Comment by xg15
3 days ago
This is also the exact reason why all the bright-eyed pieces that some technology would increase worker's productivity and therefore allow more leisure time for the worker (20 hour workweek etc) are either hopelessly naive or pure propaganda.
Increased productivity means that the company has a new option to either reduce costs or increase output at no additional cost, one of which it has to do to stay ahead in the rat-race of competitors. Investing the added productivity into employee leisure time would be in the best case foolish and in the worst case suicidal.
Which is why government regulations that set the boundaries for what companies can and can't get away with (such as but not limited to labor laws) are so important. In absence of guardrails, companies will do anything to get ahead of the competition. And once one company breaks a norm or does something underhanded, all their competitors must do the same thing or they risk ceding a competitive advantage. It becomes a race to the bottom.
Of course we learned this all before a century ago, it's why we have things like the FDA in the first place. But this new generation of techno-libertarians and DOGE folks who grew up in a "move fast and break things" era, who grew up in the cleanest and safest times the world has ever seen, have no understanding or care of the dangers here and are willing to throw it all away because of imagined inefficiencies. Regulations are written in blood, and those that remove them will have new blood on their hands.
Some regulations are written in blood, a huge chunk are not. Shower head flow rate regulations were not written in blood.
Your post started out talking about labor laws but then switched to the FDA, which is very different. This is one of the reasons that people like the DOGE employees are tearing things apart. There are so many false equivalences on the importance of literally everything the government does that they look at things that are clearly useless and start to pull apart things they think might be useless.
The good will has been burned on the “trust me, the government knows best”, so now we’re in an era of cuts that will absolutely go too far and cause damage.
Your post mentioning “imagined inefficiencies” is a shining example of the issue of why they are there. Thinking the government doesn’t have inefficiencies is as dumb as thinking it’s pointless. Politicians are about as corrupt of a group as you can get and budget bills are filled with so much excess waste it’s literally called “pork”.
Efficiency related regulation like the energy star is THE reason why companies started caring.
Same with low flush toilets. I vaguely remember the initial ones had issues, but tbh less than the older use a ton of water toilets my family had before that were also super clog prone. Nowadays I can’t even remember the last time a low flush toilet clogged. Massive water saving that took regulation.
Efficiency regulations may not be directly written in blood, instead they are built on costly mountains of unaddressed waste.
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I don't think regulations are enough. They're just a band-aid on the gaping wound that is a capitalist, market based economy. No matter what regulations you make, some companies and individuals become winners and over time will grow rich enough to influence the government and the regulations. We need a better economic system, one that does not have these problems built in.
Gaping wound that lifted billions out of powerty and produced the greatest standard of living in human history.
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> We need a better economic system
none has been found. The command economy is inefficient, and prone to corruption.
informal/barter systems are too small in scale and does not produce sufficient amounts to make the type of abundant lifestyle we enjoy today possible.
As the saying goes - free market capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others.
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> 20 hour workweek etc
We have that already. It's called part-time jobs. Usually they don't pay as much as full-time jobs, provide no health insurance or other benefits, etc.
> provide no health insurance
I am so glad to live in Germany...
… where your full time job pays less than the GP's part time job
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It's a bad deal as a developer. I receive 50% of the money but still provide 70-80% value to the company.
As someone who straddles two fields (CS and Healthcare) and has careers/degrees in both -- the grass isn't always greener on the other side.
This could be said about most jobs in the 21st century these days in any career field given. That's a culture shift and business management/organization practice change that isn't likely to happen anytime soon.
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Yes, this is an observation I've made about the illusion of choice in so-called free markets.
In actuality, everyone is doing the same thing and their decisions are already made for them. Companies don't just act evil because they are evil. They act evil because all they can ever be is evil. If they don't, then they lose. So what's left?
Facebook becoming an ad-ridden disaster was, in a way, predestined. Unavoidable.
Indeed, and I don't know why people keep saying that we ever thought the 20 hour workweek was feasible, because there is always more work to be done. Work expands to fill the constraints available, similar to Parkinson's Law.
Probably because the 40-hour workweek was feasible.
It became feasible because back when the workweek was "whenever you're not asleep", a lot of people set a lot of things on fire until it wasn't.
This misses a huge part of the story, increase in productive, means a large economy, means more efficient use of resources, means compensation goes up over time. If you want to live the live of somebody that did 40h a week 40 years ago and only work 20h, you can already have most of that, and still have many options somebody back then didn't have that is virtually free.
The actual realization is that most people simple rather work 40h a week (or more) and spend their money on whatever they want to spend their money on.
Specially many of us here, can do so easily. I personally work 80% and could reduce it further if my goal was maximum leisure.
By far the biggest reason it doesn't feel that way, is that housing polices in most of the Western world have been utterly and completely braindead. That and the ever increasing cost of health care as people get ever older and older.