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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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I'm willing to bet we'll reach 30% unemployment in five years. If not sooner. The question becomes - what do we do about it?

30 hour work week like Keynes intended.

30 hours relative to 40 work hours today. But that's 3 people still working 40 and one HR drone or professional emailer working 0 hours.

30% seems entirely too high

Doing what exactly? What possible value does your typical laptop class member have in an AGI world?

Diversity and Equity consultant, Human Resources officer, Climate Change Impact consultant, the list could go on...

I don't know why HR always gets lumped into the list of useless corporate jobs. As someone who owns a one-man law firm, if I were to hire an assistant the first thing they would need to do is essentially act as their own HR department because I wouldn't know where to start when it comes to things like payroll, benefits, onboarding, etc. Now imagine instead of one person it's 500 people and the company needs a consistent policy and procedure when it comes to something like taking FMLA time and it's understandable that you'd need an entire team of people just to handle the constant barrage of questions and requests. This isn't something that you can just hand over to middle management or they'll spend too much time doing shit like that as opposed to what you ostensibly hired them for.

Because if HR were merely doing things like that no one would care. Instead, often they try to start expanded their reach into the actual business.

Often leaving their actual mission behind or understaffed.

This is a great answer, the problem is competition, incentives, and Moloch. If we want this to be a reality we need to immediately start lobbying and building a consensus for a shorter workweek. Something I don’t see happening unfortunately.

It’s a shame most socialist and communist groups have been totally captured by spewing and debating bullshit all day instead of discussing and planning for realistic outcomes like a 30 day workweek in light of AGI. Hopefully they’ll get their collective act together.

30 day work week? That seems rough ;)

Oh yeah, it's brutal. All the 100 hour days....