Trizek

"Destroying an Earth-threatening asteroid..." But what asteroid ? That's all the point, it's ridiculous to care as much about a non-existing asteroid in the near feature than the plenty of dramatic problems that are causing damages for centuries.

"Someone has to do the work", "confiscating the fruits of the productive to give to the idle punishes the former and rewards the latter". That's absolutely not what liberating work is about, and what you describe is a pretty narrow view of economics that we're taught since childhood. Investigating a bit economy shows it get way more complicated than that, just defining "productive value" is a very deep subject. I don't believe you and I are able to assess if an economic system is sustainable or not (reality shown even the best economists can't), whereas scientist are pretty accurate about the low probability of an asteroid destroying earth in 2016.

Sure you can definitely live with lower standard (nice story of yours by the way, remember us how recent progress revolutionized our lives). But I mean liberating as much as we can people from the necessity of working, and improving their quality of life in general, is a more realistic fight for humanity than destroying an asteroid.

"people that claim working nine hours in a day instead of eight gives no (or negative) additional benefit are either being disingenuous or just have terrible work habits" It depends on so many factors (self interest in the job, capacity, health, age, repetitiveness, nature of the job, stress involved, etc...) that it can be true or false in different cases.

“Hey you, working three jobs to feed your family! Half of the time you are working is actually of negative value so you don’t deserve to be paid for it!” Negative value might be abusive but those people are for sure less productive in their second job compared to if they wouldn't have to do the first one. But the net production is for sure higher for 2 jobs than 1.

"does that mean the rest of the day that you spend with your family, reading, exercising at the gym ... you would be spending your time on, are all done poorly?" Assuming every activity is consuming the same resource is a very speculative statement. Being exhausted solving a math problem doesn't necessary means you're exhausted to run.

"When you hit a wall on one task, you could say “that’s it, I’m done for the day” and head home, or you could switch over to something else that has a different rhythm" That's assuming every job is made of very diverses tasks. As a core of modern economy, division of labour actually lead to the opposite in many cases. And that's sort of true for many jobs in game industry where your day job can turn very repetitive and all the tasks, no matter how much, looks the very same.

"Given two equally talented people, the one that pursues a goal obsessively, for well over 40 hours a week is going to achieve more" You would need a study to back it up, I would be very curious of the result of these two people over a period of 40-50 years of career at 80 hours per week for one and 40 for the other.

But the big problem of today's society isn't an asteroid threatening to blow us all, it's people being forced to work more and more to make a living.