His american colleagues sometimes poke fun at my cousins branch for only working 35 hours a week, taking long vacations and having lots of state mandated holidays throughout the year. When they hire someone new they sometimes comment on how lazy the german colleagues are…

Then they point them towards the numbers and the fact that the german branch is constantly setting the productivity records. They’ve been outperforming the americans by more than 10% for years.

I’ll read this next weekend 🙃

Sounds sexy

I know right? Who cares about basketball?

Absolutely nailed it.

Some people would want others’ lives to be embedded into one hierarchy, and that only.

So that everything of importance were decided by people on top of those hierarchies.

Ex-USSR countries show full well why this shouldn’t be allowed. It, of course, was done there accompanied by a different ideology, but.

Start billing your job for providing support services to their employees

Self? Kinda. To others? Don’t get caught.

It’s not about productivity. If that were the real goal then the entire system would be structured radically differently, given what we know now through actual research. The real goal is ensuring that workers do not have ample time or energy to collectively organize. Make sure they don’t have the time to even think about anything else, and you ensure they damn sure don’t have the time to rebel. The other goal is ensuring there are a significant number of unemployed people in terrible enough conditions to make them desperate, but not so terrible that they are incapable of working. That way if s few stray workers get a bug up their ass about organizing and striking, there’s a reserve army of labor in the homeless and unemployed communities that can step in and scab.

And sitting on the couch with their dicks in their hands is “hard work” for them, but it’s just jerking off for the rest of us. These assholes consider themselves working when they sleep, because them being rested is “good for the business”.

Hierarchies are bad for honest people. Honest people take work and meritocracy seriously and try to follow them.

But hierarchies are never about meritocracy. Hierarchies are always built by people who have connived their way up. Those who have worked honestly don’t build hierarchies, at worst they are pressed to do that by outside pressure.

In any case, the market economy I’m in favor of doesn’t include big businesses. As in “at all”. Big cooperatives at the maximum.

For the obvious reason that the bigger a business is, the less it’s about market and the more it’s about power and hierarchy. Big businesses are the way human nature with jungle law and such fights markets and rules. By making the space untouched by market mechanisms and rules into something continuous inside one subject - the company.

It’s the same as siloed services in the Internet. A thousand and one web forums are free, despite open despotism of webmasters in each and every one of those. A three or two big social platforms are not, despite their owners trying their best for their policies to appear impartial and professional and depersonalized.

And I guess that’s where I can agree that the “market economy status quo” has been broken by such evolution showing itself both IRL and in the Web. You can’t make something like 1999 Web and expect it to not turn into 2024 Web. And you also can’t make a functional market economy old-style and expect it to not degrade into what we have.

I like solutions touching upon the root of the problem, so - in my opinion personal responsibility (one can even say sovereignty, pun intended) is key. You don’t lose responsibility for your decision just because you’ve paid someone else or have been paid by someone else. You are both responsible, since it’s a common endeavor. The responsibility is not divided, it’s copied. Also personal responsibility excludes companies as subjects of the law. Only a person can have responsibility, property, make decisions.

That and fully protected free speech and right to self-defense and transparency of the state. I’m not talking about forcing others to give you platform, I’m talking about shadow bans, about state secrets not being something you’d care about if you hadn’t signed anything, about state official’s decisions being only contestable in court, something like that. Anything forcing you to keep your head down.

OK, done dreaming.

Fun fact: Where I live (Devon, England), every common person once had to spent two days a month working for their local Lord for free, maintaining the roads. That’s as well as paying rent to them, of course. Plus, they had to provide tithes to the Church as well as grow or raise enough food for their family. And if they had any strong sons that might be particularly useful in working their meagre strip of land, they’d be conscripted for the Crown’s armies.

They worked 7 days a week. Incredibly hard and long days by our standards. The only half day they got off was to go to church, which wasn’t really optional. (You weren’t forced, but the whole community turned against you if you didn’t)