Comment by quacked | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quacked | Hacker News Reader

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The "n-hour workweek" is arbitrary. We work as much as we do because that's what the lending institutions need us to do so they can justify and manage the global trade and manufacture of calories, textiles, fuel, shelter, and implements.

We don't work 50-60 hour weeks at software companies because we'll die of starvation or exposure otherwise, we work that much because the finance trade our work supports allows us to live in a 2-story houses in the first world without knowing anything about construction, defense, farming, etc. The real work [1] gets handled by other people who make less money than us. But we still have to work so the lending institutions can make the debt contracts balance correctly.

[1] Yes, some of us do actually work on real projects, with real consequences to downtime, I understand. But how many brilliant engineers work for F+N or Spotify or whatever that could work on domestic engineering projects instead? Would they still have to work 60 hour weeks? Is such a project even possible without involving lending institutions, and the second those institutions are involved, doesn't that put us right back at the "justify the global finance infrastructure"?

We work hard because we make stuff people want. We can make more, better stuff by working hard. I do think 50-60 hour weeks are often counterproductive, but the money we make ultimately comes from providing value to someone. It isn't turtles all the way down.

If your business is operating mainly on loans instead of revenue, it's because the lenders believe that you will provide value to someone in the future, and that you'll be able to capture some of that value and give it to the lenders. The lenders can be wrong, but it's still about giving people things they want.

There are some bad businesses, for sure, which are about tricking people into giving you money without giving them something in return. And a lot of business activity is about jostling for a good negotiation position (e.g. consolidation), so that you can capture more of the value you provide. But because people control their spending, you ultimately have to make something people want (or make them want what you have) if you want to make money.

Overall, you almost make it sound like the global trade of calories/textiles/etc is a bad thing, but it is an extremely good thing! It is one of the best things!!!

You are speaking as if moving money around is some useless non-work. But it's the mechanism that makes the economy tick at scale, this is why you can easily buy potatoes grown in Idaho and order electronics assembled in China, while also buying a car without paying the cost upfront.

Let's declare, say, trucking as non-real work. Trucks produce nothing but pollution; why do truckers work the long hours they work, and command the high salaries they get? All the while the "real work" is done by other people?

(Disclaimer: I never worked for financial, trading, or trucking industries; my grandfather was a truck driver.)

Ultimately we all need food, shelter, clothing, and other things of decreasing necessity. The way we get those things is to trade something of value; few of us are capable of producing everything we need by ourselves. We all have different talents and abilities, but most of us find something to do that produces value for someone else. So that we don't have to directly trade e.g. eggs for a plumbing repair, we invented money so that the value we each produce could be abstracted into something that is acceptable in trade for anything else we need.

Money is an abstraction for the value of productive work. We must each produce enough value that we can trade it for the things we need. It's also why univeral income will never work. If money is given to someone in exchange for nothing, it is worth nothing.

>Money is an abstraction for the value of productive work. We must each produce enough value that we can trade it for the things we need. It's also why univeral income will never work. If money is given to someone in exchange for nothing, it is worth nothing.

But we're literally handing money to people in exchange for nothing right now (ie. welfare), yet US dollars are worth something.

One way to interpret welfare is the government paying off people who have no capacity to be productive from interfering with people who are productive. If the needy did not get “free money” they would have to resort to crime, which negatively affects others.

Rather the environment they live in has no investment or opportunity and the people living their, being poor and dealing with the hand that local investment in education has dealt them have difficult times getting out, let alone just surviving

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