[jmyeet]

Thing is, technology (particularly automation) could make life better but it not doing that is a choice. Think about it. We could live in a world where people only had to work 20 hours a week or even at some point not at all. We don't do that because we have a system that simply makes a handful of people even wealthier. We will likely see the first trillionaire minted in our lifetimes. That is an unimaginable and unjustifiable amount of money for one person to have.

So you're not really complaining about technology making things worse. You're complaining about wealth inequality, which is a direct result of the mode of production and the organization of the economy.

Internet access should, at this point, be basically free. The best Internet in the country is municipal broadband. It's better and it's cheaper. It's owned by the town, city or county that it's in, which means it's owned by citizens of that municpality.

Instead what we have in most of the country are national ISPs like Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum and AT&T and the prices are sky high. They are only sky high so somebody far away can continue to extract profit from something that's already built and not that expensive to build.

You will get lied to by people saying national ISPs have an economy of scale. Well, if that were true, why is municipal broadband so (relatively) better and cheaper? Why would there be state laws that make municipal broadband illegal? Why would national ISPs lobby for such laws?

[alehlopeh]

If it’s a choice, then who gets to make that choice? Certainly not the individual. I don’t remember getting to choose anything of the sort. If you say it’s society that makes the choice, how does that work exactly? Through democracy and governance? Well then society did make the choice. Are you then complaining that the choice society made is not the one you prefer? From the perspective of the individual, it’s not a choice at all.

[joe_mamba]

>We could live in a world where people only had to work 20 hours a week or even at some point not at all.

How would your country function, if all medical staff, construction, rail, sewage, police and firefighters suddenly worked half as long or not at all, starting tomorrow?

Because my home country tried this whole "if we seize the means of production from the wealthy elites, we won't have to work as hard anymore" ~80 years ago, and guess what happened to the workers? Were they working less hours for more money, OR, were they working just as much while also starving and being plagued by shortages?

The problem with your logic, is that it only applies to bullshit Western office corporate jobs who are anyway not actually doing much useful work for 40h. All those office jobs that don't need to be working 40h, were just subsidized by endless money printing, that's why you see so many layoffs happening, once the ZIRP era ended when they were hiring people just to raise headcounts to boost stock valuations to gullible investors they could rug-pull, but now the bubble popped and the jig is up.

And it only works in a world where you own the world reserve currency, and globalisation, free trade and international competition does not exist, because the countries who will work harder than you, will outcompete you and subjugate you in the long run so you can make their sneakers and phones for 60h/week, while they kick it back and live from printing money.

[jmyeet]

Your assertion seems to be that those things haven't had massive productivity gains over time. Cleary they have. Firefighters aren't carrying buckets of water or using a horse-and-cart. No, they use fire engines, helicopters and planes. They use more advanced fire suppressants and protective gear.

Medical professionals have better diagnostics, health records, MRIs and other imaging equipment and so on. The medical profession is pretty much a perfect example of my point, actually. Do we train more doctors (per-capita) or just expect existing doctors to work more hours? There are a whole bunch of vested interests in constraining doctor supply.

Likewise, resident physicians are incredibly profitable for hospitals because they create a lot of value and cost nothing. You see this where various parties are trying to increase emergency medicine residencies from 3 to 4 years.

Hospitals hate fully-qualified attending physicians because they can't artificially suppress their salaries. It's why we've gotten things like Nurse Practioners, Physician's Assistants, CRNAs, etc. It's also why, for example, you see a case like in Oregon where private equity is trying to destroy physician organization. I'm of course talking about Peace Health and ApolloMD, a case in Oregon recently.

We also make medical people spend a bunch of time dealing with insurance BS, for literally no reason.

This isn't just a BS "corporate job" thing.

[joe_mamba]

You said a lot off-topic rtants, without answering my question directly: How would your country function, if all medical staff, construction, rail, sewage, police and firefighters suddenly worked half as long or not at all, starting tomorrow?

You mentioned a lot of tech improves since the stone age as an argument, but existing staff working 40h already use those tech advancements.