zen buddy said:

Icelander said:

Yea it's a bitch but I sort of beat the system to a small degree. I've rarely worked over twenty five hours a week in my life and often taken whole years off work. Then I retired at 54. Now I just hang and do volunteer work with dogs.

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Would you mind sharing a little more? So few people manage to pull this type of thing off, naturally I would like to know how you did it.

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Icelander said:

zen buddy said:

Icelander said:

Yea it's a bitch but I sort of beat the system to a small degree. I've rarely worked over twenty five hours a week in my life and often taken whole years off work. Then I retired at 54. Now I just hang and do volunteer work with dogs.

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Would you mind sharing a little more? So few people manage to pull this type of thing off, naturally I would like to know how you did it.

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By being a good hunter gatherer and living off the waste of this society and not wasting my money on things I didn't really want. I saved and saved and lived cheaply. It took a lot of years but I had a pretty good life for a lot of that time. Then I paid cash for my house. Even on low wages if you save and invest wisely and don't waste your hard earned labor then anyone can do it. But you can't buy a new car every few years and get the latest whatever until the old one has worn out. I still use a northface pack that I bought in 1973.

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ScavengerType said:

WhiskeyClone said:

Most people cannot think of a way to create value other than to sell their time at a low price to someone who is more creative and ambitious than they are. 

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I wouldn't agree with how you voiced this aspect. Frankly, my last job, which I was voluntarily laid off from for being a rabble-rouser, had me being employed by morons who had shit all of an idea what to do about their problems. I knew some of the solutions and reasons personally for some of the company's biggest problems, but due to my low rate of pay I never volunteered such information, with the exception of safety issues. Most of the supervisors only worked as supervisors because they would do the job for such little pay, often experienced workers who would be better suited to the task would say of those positions that they would not do them for that price. I left this place because it became evident that I would be unable to launch a successful lawsuit against them and otherwise they directly did something that was professionally compromising to some of my certifications. Additionally, nepotism was rife, and the site manager had run a similar buisness into the ground but got his job on account of being buddies with the general manager.

Now that was an extreme example of a place where the position of seller of time was not in any way linked to creativity, in fact a lot of people's affluent positions in life are products more of privilege and connections. Creativity is important to actually rise out of poverty but it is nothing without investment capital. I can think of many examples where I could have made shitloads of money off of knowledge I had gained or a creative take on a situation that others did not seem to see. But I had no investment capital and that was that. Similarly I can recall someone recently saying they had investments in some resource future fund but rather than tell them to dump them because something was going to happen I didn't, because they were a douchebag.

I know you can argue that if I fight tooth and nail I can get this capital and invest it, but the privileged or connected can do this effortlessly and in that I think that creativity all together becomes relatively moot as an employer running an already established buisness.

In fact I contend that when it comes to this particular issue Marx wrote the end all of critiques in his book "Capital" where he proclaimed that the poor only have their labor to bring to market and that is why it is sold. He proclaimed that in a society the price of labor was reduced by it's abundance (obvious right) and in his time this was the rule and reality of poverty. Businesses would work their employees for in some cases 15 hour days and they had no time or no space to better their situation, but as well over-working some while leaving others unemployed lowered the price they had to pay for labor by inflating the surplus labor pool, even if they had to pay overtime on the occasion. Is that "creativity" or just plain crooked?

youbreakyoubuy said:

I read somewhere that prehistoric man only spent about 3 hours a day to keep himself fed and sheltered.  I don't have a source for this claim.

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I would bet that's an average and likely a presumptuous prediction of some anthropologist at that.

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Huehuecoyotl said:

Yeah, but North Face is a solid brand. It don't wear out. My Kelty is 20 years old and I still use it.

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