this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
1250 points (93.2% liked)

Political Memes

5054 readers
1813 users here now

Welcome to politcal memes!

These are our rules:

Be civilJokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.

No misinformationDon’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.

Posts should be memesRandom pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.

No bots, spam or self-promotionFollow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] -2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Shit take, the average person only used to have to do 20 hours a week of labour to feed their family

Money didn't make labour "more efficient"

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This only works when you divide the time spent working over the year. As a medival peasant you worked your ass off in spring or whenever you sow your fields, kept it up while it grew, which was somewhat normal working times by todays standard, and toiled for double digit hours in harvesting season again. After that was time to do literally nothing. When you look at seasonal holidays in many european countries, they are mostly at the end of harvesting seasons, when you could easily be blackout drunk for a week because there was nothing else to be done. I personally don't mind regular working hours when the alternative is half a year of 15 hour shifts and half a year of more or less no work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Was it 7 days on of 15 hours? Because if it was only 6 and I had that one day break once a week and eventually got 6 months off later I would definitely want to do that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You can easily have medieval levels of quality of life working like 1 hour a week today. No one, not even kings a few hundred years ago had modern quality of life even with vast amounts of wealth extracted from whole continents of peasants. Modern money and economic systems allow for global trade and innovation that makes things Napolean couldn't dream of into boring every day stuff for you and me.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

Keep defending the need for multiple people to work multiple jobs to sustain a small family

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

And lived to the ripe old age of nineteen🤣

"People had it better before modern society" is one of the dumbest beliefs.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

The reason average life expectancy used to be so low, is because infant mortality was ridiculously high.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

You’re also missing the distribution of those life expectancies. While everyone is crapping on the wealthy, who do you think was able to live to a ripe old age? Who do you think was more likely to die at birth or as a kid, or young adult?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago

Yeah I know, but the overall point still stands. Life was not better back then. That's not a gotcha, it's a technicality.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Are we going to let this perverse society take every improvement we make and make us pay for it? We all work for the common good and we have the right to reap the benefits, not be forced to adapt to a system that exploits us just because someone sometime ago invented penicillin and so that good must be offset by an equal sacrifice?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's... How life works. In literally every society on the planet right now that's how things work. If you want something someone else did you have to give in kind. Medicine, clothing, food. No matter what the system undo t get the fruits of others labor for nothing.

People with your take are always thinking they can exist in a society where everyone else provides and u get to do nothing and relax ...cuz reasons apparently.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I didn't get the same takeaway from their message. I don't think it's that we should do nothing and get everything, rather we should do things and get a reasonable return for having done them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

You don't ever get guaranteed all the resources you need to exist. Saying otherwise is literally in the op post. Pretty clear to me.