this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
253 points (93.8% liked)

Microblog Memes

11493 readers
191 users here now

A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.

RULES:

  1. Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
  2. Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
  3. You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
  4. Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
  5. Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
  6. Absolutely no NSFL content.
  7. Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
  8. No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.

RELATED COMMUNITIES:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I couldn't find an uncensored version

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

people seem to be constantly forgetting the very real threat of a mass unemployment crisis induced through automation. WW2 was essentially caused because of people's dissatisfaction, there were fewer jobs than people, and people couldn't find work, and that caused havoc. now i see people here dumbly arguing "nuh uh, we need more workers to sustain the system" to which i say, have you ever considered that the number of jobs over time is, in fact, not constant?

[โ€“] FishFace@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago

You haven't responded to anything I said about the balance of production, or what I said about decreasing living standards. At the risk of throwing more words into the void:

High unemployment is very bad. But that doesn't mean an economy is fine as long as everyone is employed: if there are important jobs that can't be done, that is also bad. And because workers are not all the same, that means it's possible to have high unemployment in one sector (e.g. all software developers get laid off because of AI) at the same time as having not enough people in another (e.g. we don't have enough nurses in our hospitals).

You can hope that this will balance out and that you can retrain your software developers to go and be nurses. What you do at your peril is assume:

  • that the numbers actually work and you don't still end up with a deficit one way or the other
  • that this can be done in time to avoid a catastrophe
  • that this doesn't cause suffering to the software developers who actually don't want to be nurses and are wholly unsuited to it

The last point means that you in fact cannot just shift your workers around like this, and instead need a long period of shuffling around where some software developers are unemployed and killing themselves due to depression, others are training to be nurses, others are training to do something completely different, accepting lower pay because they're going into a sector without high vacancies, causing some people in that sector to seek better opportunities elsewhere, and so on, until - hopefully - the sectors are balanced.

have you ever considered that the number of jobs over time is, in fact, not constant?

If you can do the same work with fewer people, that may lead, over many decades, to fewer hours worked per person, effectively increasing the dependency ratio (interpreted not, as it normally is, as "workers to non-workers" but "hours worked to hours not worked"). It did after the industrial revolution - it took a long time, and many lives ruined by poverty.

Issues with pensions are already happening.