These sorts of proposals always seem biased toward white collar work. If you can accomplish all of your work for the day in 4 hours and spend the rest of the day “sitting in cafes arguing about politics” then that’s great for you, but wouldn’t someone need to work in that cafe to bring you the coffee? And if more people are going to be going to cafes, wouldn’t those workers need to work even harder? And wouldn’t the people who harvest the coffee beans and the people who ship those beans halfway across the world and the people who inventory these shipments and divide them up across multiple retail spaces based on demand all still need to work the exact same amount, if not more? To me, it seems like blue collar or retail workers will get the short end of the stick while the people with bullshit jobs that contribute nothing to society get rewarded with even more free time. But of course that’s nothing new. People with essential jobs have always been the first ones to get shafted.
This guy: "Oh gee golly, all of this pretending to work all day sure is hard. I wish I had more free time :( " The girl bringing him coffee who makes minimum wage and just learned she’ll need to work a double shift today and will now need to make arrangements to have her kid picked up from day care: “Wow that must be super hard, I literally cannot imagine having to deal with that”
I don’t know man, I’m not going to pretend I have any better ideas but we need to start framing these things better. Obviously I would love for all workers to have as much free time as possible, but when people keep talking about work in terms of “going to pointless meetings all day” or “typing stuff into spreadsheets” then it’s hard to take their ideas seriously.
I think it’s a great idea. Using melodies from other songwriters/composers has been a part of the western music tradition for centuries: Brahms writing his Academic Festival Overture with melodies from a bunch of drinking songs, Tchaikovsky using both the Russian and French national anthems in the 1812 Overture, both Brahms and Rachmaninoff having pieces titled Variations on a Theme by Paganini, basically the entire history of Jazz music, half of the discography of Led Zeppelin, etc. It seems the logical continuation of this tradition in the digital age would be make samples or sound libraries available for other artists to use. Music is the most collaborative form of art after all, and copyright laws only serve to hinder that while enriching a select few – with those few very infrequently being the actual artists.
Quick plug for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, who released their album Polygondwanaland for free, including the vinyl masters. So anyone who wanted to could press their own vinyl of the album with their own album art and even create their own music videos. There were a ton of small record labels who made their own prints with super cool designs.