Indeed. The implication that everyone could be 'farting around' and still have an internet-using, nuclear-war-avoiding, space-traveling society is inaccurate. That's not to say everyone always has to do difficult work. But sometimes some people do and they should be celebrated for doing that hard part.

Only some people can fart around all of the time, but everyone can fart around some of the time.

> Indeed. The implication that everyone could be 'farting around' and still have an internet-using, nuclear-war-avoiding, space-traveling society is inaccurate.

Quite the opposite I think. Our machines can 'already' work well enough to provide free food, shelter and education to every person on earth. Even still, we produce food for 10B people yet hunger is a problem.

If everyone was given free food, shelter and education, then everyone would fart around and get bored until some of them hackers gather to build a space-ship and others join in. Utopia? probably. But the real problem is broken distribution model which real means broken governance model.

I would not say it's clear that we can provide 'food' 'education' and 'shelter' for everyone. For starters, those are categories and say nothing about the quality of food, education, or shelter.

Secondly, are you sure all work can be done by currently-existing machines and people willing to do that work for fun? For example, maintenance on a broken sewage system. I think there's going to be some jobs that machines can't yet do, no one wants to do, and yet still need to be done.

But, what about Dicking Around?

:P

Did I miss some huge event when going out to buy an enveloped is being in a privileged position?

Structuring your whole afternoon as make-work so you can continue to mail pages to a typist is, yes, privileged.

This fact works counter to the studied "just a dude out observing the fullness of humanity" vibe of the paragraph.

So for me the piece is very unstable, tilting back and forth between these two poles. Perhaps that's why I remembered it across 20 years.

Having copious free time has always been a privileged position. The extent to which you can waste time is a direct expressino of privilege.

>> One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit -- but rarely articulated -- assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night.

>> These images are backward projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid-nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...

I don't see any discussion vis-a-vis the whole decades that we know spend not working, ie., childhood and retirement. My grandmothers haven't worked a single day (barring small chores) for the last 20+ years. I only started really working 23 years after I was born. I doubt any of this was true during the middle ages.

"expressino"

Its the fundamental sub-particle of privledge; might not have any mass but it still smells and looks like overpriced coffee and arrogance.

If a neutrino is a little neutral one, I'd like to think that an expressino is a tiny expression, in this case of privilege.

Congrats, you caught a transposed character in an HN comment. Sometimes, I don't care enough about these comments to exhaustivley spell check them. I guess I don't have the time. Maybe you should chekc your privilege.

I wouldn't worry too much about chekcing anything. You've possibly started a meme with "expressino". I shall be using it.

Oh, and it's also remarkably close to this [1], which I didn't know about until now, and now want to try. Thanks for your accidental character transposition. It has led to good things.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espressino

LOL, not at all. It's a great thing. It's a new word as far as I'm concerned and I'm dedicating my life to making it A Thing (TM).

Or welfare. Don't forget about welfare.