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Comment by lidHanteyk | Hacker News Reader

You've been downvoted, but it's worth pointing out exactly why you're wrong: I am talking about salary, which means that folks are compensated not based on a number of hours spent working but on the overall impact that their work has on the organization.

Also, I have been salaried several times in my life, and in each case, I was expected to do various things outside of a 9-5 "workday" sort of framework. Without being too self-oriented, I think that I earned the salary commanded. I've never been compensated even $200k/yr, and my highest is about $150k/yr. Even those of us that are well-paid and well-respected for our work are not paid enough to justify the time that we lose to work.

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I truly am not understanding how anything you write makes me wrong. If we value a life at a certain amount, it seems we can value it out at per year, per hour.

These are all just estimates.

But if your life is worth x per year, and you x * z number of waking hours, and you trade some of those waking hours for cash ...

Where am I wrong?

Edit: I’m not even sure why we are pruning non working years from the calculation.

Aha! It's because we are talking about the value of a laborer, of a plebian, of an everyman. The value of the typical person, to some society, is the labor that they can provide to the society. Money is the only way that society can estimate the value of people. This might be a foreign way for you to look at people, but it's common in the Marxist worldviews.

In other words, society doesn't care what you're doing when you aren't working, as long as you're leaving society alone. Thus society has no real reason to pay you just for existing. We might demand that our society put money in everybody's pocket, as a way of creating a capitalism which respects humanity, but it is not strictly necessary, because money is not strictly necessary for a society to exist.

Yeah you value some of your own time, and choose not to trade that to society but just use it for yourself.

So the total value of your life, to you, should necessarily include all the money you can earn plus all the things you do that you value more than working.

Etc.

Edit: I’m not disputing that other systems, including non money based systems are possible, it just seems way outside of the scope of the original contention.

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