But plants kind of live in the real world, and I live in violently enforced fantasy bullshit. Literally the majority of the resources, of that work, goes to maintaining inequality and oppression, not to anyone's survival.

Take every penny in advertising policing 'genAI' and military budgets. Just the most obvious inarguable 'this couldn't possibly be for anything else', and it's over half of the minerals work hours and CPU cycles,

So the amount we have to work is at least twice as much as the actual amount to survive, and the benefits are no more than half as much. And all of it in deeply bullshit conditions, usually in ways that are 90% oppression 10% productivity at best.

And these are kinda conservative estimates.

So get peter thiel's dick out of your mouth before you speak, boot licker. You won't sound nearly as fucking stupid.

Touchy much?

I’m not the one complaining about the hours per week I work or my compensation… just saying…

Honestly— we’re just another organism on the planet.

Separate yourself from the system — a hatchet in the wild… and you’ll find you’ll still have to work. The native Americans had to hunt and build domeciles and make clothes… maybe farm… fish… it’s work all the way down to the first turtle.

You put a lot of work into coping with the amount of billionaire dick you suck.

Admittedly, this is very refined copium, the cognitive dissonance is very smoothe, the choices you're pretending don't exist and horrors you need to pretend are inherent are very refined. A+ rhetoric, gotta respect the evil game.

Still get the billionaire dick out of your mouth before speaking, boot licker.

First: we’re all here because we want to weaken the current corporate hegemony. So… yeah… down with big billionaires. You and I are on the same team. (Unless you don’t get the Orwell reference.)

So… I just want to get this straight.

Let’s say it takes X amount of work to support your needs. Your PB&Js and Captain Crunch… whatever it is.

So… In your world… let’s say you eat for free… whose precious calories get burned in the acquisition of the calories upon which you are sustained?

I'm not averse to the idea of doing shit. I'm averse to 99% of the value of everything i do being stolen and given back in the form of thugs who k8dnap my neighbors and gas my friends and might kill me at any second and nobody will care, and will not contribute to that system.

But it is actually possible to eat for just about free. The precolumbian peoples of north America had actually cultivated a sort of abundance that allowed for very nearly this in some places. Doesn't work with our current population, and I like building shit¹ so it's not the utopia I'd choose, but is in fact possible. Shit was basically rock candy mountain. And I'd be okay going shit for other people. I do in fact. It can be fun, when work isn't made miserable. They didnt choose to be here any more than I did, and in light of tgat they should be allowed the necessities of life.

I'm not interested in what you have to say about any of this, what with the billionaire dick youre choking on.

¹also toilet paper and antibiotics

I’ve tried to remain civil but since your dream job is “going shit for other people,” I agree we don’t have much in common. Yes — that’s a quote.

Allow me though to ask you to leave your ignorant, toxic, homophobic, ugliness at Reddit where they need people like you to undermine their efforts at community building.

I checked out your zero original post profile and discovered you’re just a little rage bait bot. Cute. Keep undermining Lemmy. We will persevere.

Oh… and wanna know how a rage bait bot reveals itself? It has to have the last word. Hang in there.

I think it would incredibly more desirable for society to have a firm social safety net (housing, food, healthcare). We have the technology and means to do so without breaking a sweat.

If we try it and society stagnates, we can always tweak it to incentivize certain types of work. Myself, I believe society would see vast improvements when people aren't surviving and living in shambles. I believe many of our current issues would be quickly solved once we are broadly able to slow down and think for a moment.

Deserving or not deserving doesn't really factor into the equation. We need to create and build a world worth living in. I want to live in a world where people are more free, healthy, and safe - where work is directly benefiting our communities instead of people being forced to slave in hostile work environments to barely make it.

In general I agree. People should be able to make informed life choices without pressure. However, I don't think universal basic income is the solution (see below). In Germany we have no public university fees and you can get Bafög; which is a far from ideal conditional income enough to cover housing and food while you study. You have to pay a part back once you are done, but far from all (at most 50%; often less than that). I wouldn't mind a study UBI.

I am for social security and social services that allow you to make an informed choice of what you want to do. Beyond that I am for "you have to work". But I am looking at "work" from an European perspective with all the protection laws in place and not an American perspective.

The main problem with UBI (Universal Basic Income) is that while tests showed benefits (highly depending on countries), financing UBI is difficult. So far no larger country has completely adapted UBI at least partly due to that reason. Also, no study was long enough to see the "people are less incentivised to work" issue.

If you choose to have a child entirely on purpose in 2025, you're just a piece of shit, or fanatically devoted to 'The Revolution' and think its gonna happen any day now, because you're delusional¹.

¹you had better not use that child as an excuse to stand the fuck down. That child is why you belong at the absolute front of every police encounter, risking your life for their future. If you have a child and are not regularly trying to kill police Nd the wealthy, that child should be taken from you, be ause you do not give a shit about them, they only exist for your own self gratifying natalist bullshit.

I mean…ya…but this “quote” doesn’t appear to me to be talking about the wealthy…but rather addressing the notion that poor people and the unemployed have no value if they don’t have employment/can’t find better employment.

Could be wrong.

"If you don't earn money, you don't deserve to live."

This is how I interpreted it and it definitely feels true, that's how capitalism treats us.

For clarification, I initially read it to mean that anybody "poor enough" to have to work to earn money does not deserve to live. I.e., rich people are human, everybody else is subhuman.

Your interpretation I saw a few moments later, and that the post was criticizing that phrase. Basically, the polar opposite of my first impression.

Ah yes it can be interpreted multiple ways, I see your perspective 1) there are people who don't need to work in order to earn money, they are the highest class of humans.

2) Then there are people who have to work to earn money, they are considered pitiful but still essential cogs in our economy,

3) then there are people who do not earn money and they are the ones who capitalism deems worthless.

No, you're confusing trade itself for capitalism, and severely downplaying the immense siphoning of material wealth that goes on, especially at an international scale. Capitalists steal the value created by workers, workers are not on an even playing field with capitalists. They sell the only commodity they can, their labor power, while capitalists leverage their ownership of capital to fix labor prices around subsistence wages.

Regulation can't fix capitalism or save it from the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. We need to move onto socialism, where public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy and production and distribution are oriented towards satisfying needs rather than profits.

Not necessarily. Capitalism functions by the following circuit:

M-C...P...C'-M'

Money is used to buy commodities, such as machinery, raw materials, and labor power, then production happens, then higher value commodities are the result of said production and sold for greater sums of money. M' is fed back into this system, and M'' is output at the end, over and over. The increase in value comes from unpaid labor, ie wages that don't actually cover all of the value created, because capitalists cannot profit otherwise.

Socialist systems don't have equal pay for everyone (that isn't the goal to begin with), but also don't have this system of capital ownership as the principle aspect of their economies and as such private ownership is phased out over time in these countries.

I think you will see plenty of private ownership in any country. Unless you accept the paper only "public property" with a ruling class of "I am the state" philosophy.

Every country has billionaires, in capitalist countries they buy politicians and in authoritarian countries they are the politicians, but inequality is there nonetheless.

Publicly run industry doesn't normally function with the same circuit of turning money into a larger sum of money that I described, nor are administrators a "ruling class." Inequality in distribution exists, but isn't necessarily the problem, equalitarians that seek equal distribution for everyone are exceedingly rare. There's a qualitative difference in outcomes for the working classes in socialist countries where public ownership is the principle aspect that manifests in dramatic uplifting of their material conditions, whereas the point of the capitalist system is said inequality. The sheer scale of inequality in capitalist systems far surpasses socialist countries.

In the USSR, for example, the gap between the wealthiest, ie professors and scientists at the top and the average factory worker towards the bottom, was about ten times. In capitalist countries, that number skyrockets to billions. In the PRC, which has a socialist market economy, the number of billionaires is going down while the GDP and GDP per capita of the PRC is growing dramatically year over year, alongside real wages.

Yes, Stalin was not ruling class. Not at all. Benevolent caretaker. Same as Maduro, the Kims and Xi.

PS: lol at professors being the wealthiest in the USSR. Big lol.