All of these people have motives… Their motives simply aren’t money
it's a matter of motivation
Submitted 1 month ago by bearboiblake@pawb.social to [deleted]
https://quokk.au/static/media/users/fp/iZ/fpiZzYGU8x7nmEi.jpeg
Comments
homes@piefed.world 1 month ago
abysmalpoptart@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I do believe this was the message that was intended to be conveyed by the post itself
homes@piefed.world 1 month ago
Some people really need it spelled out, though.
tkk13909@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Hence: without profit motive.
blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Are people not profiting off their feel good hormones just like they would getting a shiny new doohickey?
Jankatarch@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I would gladly fix and assemble home appliances as hobby if I didn’t have to worry about money.
musubibreakfast@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Hell, I’d teach for free if I didn’t have to worry about rent.
flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Yeah, some of that would be amazing!
I’d also happily shovel shit at the local zoo or assist nurses with prepping beds, etc (probably just ending up getting in their way, however!)
gmtom@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I would do basically any job that needed doing if my needs were provided for no matter what.
erdem@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
I would like to do that too but it is so bad in my country.I have to work hard for the university and the job that i don’t even want when you graduate from the university. its soo hard to live properly in a third world country.
jeniferariza@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Turns out passion, curiosity, and purpose are way stronger motivators than profit ever was 😅
percent@infosec.pub 1 month ago
It depends on the person. I’ve known people who are much more motivated by money. Some of them ended up in prison, some are doing quite well, and some are still trying.
Honestly, I sometimes wish I were more money-motivated. I’m very lucky that my passion happens to earn a good salary (for now), but I gave up my business for it.
thermal_shock@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Everything depends on the person. Hitler could have been a great artist if he wasn’t a genocidal maniac. 🤣
jj4211@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Problem being the jobs that don’t inspire passion, curiosity, and purpose, but we still need them to get done.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 month ago
They lock essential things (e.g. food, water, shelter, medical services, etc.) behind a paywall because they know it is not true that people do not always—or even usually—want money.
But people do need essentials to live, and if they’re the only ones who can give you money to get those things, then they can order you to do what they want instead.
bearboiblake@pawb.social 1 month ago
Imagine an Internet where services are provided to make our lives better, not just to turn a profit.
Imagine a world where automation didn’t take away our livelihood, but helped us to spend more time doing what we wanted to do.
Imagine a world where food, water, shelter, education and healthcare was available to everyone, not paywalled.
This world is possible. We can get there. If heaven exists, we must create it here on earth.
Organize, protest and elect. Emphasis on organize and protest.
- Get as involved as you can with activist efforts locally.
- Organize, network, focus on building solidarity. Join or form a union. Join the IWW.
- Vote at primaries and elections for the best candidate, even if you doubt they can win.
- Don’t punch down.
- Don’t punch left.
- Educate yourself, politically.
- Push for voting reform and for anything that breaks the two-party system
G3NI5Y5@europe.pub 1 month ago
The fantasy-story of profit motive: Without capitalism, people are just lazy, unproductive and die eventually. But with capitalism, there is great innovation, motivation and excitement.
Cool story, but absolute nonsense.oppy1984@lemdro.id 1 month ago
Yep, years ago there was a massive jackpot for mega millions or Powerball, I can’t remember. I was hanging out with a buddy and we got to talking about what we’d do if we won. Of course we joked about all the stupid things we’d do, but after that night the thought stayed with me and I’ve put a lot of thought into it.
After years of thinking about it I realized that when I take vacation from work, I stay home but I work on projects I care about. Homelab, open source, animal welfare, ect. I have severe ADHD and can’t stand just laying around, so I know I wouldn’t stop working, I’d just stop working to live.
I even spent one weekend researching and developing a plan for if I actually won and put it all in a folder so I can just open the doc and see my plan, then take that an the spreadsheets to the lawyers, asset manager, and CPA, and protect myself and the money. Definitely not a obsessive ADHD weekend…lol.
As it stands right now I’d take $5 million and live off dividends, each parent gets $5 million, and anything left over goes into a nonprofit foundation I would set up to fund all the open source and nonprofit projects I care about.
When people ask me why I waste money on the lottery, I just say I don’t want the money to be rich, I want the money to be free. Also I only spend $12 a week to play, the only time I buy extra tickets is if I win a few bucks on a ticket, then I just cash it in for some extra draws.
Ogy@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yeah it is one of my biggest pet peeves when people say capitalism drives innovation. Like, it does help spread technology, and it can cause tech to be refined quickly (e.g. the smartphone), but it is absolutely not what has driven the vast majority of innovation. People just want to solve problems and fiddle with things they find interesting, not make bucketloads of money.
zbyte64@awful.systems 1 month ago
It’s one of those “every accusation is a confession”. People are thinking about themselves when talking about others.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 month ago
Volunteer firefighters do actually still get paid.
Source: Was volunteer firefighter.
Chainweasel@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Same, 6 years from 2005-2011, $7.50 an hour for a call was great money in 2005. I think we were up to $10 by the time I quit
thermal_shock@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I was thinking that was shit money, but I was making $2.13 as a waiter in 1999-2000, so that’s about right. I made $5.15 when min wage was finally raised to $7.25, where it’s been for almost 20 years.
bearboiblake@pawb.social 1 month ago
Out of curiosity, would you still have done it if it wasn’t paid?
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 month ago
Hell yeah! I didn’t even know I would be getting paid until I went down to the station to ask how I sign up.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Most firefighters in the U.S. are volunteer, and make no money at all. Being paid per call is not the norm.
kungen@feddit.nu 1 month ago
Isn’t it just a small stipend? Nothing you could live on, even if houses were burning down 40 hours a week.
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
I’m convinced people who believe that are some of the biggest shit stains on the planet.
bearboiblake@pawb.social 1 month ago
Personally, I was one of the people who used to believe that, because I was born and raised in a society that taught me that since birth. I can totally understand that there are people out there who still believe it, and I do everything I can to try and bring them up to speed. It’s hard to unlearn everything you have learned, especially if you’ve already made big, irreversible decisions in your life based around the lies you believed. I think the key is to try and find common ground, and to empathize with people, even when they’re not acting their best. I believe nearly everyone is redeemable.
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
So did I, but I’m more referring to the Wall Street and CEO as well Billionaire types who wouldn’t do anything if they didn’t get more out of it.
Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Capitalism and so called meritocracy have brainwashed humanity.
Jay101@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Meritocracy is a lie when almost every who wields wealth or power is a white old man. It’s like they have special quota for white men.
buddascrayon@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Maybe the problem in our society is the people who are only motivated by profit.
menas@lemmy.wtf 1 month ago
"Without the fear of poverty, no one would be submissive "
JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Volunteer firefighters are paid pretty damn well while 20 of them stand around a car wreck at 2am.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You think the guys who don’t get paid at all are paid pretty damn well? I don’t follow.
JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Volunteer firefighters are not unpaid, that not what volunteer means in this context. They are not full time, professional firefighters, they have normal jobs and when a call goes out, whoever can make it drops what they’re doing and goes in. But they absolutely get paid, very well, for their time, from the tax payers dollar. Or by directly suing for restitution as with my car accident. $1700 for a gaggle of looky lous
moakley@lemmy.world 1 month ago
My Minecraft survival world is awesome, but I think in this context “productive” is usually referring to, you know, farming and stuff.
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Honestly if people didnt need to take the first job they could under threat of homelessness i truly believe enough people will just end up doing everything we need done out of the sheer need to do something
moakley@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I think UBI would give us a lot more artists.
Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Yeah for sure, it took me a couple decades but i finally got a data job i really just enjoy the worm after starting from the bottom minimum wage and working up a bit in two other careers first lol
CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I think it serves as an illustration that people will do difficult and tedious computer work for reasons other than money it specifically being Minecraft isn’t really the point to me
bearboiblake@pawb.social 1 month ago
For sure, but people have lots of incentives to do farming and stuff even without the profit motive, otherwise human civilization wouldn’t have made it out of the paleolithic era. Humans are actually the most co-operative species on the planet, it’s biologically hard wired into us to work together to improve our living conditions for our communities and to share what we have with others.
blarghly@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This altruistic instinct rapidly tapers beyond one’s immediate community. Sure, we have the instinct to try helping others, even those who are very distant. But without reinforcement of our good behaviors, any given behavior will peter out.
Like, suppose you are making enough money to live comfortably. You then hear about a charity that builds wells to provide clean drinking water to people in impoverished parts of the world, and decide you can spare $5 per month to help them. So you donate $5. However, this charity focuses entirely on doing the actual charitable work, so you have to remember to donate and manually type in your credit card information each month. And they don’t do any PR. No monthly emails with personal stories about the people they helped or anything like that. Instead, they simply have a publicly accessible spreadsheet that has data on wells built and people served. Almost everyone would stop donating to this charity after a month or two, simply because they would forget or procrastinate until they forget, because our brains don’t assign relevance to things which don’t create an emotional impression on us. Compare this with, say, helping your child and their new partner build a home with your own hands. This kind of project provides lots of positive reinforcement - exercise, time outside, time spent with others, seeing progress being made day by day, the appreciation of others, the knowledge that you have helped someone who is important to you.
Hence why most people find most jobs to be unpleasant in one way or another. Not many people want to spend their days pumping a stranger’s septic system. The unpleasant work (aka, “work”) is what is left over after everyone does the pleasant work for free.
Also, some anthropologists theorize that the beginning of labor intensive agriculture and large permanent settlements was only possible via forced labor, coerced by violent, authoritarian leaders. Evidence shows that early agrarian life was significantly worse in just about every way than nomadic hunter-gatherer life, which explains why hunter-gatherer tribes almost universally fought against or fled from agrarian settlements.
nlgranger@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You might like this initiative: www.minecraft.net/en-us/…/uncensored-library
wrinkle2409@lemmy.cafe 1 month ago
I think the more automated the job is, the easier it is for people to get started. So with better farming technology I would expect more people interested on it.
blarghly@lemmy.world 1 month ago
We already have better farming technology. People prefer to grow gardens in their back yard with compost made from their coffee grounds instead. Iirc, John Green calculated that - even excluding the cost of his own labor - one tomato that he grew in his garden cost him $18.
There are certainly a lot of problems with modern agriculture. But food is far cheaper than it has been for pretty much all of human history, when the collection and preparation of food took up the vast majority of most people’s time.
Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I thought there was a ton of farming in Minecraft
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 month ago
Farming Patreon support for your Minecraft streaming gig.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Shitposters:
bearboiblake@pawb.social 1 month ago
Doing what we can to bring the light of anti-capitalism to your feed while still keeping it light and breezy big guy!
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Oh, I‘m less of a big guy and more of a big fan of your work.
melfie@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
The studies about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation suggest otherwise, and that monetary rewards can even have a negative impact on productivity and creativity. Ultimately, we want a society of intrinsically motivated people doing their best, most inspired work, not a society following financial incentives.
Jay101@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Even more powerful examples, despite threat of persecution at the hands of Oligarchs and the state instruments these persist: Sci-hub, Library genesis
Mudman@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Is it fair to compare Linux and Windows in this context? 👾
bearboiblake@pawb.social 1 month ago
I think that’s a great comparison - and we could broaden the analogy a bit, too. Windows is an example of the means of production being privatized, and Linux is more of an example of a more horizontal structure (to a certain extent). We see that the development of Windows follows the incentives of shareholders - towards AI, advertisements, dark patterns, data gathering and so on, whereas the development of Linux and open source software follows the incentives of the users and the developers, towards things that actually add value to the lives of the people who use it.
Ontimp@feddit.org 1 month ago
I think people misunderstand the use of money. Money is just a point system we use to decentralize coordination and resource distribution questions.
Only idiots would claim that it’s the only motivator for humans. But the more complicated and contentious resource distribution questions become, the more important money becomes as a system.
In basically all the examples given here, the resource inputs in question are individuals personal time and expertise. They of course face opportunity cost considerations, but can ultimately decide to sacrifice their own time individually.
Money and the desire to get more of it (in absence or other specific needs) is pretty much necessary to keep any society with more than 50 people or so running.
bearboiblake@pawb.social 1 month ago
Money and the desire to get more of it (in absence or other specific needs) is pretty much necessary to keep any society with more than 50 people or so running.
How did we manage for thousands of years without it?
Don’t you think there are alternative systems we could use for the allocation of scarce resources? Alternatives which do not inevitably cause the rise of fascism, for example?
Ontimp@feddit.org 1 month ago
Well for the majority of time when we did not use money, communities were quite small and/or ressources so scarce that money lost it’s value, as people lose trust that you can actually exchange it for goods later on (e.g. during a famine the incremental value of food in monetary terms is astronomical). Money hence emerged first in situations where value needed to be conveyed over large distances, where punitive mechanisms of governance (i.e. someone more powerful than you puts you in a box or lobs off your hands) become ineffective - it emerged along the first trade routes, and means of control by distant power centers (such as in China).
There are alternative systems for the distribution of scarce resources, but they ultimately require centralized governance bodies - this is where most communist states failed in practice. If something belongs to ‘everyone’, it belongs to the one with the biggest stick, usually the state; If something should be used for the common good, someone qualitatively needs to decide what that is.
I can’t think of any alternative forms of resource distribution that don’t rely on a central decision making party.
The key issue with money, and why it leads to the emergency of fascist ideology imo, is when money pools with a powerful class of people that or filthy rich, somehow ‘own’ entire organisations including the media, and then become politicians as well. Concentration of power is the actual evil here, not private ownership.
So what should we change?
-
- Wealth tax and high inheritance tax ties directly to monetary redistribution mechanisms such as a basic income
- 100% income tax above a certain level of income but lower or no takes in most income
- Taxing of productivity (if elegantly possible)
- No owning of land, just renting it from the state.
- Price-based mechanisms to account for negative externalities such as greenhouse gasses
- Limits to allowed pay disparities in companies
- Company types that disincentive value extraction and financialization
- Limits to stock buybacks
- Limits to the complexity of financial products
- etc.
Long story short, what Social Market Economy was originally intended to do
-
Bassman1805@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I mean, the earliest known currency is almost exactly as old as the earliest known cities. Farmers would deposit a large amount of grain at the local temple (which were effectively the tax collection sites of the time) and were given clay tokens on exchange, which could be used in place of actual goods at tax time.
This system was set up because of the nature of farming: you make a lot of product in a short time, but most of the year you’re just waiting for your crop to grow. These tokens allowed farmers to pay their tax duties up front, and then have physical proof that they’d done so when paying taxes outside of harvest season. But it was only a matter of time before people started trading those tokens amongst each other. “Give me a goat and I’ll give you these tokens so you don’t have to pay tribute next season.”
Before that, villages were pretty much just hand-to mouth communities of just a few families. Surviving, sure, but not in the kind of complex society where one needs to draw equivalence between extremely different forms of labor.
teslasaur@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Capitalism is way more fair than feudalism, as i gather that this is the angle you are asking from. A cursory view of history would say that rules-based capitalism is much more fair than, say, one party communism.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Most creative people don’t profit from their creations. Some do. Most don’t.
n7gifmdn@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
I apologize for my ignorance but what is productive about Minecraft players?
bearboiblake@pawb.social 1 month ago
I think [The Uncensored Library]((www.minecraft.net/en-us/…/uncensored-library) project is pretty cool.
Diurnambule@jlai.lu 1 month ago
They reproduced a library in n a Minecraft world to allow people around the world yo reach Anna archive. They reproduced town, they created a full open work Pokémon inspired mod. They are creative in général.
Bysmuth@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
As depicted in the op, they’re artistic sculptures/scenery that amaze people.
33550336@lemmy.world 1 month ago
in some sense these are cool duties, let me know when someone voluntarily emptied septic tanks of other people
BilSabab@lemmy.world 1 month ago
this picture doesn’t address the fact that a lot of people work to enable subsistence and in this economy it is becoming very common.
Red_October@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Okay, now who’s going to haul garbage and unclog sewers just for the love of the game?
Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
These are all things that people enjoy doing though, and there is a certain amount of glory in doing them.
Do you think your plumber or electrician would be willing to work for free?
stupidcasey@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Nobody would be motivated to do the Grunt work and the demeaning work and the harmful work and the monotonous work and the thankless work, and why should they if they get the same reward for doing the opposite?
Wander@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
This is not everyone. These people are great but rare.
If there was a world full of people like this, life would be different but it isn’t. Most people suck.
Now in a time when there was homogeneous society and there was about 150 people you interacted people could be kept a lot more in check. But today no way.
Just today for example I called some guy scum and threw a plastic bag in his face because he took his dog to the beach and wouldn’t pick up his shit. I highly doubt that guy would do 40 hours of work for someone else if he didn’t have to. I had actually talked to him before that and he seemed positively pleasant.
wpb@lemmy.world 1 month ago
One of these is not like the others
mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
can someone remind me where volunteer firefighters are actually volunteers and not just part-time or on-call employees
paulcdb@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This is how you tell rich people have some serious mental health issue.
Decent people would rather a world where people worked because they enjoy that type of work rather than being forced to do it because they need money to live.
If you removed money, imagine where we’d all be as a society without the toxicity of money, wars and hate! :(
realitaetsverlust@piefed.zip 1 month ago
Probably dead or living in the stone age.
There’s so many jobs that people don’t enjoy but are necessary. Nobody enjoys working in the middle of an australian desert at 40°C in a lithium mine. Nobody enjoys collecting your stinking trash. Nobody enjoys sitting in a store for 8 hours a day, scanning groceries. Nobody enjoys working in a warehouse for 8 hours.
However, these jobs and many more are vital for todays society.
You make it sound like wealth and wars are an invention of capitalism and not something that has existed basically since the dawn of time, even as something you can observe in primates, albeit on a much smaller scale.
Nalivai@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The reasons those jobs are such shit is also money. A lot of people enjoy cleaning, nobody enjoys being overworked. Normal functioning societies don’t leave heaps of stinking trash around, they neatly pack it and the work of a janitor of garbage collector becomes actually enjoyable if you’re a proper type of personality.
Hell, my uncle right now works as a part time street sweeper basically for free. He has his basic needs made by other means, and his “job” pays him enough to get a cup of coffee before the shift and a sandwich after. He just enjoys making the world cleaner, chatting with locals, taking care of stray cats, and having a routine. All of that is possible in a world that doesn’t revolves around squeesing every bit of labour from people so some pedos can buy themselves another island and fill it with sex slaves
MnemonicBump@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Like, half of the jobs you listed would be automated out pretty quick in a world without money, out of the other ones, a few would be rendered obsolete without profit motive (pretty sure we can find something better for batteries than lithium, and why would you need someone scanning groceries if there was no money?). What’s left can be rotated out or done by lottery, and those doing the undesirable labor get to have more luxury items or whatever. It’s not hard to imagine, people have been doing it for centuries.
dejova281@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Believe it or not I’ve actually met someone who enjoys this line of work. He lives in the middle of nowhere in Paraburdoo Australia and loves the heat. So not exactly nobody…
paulcdb@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I take it you asked all 7 (or whatever) billion then?
Who says they’d need to? You talk like someone would need to do that because right now capitalism demands more production!
Again, if we didn’t produce so much garbage, products with layer upon layer of plastic, we’d make glass and clay pots and grow, make and reuse locally making less garbage all the way but then in the 90s you had to collect bin bags off the street, now its all wheelie bins, if my health allowed I would happily go round collecting rubbish.
Also I’ve had issues with drains in the past and when I asked them about the job, they actually enjoyed the challenge. So I think you’re confusing people who do a job because too much demand means people doing jobs for the money rather than less demand would actually mean people wouldn’t even need a set job. Feel like drains on Monday, go for it. Had enough and feel like helping someone tin food on Tuesday, go for it.
Look at Animals, how many animals work 2 jobs just to survive?
Another thing thats only a thing because capitalism demands we keep producing more and more shit. That washing machine that used to last 10 years now breaks after the warranty because some riches want more money and power!
It amazes me how blinded people are to a capitalist free world. Look at the waste now, the plastic pollution and then look carefully at the next package you buy and ask “does this really need ‘this’ much packaging? Do i care if this new spade I bought with all its shiny cardboard and plastic protection, arrived with a scratch? But even if the TV was scratched, does it really matter so long as it worked as intended?
But then I have no kids of my own and every year I feel better not having brought kids into this mess because unless you’re born into money now there is very little to offer kids in the near future right. 😕
PlexSheep@infosec.pub 1 month ago
Capitalism is different from a regular market in that it is not just trying to make a profit in order to have enough money to exchange for useful goods and services.
Capitalism demands that your profit grows and grows and grows. It’s growth for it’s own sake. A capitalistic economy like our world economy needs to grow 3% or so every year or it gets into a recession. 3% doesn’t sound like much, but it’s exponential growth, doubling every 25 years or so. This growth doesn’t come out of thin air, but from extracting from value from other people, our world and so on.
And measuring an economy by GDP is incomplete, because it doesn’t take uncompensated labor, human happiness and wellbeing, and public goods (like a healthy nature) into account. When a factory owner pollutes and dries up the river while employees have no choice but to work 16 hour weeks, GDP goes up.
In nature, things grow until they are mature. That does not mean progress halts. Adults don’t grow anymore, but continue to learn.
My try to explain why money and markets are okay, but growth for it’s own sake (growthism you may call it) is destroying our societies, making us unhappy, and is also killing us with the climate and biodiversity crises.
Shellofbiomatter@lemmus.org 1 month ago
Society would collapse.
While working out of enjoyment instead of necessity is a noble and good goal. There are jobs that no one enjoys. Money can be used as an incentive to motivate people to work on jobs that aren’t that enjoyable, but still necessary.
Micromot@piefed.social 1 month ago
Which jobs? Most of the time there are people enjoying something you wouldn’t expect
bearboiblake@pawb.social 1 month ago
Living in a nice society is all the motivation people need. I hate doing dishes, but I do them because I hate living without clean dishes even more. Everyone understands sometimes we gotta do stuff we don’t like doing for a greater good. Acting like we need a wageslave class to do menial tasks otherwise we’d just let our world collapse is insulting our collective intelligence.
balderdash9@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Indigenous peoples figured this shit out before centralized governments and computers, I’m sure we can think of something.
Whostosay@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I don’t think you understand. I want my boat to be bigger than your boat.
paulcdb@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I mean, thats easy, I don’t have, or care to own a money pit that I only use once a year, i mean boat! 😎
Unless you count 3D printed benchy… and even then if you scaled your benchy up then it’s bigger than mine!