this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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[–] Shellofbiomatter@lemmus.org 5 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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 24 points 1 month ago (7 children)

Which jobs? Most of the time there are people enjoying something you wouldn't expect

[–] Shellofbiomatter@lemmus.org 12 points 1 month ago (8 children)

Some yeah, but undoubtedly not enough to keep it working. For example i doubt that many people enjoy working at garbage disposable or basically any waste disposal. Of course these jobs should be fully operated by machines. Or any assistant jobs in manufacturing or jobs that operate in shifts.

[–] waddle_dee@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago (10 children)

Uncle worked down at city dump. He loved it. He was kind of a garbologist in a way. He was fascinated by all the things folks threw away. Retired there too. Got a job right out of high school and worked until he was 62 and retired. Dude has so many "trash" sculptures. That is to say, sculptures made out of trash. I think you'd be surprised the jobs folks enjoy doing.

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[–] curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

For example i doubt that many people enjoy working at garbage disposable or basically any waste disposal

Ehhh I bet you'd be wrong. Only anecdotal obviously, but at practice and games for the kids, a lot of dads just chat when there isnt much going on. A couple of them work for the local garbage company. One of them commented that he doesnt know how I stay inside and work all day, he really enjoys being outside with the trucks in the morning, then enjoying the afternoon outside with the kids. Another one is a mechanic for them, he always thought the trucks were cool, and he still enjoys working on them (though he will 100% tell you, in great detail, which manufacturers suck for various parts). Haven't talked much with the last one about work, I think he is the only one just straight up doing it for money though.

And who knows, maybe the guy who likes being outside says that to be positive about his choices in life, but I see him at the park with the kids a lot, I've run into him heading out to the trails on his mountain bike, etc, so I believe him that he's perfectly happy doing it.

Automation for unwanted tasks is great though, I agree, and where automation should be focused.

[–] blarghly@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

One of them commented that he doesnt know how I stay inside and work all day, he really enjoys being outside with the trucks in the morning, then enjoying the afternoon outside with the kids.

He could be taking the local kids out for hikes in nature instead - an activity which also gets him outside, provides a benefit to society, and lets him spend time with his kid and their friends. If he didn't get paid, do you think he would prefer picking up garbage, or going on hikes with his kid? And even if he finds picking up trash meaningful now, do you think he started the job for the money, benefits, and schedule, and then learned to appreciate the good he was doing for the community after years of doing the work?

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[–] Kn1ghtDigital@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I met a guy last week who was unusually passionate about water filtration and wanted to make a business globally. People are wonderfully weird.

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[–] svcg@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 month ago

I daresay there's a few people out there who might enjoy going into the sewers to manually remove the fatbergs, but probably not enough.

[–] r00ty@kbin.life 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I was also thinking that. As an example, retail work seems to me to be a kind of hell I don't think I'd want to endure. But I know people that really enjoy it. So it's probably true of any job you might think is only done by those that are forced to.

I think, if AI and robotics replace most jobs. After some years of pain when capitalists enjoy the infinite money glitch they've discovered, there will either be a revolution or a natural coming to understand that things need to work differently.

Now, understand this would only work if the vast majority of work could be done via automation. In this case the vast majority of people would be able to pursue what they enjoy, a bit like the star trek anti-economy. If all remaining required jobs were no longer filled by those that volunteered to do them, there would be some kind of draft (think like jury duty), where people able to do a job have a chance to be called in to do it for a few months then released back to pursue their own interests.

I've always seen capitalism as the carrot on a stick we need, when we need human productivity from the vast majority of people. If that's no longer the case, it's not a suitable solution and all the ideas like universal basic income are just stopgap measures to try to eke a bit more time out of the capitalist system that has already run past the point where we can keep enough people usefully employed to make it work. That's almost certainly the reason we're seeing the huge wealth disparity that increases. As the productivity per person goes up, all the increased value only ever rises to the top.

Bit of a mini rant there, sorry about that.

[–] MnemonicBump@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago

You are 100% correct

[–] Soulphite@reddthat.com 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I can't imagine anyone enjoying being a correctional officer enough to do it for free. Or waste management (sewage).

[–] MnemonicBump@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Why do you assume that we'd need correctional officers in a world without money?

[–] Soulphite@reddthat.com 2 points 1 month ago

Oh I dunno, people are still inclined to uh probably murder and/or rape people for fun, steal things, commit any other unlawful acts society may deem against the law that doesn't involve monetary situation. I understand money is the root of all evil but some people are evil just because.

[–] CaptainPedantic@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Because people murder each other for reasons other than money.

[–] CaptainPedantic@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I build rockets that go on satellites and scientific missions. I enjoy my job; I find it extremely interesting and often quite fulfilling. In the grand scheme of things, I really wouldn't change much. But like my boss said on the first day of the job, "This job is awesome, but it's not worth doing for free." If you told me I could still enjoy the same level of comfort at home that my job affords me, but I wouldn't be paid, I would quit. I'd rather be at home reading, spending time with my family, playing around with my hobbies, etc.

My wife is a nurse. She loves her job, but she wouldn't do it for free either. Her love for the job prevents her from quitting when she's abused by the public for 12 hours, the pay makes her come in.

Some people are motivated by enjoyment alone to do jobs for free, but many are not. Or the thing they love doesn't help society in a meaningful way. Or they just don't want their hobby to turn into a job. I don't think there's a big enough overlap to have a functioning society.

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[–] bearboiblake@pawb.social 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (7 children)

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. We can share the burden.

[–] trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Living in a nice society is all the motivation people need.

You might want to read up on the bystander effect. You do the dishes because no-one else is going to do it. But as soon as there are others who can do the job people will just stand around and let other die before they put in the effort.

[–] bearboiblake@pawb.social 6 points 1 month ago (13 children)

Don't you think there is some way we could structure society to counteract that without creating an underclass of wage slavery?

[–] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's been one of the goals of just about every socio-economic system, but since are not yet at the point where we can completely automate away all undesirable jobs, it all circles back to being shit.

[–] bearboiblake@pawb.social 2 points 1 month ago (6 children)

I believe that there's a way we can fairly share out all the shitty work among everyone, rather than a few at the top who do no work and exploit everyone, and a lot of people at the bottom who do all of the dirty work.

We don't need to automate everything, we just need a fair system to distribute the work evenly. We have the technology. We can do it. The reason we haven't is because those in power benefit too much from the current system.

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[–] Nalivai@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

That's absolutely not what bystander effect is, not even close. It has also nothing to do with the issue at hand. Bystander effect caused not by not willing to put an effort, it's incredibly complicated, layered, and not exactly explained, but probably the only thing we know about it for sure is that it's not because people are lazy

[–] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Sure is a good thing doing this dishes is the most complicated and least-pleasant thing people can do...

Who's gonna volunteer to go through years of training specializing in commercial diving in wastewater to treatment plants for free?

[–] bearboiblake@pawb.social 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Someone who wants to live a life of luxury and comfort in a world with wastewater treatment plants, knowing that everyone else is also pitching in and doing their part.

Someone who wants to live in a world without billionaire pedophiles in power doing nothing but hoarding all of the wealth.

Someone who cares about the wellbeing of their community and is motivated by that, rather than by selfish greed.

In other words, anyone. Everyone.

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is idealistic to the point of parody.

[–] bearboiblake@pawb.social 4 points 1 month ago

These are all real things. A better world is possible. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but remember that incredible changes that would have seemed impossible have happened before and will happen again.

If you told a pioneer in the Virginia company back in 1607 that black women would be given rights and the abililty to vote to elect their leaders, they'd probably burn you as a witch.

[–] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Everyone can't do everything, and some specialized jobs with specialized skills are extremely unpleasant. Are you suggesting that we just hope things get done, or that we force people to do it while giving nothing in return.

One is delusional - the other is just slavery.

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[–] Nalivai@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

"Who's gonna do mindbraking soulcrushing jobs for days without a break?" Nobody, that's not a job that has to be done this way. "But if we stop orphan crushing machine, what will crush all the orphans?"
When you're imagining the worst parts of the worst jobs, remember that the reason those jobs have worst parts is because the main incentive of every job is to have the profit of a job as high as possible, and to exploit the workers. Yeah, some jobs are hard, some are complicated, some are dirty, some are all three. But all that is something people can and regularly enjoy. People don't enjoy when it's degrading, when it's soulcrushing for no reason, when there is obvious injustice. And it has nothing to do with jobs

[–] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Some things require years of specialization and simply can't be done by novices. You don't want volunteer engineers, pharmacists, etc. Some of those specializations are also unpleasant. We need to support people and not require that all humanity be profitable, but we also need to incentivize people to do shitty and/or difficult jobs. That balance is extremely difficult to find, and the most effective solution we've found is paying people for that work. There's an incredible imbalance in our system right now that values non-productive ownership over all else, but the solution to that isn't saying "Fuck it - nobody gets paid and it'll all work itself out."

The easiest solution is to tax the shit out of the uber-wealthy. Right now we have lower classes defined by income and an upper class defined by wealth. If we remove the wealth and make work and productivity more valuable than ownership, it moves us much closer to equity.

[–] FishFace@piefed.social 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It sounds like you have never come across the concept of the tragedy of the commons?

The particular topic of waste disposal is a good one because we have good historical accounts of the transition from a free-for-all to regulated, paid profession. Take the example of Paris, which in the 17th century was infamous for its dirt and stink. Repeated efforts to force people to keep their own streets clean failed, and ultimately residents complained that if the King wanted the streets to be clean, he had better pay for someone to come and clean them. Eventually city officials managed to force (through threat of punishment) residents to sweep waste and mud into the middle of the streets, and pay people to come through and collect and remove it.

In 15th century Britain, nightmen removed waste from cess-pits and charged two shillings a ton. If there were enough people who just loved shoveling shit so much to do this without money changing hands, why weren't they out doing that?

[–] bearboiblake@pawb.social 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (7 children)

I'm actually very familiar with the idea of the tragedy of the commons.

Rather than re-cover well tread ground, I hope that you don't mind if I quote from a relevant section of an Anarchist FAQ, and I encourage you to check the link I shared, as it goes into far more detail:

In reality, the "tragedy of the commons" comes about only after wealth and private property, backed by the state, starts to eat into and destroy communal life. This is well indicated by the fact that commons existed for thousands of years and only disappeared after the rise of capitalism -- and the powerful central state it requires -- had eroded communal values and traditions. Without the influence of wealth concentrations and the state, people get together and come to agreements over how to use communal resources and have been doing so for millennia. That was how the commons were successfully managed before the wealthy sought to increase their holdings and deny the poor access to land in order to make them fully dependent on the power and whims of the owning class.

[...]

In fact, communal ownership produces a strong incentive to protect such resources for people are aware that their offspring will need them and so be inclined to look after them. By having more resources available, they would be able to resist the pressures of short-termism and so resist maximising current production without regard for the future. Capitalist owners have the opposite incentive... unless they maximise short-term profits then they will not be around in the long-term (so if wood means more profits than centuries-old forests then the trees will be chopped down). By combining common ownership with decentralised and federated communal self-management, anarchism will be more than able to manage resources effectively, avoiding the pitfalls of both privatisation and nationalisation.

If you want a modern, real-world example of this which you may have actually experienced yourself, look no further than this medium we are using to communicate. The Internet is a great example. The Internet was a fantastic common space lovingly maintained and curated by individuals, with services and content provided freely. Corporations encircled it, and turned it into the torment nexus we have today. It wasn't because of us, collectively, that spoiled the commons of the Internet - it was capitalism itself.

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[–] r00ty@kbin.life 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm not saying you're wrong. But you realise how that reads right? It sounds like you're saying we should keep a boot on the neck of "the little people" so the rest of us can have a good life.

[–] Shellofbiomatter@lemmus.org 5 points 1 month ago

Fair point, though i did try to use positive encouragement model to incentice people to work in not so enjoyable jobs. Even if not permanently, maybe in rotation.

[–] balderdash9@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 month ago

Indigenous peoples figured this shit out before centralized governments and computers, I'm sure we can think of something.