sleepysysadmin

>I was again, arguing about work on reddit. Someone said that even animals "work" to survive. I found that the comparison was not really good.

Seems like a good comparison to me. Society is not post-scarcity. People in society must produce a surplus and contribute that surplus. Economics is how we measure how much contribution happened.

>Food and shelter are abundant.

Food prices are climbing and housing is in bubble territory. Abundance is complicated.

>I guess that's what people criticize about current capitalism.

Marx has many valid arguments against capitalism. It's very obvious today that socialism is dead. It officially died in 1989. Though that doesnt solve the problems with capitalism.

>In earlier times, in hunter gatherer societies, food was scarce and work was important. But today, you cannot tell people that working in fast food or in customer support is mandatory to eat and have a roof on your head.

Nobody is saying they must work the mcjob. Many many other jobs out there. Entrepreneurship is important to capitalism.

However we absolutely are saying you must contribute something to society in order to eat and have a roof over their head. If you don't, that's your decision, you deal with the consequences. Our society is not at the point where work is optional. Perhaps getting people out of the mcjobs and building a fully automated factory where food just comes out at no cost. Where housing can be 3d printed in a weekend anywhere in the world. We get to the point where maslow heirarchy of needs is solved and you can decide to not-work as much as you like.

Never criticize. It will never work or be beneficial at all. No point even going to your manager. It's not your problem and you haven't been asked to help. Furthermore, it's your manager's job to fix this and they too aren't doing their job. When you criticize you will be criticize them as well.

I've been in your position many times. The big problem arrives is when incompetent and useless coworkers start unloading their work onto you. I have been in this situation many times as well. The best advice here is to never lie. Never 'cover'/lie for said coworkers.

Oh another rule, never let any coworkers know how much work you do. You arent just avoiding bragging, tons of benefits down this line. Could be the case of what's happening here.

>Pleasure seeking increases, sure, I just don't agree that violence is the prime focus or end goal of any majority of the participants or viewers of any of the things you brought up.

no, not prime focus yet. If hockey is a fresh pleasure, the fighting or violence isn't important. The end goal however is that you must have this violence or the pleasure seeker moves to the next thing which will have it.

>Violence might be a part of it, but it's clearly not the main part of any of it, otherwise violence would be increasing rather than decreasing in every single one of those, and more people would just turn to the simpler sources of violence.

That's my point and why i picked my choices. Violence isn't the prime focus. Afterall go watch boxing or MMA. Which some people have gotten their pleasure seek onto this for sure.

>Why would anybody watch Hockey for the fights when many games don't have any fights at all? Nobody who really just wants to see car crashes is going to sit through hours of cars driving in circles for the chance to occasionally see a car hit a wall and spin out.

Fighting is but 1 violence. Checking is another. Elbowing and slashing are others.

>Looking up "Nascar highlights" on YouTube, I can see that it's not all about crashes, it seems to be all about turnarounds, where somebody suddenly overtakes somebody else, or somebody loses their position quickly, so crashes are a part of that, but it doesn't seem to be "about crashes", but rather about changes in the standings of a race in progress.

Lets not even go into derbies where the goal is to literally crash into each other until you're the last working car.

Or monster trucks which crush other cars.

This is all about pleasure seeking and constantly need to increase which leads into sadism.

>Out of the hockey fans I know, only the really casual watchers are interested in fights and checking at all. The big fans are way more interested in the strategy and statistics and many of them are annoyed when a big fight breaks out and wastes time in the game. If what you were saying was true, way more people would just be watching videos on the internet of people getting into street fights than professional sports.

To be fair I havent watched in quite some time but as the saying goes... I went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out!

This is very simple to evaluate. What would happen to the NHL is fighting and checking was banned. Any physical violence is an immediate contract break and players thrown out of the league? Dont get another $.

Obviously violence would go away but how'd the sport work out? I'm thinking hockey would suck pretty hardcore. NHL viewership would be at all-time lows without question.

Also yes, street fighting videos are ridiculously popular but also why they were banned on so many platforms.

>It's way easier to find videos of car crashes than it is to watch hours of cars driving in circles. I don't understand the appeal of NASCAR, but it's clearly not about the crashes.

I mean no offence against nascar. F1 has nothing but crashes as well. Every highlight reel is about the crashes. So it is about nascar. Nascar highlights are all about crashes.

>Why not? You might find that long-term players of games are more interested in good gameplay than bloody effects or the violence itself. I've noticed that games in general are tending toward less violence and blood than a decade or so ago.

The violence is the point being made. Pleasure is fleeting. Violent video games are fantastic because it lets you chop someone's head off when you cant do it in person. When you have gone so far as to needing that level of pleasure, the next step in solving boredom will be more extreme.

>I think you are being unfairly judgemental about things that you don't understand.

Not judgmental at all. I've got my TF2 and skyrim installed. I watch violent sports. Im not judging people who do these things. I can see that's how people took my post by the heavy downvotes.

The point being made isnt about NHL being bad or good or that fights are or arent part of it. Its that this pleasure seeking constantly increases.

Pleasure is fleeting. It must be or else you'd still be glowing from your first orgasm.

Inevitably the search for pleasure will require variety and inevitably that variety brings you to inflicting pain on others.

We do it publicly. The romans fed people to the lions. We have lots of violent sports. Nascar isn't about driving left. It's about the crashes. Hockey is about the fights and checking. Lets not even evaluate violent videogames.

The real trick is understanding what's happening in your brain and controlling this before it gets to the need to inflict pain.

>For me it was the masks. The masks were my tipping point.

Before covid we knew masks were effective. Doctors obviously wear them during surgery. masks are important when dealing with HIV and such.

So when Fauci and others came out and said masks didn't work. They were knowingly lying. Worse yet, there were instructions on how to turn a tshirts in masks as well as how to produce hand santizers. They took these down.

The correct decision would have been to say exactly the fear, 'we have supply issues, we recommend cutting up old tshirts.' Not only does it prevent spread, it solves all problems.

Then we went a week later and they talked about 'new normal' and '2 weeks to flatten the curve'. Their lying didn't stop. They lost any smidgen of trust they had. Then they came out with emergency approvals to use experimental medicine for something that clearly isn't a vaccine and they are lying and calling it a vaccine? Sorry but this amount of lying should make literally everyone question their motives.

>1. It was statistically extremely likely a virus like COVID would come along soon, and models have predicted such viruses arising naturally for a long time.

Yes, been seeing these predictions for a long time.

>It is at the same time perfectly possible it was engineered.

Occams razor clearly indicates it was engineered at this point. We have had years to prove it was zoonotic, it's not.

>It is a plain stupid move, politically, to outwardly entertain the idea that COVID was engineered - unless you've got proof so damning not even China could ignore it. Unlikely to exist. And even then it is only going to score you a few feel-good points with the plebeians at home.

Not sure I agree with this point. There's a wide gap at this point between 'engineered to release and attack the world' and 'lab leak because they were incompetent.' Which is exactly what was already established. Many sources clearly indicated they werent following basic safety procedures at that lab.

>Either possibility has no impact at all on shorter term decision making. It is stupid to burden people whose immediate goal it is to save lives with even more political minefields they have to navigate.

On the contrary. They cannot do their job effectively without doing exactly this. If we ignored reality like we did, they now will react inappropriately. Which is what happened.

>In conclusion, one can theorize that falling interest rates can be indicative of tight monetary conditions in the economy in the sense that demand for credit is falling (due to explanation one) and/or access to debt funding/financing is limited to just the largest and most creditworthy businesses (due to explanation two).2

Boomers are retiring or getting damn close. They are moving their investments to 'safe' options like bonds. In reverse the system has to match up those bonds with someone issuing a bond. This is typically cars and houses. So for a boomer to invest in a bond, someone had to have bought a house. If interest rates were high, then people wouldnt be buying houses. So interest rates must drop so that the investments can happen.

Furthermore, it's also those same boomers who are selling their large house to 'downsize' or whatever. They cant sell unless someone is buying.

The even crazier thing, the real yields on bonds are negative right now. Interest rate is 0.25% in Canada while inflation is at 4.7%.

So retirement funds are effectively losing the difference. The boomers thought they could retire because they have some nice big numbers but it's double edged. They might have a big number but it doesnt grow much at 0.25% and their costs to buy things is 4.7% higher. So in a few years many boomers who retired may find out they cant afford to be retired anymore.

Caffeine is in so many things. Even more interesting is that it's a stimulant that is unique. Every other stimulant is controlled if not illegal. Amphetamines or cocaine for example. The problem is that it has a long history and government would not be successful in controlling it. Even though they clearly would if they could.

How many corporations literally provide coffee to their workers. Even to the point of paying you to drink it on a break? This drug is clearly beneficial to these corps. The increase in focus and productivity is obvious. This boost to cognitive function is what created the age of enlightenment.

>Tangentially, I recently moved to Canada and was surprised by the lack of quality healthcare..

This is very complex and absolutely hilarious when American democrats think of Canada as a better solution.

>Literally could not believe some walk ins have paper files and use fax, plus finding a GP apparently is a months long quest.

We have very good laws in place protecting health information. $10,000 tort damages for leaking health infos and then much larger fines for more problematic issues.

Some hospitals try to do the right thing and will have high security maturity. The other hospitals basically do the opposite. They forcefully will not secure their systems and save the money and put it in a fund to pay out the inevitable breach.

>Visiting a specialist took ages, and I wouldn’t say it was the best / most modern infrastructure there either.

Canada's healthcare system is tiered. You have the public single payer which is trash at best. Virtually all employers pay for health benefits which bring you to the 2nd tier. This gets you into a ward and such. There's a 3rd tier where you get good service, private rooms, skip lines. If you work in public sector or a big union you most likely are on this 3rd tier. The final tier is for the people whose names are on the wards. The "Such and such family ward" because they donated significant money to the hospital. These people get immediate access to everything you might expect. Nicest rooms. everything.

>(And I went in downtown Toronto, must be so much worse for more remote places I guess).

85% of Canadians live in urban areas near to the US border. If you choose to live somewhere else, you know you're living far from civilization and already accept the lack of service.

>In the end we kind of shunned the public system and decided to go private healthcare instead. But (luckily) have not really had to take advantage of it)

dont get me wrong. I dont mind our tiered system. ohip covers the basics which everyone should get coverage for. Break your arm? taxpayers/rich pay to fix it. 2nd tier is plenty for most people. 3rd tier is nice but most people dont realize it exists. Ive had a lady talking to me about how she has to wait many months to get in to a specialist, the same specialist that I waited a whole 3 days for. Also yes, the billionaire folks are going to get the best treatment, it's no surprise.

Are you me? Same here. Fully vax and picked up omicron. 2 days bed. Every single flu I've ever had was worse than this covid.

>Already contracted Covid, have 2 vaccines, I'm down to get a booster every year or two, at my own leisure.

I will go get the flu shot. I don't know, nor care, what strains they are going for in the flu shot. I do know they tend to target different strains every year. They can mix match as much as they like. If coronavirus is the one they want to target this time, fine whatever.

>I'm OK with and to be honest, it feels a lot like the government trying to deflect from the fact healthcare isn't OK (at least in my home country, Canada).

2 weeks to flatten the curve was only to prevent healthcare system from collapsing. But for whatever reason they switched to 'lets eradicate all illness by staying home and wearing masks.

>There's always been risks to life and this feels more like governments are trying to convince people the risk should be zero so they can be the heroes while at the same time expanding their powers...

Makes me wonder. why in history did we never try to end the flu season? there's clear starts and ends to the flu season. Mandate wearing mask in public stores seems like it eliminated flu and cold.

Though you touch on an interesting thought. Has covid really been all about government expanding their power? I dont think covid was created for this purpose, but I certainly suspect they all jumped on board to using it as an excuse to expand their power.