94 points

Anytime I’ve done some world building in my head for the great human empire :tm: it involves some sort of rotational labor period in each citizens early 20’s to give them exposure to a few different styles of work

It’s a nice way to give back to the community while also getting to see how the rest of the world lives

I’m sure there’s flaws with it but sounds a hell of a lot better than what we have now

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76 points

I genuinely believe everyone should serve some sort of customer service role at least once in their life.

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59 points

Except the American response to this would be to be extra shitty to retail workers since customers were shitty to them during their tour.

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13 points

Yeah…I thought that as soon as I hit Enter.

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8 points

That’s not how walking a mile in someone else’s shoes work. It’s the opposite.

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5 points

What is this, academia?

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7 points

I’ve had similar thoughts. Maybe not a rotation, but a compulsory period of service following high school that where people can select from a variety of public service assignments.

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2 points

Compulsory service exists in many parts of the world and it is rarely good.

Forcing people to do work they don’t want to do leads to very unproductive environments that are also very open to abuse. Being forced by law to do the work has a tendency to create super unhealthy power dynamics.

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0 points

Likewise, I think 2 years of public service or military should be compulsory. The truth is we do need a defense force given the world, but it’d also be nice to have americorps or something expanded to fit the service option. Make military service more enticing than the other, I don’t care, but provide room and board, and a spending allowance at the very least for both.

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4 points

Great, I would love to have some free research assistants! Oh wait, these plans invariably only concern manual labor (real work TM).

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3 points

I think if you could opt out of you really really didn’t want to do a particular job then it would be fine. Maybe if it’s a job that a lot of people dislike, like sanitation, you could provide an incentive to make it worthwhile - like you get the next season off.

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3 points

Well I imagine it like high school electives. You get to pick from a selection and go through 3 or 4 until you’re ready to settle one some sort of career

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1 point

What’s the equivalent today? Volunteering? Summer jobs?

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9 points

Military service

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3 points

community theatre and improv comedy

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1 point

Americorps and the peace corp are a thing, but I’ll admit, I’m not sure how much of a thing?

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62 points
*

how to tell when someone has just had their 31st birthday

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54 points
*

“Make America Great Leap Forward Again”

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14 points

I for one will be sowing all my seed incredibly close together, the plants will grow stronger together. Also all birds are now counter revolutionary, get out your noisiest banging pans my dudes.

Also, how do I invest in pig iron futures?

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1 point

Unfortunately, MAGLFA doesn’t have the same ring to it…

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30 points
*

Over a decade ago, Obama proposed significantly expanding AmeriCorps, the tea party Republicans basically did everything they could to water down the expansion to amount to basically nothing.

I wonder if Twitter Republicans even know AmeriCorps exists…

Anyway, what we should actually do is mandate that everyone who earns double area median income for 3 years in a 5 year period has to spend 6 months working in a call center, retail, customer service, fast food.

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43 points

Stop demonizing your neighbor. Demonize the 1%.

That income range still very much encompasses “normal” people who already pay a large share of income taxes.

Tax the super rich (both income and wealth), and redistribute that money via healthcare, education and social programs like UBI.

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17 points

Stop demonizing your neighbor. Demonize the 1%.

Even more than the 1%, the 0.0001%. An excellent resource to illustrate this point:

Wealth Shown to Scale

I feel like everyone should go through this at least once. It’s eye-opening. Even people who we generally think of as crazy rich, like the average hedge fund manager, are just a drop of water in a pond compared to the ultra-wealthy.

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1 point

I made it to the trillions but I clicked the paper billionair link and then had to restart. Fuck that haha

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13 points

Yeah people don’t get this. Many of those people may agree with you and were simply lucky enough to get comfortable in life. They are certainly not the main contributors to inequality in our society.

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6 points

I like to say it like this: I’m doing alright, but not “able to weather serious healthcare in America” alright. I think that’s a decent way to lessen the confusion of class divide.

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2 points

To be fair, we can’t get to higher taxes and social services without both mass labor organization and recent successful Socialist revolution, which is what allowed the New Deal to go through. Socialism is still a necessity, and that starts with organizing.

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30 points

Didn’t they try this already on like teenagers or college students or something? Didn’t it go horribly wrong?

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66 points
*

+3,000 student athletes in The A-Team. And yes it went horribly wrong. Some students started unionizing immediately.

“Then you go out in the field, and the first ray of sun comes over the horizon. The first ray. Everyone looked at each other, and said, ‘What did we do?’ The thermometer went up like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. By 9 a.m., it was 110 degrees.”

Garden gloves that the farmers gave the students to help them harvest lasted only four hours, because the cantaloupe’s fine hairs made grabbing them feel like “picking up sandpaper.”

The farmers sheltered them in “any kind of defunct housing,” according to Carter — old Army barracks, rooms made from discarded wood, and even buildings used to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II.

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17 points

Thank you!! I was trying to find this but was struggling to find an article about it.

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4 points

I’m bookmarking this article. Probably gonna use it a lot these coming years.

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1 point

Save it as a pdf (using the print option) in case it gets disappeared

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