I'm with you that things suck now and don't need to be this way, having carefully not said otherwise.
But I also think you might be underestimating how many people's ancestors were slaves, serfs, miners, and laborers during hose prior several millenia of settled, urbanizing civilization. We don't all come from aristocratic or even subsistence farming stock.
It can be less bad than it is, we might want to strive to make it less bad than it is, but it's been pretty darn bad for a long while. For pressing modern problems we also need to commit to more immediate tactics.
I'm not saying everyone had it better. Chattle slavery is definitely worse. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think we needed to have slaves to make progress. I want to push back against this idea that it's inevitable to have to work as much as we do. A worker today is significantly more productive. We could probably make life a lot easier for everyone by finding a more equitable way to distribute resources and by breaking up and regulating all the rent-seeking monopolists who makes things more expensive than they need to be.
Yes, someone responded to me saying just that and it's also a position I've seen frequently on HN. I think plenty of people have that as a gut reaction to any proposed change in the status quo.
Your first sentence is a false factoid repeated online [0][1]. And anyway, there is always more work to be done, so I don't understand why people think working hours would ever decrease; as soon as we build one thing, another problem crops up. We would only stop working until all problems in the world would have been solved, which is never.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to die of now-curable diseases that were only able to be cured due to the hard work of many, many humans over generations. To think that that human progress is akin to a personal hedonic treadmill is misguided.
Most people I know spend a lot of time doing unnecessary things for their job. I don't have a magic solution to fix all the bureaucratic bullshit people are subject to but acknowledging it's a problem is a start.
Stock buybacks. They serve nothing but short term driving up of profits purely to increase the value of management's stock options. They have no place in the functions/purpose of a healthy stock market.
It's because the people who say things like the above have no real alternative solution in place and simply say things that sound good in theory (or are even wholly unrelated, as you explained) but fundamentally don't change anything about the world.
It's not really a personal attack, it's an observation. You haven't actually elaborated on the parent's question but for some reason replied to me instead, which proves my point.
Not a personal attack, sure. I responded to the personal attack first my dude and responded to his post literally within one minute of your reply here.
Stock buybacks are stock manipulation by management and a means of tax evasion (raises the stock value in order for the big holders to borrow against held stock so benefiting from gains without paying taxes, something average holders don't benefit from) and add ZERO to the economy or the market. Companies using the funds as intended by a functioning market, either re-investing in the company, strengthening the company by holding in reserve, or rewarding investors with taxable income that then circulates in the economy and provides the expected tax funds.
Also your response to my was was again a personal attack in the form of 'observation'.
My point is that that can all be true about stock buybacks (which I disagree with your interpretation of, but anyway), but that is completely orthogonal to what was asked, which is, why would stock buybacks allow more time and less work for workers? That is what I meant when I said that people respond to such questions with something unrelated because they have no real alternate solution.
See my reply above regarding SouthWest, it's poor scheduling software that had huge impacts on flight crew up to and including reaching catastrophe in December 2022 that cost SouthWest a $1 billion expense, and the billions of dollars in stock buybacks SouthWest did in the run up to the totally preventable with investment in the company billion dollar failure (that had already been seriously impacting workers previously). This real world over a billion dollar loss example took me literally 2 minutes to come up with because your weak 'poster is dumb and their position literally is empty echochamber' annoyed me enough to hunt you a random real world example for my 'just an empty echochamber mentally weak take'.
Food for thought: I have never had a productive conversation with someone who thinks buybacks are market manipulation and see it as cue to disengage. IMO it is like debating with a sovereign citizen. They invoke a ton of technical concepts and jargon, but all with their bespoke personal definitions. Up means down and 2+2=5. We simply dont share enough common reality to communicate.
Indeed, it is tiring to talk to these folks and simply not worth reiterating the same point over and over when they bring up wholly orthogonal topics to the point at hand. It seems like their other comment threads are similar in nature.
Those funds would either be re-invested in the company (providing a better work environment and a stronger financial position for the company) or distributed to the shareholders and circulated into the economy and generating tax revenue for society. Instead they are stuck in 'paper' stock value that does nothing but allow the rich to borrow against the 'gains' denying society even benefiting from the taxes those funds should generate if not re-invested in the company in an actual, non 'paper' valuation way.
"paper" value does not simply translate to material value, and when it does, it is simply inflationary.
Imagine every company cut buybacks and raised salary 50%. There would still be the same number of hamburgers and houses, and the same number of labor hours would be required to produce them. As a result, you would simply have an inflation on the order of 50%.
There would only be more tax and circulation in a nominal sense, not in real currency.
December 2022 SouthWest canceled all flights for multiple days costing a billion dollars because of poor scheduling software. Running poor quality/inefficient scheduling software most likely incurred other additional expenses/stresses for workers and flight crews during a larger period than December 2022 but there is not a way for me to quickly to put a cumulative value on that for a response here. That 1 billion dollar loss and incurred stress for workers can be attributed to the stock buybacks listed above.
It can't be attributed to stock buybacks though, you just assume it can be. Lots of companies that didn't buy back stocks also have poor internal software and may generally not reinvest that money internally, or invest it incorrectly instead of blowing it on some other thing than buybacks. There is no causal relationship at all, and not even a strong correlative one between buybacking companies and business failures.
Why did you move the goalposts from employee stress, what we were talking about, to business failure? That's a ridiculous level goal move.
I gave an example where the stress from lack of reinvestment in core company infrastructure (the scheduling system is KEY to a successful airline, and the airline knew it was an issue of stress/deficient because it was an important talking point in union/company talks because of the stress it was causing way in advance of it escalating to causing a billion dollar expense). That it didn't shut the company down completely (just for a few days, during one of the business travel seasons) is not relevant to causing employee stress.
Southwest spent billions in the immediate run up on stock buybacks.
Southwest did not upgrade a known deficient scheduling system vital to their core business.
This poor scheduling software had major impact on flight crews during the same period as stock options (to the point their union complained) proving my initial point.
Not only that, Southwest's neglect in order to feed stock buybacks resulted in a cost of a billion dollars to the company itself, let alone my original point of needless stress on employees sacrificed for stock buybacks instead of business re-investment.
Business failures, not business failure, as in failure to upgrade systems as you mentioned, not wholesale business bankruptcy. The point is that there is no causal relationship between stock buybacks and not reinvesting into systems, as many companies who don't buy back stocks also don't necessarily reinvest and may still cause employee stress. That is specifically my point, that people talk about unrelated things that don't relate to the main point. Correlation does not equal causation.
You win. There is zero way to PROVE my exact specific was caused by the over 3 billion dollars of stock buybacks SouthWest did during that period. I can't go back in time, prevent those buybacks, and see where SouthWest would have used that over 3 billion dollars. But I can know that with it going to useless stock buybacks when the company was unstable and have failing core systems the market provided a perverse incentive (stock buybacks) over sound business decisions (making sure core business systems were up to requirements and not needless placing stress on employees specifically flight crews). The market should have pressured the company to ensure it had a sound business. Instead it sucked up over 3 billions dollars. Is that the invisible hand at work?
