Eric Schmidt: Competing with China Means Sacrificing Work-Life Balance

This is just CEO-Brain bullshit. These people keep thinking we live to work, instead of work to live. What they forget is that yes many CEOs and "Founders" do work insane hours. But thats because they expect that at the end of the rainbow they will look in their bank account and behold a stupid number of zeros in their bank balance.

But the rest of us have our labour effectively stolen from us. We make the boss a million dollars off our labour and in return we get maybe $100K. For most americans, a lot less. Its almost as if 3/4 of the week we are working for free. And they want us to do more? Fuck no. I want to spend time with my girl and the kids. I want to spend time playing in punk bands, or shooting scrubs in videogames.. I want a fucking holiday.

If they want me to spend MORE time in the office, and especially if they want 72 hours a week, then I want to see at least six zeros hitting my bank account every goddamn year. And then in a year or so I'll say "Bite me", and take those years, find a nice house in the south west forests and live out my years fishing or growing murder-chillis or doing sick leadbreaks.

These billionares, they aren't like us, and they arent on our side.

Good luck explaining it to your employees - We won't rise your wages, but you will now work 996. Now please, be grateful for having a job.

Now the same employee could ask, what is it good for to compete with China, when only thing they will get from it is more miserable life.

Something an oligarch would say.

This is how capitalists blame the workforce when they can't compete. There has been studied that disprove so. They themselves proposed remote work, 5 years ago. Don't fall into this power scheme where they blame you and put you on the lash again. Fight back woth all you can. Do you think Chinese like to work 996? That there is no burnout or sabotage in China?

Eric Schmidt type leaders use fear and doubt to get the chimp troupe to do things. Mostly always benefiting Eric Schmidt more than anyone else. He used the same methods in google and everyone can see what google has become thanks to the seeds this man planted.

Contrast with the leadership style of JFK, faced with the Soviets.

He gives a 'we shall go to the moon' speech. When he talks about the Soviets, he doesn't talk about the fear of Soviet domination. He talks about American tech being better and benefitting more of humanity than anything the Soviets have produced.

He is not even talking about getting to the Moon being the point of the story. He is saying goals have to be set that are hard, "because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills".

He is saying we pick goals so that everyone feels a need to be better than they were yesterday. This plants the seeds for producing a NASA. No talk about work life balance required.

Be conscious of Leadership styles. Cause they have a big effect on how your energies and thinking develop in life.

"Competing with China" is an awfully convenient fig leaf for "ensuring Google doesn't go bankrupt" huh?

Funny how these rich people's solutions for national growth [1] always end up enriching them instead of the nation. To make a nation grow as a net producer, two things are needed. Improve the availability of capital for setting up production, and encourage its growth by driving up domestic consumption. Both require boosting cash flow in the economy (as opposed to hoarded wealth). And the way to do that is to improve the job availability and the wages. In other words, the employers have to hire more people and pay better wages.

So what happens if you go the other way and cut jobs, cut wages and raise work hours in the name of 'efficiency'? All the extra profits will go to the company owners and shareholders, unless the worker wages raised proportionally at least. Even if the wages are increased, it still means that the cash is reaching fewer people, unless you hire more people - something that they're actively avoiding by forcing the current employees to work harder. Meanwhile, the extra wealth they make this way end up hoarded in some tax haven without contributing to any productive economic activities.

All these talk about hard work, efficiency and competence are for gaslighting the ordinary folks into enriching the oligarchs even further, while they refuse to even pay their fair share of the tax, much less do what's actually necessary to boost the national economy.

This is also a trend in India since just after the pandemic [1]. It's spear headed by an oligarch whose son in law is a former British PM. His infant grandson has more wealth in his name that what any of his employees can hope to see in ten lives.

The really troubling bit in both cases is the messaging. On the first thought, they sound like they care about the nation and that their demand is correct. But it takes a bit a macroeconomic thinking to realize that their advise only enriches themselves at the expense of the nations. This sort of deceptive messaging should be called out and condemned.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-67269976