling the order in to actually receiving the product. This was normal. Now imagine how people would react if their amazon orders would take that time on average. We all know the working conditions at amazon and places like amazon, most people also know amazon has optimized the shit and humanity out of them which was only possible through modern automation. If their computer systems were to fail, they'd have to shut down as the human amazon workers don't even know where the products are in their storage facilities. Only the computer knows this and how they are sorted, there's no human reasoning involved at that stage in amazon storage facilities anymore. Very different from the retails of old, but also a lot more efficient. We got used to this quality of service. If you order something on Monday, you expect it the same week at the very least, period.

Amazon isn't the only industry working like this and in fact your average product output in these more production and service related industries has been exploding since the 90s through automation. In the early 00s I personally toured a newspaper printer where from storing the huge paper rolls that come in via freight transport, to printing, to packing up the papers for transport, there were no humans involved in the production except in dedicated control rooms. This has been happening everywhere. In almost all industries the same amount of human workforce puts out vastly more work. Or if you want to put it in other words, the same amount of manhours a week bring you a vastly increased amount of work done, all though automation. In your theory, the increased wealth for your average non-replaced office worker means he'll order more stuff on amazon or go more often to mcdonalds instead of eating at home and that means these places have to hire more people to keep up with the demand, in practice though, they don't or only to a small degree. Mainly, they just automate more.

This is different to other technological jumps humanity made. When there was the big mechanization and mechanized farming and cars put people like unskilled farmhands out of work, that technological revolution brought more jobs. We might not have needed the unskilled farmhands anymore, and we might have not needed cowboys anymore as we had cattle trucks now, but now we needed mechanics, we needed gas station attendants, we needed construction workers paving and maintaining the streets, we needed engineers designing the mechanic parts and a plethora of specialized workers making them, we needed ticket sellers at drive-in theaters, we needed people getting and refining the oil and rubber and other raw resources. Cowboys maybe weren't needed anymore, but they could get better jobs in the cities and it raised the quality of life for all. Giants like GM employed tons of people and these industries created tons of jobs and even entirely new industries around them. They also stayed in their lane. GM did vehicles and vehicle parts. That was their thing.

Now the new technological revolution brings us companies like Google. They only employ a fraction of people the likes of GM back then did while creating more revenue in scale. The industries that are created around their technological achievements are quite similar in that a big workforce is not created. (How many people can make a living off YouTube after all?) They just don't lend to growth the same way as the old industries did but at the same time, they destroy entire industries by the technological infrastructure and methods they develop. The same gaggle of tech companies actively replace workforce in other industries through their work that are completly unrelated to them, while creating no replacement jobs for the people that lose their work. People's work output doesn't get upgraded with more sophisticated tools anymore, people actually actively compete with these tools for work now. Historically, it has never been like this with advancement.

All this means more and more money in the hands of less and less people. Industries that output more and more product through automation as we already have established have to compete for fewer and fewer customers that can actually pay a worthy price for the product. This leads to more optimization and automation in order to turn a profit and the circle continues.

Of course you could just tell all the people that lose their jobs to learn how to code or get similar more highly specialized and demanded jobs, but first of all simply not every person is equipped to do this because people are simply not created equally and second of all the demand is not unlimited. There's only so many doctors, lawyers, programmers, engineers, tv-show writers, youtube personalities and artists you need per capita. High-tech societies will have to have a serious talk about the workforce situation eventually, especially if population numbers keep increasing. This would be a good thing for governments to do, sadly barely any government cares what happens after the next elections and so far it's easier to fudge employment numbers and buddy up with industries to "create jobs" that realistically can't sustain the people working them.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Reading it over it seems they've been turned off from entry level positions because the requirements are too high and the pay too low.

This is actually a thing and it's the cause of HR and HR is fucking retarded. But this doesn't mean install communism.

 

[TyroneCoalburn]

You can reduce the argument down to an absurd statement if you want, doesn't change the facts.

i agree that it's absurd.

Most great things were done by people who were devoted to doing that one thing really well. Great artists are known for making great art, not for doing gymnastics and winning bicycle races and solving Rubik's cubes. The exception are people like Leonardo DaVinci who were seemingly great at anything they put their mind to.

most great things are made from people with ambition and inherent physical and mental properties, some people had a straight career line from school kid to professor, some people discovered their talent in the mid 60s and where mechanics and plumbers all the time before. yes, you dont get to be on CERN with after work bookreadin'. yes, you dont get to be in a Philharmonica Orchestra as a woodcutter (since you don't have all your fingers anymore probably) but that's not and wasn't the point at all.

Chores are literally work. I don't know what else you are going to call them. Is mopping the floor or washing the dishes leisure activity?

when you mean by work "converting glucose into mechanical energy" sure, whatever. but that's the housewives argument who didn't have a job but says she "worked". cleaning the toilet, scrubbing the floor is as much work as cleaning one's nose or feeding the cat/dog is. and again, r/antiwork would agree with you. "chores are work and i don't like it, ipso facto i shall do no work ever again because i dont wanna".

 

[Cheemsburbger]

I looked for this screenshot for over an hour

 

[Hux]

Well, at least these people are kind enough to be honest with the fact their life goals is to just be lazy fuckwits instead of masking it behind a mask of hippy dippy feel good bullshit like "it's because they care oh so much about the downtrodden" or stupid shit like that

 

[Sorlock]

Let's all go there and tell them to get a job.

 

[A Logging Company]

In a society that's moving toward automation and outsourcing at breakneck speed, there's a serious conversation that needs to be had about the nature of employment and what it might mean in the future.

... this ain't it.

It would be one thing if the sub was focused on becoming self employed, or homesteading, but they just want to take without giving, and treat it as a great rebellious moral grandstand. The screencap earlier in this thread saying "Fuck Volunteering" pissed me off, because its that attitude that enables the capitalist society the hate so much.

 

[Sexy Senior Citizen]

Some tard gets upset over being told to be nice to the customers.

A few thoughts.
First, the fact that upper management had to create those rules is likely because you and your coworkers treat the customers like shit. Yeah, I get that customers can be little shitheads, but their money is what goes into your paychecks. Treat the customers like shit, you find yourself with no customers. No customers, no paycheck.
Second, the reason management gets paid 3 to 4 times what you make is because you're too stupid to realize point number 1.
Third, you work in a fucking call center; no wonder you're timed on everything you do. You have to be there for when the customer needs you. You serve at the pleasure of the customer, not the other way around.
Fourth, 8-10 hours? Fucking lightweight. When you do 12-14 hours a day with no overtime, six days a week, you can bitch about how you're overworked and underpaid.

 

[ColtWalker1847]

I disagree with your disagreement. More money more jobs yes, but only to a degree. Lets take for example online ordering. Ordering things from home is by no means an invention of the computer age. I don't know how far back it goes and you can probably look it up but I'm aware that it already was a thing in the 50s at least. Everyone above a certain age here probably still remembers these big-ass catalogs you could order things from. In my country at least starting in the 80s you could even send your order online via BTX with some of the big catalog retailers. (don't worry if you don't know btx, it was something germany-specific, you can look it up if you like old tech things) Really bleeding edge starting from 1983. So amazon wasn't even the first big retailer to do online via computer by far.

Everyone who ever did order via catalogs of old also knows that it easily could take three to six weeks from sending/calling the order in to actually receiving the product. This was normal. Now imagine how people would react if their amazon orders would take that time on average. We all know the working conditions at amazon and places like amazon, most people also know amazon has optimized the shit and humanity out of them which was only possible through modern automation. If their computer systems were to fail, they'd have to shut down as the human amazon workers don't even know where the products are in their storage facilities. Only the computer knows this and how they are sorted, there's no human reasoning involved at that stage in amazon storage facilities anymore. Very different from the retails of old, but also a lot more efficient. We got used to this quality of service. If you order something on Monday, you expect it the same week at the very least, period.

Amazon isn't the only industry working like this and in fact your average product output in these more production and service related industries has been exploding since the 90s through automation. In the early 00s I personally toured a newspaper printer where from storing the huge paper rolls that come in via freight transport, to printing, to packing up the papers for transport, there were no humans involved in the production except in dedicated control rooms. This has been happening everywhere. In almost all industries the same amount of human workforce puts out vastly more work. Or if you want to put it in other words, the same amount of manhours a week bring you a vastly increased amount of work done, all though automation. In your theory, the increased wealth for your average non-replaced office worker means he'll order more stuff on amazon or go more often to mcdonalds instead of eating at home and that means these places have to hire more people to keep up with the demand, in practice though, they don't or only to a small degree. Mainly, they just automate more.

This is different to other technological jumps humanity made. When there was the big mechanization and mechanized farming and cars put people like unskilled farmhands out of work, that technological revolution brought more jobs. We might not have needed the unskilled farmhands anymore, and we might have not needed cowboys anymore as we had cattle trucks now, but now we needed mechanics, we needed gas station attendants, we needed construction workers paving and maintaining the streets, we needed engineers designing the mechanic parts and a plethora of specialized workers making them, we needed ticket sellers at drive-in theaters, we needed people getting and refining the oil and rubber and other raw resources. Cowboys maybe weren't needed anymore, but they could get better jobs in the cities and it raised the quality of life for all. Giants like GM employed tons of people and these industries created tons of jobs and even entirely new industries around them. They also stayed in their lane. GM did vehicles and vehicle parts. That was their thing.

Now the new technological revolution brings us companies like Google. They only employ a fraction of people the likes of GM back then did while creating more revenue in scale. The industries that are created around their technological achievements are quite similar in that a big workforce is not created. (How many people can make a living off YouTube after all?) They just don't lend to growth the same way as the old industries did but at the same time, they destroy entire industries by the technological infrastructure and methods they develop. The same gaggle of tech companies actively replace workforce in other industries through their work that are completly unrelated to them, while creating no replacement jobs for the people that lose their work. People's work output doesn't get upgraded with more sophisticated tools anymore, people actually actively compete with these tools for work now. Historically, it has never been like this with advancement.

All this means more and more money in the hands of less and less people. Industries that output more and more product through automation as we already have established have to compete for fewer and fewer customers that can actually pay a worthy price for the product. This leads to more optimization and automation in order to turn a profit and the circle continues.

Of course you could just tell all the people that lose their jobs to learn how to code or get similar more highly specialized and demanded jobs, but first of all simply not every person is equipped to do this because people are simply not created equally and second of all the demand is not unlimited. There's only so many doctors, lawyers, programmers, engineers, tv-show writers, youtube personalities and artists you need per capita. High-tech societies will have to have a serious talk about the workforce situation eventually, especially if population numbers keep increasing. This would be a good thing for governments to do, sadly barely any government cares what happens after the next elections and so far it's easier to fudge employment numbers and buddy up with industries to "create jobs" that realistically can't sustain the people working them.

That's the Luddite's argument rewritten for tech. Like almost word for word. "If we replace the skilled workforce with machines the rich benefit and the workers suffer"
But what you and they fail to account for are the consumers which are far more numerous than those negatively effected. Most people win. Those smart talented people effected can go do other more economically viable shit. That retail worker at Sears that is bearing the brunt of this can then go run a forklift or drive a FedEx route or service equipment or something.

 

[The Fool]

Most of the time, automation isn't replacing a worker, it's giving a worker a new tool to make their existing job easier. Even McDonald's isn't replacing anyone, their new touchscreen system is actually making more jobs since they now have a new position of someone standing by the kiosks to assist customers and hand out napkins.

 

[Webby's Boyfriend]

Fascinating subreddit, It's like they read The Culture series and missed that the general population wanted to serve The Culture and that only a chosen few were capable of doing so.

The Culture was run by the Minds, as a pan-human on an orbital, the Minds basically own you.

 

[Linako 2.0]

Some tard gets upset over being told to be nice to the customers.
View attachment 1053690
A few thoughts.
First, the fact that upper management had to create those rules is likely because you and your coworkers treat the customers like shit. Yeah, I get that customers can be little shitheads, but their money is what goes into your paychecks. Treat the customers like shit, you find yourself with no customers. No customers, no paycheck.
Second, the reason management gets paid 3 to 4 times what you make is because you're too stupid to realize point number 1.
Third, you work in a fucking call center; no wonder you're timed on everything you do. You have to be there for when the customer needs you. You serve at the pleasure of the customer, not the other way around.
Fourth, 8-10 hours? Fucking lightweight. When you do 12-14 hours a day with no overtime, six days a week, you can bitch about how you're overworked and underpaid.

I want to agree with you, but the rule where you are forced to smile sounds like bullshit to me.