Work and Value

EditDate	2020/04/23

Related Threads: 2021:Econ, 2021:Voting Campaign, 2021:Economy, 2021:Care, 2021:COVID-19

Since time immemorial the ruling class has used dissension in the oppressed class to keep them under control. Rather than fighting for equitable life for all from birth the privileged few foster fighting each other for the scraps they've left.

With the advent of automation of not just production but service as well those scraps have gotten so scarce that the fight is truly desperate.

Those benefitting from the bounty are ecstatic that those left out are blaming each other.

Which makes more sense

• The top 25 hedge fund managers make more money and pay less taxes than all kindergarten teachers because immigrants are holding wages down and minorities are all on lucrative welfare benefits.

OR

• Americans cannot make ends meet because 25 hedge fund managers make more money and pay less taxes than all kindergarten teachers.

I'm pondering what it means that the impetus back to work is not being driven by what value the labor produces but rather by the capital or profits it produces? I understand many services such as restaurants and personal service like salons are things we desire and don't need or deem essential and that desire makes sense to me but what is actually driving that desire and how we establish that worth to ourselves? Take sports for example what motivates people to spend thousands of dollars to watch 10 guys run up and down the a 94' wooden floor trying to throw a ball through a hoop but spending over $240 to feed a family of 6 $40/head is considered an extravagance? More importantly if both could be done better by machines (faster and cheaper) and we still rewarded the replaced laborers adequately why is that unacceptable? It's almost like where on a wheel running to get someplace but we just end up spinning the wheel throwing off resources someone else is gathering!

Interesting power dynamic at work in the economy right now...What happens when you're forced to scale back to just what you need versus what you believe you want? How much do you miss what? Who is most affected by the draw down? Who does it scare the most? If you didn't have to run the treadmill to survive would you be more or less happy? Hw much do you really miss the satisfaction of work? Good time to think about that!

To salvage the work when machines are more productive than humans you must redefine value.

1. Move away from defining the 'best' job as being the most profitable and efficient job. Looking back how many folks see the box building introduced in the 60s as being the pinnacle of human architecture. While they were the most efficient and provided the least space they were not the most livable. As in A Timeless Way of Building we have to reintroduce human specifications and art into our daily lives. Folks don't live and work in Firenzi because it's efficient.
2. We have to loosen the specifications on things so that all items, including people, are not FRUs (Field Replaceable Units). New electric cars for example should be upgradable in place as better batteries and computers come about and certainly the WinTel 18 month recyle money machine needs to be replaced with the Opensource refresh and upgrade cycle. Linux still runs effectively on 386 machines.
3. Finally we need to move to a service model employing machines to provide the best quality of life for the most people. The discord, inevitable from shrinking resources and growing population, can no longer be bottled up militarily. We need to move to a world where everyone is entitled to food, housing, health and education and they earn greater benefits by working to increase the abundance for all. Any occupation looking to hoard benefits for a few, like hedge funds, should be relegared to a utility while occupations like farming, teaching, building and nursing should be elevated.Web References https://johnnywunder.info/mywiki/index.php/Work and Value
   

New Definitions

I think we need a new definition of work and value and from that we can work out a better system of compensation or distribution of wealth? It won't have that much an affect on me as I'm sort of over the hill but those of you starting out are facing a quandary. If we continue to define work as the production of goods we have more workers than we need. We need to change at a level similar to the Industrial Revolution how we perceive work and value.

Think through what is of value to you? What would you work hardest for? Then ask yourself whether you're doing that and if not why? Most likely it's tied to our compensation system and you can't get paid for doing what you see as valuable and worth working for? The question is particularly poignant as machines replace us at more and more routine production tasks that had been considered valued work. On the assumption that eventually machines will be able to do all the routine repetitive production tasks that we find boring, tedious and hard (what some of us may define as work) what will we call work that we replace those activities with and what value will it produce that we can be rewarded for. Machines doing our old jobs better, more efficiently and with less resources should and can be a good thing but only if we see clear set of human activities that we're willing to pay for.

The Industrial Revolution used energy and machines to produce vast amounts of processed material goods from the earth's raw materials while freeing the majority of humanity from having to grow their own food. The Agricultural Revolution 8-12,000 years ago provided stable food source allowing civilization to evolve in form of rulers, military, craftsman and artisans to come about from hunters and gatherers. We are at the precipice of such a leap where are we to land?

Work and Value Articles

Work and Value Articles	Short Description	Analysis
Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled Robotic Weeders in Precision Agriculture from NC State Extension Publications	NC Cooperative extension published an article on precision robotic weeders directed by AI.	Robots are becoming cheap and precise enough to work on small farms reducing the work and impact of weeding on more and more crops meoving beyond large row oriented fields. Generally though robots are still too large (and expensive) for us. A small solar powered raspberry pi permanently in the field moving around would be a better solution for us. I would burn the weeds versus precision herbicide.
The American Economy Is Rigged from Scientific American	Americans are used to thinking that their nation is special. In many ways, it is: the U.S. has by far the most Nobel Prize winners, the largest defense expenditures (almost equal to the next 10 or so countries put together) and the most billionaires (twice as many as China, the closest competitor). But some examples of American Exceptionalism should not make us proud. By most accounts, the U.S. has the highest level of economic inequality among developed countries. It has the world's greatest per capita health expenditures yet the lowest life expectancy among comparable countries. It is also one of a few developed countries jostling for the dubious distinction of having the lowest measures of equality of opportunity.	Wealth is even less equally distributed, with just three Americans having as much as the bottom 50 percent—testimony to how much money there is at the top and how little there is at the bottom. Families in the bottom 50 percent hardly have the cash reserves to meet an emergency. Newspapers are replete with stories of those for whom the breakdown of a car or an illness starts a downward spiral from which they never recover.
Failing Mail Order Prescriptions	WellCare, CVS and USPS have again failed to deliver my prescription	I suspect that we are on an Island has broken the integration between their systems. This is the second failure.
Smoking on the Porch	I'm setting it up so I can easily record on the porch.
Snake Hill	Got some disconcerting news today :(	I can't deal with my thoughts and emotions in tweets, texts, or even social media so...
... further results

Work and Value Quotes

Work and Value Quotes	Work and Value
Religion and Philosophy	to me says we're in a time of disruptive change to what we do and what we value. Science and capital (artificial intelligence and automation) are at the core of this but once we can not only produce more than we need but indeed more than we want with fewer people working we need a new philosophy for how we live. What is the philosophy we can common ground on?

Wealth Inequality

No recorded data at this time.

Analysis Archive

--Johnny 22:59, 5 June 2016 (EDT)

Trade in your hours for a handful of dimes The Doors circa 1968.

Published in the NYTimes Comments Section. Time for New Enterprises. What is our most precious quantity? I'll venture to say time. Time for family, friends and life. To date no machine can manufacture time. If we stop aspiring to more goods automation can give us better times.

With all respect to the work ethic, consumption and money can we now be wise, conserve and enjoy life. Can smart machines free us to spend time together or must they eat our time? The machines truly don't care, the choice is ours.

--Johnny 08:27, 22 February 2016 (EST)

Wisdom of the Carpenter and Walrus

"The time has come," the walrus said,
"To talk of other things
Of shoes and ships and ceiling wax
Of cabagges and kings
And while the see is boiling hot
And wheather pigs have wings
Kaloo Kalay no work today
Were cabbages and kings"

I think we need a discussion of work and value.

1. How do you define work?
2. Should you be compensated according to the value you provide or how hard you work?
3. If a machine can do a job better and more effectively than you is it not more valuable than you? Worth more?

The Decline

Sitting here puffing my cigar and sipping my beer I reflect on the decline of civilization and the self-fulfilling nature of the self-serving philosophies foisted on us by the deluded captains of our ship of fools. Sit down pull up a chair and hear a humourous tale of how we die not with a bang but rather with a whimper.

I was the personal administrator (South Carolina does not execute but rather administrates) of an abode in the quaint hamlet of Myrtle Beach and completed the execution of my duties last month. In the course of doing that on 2021.04.14 I notified the city that they should no longer send the bills to me. Todays mail had the latest utility bill still addressed to me.

Being a pro-active citizen I thought I'd contact the city to tell them I'd no longer be compensating them for services I was no longer involved in and that's when the fun begins.

After a suitable hold of about 5 minutes where the process of having them call me back when they we ready to put me to work again a pleasant enough woman came on the phone. I explained to the woman what was going on and she promptly told me I screwed up and would have to terminate the account and come down and reopen it.

Now though I am typically willing to do others work for them because over the course of my years I've garnered the wisdom that I can complete it with less effort and negligible aggravation in this case she was asking me to spend 3 days to fix what she could repair with one internal phonecall. I decided to force her to do her job.

I told all I needed was to verify the address. She looked up the address and told me it was already the correct address and I explained that was because last month I had done the address change. She then blamed the USPS, a popular trope for all incompetents today, and me; saying I must have forwarded to mail :).

When I explained the mail was not forwarded as the bill had my address printed on it.

Then she told me that I did not understand how forwarding the mail worked and that that Pitney Bowes printed the forwarding address for the USPS. As it turns out I was actually one of the people who helped build the BCS (Bar Code Sorters) that sort 98% of the mail in the US and had worked with Pitney Bowes. I explained to her that the USPS would have had to open the enveloped, print a new bill, insert it in envelope and seal it which somehow I doubt they did.

She then decided that the mail could not have been addressed to me because she had the right address in her system. She told me the mail had been forwarded in 2019.08 and had the address changed in 2021.04.14 so the latest bill 2021.04.30 would be addressed correctly.

I told her I had just taken the 2021.04.30 bill out of my mailbox.

She said that was not possible.

I then said it might be possible that the address change missed the current billing cycle which ran 2021.04.18 and that I would contact the appropriate people to make them aware but that if the next bill came to me I would ignore it.

I can understand why people think government doesn't work but my take on the cause of that is not that the government is at fault. Rather I think those who say government doesn't work and resource in line with expecting it not to work get what they expect.

My hope is that as they prefaced my call was recorded for quality purposes but I'll be honest until something changes I'll just bite my tongue and chuckle.

Our civilization is in decline.

Time for new Enterprises

Is it not time to question the underlying assumption that constantly accelerating growth is 'the good thing'? In most other systems accelerating growth of one part, finance, at the expense of other parts health, the environment and just time, is considered a cancer threatening the organism as a whole.

Given that we now can feed, house and provide comforts for people with machines doing the drudgery isn't it the moment to point our enterprising nature at something beyond production? Is that not the real reason Governments are forestalled. They either want to go back to the Puritan hard work ethic (austerity) which has been overwhelmed by the machine or don't know where to go and so do nothing.

Shouldn't economists, scientists and that demeaned discipline philosophers be looking to address the biggest cultural shift since the agrarian to industrial revolution?

It is a new world and increased productivity through automation doesn't enslave us to capital but frees us from the drudgery of production. Johnny

Link to My NYTimes Work and Value Comment