Me too

The movie gets panned a lot, but I liked it.

That's what I was thinking of while reading the post, too.

Are they working all through the night? One man working 40 hours a week with no sickness but including 5 weeks holidays per year works 1880 hours. A year of hours is 8760.

I mean, maybe. But a year seems like a lot for a full team, so either that team is not working as much and as consistently as you'd think OR that house is worth a lot more than a year.

Skill issue. They build houses out of concrete here in China in like a month, in Japan they use wood and do the same, tho they lose all value after 30 years.

Money has a network effect (especially physical cash) so it needs to have a compelling advantage to unseat whatever is dominant in the area. Like Glover said in the article, every local currency needs at least one dedicated evangelist.

I'm surprised modernizing it to digital didn't help, since that reduces the impact of the network effect. In 2019 you could already do "atomic transactions" between cryptocurrencies without having to trust an exchange.

"I as a CEO provide job opportunities and "hours" to spend for TEN THOUSAND people. Obviously my time should be considered worth more than a doctor who does only one person's hours"

There's many reasons why one would claim that their job is more important, but essentially there's 2 kinds of jobs: those that are valuable to the society, and those that are not. Plumber's job is just as important as doctor's

different jobs have different values

No, fuck that line of thinking. We live in an interconnected world where every worker does something useful for society, and they all have a right to a happy, fulfilling life.

At most, only one order of magnitude greater seems fair. Nobody's job is a billion times as hard as any job.

Lots of white collar jobs just straight up shouldn't exist. Not all, but a lot of them.

But also hours should be for luxury items and basic necessities should be free for everyone.

The hour system on its own just pushes the issues with capitalism one step back.

Sanitation is definitely one of those jobs that don't get valued and paid enough.

Isn't that backwards? You would get more sanitation workers if they were paid the same as white collar

stumbles upon socially necessary labor power…

Working on an oil rig is a lot more dangerous than most white collar jobs. The time cost would have to account for the expected years of your life that you lose from taking on that job.

Good, maybe we wouldn't be such a bunch of wastrels if we weren't running around because a website might go down or meeting might be delayed if we don't rush

Op's post is a very simplified rendering of Marx's Labor Theory Of Value. Marx says that the value of a commodity isn't just determined by the labor time it took to make, but rather the socially necessary labor time.

In short, the average amount of time that a society uses to make a given commodity. So of you, as an individual, were really slow at the widget factory, your widgets don't get more expensive just because it took you longer. You just get fired for being lazy.

Instead, value is determined by this Socially Necessary average, and that average is augmented by technological advancements in production. By extension, Marx says, those technological advancements in turn influence the way production, and therefore society itself, is organized;

slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity.

The reason people lack access to the necessities of life is because they labor for, say, 8 hours a day, and only recieve a fraction of the value they produce by their labor, in wages. The solution isn't necessarily to give those workers all the money, though pay raises are often a good thing, but to take the surplus value that would have previously been hoarded by a capitalist, and have its use be put towards the betterment of society, and be democratically decided upon in some way.

I strongly disagree (given this system is fleshed out a lot more, obviously). This is the bullshit they sell us at the top of corrupt systems.

I work slowly sometimes because I don't earn a fair wage. Fifteen years ago, I earned a fair wage and I put extra time in that I didn't need to. Today, I do the opposite. This is because my employer today is untrusting, abusive, and exploitative.

Maybe, but I would probably be excited to pick up other professions. I feel like I could do drywalling as a side hustle.

Some systems consider receiving the education as on par with performing the job it prepares you for. I.E. you get paid to attend school and it doesn't work out like you have to put your life on hold until school is finished.

Healthcare’s goal should not be to be profitable. The government should subsidize both the education and pay of medical staff for the wellbeing of their people.

Your training increases the value of your labor power (the cost of reproducing your labor and what the value of wages tend towards) making your hourly wage larger. The meme is good agitprop but it isn't real marxian analysis.

It doesn't really matter for this point.

The point is that nobody earns ten million hours (1,140 constant years) of work ($1b @ $100/hr).

You can have a lot of leeway with ratios and that'll still never be true.

I've played around with this idea, and the best solution I came up with was amortizing hours spent in training over the course of a career. If you spend 20,000 hours in med school, and you have a projected career of (40 years × 2,000 hours per year) 80,000 hours, one hour of your labor would have a value of 1.25 "unskilled" hours.

You also get paid while studying. What a concept :O

You did a whoopsy by picking health care as your example, but you’re spot-on. Our ability to develop new skills, learn from experience, and invent new ways of doing things is perhaps the distinguishing feature of human labor over mechanical processes.

This is a decent meme for the world of 15 years ago, but as algorithmic (and now AI) centric labor has taken over and turned us into “chickenized reverse centaurs” (as Cory Doctorow says), I think it accidentally makes the same case that the tech lords are making.

That is: output is output. Artists are valuable for the art they produce, not for being an embodied being in our shared space that specializes in looking at things from new angles. Coders are valuable for the finished software they produce, not for understanding the system in motion. Etc.

Edit: There’s a Marx quote I like…

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.