Comment by fartattack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fartattack | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I know plenty of people who have chosen not to work forty hour weeks and make do with varying levels of money.

I have family who choose to be stay at home parents, I know working class people that own small businesses, like a caterer, and I know successful engineers who have negotiated part time roles, and contract work

These people all work, and they all get by. Working 40 hours a week is also a choice. I know people who work more than that too, because they enjoy their work (a shocking concept to the antiwork crowd I'm sure), and I've talked to gig workers who like the flexibility

These are just anecdotes but if it's the structure of the forty hour work week that you don't like, you just need some creativity, and maybe a willingness to make do with fewer material things, but you are NOT excused from the moral imperative to work if you are able bodied.

There are people who really can't work and if you can and choose not to do so, you are hurting society's ability to help those people.

We all make decisions based on what we think we need and the reality of our situations.

I feel badly for people who don't think about the second-order effects of their decisions, though. If one chooses to only do enough to get by starting at a young age, they'll still be waiting tables (or some equivalent) in their 60's, one paycheck away from disaster.

On the other hand, working more than you need has compounding effects. Ben Franklin got about his business with a hand-cart early in the morning in his 20s and 30s and was in shape to retire in his 40s - and could indulge in public service, invention, scientific experimentation, and exploration to his hearts desire after that.

We can't all be Ben Franklins, though I think more of us could do so with better decision making.

My back of the envelope calculation puts the strain of our national bums at 1 dollar a month for every taxpayer. Netflix is $10. EU membership is $10. Every single bum in my country is 1 dollar combined.

And we're giving these people a home, heating, water, electricity and Internet access, plus food, all for free.

I don't know what the rest of the world is doing, but choosing not to work is not the social burden you make it out to be, at least over here.

>My back of the envelope calculation puts the strain of our national bums at 1 dollar a month for every taxpayer.

How did you get those numbers? I took $1/month, multiplied that by 144.3M tax payers, dividing that by the federal poverty line of $12.88k/year (presumably the minimum amount needed for living), and only got enough funds to pay for 134k people. Wikipedia says there were approximately "1.5 million sheltered homeless" in 2014, so that's an order of magnitude more. Add to that, the effects of this program disincentivizing work, and I expect that the final cost to be two orders of magnitude more expensive than you proposed.

Notice how I mentioned EU membership? It's a non-USA calculation. As I said, I don't know what the rest of the world is doing. I get your $12.88k/year at a fraction of $1/mo for the taxpayers over here and I'm living like a king. No idea why providing basic necessities is supposedly so expensive in the US.

While such leisure disincentivizes bullshit work (which is a good thing), it allows me to do actual, meaningful work. I.e. pursue my lifelong dreams pertaining to computers and art.

> the moral imperative to work

So how many hours goes to the moral imperative side, and how many to the "I like to have nice things" side?

Because I'd be willing to accept that I have a moral imperative to work 8 hours a week. And as technology improves, that number should decrease.

working 40 hours isn’t a choice if you need healthcare

Reply on news.ycombinator.com