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Comment by jsprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

You can't look at yourself solely as an individual (unless you only depend on yourself), but have to look at yourself in the larger picture of our ecosystem. If your 'shorter-work-hours' results in everyone else needing to put in 'longer-work-hours' to satisfy global needs and/or demands, then there is an argument that you are a free-rider.

Instead, the totality of 'work-hours' needs to be examined in detail and we need to think about whether the distribution is 'fair' and how we can reduce 'work-hours' across the board, for all individuals.

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Bullshit. Everyone else doesn't "need" to put in longer hours so I can have a reasonable schedule, and it's in no way my fault if they decide to do that.

I'm not a "free-rider". If my employer isn't satisfied with what I can do in a 40-hour week, then they shouldn't be paying me. I will absolutely not work 60-hour weeks on a regular basis.

If my individual interests clash with those of the "ecosystem", then my individual interests take precedence. If I don't look out for my work-life balance and overall happiness, then who will?

You examine yourself in a vacuum. Does your food come free? Does your water? At the current time, someone must do some work in order for you to remain living. Some of those people who do that work are not afforded the work-life balance others are able to achieve.

Can you eat your employer's bank credits?

Considering the vast majority of humans are doing "work" that doesn't help anyone get food or water I think this argument is a little specious. Who defines the necessary attributes of this environment?

I'm not sure that(vast majority)'s accurate. I'd guess many people go to a food distribution center daily, or at least weekly, to select and transport food for their family and friends. Many work in the food and beverage service industry, either serving or preparing food for consumption. Many are employed by manufactured foods factories. Transport trucks that go from production sites to distribution and/or manufacturing centers don't drive themselves yet. There are also those who actually work on raw production.

Most of the jobs you're listing here are hourly jobs with 40 hour workweeks; or they're at least paid overtime.

The salaried workers doing 60-70 hour weeks every week are not doing anything related to providing food or beverages. They're programmers, advertisers, sales, lawyers, etc. Not exactly life giving jobs.

I'm sure some Coca Cola, Nabisco, and McDonalds employees work 60+ hour weeks but they're not serving food, they're maximizing profits for the company.

We could all be well fed and hydrated without a single person working 60+ hours a week.

Hmm, it sounds like you only consider people in the United States, which is only about 5% of the human population.

No, you as an individual don't 'need' to do that. What does 'need' even mean? Require to survive?

Making societally optimal decisions is a crazy burden to try to put on a single person. As single entities we don't have near the amount of information or power required to act on that impetus with any weight.

Society as a whole needs to establish norms, and perhaps regulations, to ensure it doesn't fall apart. Individuals should consider those norms in their decisions (and fight to make them better). But slapping someone with the responsibility to be a single person acting alone to maximize happiness for their collective is asking them to be impotently act on shoddy heuristics.

How will my working 60 hours on something improve the work life balance of people in extremely poor bargaining positions?

It seems to me it might even make their bargaining position worse. There is less need for people who can accomplish the task the more any given individual can accomplish on their own and the more people there are who can accomplish that task. Monopolising the potential pool of work is a bad thing just to get more money that I don't need.

Yes, let someone else do more work. Perhaps someone who wouldn't have chance to work otherwise. And in my free time maybe I'll spend some of that money I make, and that will create even more jobs - providing people in other parts of society with a better bargaining position as well as those who share in the pool of work; the pool of mutually beneficial need; that I enjoy....

The idea that if I work 60 hours at some esoteric piece of technology the work life balance of people who don't have the leverage to achieve a comparably small working week will get better strikes me as nuts. There's no plausible mechanism connecting the two being shown.

You're making the bad assumption that working less hours gets less things done. The author made it clear that he gets more done while working less hours, so it follows that people burning the midnight oil for social cred are the real leeches, rather than the people who prioritize better.

Also, cranking away on Rails sites isn't going to feed the hungry or give water to the thirsty, by and large. Those are social problems of bad distribution, not lack of productivity.

Your work-centric worldview and live-to-work attitude are at best shortsighted and bland. I suggest that you broaden your horizon and look at the bigger picture and derive meaning of your life away from work and career because as you're aging, these matters become more and more less relevant and less enticing.

Your simplistic worldview ignores facts: humans need large amounts of food and water to survive and thrive. Those things don't get to your body for free [as in 'effort']. At least, not on the scale that humans are currently occupying the planet.

To remain at our current level requires tremendous physical labor and organization of process just to deliver the required nutrients to every person, every day (and we still fail to achieve 100% distribution). There is a base level of effort required to sustain our current state. To believe otherwise is foolish delusion.

If you supply your own nutrients and use no product of another, you may exempt yourself from the previous analysis. Otherwise, I suggest we figure out how to achieve the above with as little 'work-hours' as possible.

humans need large amounts of food and water to survive and thrive

So, are you shooting for a subsistence income level for ALL humans?

I don't know why we should work for 60 hrs/w with no OT compensation to feed the planet when the 1% of Earth's population are hoarding over 35% of global wealth if not more.

Maybe you should talk to them and convince them to give some of that wealth back to the poor so they don't starve to death?

You're spinning strawmen. When did I claim any of that?

'Wealth', in the context you speak of it, is an illusion. Your question:

>Maybe you should talk to them and convince them to give some of that wealth back to the poor so they don't starve to death?

Is non-sensical. A person cannot eat 'wealth', just as one of the other responders cannot eat his employer's bank credits.

"Wealth" is what enables those putting in "effort" to trade for others' "effort" in order to sustain oneself. Although nobody can eat "wealth" or his employer's bank credits, one can absolutely trade "wealth" for "efforts". This is the point of currency. Your strawman that "wealth" cannot be eaten is completely false.

>Your strawman that "wealth" cannot be eaten is completely false.

It's not a strawman, it's essentially what the person I was responding to claimed:

>Maybe you should talk to them and convince them to give some of that wealth back to the poor so they don't starve to death?

The real strawman is the specious concept of 'wealth' that is being perpetrated here.

The current world food production is enough to feed 10 billion people (50% more than the current world population) a diet of 4000 calories/day (double the recommended amount for a woman, >50% more than for a man) [1]. And that's not including fruits & vegetables, only staple grains.

People go hungry because of distribution problems, not because we don't produce enough food. Southern Nigeria exports food to the rest of Africa while people starve in Northern Nigeria because the roads are not good enough to transport food. The Red Cross sends enough food into Somalia to feed the whole country, but it is all appropriate by warlords at gunpoint. Americans grow fat on fast food while peasants elsewhere starve because many of the calories we produce are used to feed animals. That's not even talking about the millions of tons of corn that are poured into our gas tanks through ethanol subsidies.

[1] http://www.gardeningplaces.com/articles/global-food-crisis.h...

I agree. That is why I focused on the 'get to' and not the 'produce for' aspect. However, there is still labor involved in producing food and those who actually produce it (as opposed to those who only claim to [ie. corporations]) are often exploited.

Not to mention the "ugly food" [1] dumped in the trash because it looks OMG ugly!

[1]: http://time.com/3761942/why-people-are-falling-in-love-with-...

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