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>There is this strange notion that capitalism has something to do with meritocracy.

This is a problem of you not knowing the statistics and getting sucked into criticisms of problems that are literally unsolvable.

Success can be predicted with reasonable accuracy with two traits. IQ and Contentiousness. They account for 25% and 20% of the factors that determine success. We don't know what the other 55% is, it's obvious that it's not solely blind luck because that would mean that there were only three factors total in ones life that determine success (reality is too complicated for something like that). Now there are other factors that are negatively correlated, like neuroticism. Now I think that us identifying that 45% of factors success being hard work and the processing speed of your brain are a obvious indicator of meritocracy. That's not a small amount. And given that both Personality and IQ are, at the very least, 50% genetic, upwards of 80%, and that you can't raise IQ with education (Yes, that's right, YOU CAN'T, there is no basis for anything relating to increasing the IQ of an individual, none, zero, it's a set amount that you can decrease it, but you can't increase it).

Seriously, I cannot stress this enough, you are wrong, you are using logic and criticisms that are designed to be for unsolvable problems to promote people into positions of power because they promise you to solve these problems. You can never have a society with perfect equality, it's just not possible. The sooner we get away from this nonsense the sooner we can focus on actual problems that can be solved.

I wish I had time to source all of my claims here, I have to get to work, you can find most of these statistic by looking for them on google. I'll source them if you really want, but it's common knowledge for anyone who studies psych to a reasonable degree.

I would add (to the chain, not that anyone will look) a read through Anand Giridharadras' «Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World»

It's not that Gates et al are not doing good, it's that their doing good is at the expense of public oversight. When a private interest (like Gates) has more say over a schools technology use, policy, and future than the public it is serving.

Billionaires absolutely need to give to charity—but they should not be able to mould the world with their "gifts."

Free PDF, ePUB and audiobook: https://thebreadbook.org

The 5$ bread book on amazon is 'non-profit', in the sense that the entire purchase price goes to printing and distribution. (link)

worker co-op online store: https://www.firestorm.coop/products/783-conquest-of-bread.html

There are a lot but you could start with The Case for Socialism by Alan Maass who points out that the term "left" in the context of political philosophy has its roots in the French Revolution and that later it was applied to socialism, communism, and anarchism.

It was in the late 19th Century when Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto that the terms "left wing" and "right wing" were established with "right wing" refering to capitalism, monarchism, and the general idea that social hierarchies are natural and inevitable.

Conclusion: Burn It Down. God, I want to read this now. In the meantime, there's always The Burnout Society (everyone should read it).

Typical fast food environment, I'm afraid. I read an account of a journalist's time working in fast food as she researched for a book project. It was nothing short of abuse.

Excerpt from a NY Post interview:

"At fast-food franchises like McDonald’s, employees are often pushed to work at such dizzying speeds — “like a Benny Hill video on fast forward”— that injuries are inevitable, Guendelsberger explains.

Brittney Berry, who worked at a McDonald’s location in Chicago, told Guendelsberger that while trying to keep up with the pace, she slipped on a wet floor and severely burned her forearm on a grill to the point of nerve damage. “The managers told me to put mustard on it,” Berry told Guendelsberger."

Its a good read, just don't buy it off Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Clock-Low-Wage-Drives-America-Insane/dp/0316509000/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?keywords=on+the+clock&qid=1574024648&sr=8-2

>Fred Koch, co-founder of the corporation that later became Koch Industries, harshly criticized American workers under New Deal policies in 1938. He extolled the economic policies of Emperor Hirohito and fascists Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini:
>
>"Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard… The laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome."

Oof, that's pretty damning. Papa Koch was literally praising the state of Germany, Japan, and Italy only a few years before WW2 broke out.

The apple doesn't fall far.

Watch this

and read this

Found a link for the referenced book, The Problem With Work by Kathi Weeks.

And another if you'd like to purchase it

Fwiw, that is nowhere near $10 worth of candy. You can get 5x that much for $8.54 on Amazon

There's a book on Amazon which is highly critical of Amazon's employment practices.

www.amazon.com/Clock-Low-Wage-Drives-America-Insane-ebook/dp/B07K6H5235/

Acetaminophen, aka Tylenol, is a recognized fever reducer, although we don't understand exactly how it works.

Pediatricians often reccomend rotating acetaminophen with an NSAID (ibuprofen or aspirin) for children with high fevers, to avoid going over the reccomended daily dose of either, to keep fevers down without causing lasting damage to the filtering organs (liver, kidney, etc).

Most bottles of Tylenol even say "pain reliever/fever reducer." Here's an Amazon listing clearly showing a photo of the "fever reducer" claim on the product's box. https://www.amazon.com/Tylenol-Rapid-Release-Reducer-Reliever/dp/B01HI7WP0U

Of course, the advice to just take a Tylenol to work through a fever is still total bullshit.

Maybe 50% of the economy and 50% of jobs are concerned with producing and selling things that people don't actually need - stupid novelty items, gifts for the home etc. Stupid shit like fondue mugs or cat-shaped cutlery or a calendar of nature's dick pics or temporary tattoo kits or Billy Big Mouth Bass singing fish. The list goes on and on and on and on. We are killing the planet to extract raw materials to produce this endless torrent of unnecessary pointless shit. Not only that, but hundreds of thousands of people miserably waste their lives producing and marketing this crap that benefits nobody. It is not essential to meeting the needs of anyone.

If you get rid of these industries, the health of the planet immediately improves and you free all these people from this pointless labour. It's not gonna happen though, governments won't allow it.

There a book by David Graeber (anthropologist and Occupy Wall Street organizer) called Bullshit Jobs that examines how productivity increases through automation have resulted in more pointless jobs, instead of a reduction in work. Definitely worth a read.

Don't glorify production/manufacturing jobs. I've worked in a handful of factories and the only reason half of these jobs exist is because it's still cheaper to pay a human to suffer than it is to buy expensive robots+engineers to oversee the robots. Mandatory overtime is common and the repetitive motion strain will ruin your body.

I think this exchange is useful, but it does lay bare some basic points of disagreement, so I'm not sure how much it's worth continuing. Just to respond to a few things.

Corporate agriculture is killing us and the planet. That's what automated food looks like. A lot of it is still done by factory farmers, most immigrants, for very low pay, who have to keep up with the pace of the equipment, and I agree that that's absolutely intolerable, but in my view the answer is not in this case 'let machines do it all instead'. Food is not an industrial product. Grown on the scale it is now requires poisoning the soil and the food itself, plus massive overuse of water among other things. I don't see how full automation would change any of that, and likely would make it even worse. See: Formerly Known As Food. I have no problem with tools that make farmwork easier (which is very labor intensive even on a small scale), but they have to be under the farmers' and consumers' control.

> Are you some sort of Luddite?

Yes, I am. I'm glad you asked. Luddites were the original 'workers against work' and we still have a lot to learn from what they did. Smashing the machines is a time honored anti-work tactic; I think full automation, of bullshit work anyway, has some potential but comes with a lot of risks. The key in any case is worker control.