volunteer firefighters are paid, btw
at least around here. it's just not their primary occupation.
fuck, my buddy makes good money from it, pretty sure
edit: where am I
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
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They don't get paid in Australia, they do it out of care for their community.
They are actively against getting paid because pay can pressure people to risk their lives on the front lines for a cheque and it promotes a culture they don't want in their peers who need to be there to support them.
neat, til. I've always heard the same comment as mine until now
edit: just noticed this is not an NA instance. still not used to having to check that when posts slip into my feed
Well remember next time you hear of Australian firefighters helping out in Canada during our off season, that many of them are there just to be good cunts and save lives without getting paid for it.
They wouldn't do the specific petty stuff that the masters of capital want.
People will try to cure the sick, advance science, or even empty the dustbins because they see a benefit in having a nicer world to live in, or even an ego boost.
They will not spend forty hours per week in a box trying to optimize some microscopic risk factor in a credit algorithm without the threat of starvation. There's no bhy-in so they had to manufacture it.
Okay, where do we find the volunteers to haul garbage and unclog sewers who are just in it for the love of the game?
Why don't we start by allowing/training volunteers to do it and see? You'd be surprised what people are willing to step up when given the opportunity.
I'd volunteer to help build robots that do it for us.
People who play garbage truck simulator
People who play garbage truck simulator don't have to smell the work themselves nor ever have to actually lift a single trash can. Definitely not the same thing.
Isn't that just emptying the dustbins on a grander scale?
Go into the sewers to break up a fatberg in a literal river of raw sewage and then try to tell me it's just emptying dustbins on a grander scale. There are a lot of jobs that are vital to a functional society that nobody wants to do, things that only get done because they get paid a lot to do it.
If thé work is hard, needed and so pénible nobody want to do it. It should be really well paid
Scream your priviledge why dont you. No its not like that at all.
You posted this in /c/politicalmemes@lemmy.ca a few months ago. Here's my wrinkle that I posted back then too.
Money (and hence profit motive) is an analogue for being able to acquire and do things we need and want.
There’s two kinds of miserable people in relation to profit motive - those who can’t acquire enough money for the basic things they need to be happy, and those who took the analogue so far that they think money = happiness.
There is generally very little issue getting people to do things they want to do (things that feel meaningful) as long as they manage to cover their basic needs somehow, but there are definitely issues getting people to do things that they don’t want to do - which is where profit motive shines.
There is much more garbage to collect than there are people who want to collect garbage, more deliveries to make than people who want to make them, more places to clean than people who want to clean them.
Luckily, there is someone who wants the garbage collected, someone who wants the toilets cleaned, someone who wants their trinkets delivered. Hence, we get people to pay for that, and thus we can use profit motive to incentivize someone to do those things, at least until we manage to automate it.
I'll also add the following. I think a key problem in modern economics is that the arbitrary creation of money/capital (need) via debt (promises) has become far too easy. It allows entities and individuals that already have large balance sheets (control a large amount of capital) to get incredible leverage in a way that is very difficult for any working individual to compete with. This skews the entire productivity of society away from outputting what regular people need/want to acquire through their work (that they trade for money).