Time is on my side. Yes it is

Posted on by theothersullivan 1 Comment
Cafe Workers in Ethiopia

What does a world look like where the valuation of worth is not arbitrarily measured as an equation of: Cultural worth divided by time divided by end product?

In the current system the valuation of cultural worth is entirely arbitrary and unreasonable. Cultural valuations often, but not always, place greater value on time spent in creative and mental pursuits when contrasted to physical or servile pursuits. The time of the person who slings Coffee’s is considered of lesser value than the time of Singer/entertainer at the coffeeshop; the professional baseball player’s time is worth exponentially more than the gym teacher of baseball.

Time spent acquiring ability to extract the end product, sometimes, but not always, adds to the valuation. Paradoxically it often takes less time/effort to achieve an end product as the level of expertise increases.

How much time is how much money varies depending on the task/end product—the price and quality of the Journeyman’s versus the master’s end result could be the same or vastly different—the time to completely is likely far faster for the master. In part, this is why the concept of an hourly wage exists—the journeyman can’t survive if the valuation for the end product is the sole basis of their remuneration.

A common saying suggests that it takes 10,000 hours of time to master any skill.  Those 10,000 hours sometimes add value to the end product but sometimes it’s just a matter of amount of time to complete the task.

When the amount of time spent actively working decreases to produce the same end result, the expectation is almost always that more end result is required from the worker in order to maintain full wage value. An office worker in a role for more than 10 years can solve their role’s tasks far more quickly and efficiently than they did as a new hire because they have over 10,000 hours experience in their role. Their pay scale for the role does not change, but the amount of non-working time they have in a shift may reach the point of exceeding time spent working, as their experience increases.  In the current world of time is money, an audit of such a role in year one would show an inefficient worker in need of improvement (to be expected—still learning the role), year 5 would show and adequate worker, but year 10 would show a lazy worker, who needed to be reprimanded for laziness—even though the same amount of work is being completed as it was in year 5.

So what’s fair? Is it fair that I can work faster than you to get the same task completed? Should I be “penalized” for that by having more work assigned to me than you? Should you be paid less? Should I earn more because I have a graduate degree? Should you earn more because you can throw a ball into a glove from 60 feet 6 inches at 140 Kph and I can barely throw 30 feet on target, underhand?  

I don’t know the answer, but Covid’s taught me that society needs the coffee slinger, the grocery store worker and the baseball player equally, if for different reasons. It’s got me thinking that how we value our worth in time needs an overhaul.  

Why Dictatorships Fail

Posted on by Llewen Leave a comment
Vladmir Putin

There is a lie that many believe about dictators. They are often called “Strong Men”, and many admire them for their toughness, their decisiveness and even their brutality. But the truth is, they are weak. They are weak for a very simple reason. Dictators are weak because they are evil.

What is Good and Evil?

One could say, this is a fallacy, how can you even tell me what is good and what is evil? What you believe to be evil, might be good to someone else. You simply want to live in a universe where those you call good always win. So when you say those who are evil are weak, it is a childish insult, with no basis in truth.

But this is what dictators do, and this is part of what makes them evil. Dictators torture and kill those who disagree with them. The thing is, in a dictatorship it takes courage to express disagreement with the dictator, because it is dangerous. Those who express dissent are not always automatically correct simply due to the fact that they are disagreeing with a dictator, but there is a very strong possibility that when they express dissent they are, at a minimum, expressing the truth, as they see it.

That means that when dictators torture and kill dissidents, they are torturing and killing those who tell them the truth. This is a recipe for disaster, and this is what makes dictators weak. In a dictatorship this means that dictators inevitably surround themselves with people who will tell them what they want to hear, with sycophants, with those who are corrupt, and with those who are fundamentally dishonest. People will disagree. It is inevitable. But in a dictatorship this is not permitted. This means that those in the inner circle of a brutal dictator are universally dishonest.

Evil Ultimately Equates to Stupidity

We see this now with Vladimir Putin, a brutal dictator, who has made a series of brutal blunders in the Ukraine. A brutal dictator that many, including myself, thought was much smarter than he apparently is. He drastically underestimated the will of the Ukrainian people to fight for their homeland. Putin did not account for the strength and resilience of Western democracies, and their will to fight in the face of aggression and atrocity. He also seriously overestimated the competence of his own armed forces and the effectiveness and robustness of his military hardware.

In every way Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine and the war he now finds himself in has been a series of blunders, wild miscalculations and incompetence. Why? Because he has surrounded himself with advisors and officials that will tell him what he wants to hear, and not the truth that he needs to hear. He is evil. What he is doing is evil, and that evil has made him weak and vulnerable. His life will end in miserable failure, the only question is how many will die, and how much damage will be done before he is destroyed.