• Serinus@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    There are a lot of people to bring up from much worse shape.

    It’s possible we could get down to 24-27 hours a week while maintaining our current standard of living and bringing those people up. Some day.

    I don’t think 16 hours is reasonable. And I think 32 is a more reasonable short/medium term goal.

    We absolutely have an obscene amount of wealth the spread, but it spreads really fast. Walmart made 15.5 billion in profit last year. They have 1.6 million employees in the US. If you take 100% of those profits and divide, that comes out to $9500 per employee. Average Walmart employee makes about $36,000 per year. So after some very rough napkin math, the average employee generates an additional 25% of their salary as profit. If you reduce their productivity by 50%, they’re no longer profitable. If they’re not longer profitable, they’re no longer sustaining themselves at the current rate even if the owners take no profits.

    We do have a lot of room to make things better. But we still need people to work. We still need people to deal with ~80% of the crap they deal with now. But that 20% still makes a difference, and we should be working towards that instead of away from it.