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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>However, it gives the appearance that I don't care about my career or dont care if the company is successful or not.

That's why 8 hours should be law and overtime should only be used in emergency cases (and paid accordingly).

So that those young & naive, desperate or overly ambitious to foolishly work 10 or 14 hours do not drag down (as "not serious enough with their career") those that want a stable work-life balance.

As soon as you let individuals and businesses decide how they go about it, it's a race to the bottom (those that do want it, fuck all the others).

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Its nothing about overly ambitious, its about what you said: a stable work-life balance. Start up culture has lead us to believe that if you don't work 100 hour weeks, you don't want it bad enough or you don't care; that's patently false. If you really need to work 12 hour days to get something done you need to examine how you work. I guarantee you that you could improve your tools (knowledge of your tools), change the way you develop software or spend less time playing foosball and more time in front of the screen. I'm not against working a 10 hour day when a system is down or if something crashes that needs fixed: I'm against doing it everyday. No one is going to be like "Oh I wished I had worked more" when they are on their death beds, and I wish people would start thinking long term and about their health and future.

> As soon as you let individuals and businesses decide how they go about it, it's a race to the bottom...

Or, you get free markets and laissez-faire capitalism, the greatest wealth-producing system known to mankind.

I suppose it depends how you define "wealth." And what is wealth worth if it's in the hands of a small minority, while the rest go without, for instance, healthcare or a decent education? Even if you are in that small minority, is that the society you want?

BTW, the only country I can think of that actually practices laissez-faire capitalism is Somalia: they really have no regulation. Not so much wealth being produced there.

>Or, you get free markets and laissez-faire capitalism, the greatest wealth-producing system known to mankind

Or the suppressor operating at the greatest scale known to mankind (from colonialism and imperialism, to 2 World Wars, post colonialism and still counting).

For, if you want to measure the wealth created by capitalism by the last two (or three) centuries, you cannot just add what you like (e.g the internal US market) and hide the rest under the carpet. Add the ecological impact to the whole thing, and the numbers do not look that good.

Not to mention that such a thing as pure "free market" never existed. It's a slogan, like "Don't be evil". What does exist is a huge market system that's "laissez-faire" only for those in power (countries and individuals) and "take it or be crushed" for others.

And in which the huge wealth comes along with grabbing resources with military might (not very "free"), imposing tariffs and embargoes to who it pleases you as a big western power, operations covert and open to have friendly people (including brutal dictators) in "allied" countries, and the like. Nothing very "free market" about them.

(Actually, from the moment there is even a "patent system", which controls industries and markets of trillions of dollars worth, there's not a "free market" system anymore -- and that's just the tip of the iceberg).

That's a dangerous, shallow, and incorrect blanket statement. Visit China for a month and you'll see what true free market capitalism does to people. Heck, go back 100 years in the US.

The US isn't where it is today wealth-wise JUST because of cold hard capitalism. It also helps that we have a large market with everyone speaking the same language, having similar laws, one currency, copyright and patent acknowledgement to protect inventors (back before corporations ballooned to their current size), a decent amount of civility, fair business law, a respect for the rule of law (something my home country of Bulgaria does not), strong property and land ownership, and a desire to innovate that have allowed people to build wealth.

A country isn't built on everyone doing whatever the hell they want. There's an actual formula for it.

China is an oligarchy or crony capitalist country. The wealthy and powerful use the government to get what they want. In a true free-market system you can't use the government to destroy the competition and make yourself money. This is the problem with the US today, we've given so much power to the central government that we've created a drastically distorted market.

Can you point to a historical example of a true free market system that robustly supported work/life balance?

>In a true free-market system you can't use the government to destroy the competition and make yourself money.

The US has that - look at the telecom companies. I'm sure there's many more prime examples, but Companies do indeed use the government, at least to help them make money, by stopping competition, getting bailouts and grants for things like infrastructure and just pocketing the money and sticking us with higher costs and no improvements on our service.

wtf are you talking about? laissez-faire capitalism exists no where on this planet, so "the greatest wealth-producing system known to mankind" isn't just slightly off; it's complete nonsense.

Even if you had left off "laissez-faire", the statement wouldn't have been wrong it would have been rather weak: what other systems have we actually conceived and/or tried?

I'm definitely with you, in that I'd like shorter work weeks to be the standard, and I don't want to compete with people wishing to work more hours. But what if someone really needs the extra money brought by longer work weeks? Making it illegal for them to work for a price they're willing to accept could hurt them quite a bit.

A case could be made for shorter work weeks as a means to reduce unemployment, as well as to force people to take rest from work, but you'd definitely be pricing some people in need out of the job market, and I'm not sure there's a workaround for that side effect.

>But what if someone really needs the extra money brought by longer work weeks? Making it illegal for them to work for a price they're willing to accept could hurt them quite a bit.

Oh, but I said it should only be allowed if it's paid for. So that will actually HELP those needing the extra money "brought by longer work weeks".

What happens now it that people slave away extra hours for the same basic salary, and don't get any overtime pay.

And I think it will also help unemployed people wanting work. A company will have to hire 3 people, instead of slaving 2 for 12 hours a day (and it wont hurt them, since no other company could slave 2 people either to get the advantage for themselves).

Allowed if a particularly high price is paid for it - sometimes higher than the person would agree to get paid, and higher than their employer would agree to pay. It is in these cases when you make the arrangement illegal.

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