• thethunderwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    19 hours ago

    The work needs doing, and currently only humans can do it, so someone has to do it. The problem is with how it is handled. What we need is a system that incentivises working but allows people to thrive without doing it, which is a difficult balance.

    • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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      11 hours ago

      A lot of the work doesn’t need doing.

      I remember an anthropology class where they were talking about early hominids who found these nut trees that produced huge caloricly dense nuts. They went from every day being a gamble trying to hunt or forage enough food to break even to all the sudden having a stable calorie surplus. One individual could gather 20k calories easy, this allowed others to not work. While some slacked off some took up past times and invention and they started inventing the tools that would eventually lead to them becoming human.

      There is no reason that this doesn’t hold true today. Take everything you need, food, reasonable shelter, phone, meds, etc and you come way, way below the amount you produced if you compared it to calories. We went from gathering the nuts to, farming to at least 3 periods of Industrialization and at each stage we easily 10x that amount of calories the average person produces. To the point today we could probably survive with half the people working like 12 hours a week.

      My point being that I believe UBI should be done, as the surplus that we produce is more than enough to cover it. I believe that if UBI were to happen we would see a new human renaissance bigger even than the Paleolithic or Neolithic Revolutions.

    • BoJackHorseman@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      Much of work humans need to do to survive has been automated with the advent of the industrial revolution (not even talking about computers and AI). We could afford to have half of the population not work. Oh wait, that was the case in the 60s when women didn’t work.

      Now it’s difficult financially for 2 working people to raise a family of 4, despite all the automation. It’s because the people who own the business we work for don’t pay as much as the value we produce for them. That’s why wealth is getting accumulated in the hands of few.

      • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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        14 hours ago

        Thats not true at all. Much of the work humans need to survive still requires humans.

        The fact is that people aren’t going to work and getting paid by businesses that produce products nobody wants.

        You are overthinking about a meme. There is nothing stopping you and 3 people from having a picnic in the park. I could do it every week. Someone unemployed getting the benefit could do this every week. Thinking that the current economic system is preventing people from this is insane.

        • BoJackHorseman@lemmy.world
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          10 hours ago

          A combine can do hundreds of hours of labour work in an hour. We still have to produce the same amount of crops.

          Humanity went from 99% of the population working in farming to just 2% because of advancements in farming technology. We literally only need 2 people every 100 to grow enough food to feed everyone.

          That’s why not everyone needs to work.

          We have an over production problem. Companies still manage to keep prices high by employing artificial scarcity where they tell us they only have limited quantity when in reality they have an abundance of it. Supermarkets literally throw away perfectly good food everyday instead of giving it to poor people to keep the prices high.