this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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The Internet in Ancient Times
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Welcome to the stone age... or the bronze age... or the iron age... heck, anything with an 'age' is welcome, except our modern age or any ages to come.
This is about what the internet was like thousands of years ago back when it all started. Like when Darius the Great hired mercenaries via Craigslist or when Egypt invented emojis.
CODE OF LAWS
1 - Be civil. No name calling, no fighting, keep your flint hand axes inside your leather pouches at all times.
2 - Keep the AI stuff to a minimum. It gets annoying and old fashioned memes are more fun for everyone.
3 - None of this newfangled modern 21st century nonsense. We don't even know what "21st century" means.
4 - No porn/explicit content. The king is sensitive about these things.
5 - No lemmy.world TOS violations will be tolerated. So there.
6 - There is no ~~rule~~ law 6.
Laws of justice which Hammurabi, the wise king, established. A righteous law, and pious statute did he teach the land. Hammurabi, the protecting king am I. I have not withdrawn myself from the men, whom Bel gave to me, the rule over whom Marduk gave to me, I was not negligent, but I made them a peaceful abiding-place. I expounded all great difficulties, I made the light shine upon them. With the mighty weapons which Zamama and Ishtar entrusted to me, with the keen vision with which Ea endowed me, with the wisdom that Marduk gave me, I have uprooted the enemy above and below (in north and south), subdued the earth, brought prosperity to the land, guaranteed security to the inhabitants in their homes; a disturber was not permitted. The great gods have called me, I am the salvation-bearing shepherd, whose staff is straight, the good shadow that is spread over my city; on my breast I cherish the inhabitants of the land of Sumer and Akkad; in my shelter I have let them repose in peace; in my deep wisdom have I enclosed them. That the strong might not injure the weak, in order to protect the widows and orphans, I have in Babylon the city where Anu and Bel raise high their head, in E-Sagil, the Temple, whose foundations stand firm as heaven and earth, in order to bespeak justice in the land, to settle all disputes, and heal all injuries, set up these my precious words, written upon my memorial stone, before the image of me, as king of righteousness.
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Please do show me the data that 8 billion people can survive on hunting and gathering.
With modern farming, 10% of the people can now produce enough food for everyone. And if everyone had equal income instead of the top 1% syphoning off half the wealth, we could globally support a middle class lifestyle by everyone working 20 hours a week, the same amount that hunters and gatherers "worked".
10% of the people, first of all, is around 800 million people. And secondly, that's a lot of really hard work that can't be done just 20 hours a week. I'm in Indiana. I know farmers. It's not even a 40-hour-a-week job. It's a sunup to sundown job.
So sure, everyone gets a break. Except farmers. Who earn the same amount as everyone else but have to work a lot harder.
If the required labor was split up more equitably then farmers wouldn't have to work sunup to sundown.
The entire point of large scale agriculture is that it's more efficient than individual peasants working a single field or whatever.
Nobody is saying that farming isn't hard work, but modern farming should produce more food per man-hour than neolithic farming (or hunter/gathering), right? So why should it be that farm workers now have to work harder than prehistoric people?
Because the tools are more expensive. But that's only half of it.
Do they? Because what has been said so far is that hunter-gatherers didn't work as hard. Or do you mean pre-agriculture prehistoric people? Because agriculture predates written history by thousands of years.
Once we started farming and herding, the work was harder. But also necessary. That's just how things are.
The question I am posing is not "do modern farm workers labor harder than prehistoric hunter gathers" (they do).
Instead, the question is "should modern farm workers labor harder than prehistoric hunter gathers".
Farming is more efficient than gathering. That's why we farm. So why is it the case that modern farm workers are working harder?
Because feeding eight billion people isn't related to how many hours of work individuals have to do in order to achieve that unless you don't have enough people to do the work.
Have more farmers ...
What if you can't find more than 800 million farmers?
300 years ago 90% of the planet were farmers. Surely you can find enough people.
Not if everyone is paid the same. Why do hard farm work if you don't have to?
That's exactly why the number of farmers keeps reducing under capitalism. In socialism, you can get to democratically decide how much people are paid depending on the actual needs of the economy.
300 years ago, people were forced to farm for a lord.
So are you suggesting a return to feudalism?
No, mate, I'm obviously not suggesting a return to feudalism. I'm suggesting that if humanity needs more people allocated in agriculture, it should allocate more people in agriculture.
Allocate? People should be forced to farm?
You're right, that's not feudalism, that's slavery.
Allocate doesn't have to be through violence, it can be through incentive. If farmers made twice as much as stock traders and worked 30h a week there would be plenty more.
It was already established at the beginning of this conversation by the person who started this chain that everyone would have equal pay.
I'm not that person, I reject equal income for every job.
If you want to change the subject in the middle of a conversation, you might say so ahead of time.
Just say you have no arguments and you'd rather cry about poor farmers who work so hard without actually providing any solutions
Has ordering someone to say something over the internet ever worked for you? Because you seem to think it will this time.
Then there's a problem. However we somehow manage to employ a few billion people currently.
Those few billion people are currently not paid the same as an accountant to do much more demanding work.
~~We're talking about food production.~~
I misunderstood you. Have more people doing farm work, that way we have enough food and individual farmers don't have to work so hard
But what if you can't find enough people to do farm work? A lot of people work on farms now because they don't have much of a choice. And if you could do easier work but be paid the same as you would on a farm, why not take advantage of that?
We already have people working lots of hours doing jobs they might not want to do.
The question was could we reduce the number of hours people work and still have enough food
I thought everyone was also going to be paid equally.
I didn't even mention pay
The comment chain before you entered into it:
https://lemmy.world/comment/11628981
So equal pay was already part of the discussion before you joined it.
We chase money because this equates to goods and services. Well there's a huge excess of money being produced and horded.
This excess production is a result of ... work (plus machinery, efficiency improvements etc).
So if we reduced the numbers of hours worked we'd reduce this excess.

Once again, if everyone is to be paid equally, as has been established, why would most people choose to do physically demanding jobs?
It's really not my argument. I'm saying we can work fewer hours.
However since you insist on bringing up the point of pay equality, under the current system, how can you justify the following discrepancies:
Why should a fireman risk their life for $56k? https://www.indeed.com/career/firefighter/salaries
Or a teacher who's bringing up the future generation get just $36k? https://www.indeed.com/career/teacher/salaries
Whilst a web developer gets nearly double for sitting on their ass? https://www.indeed.com/career/web-developer/salaries
Why does a plastic surgeon earn $100k more than an oncologist (who is, I'd argue, much more likely to save save a life) https://www.forbes.com/advisor/in/education/doctor-salary-in-us/
The only one of those that is hard physical labor is firefighter and it is not the consistent physical labor of farm work. Have you ever even been on a farm?
Lol. Congrats on the laser focus there.
I'm going to leave you and your farm workers, ditch diggers, miners etc, to it.
I agree with but for one thing. If we doubled the farm workforce then each farmer wouldn't have to work as hard. And we certainly have another 800 million people to throw at it.
Source? Everything we do is more an more complex. A TV show requires hundreds of people. A smartphone, millions if we include supply chains. Same for a car. A modern house requires dozens of highly specialized workers for weeks at a time, plus materials. People live much longer with better health, that's a lot of labor in research, machines, drugs and raw manpower (nurses, surgeons, etc).
Maybe you meant a pre-industrial middle class?
They didn't say we could.
They said industrial farming is more effective per manhour at food production.
And it is. There are obviously further complexities to have everything else in a modern society, but that doesn't change the fact that even modern productivity increases aren't decreasing work loads for some reason
It was in response to my saying that you cannot support a large population via hunting and gathering. You need to work harder than that. It is only more food per hour of work if you are talking about a small population. There is a point of diminishing returns and then it gets harder and harder to feed a growing population via hunting and gathering.
Nobody is proposing we switch to hunter-gatherer jobs, we're saying that the jobs we're currently doing are producing extreme excess and that excess is either wasted (fast fashion landfills, dramatic food waste) or just hoarded by the capitalist class.
We can support our current population with our current technology and work a lot less.
Anyone that is unemployed could be taking some of your work hours. Many of our jobs are redundant. A different economy can be created where we all work way less than we do while retaining our quality of life.
To say we can't is to buy into the propaganda that we need Musks and Bezos' or we'd be subsistence farming. There are other things in between.
Why would farmers in impoverished countries want to retain their way of life?
This is a bad faith argument or complete misunderstanding of the point and in either case the conversation can't continue productively.
The point is that a democratic economy where workers own the value of their production would NECESSARILY improve wealth for those workers. Nobody is employed as a charitable act, you're employed if and only if you produce more value than it takes to hire you.
And my point is that farming is hard work even if it's only 20 hours a week and why would enough people choose to do hard work when they can do something less physically taxing for the same amount of pay?
I fail to see how that same thing doesn't apply today? Why do farmers work more than 20 hours instead with the same lack of benefit?
Because people need jobs to survive and in a lot of places those are the jobs available for people with no education. What a strange question.
I've lost your point here but frankly I don't care to find it. You're like the final boss of capitalist realism in this whole thread. You can't seem to imagine any other way.
A cooperative economy is better than a competitive economy is my assertion and I'll leave it at that.
Or... I think there is a huge gulf in between what you want and the capitalist society of today and it doesn't have to be either/or.
So many people seem to think we live in a black and white world...