Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being an insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
28d ago
What I'm surprised by is why nobody has so far mentioned what, to me, seems the obvious compromise - we just shorten the work week! As our forefathers did forcing a 5 day, 8 hour work week, why don't we continue there? Go down to a 4 day work week, and/or shorten standard working hours to 6 per day?
What is this actually supposed to do? If you want to work 4 days a week, 6 hours a day, you already can.
Well, the real problem is that there isn't a finite amount of work to be done. The AI taking over a lot of human work because they can do the work of a bajillion people doesn't mean there's no longer work for humans to do.
Dean
Flairless
28d ago
If so, it would be a poorer point. Collaborators during an insurgency aren't hired to keep a building from catching on fire- the building already being on fire, hence why you need collaborators to operate the buildings while your counterinsurgency forces try to stamp out the fires the arsonists are regularly starting.
It may be very disappointing that the hired help did not nobly perish in the flames the employer gave up fighting, but a man does not have himself killed for a half pence a day or a petty distinction.
Dean
Flairless
29d ago
If their plan is to be on an evacuation flight out, why not staff the army with soldiers who only exist on paper, and rob the treasury blind?
...what occupation services do you think soldiers who only exist on paper would have provided that reduced the chance of the evacuation before it became necessary? And what do you think the treasury's prospects are if you had to pay actual market rates for collaborators to occupation forces who expose themselves and their families to retaliation?
The prospect of immigration preference for themselves or their families is the non-fiscal carrot to incentivize cooperation. It's fine if you don't think this demonstrates qualities that would make them 'uniquely' valuable citizens, but your zinger is kind directly ignoring the sort of direct contributions that they are providing, i.e. what services collaborators provide that a paper army doesn't, and how the prospect of compensation in some forms (migration) compensates/reduces the requirements of compensation in other forms (treasury).
You might as well ask 'if the plan is to get out of a collapsing burning building, why not replace firefighters with sinecures?' The answer is rather simple: because while there is a limit to what you can expect hires to do, the jobs they are hired to do is what reduces the risk of the sort of disaster that the hires would not stick around to die in.
Dean
Flairless
29d ago
If the incentives seem misaligned, that implicitly requires a perspective and understanding of what aligned incentives are. How much do you want to bet you can provide a set that others here couldn't trivially poke holes through?
You say that giving them a prospect of an escape route likely weakened their resolve. Why should their resolve to support the occupiers be any firmer if you, the occupier, make a policy that there is no escape? It should be rather obvious why that is creating an even greater incentive to not collaborate in the first place, which is what you the occupier need, and why this is a major incentive to side with the resistance whose mantra for decades was 'when the foreigners leave, we will still be here.'
Which, historically, was the winning strategy. Which is why the Afghan clans regularly played both sides, with family members on both sides of the conflict, so that if/when the GIROA failed they had family on the Taliban side who was willing to cover for them if they capitulated. It was the people who had undertaken acts of significant support of GIROA, often at foreign behest, whose families couldn't cover for them.
Yes, people are unlikely to fight to the death for you if they have an escape route. They are also unlikely to fight to the death for you if they do not have an escape route. This is because they are more likely to not fight for you in the first place, and even if they do are more likely to defect earlier on.
If your incentive strategy is moving the defection point even further up in the timeline, it should be visible why this is an even worse alignment of incentives.
Working in the white collar world is a choice, primarily done for money. If you don't care about the money, you can already go to a different sector with less rigid hours. If you do care about the money, it's not clear how a four day work week will make as much as a five day work week absent fiat government transfers, such as UBI.
This is an evergreen argument that has always been made regardless of the tech level. Why was it not compelling enough before, aside from the need/desire for more money?
Note the lack of limiting factor here. What [necessity] makes four days a week of drudgery any more reasonable than seven days, beyond current attitudes? Why should it not be viewed as soul-crushing and the [necessity] of work be paired back to 3 days of work a week?
And rightly so. People terribly interested in other how other people organize their spiritual / emotional / community affairs tend to be petty tyrants on how others should value such things if they themselves are not preoccupied.
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