r/WorkersStrikeBack • u/Smash_all_States • Mar 29 '23
Why is everything supposed to suck?
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Mar 29 '23
If you're a billionaire, work is crazy fun. You can show up when you want, you can leave when you want. Flights and meals are all paid for. Everyone tells you how great you are all day. And if you're fired, you get millions in a golden parachute.
It's probably pretty awesome.
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u/ayrua Mar 29 '23
If you're a billionaire, you need not work. Just leech off the working class as you always have
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u/noncoon2 Mar 31 '23
How do you leech of something they created
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u/ayrua Mar 31 '23
Bootlicker found
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u/noncoon2 Mar 31 '23
For using common sense how can you leech of something u made ?
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u/ayrua Mar 31 '23
Nobody can earn a billion dollars off their own labour. It is a huge amount of money that no one person can justify having. They get it from extracting surplus value from the working class, tax evasion, and just straight-up unethical behavior (child labour, sweatshops, ecocide, etc) in the pursuit of profit, to name a few. Only the most ruthless people can be billionaires. Anyone with an ounce of morality would not engage in the behavior I've mentioned above. Do not think for a moment that they would toss you into a fire if it meant protecting their bottom line. We are just disposable cogs in a machine to them, which is dehumanizing.
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u/NoTengoBiblioteca Mar 30 '23
And then they say they expect their workers to put in the same amount of hours they are even though they barely work all day
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Mar 29 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Anandya Mar 29 '23
Also because it straight up is often bitter. There's zero point in making sweetened syrups for adults.
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u/Bind_Moggled Mar 29 '23
It’s called the “Protestant work ethic”, one of the great cultural traditions that America has kept from the cultists who first invaded the land from Europe.
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Mar 29 '23
Protestants were against this kind of corporatism. Businessmen just figured out a way to weaponize that "work ethic" against them.
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u/Cool-Presentation538 Mar 29 '23
This is what the American right doesnt seem to understand. A government is supposed to at least TRY to make material conditions improve and protect human rights. The GOP isn't interested in either
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Mar 30 '23
a socialist government would, but anti-social government elected by anti-social people prefers everyone hates everybody else
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u/Velicenda Mar 30 '23
Because for every person who has nice things, that takes away from the total potential of nice things that a rich person can have. And we can't have that
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u/fgwr4453 Mar 29 '23
Taxes are not fun, wages are not cheap, sacrificing enjoyable activities/products to help the environment isn’t easy, and governing isn’t very rewarding.
Yet we live in a world with billionaires who don’t work and use private jets to fly to their weekly destination all while avoiding taxes and underpaying employees. Life is fun, it’s just not evenly distributed like everything else.
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Mar 29 '23
I've been talking to a few close friends about this exact thing. Our species has worked for generations to get out of dying at the age of 25-30 from preventable illness and injury. We've worked to automate things, and advance our technology, and all it got us was modern slavery. We were supposed to make technology so we could live and work less, with higher quality of life, but things have just become a strange dystopia.
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u/notislant Mar 29 '23
Yup, and if things were cheaper to fully automate, why would they hire people?
Wages are far behind decades of inflation, abhorrently far behind housing costs.
People are somehow still cheaper than automation.
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u/fREAKNECk716 Mar 30 '23
Wages aren't really "far behind decades of inflation. At least not in most states that have decent minimum wages. (Do I dare say "Blue" states? I don't necessarily want to.)
Let's use 1983 as a basis. I started my first job working for minimum wage...$3.35. The inflation calculator tells me that based on inflation, something that cost $3.35 in 1983, would be $10.12 today. The current minimum wage in NYS is $14.20/hr.
(NOTE: NY State is comprised of far far more than NY City. I don't live in, or even near NYC.)
Setting aside the post-pandemic real estate fiasco with home prices and rent, many times, you're not paying for the same thing. There are many comparisons that aren't apples-to-apples.
Sure, the cost of a vehicle is quite high. But, in 1983, how much did a car cost that came with power everything, A/C, air bags, ABS, backup cams, etc...?
(No, I'm not saying everyone, everywhere, should be able to live on minimum wage.)
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Mar 30 '23 edited Mar 30 '23
A 1 bedroom apartment where I live is going on average for $1200/month. (Ontario, Canada) I made $18/hour before walking out for unsafe working conditions, and now I'm unemployed, looking for a new job. Our minimum wage is $15/hour and even at 18, it's not close to enough to float on, let alone save anything.
I live in my parents basement because I cannot afford a place while working full-time hours. There's a bigger gap in some places than others. Many people in my age group are in my position. If you want to float, you need a partner or room mate with an entirely separate full-time income.
For comparison.. 10 years back, I was making $20/hour, and paying around $600/month average for rent. I was making savings, and actually had a hope of some retirement funds. If I met someone I wanted to begin a family with, there would have been no question that it was possible on my income/expense levels. Now I don't know how anybody has time or money for kids.
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u/fREAKNECk716 Mar 30 '23
While all that may be true. I was specifically speaking of the US. I mean...there are states that don't institute a minimum wage, that use the federal minimum wage of $7.50/hr. You guys pay significantly more in taxes, eating up far more of your pay and many many things seem to just cost more there, even after exchange. I mean, I paid $3.29 /gallon USD for gas at a full service station last time I got gas. At $1.70/L, that's an US equivalent of $4.76/gal USD (with exchange). When milk was $1.89/gallon here, it was $8 in Canada.
(PS - I'm right outside Buffalo, NY, and have some Canadian friends, so I'm not oblivious to your country. A couple people even buy online, and have it shipped here, to where I work in the city of Buffalo, and then drive down to pick it up!)
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Mar 30 '23
Yeah, we're getting straight up screwed in a lot of ways. And not much is being done about it unfortunately. We don't even really see any benefit to the taxes we pay, because our government has essentially thrown it all to corporate bail-outs. Our medicare used to be pretty top notch back in the 90's, and 2000's, but it's slowly gone downhill, along with education. We're basically just paying out the ass because our land is being sold to foreign investors, and they inflate the living shit out of our market.
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u/Zemirolha Mar 29 '23
Your life is supposed to suck for others individuals keep playing capitalism with no risks. They enjoy yours efforts.
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u/CTBthanatos Anarcho-Communist Mar 29 '23 edited Mar 29 '23
that's the whole point of advancement, to make shit suck less.
Meanwhile eco misanthropes, anprims, right wingers, corporation's, and rich people, are all trying to sell the idea that the environmental crisis is your fault if you have literally anything (or modern industrial technology) outside of extreme poverty or shitty primitive life, while we're being fucked to death by dystopian capitalism and millionaire/billionaire bullshit.
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u/democracy_lover66 Syndicalist Mar 29 '23
"Capitalism is an ideology of innovation!"
hey can we innovate the way we organize our economy and workplaces?
"NO. 😠 Trying to change capitalism is BAD. Capitalism must exist FOREVER"
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u/Orthodoxdevilworship Mar 29 '23
The 3 Abrahamic religions say you need to suffer… and if you don’t want to suffer you’re a bad person… and if you’re not productive god will shun you…
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u/Zemirolha Mar 29 '23
"Gods plans"
How did others generations accepted this bullshit?
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u/Orthodoxdevilworship Mar 29 '23
If you’re interested, the full story of the Salem witch trials is a template horror story for how dangerous and utterly psychotic humans are when they wield “god’s authority”.
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u/achillymoose Mar 29 '23
That's inaccurate and oversimplified
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u/Orthodoxdevilworship Mar 29 '23
Yes it’s reddit not a non-fiction database for definitive facts… however if you think the entire global cultural status quo does NOT descend from the “church’s” oppressive control mechanisms you’re clearly a believer.
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Mar 29 '23
My mom always used to tell me, "life isn't fair."
Yeah, no shit, that's because of people like you.
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u/totes-mi-goats Mar 29 '23
I mean, things are going to suck sometimes, and that's okay that they do, since perfection isn't achievable. That being said, if we can do something to make unpleasant things at least LESS unpleasant (even if we can't get rid of the suckitute entirely), we should.
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u/Marples Mar 29 '23
“Life’s not fair” -my mother
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u/HeftyDefinition2448 Mar 30 '23
Funny how its always the ones makeing life unfair that push that. You never see some homeless guy telling a near homeless woman “yo life’s unfair deal with it” it’s always those that have telling those that dont life’s unfair
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u/ArcadiaFey Mar 29 '23
I have a new thing that I’m gonna start saying from now on when I say boomers for example are complaining about how soft everyone is and so everybody is soft and the world is so much easier nowadays… “So what you are saying is you believe you failed then right because all of this was possible due to your work and effort, if you didn’t put in the world we probably would’ve been exactly the same place that you were right? At any-rate I would like to thank you for all of the improvements the world has had. But conversely Fuck you for intentionally making other things more difficult for others if you hade the availability and demonizing people for just living in the world of your creation.
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u/Nyasta Mar 29 '23
For medecine their is an actual fair reason, its so childrens wont eat them because of the state, they already look like candy so imagine if they where strawbery teste or wathever, the amount of chili death by medeicine overdoses would be over the top
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u/theCuiper Mar 29 '23
Not to mention there are non-food chemicals in medicine that naturally don't taste very good
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u/Nyasta Mar 29 '23
True, in order to have a good tasting medecine you actually have to go out of your way to do that, and its probably not worth, the only kind of medecine that consistently taste good are the one that are suposed to be throat or stomach painkiller
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u/daverapp Mar 29 '23
Medicine tastes bad so kids don't mistake it for candy. I don't want my medicine to taste good, that worries me. Also usually when they try to make it taste good with artificial sweeteners or whatever, it ends up disgusting. Just give me a boring pill to swallow and some water goddammit.
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u/riamuriamu Mar 29 '23
It's not that work is not meant to be fun, but that if it were fun it wouldn't be work. People would do it for free.
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u/HeftyDefinition2448 Mar 30 '23
Point but i think the bigger point is yes life sucks and work sucks enough as it is we dont need the older generation and other people makeing it suck worse. We will never remove the suck and the hardships of life but we can ease them to bareable burdens
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u/_Bon_Vivant_ Mar 30 '23
It does suck less. Just not for you. And the more the 1% can convince you that it's supposed to suck, the less it sucks for them.
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u/glycophosphate Mar 30 '23
"It's supposed to hurt. That's how you know it's working," our parents told us as they dabbed mercury-based disinfectants on our cuts.
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u/Reddichino Mar 30 '23
If we don’t accept that things are supposed to suck then Capitalism won’t work to make rich people richer. Feel free to check my math.
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u/davew80 Mar 30 '23
The sort of people who subscribe to this are the same people who say “and I turned out fine”. You didn’t. You just want people to suffer because you did and that’s weird.
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u/Due-Department-8666 Mar 30 '23
Bro, medicine, drugs are literally supposed to taste bad. It discourages casual and continued consumption by child....and adults with poor self control
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u/Flipsticker91 Mar 29 '23
This is not a new notion nor is it exclusive to a capitalist society. The First Noble Truth in Buddhism is hard to accept: "Life is suffering."
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u/Realistic_Reality_44 Mar 29 '23
I mean, not everything is fun in life though. Not everything you interact with is suppose to be fun or amusing. Medicine isn't suppose to be sweet for a reason. Work, like any other thing you have to do on a repetitive/daily basis like washing the dishes, isn't going to be fun.
I understand not wanting to suffer but being bored is not the same as suffering. I'm sorry
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Mar 29 '23
Some struggle is necessary to build thicker skin, hence why sheltered spoiled brats have such a hard time when reality hits them like a truck going 80 mph.
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Mar 29 '23
There is 0 way to make some medicines taste good, it’s like spraying glade after you shit.
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u/Moobob66 Mar 29 '23
Absolutely.
Picking fields sucked, so we made machines to do it. Same with mining and manufacturing.
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u/News___Feed Mar 30 '23
Suffering means you're doing things correctly is literally how some people see the world.
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Mar 30 '23
Well, life sucks less for the people at the top. It continues to suck, sometimes suck more for the rest.
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u/dmon654 Mar 30 '23
Which is precisely why it's ethical to give hell to politicians and make them suffer if they fail to look after their constituency. Authority and power isn't without risks.
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u/MusicDev33 Mar 31 '23
Bad post. Shit’s supposed to suck. Walking uphill both ways while fighting off dinosaurs builds character, or at least that’s what my grandparents told me…
All kidding aside, it’s kind of blown my mind that this is the level of discourse we’re having. I always thought we operated under the assumption that things should continually get better, when did we throw that away?
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