• Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    14 hours ago

    I’m a communist and don’t want to break my back using a sickle to harvest crops, but also no one does except people watching trad content and romanticizing it. This is why we’ve automated most of the hard manual labor in developed countries.

    We really need to update the symbol, besides all the baggage with the USSR it’s just out of date. Maybe on 1920s Russia most people were working with a hammer and sickle, and a lot of people still do to this day in less developed countries, but the meme is right, you ask your average Gen z in the developed world what the symbol means they’ll shrug and say idk.

    • backalleycoyote@lemmy.today
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      13 hours ago

      Funny you should choose the sickle over the hammer. In industrialized nations commodity crops like wheat, soy, corn, and rice are predominantly mechanically harvested. But tree fruit, berries, and a lot of veggies remain hand-picked or have a mixed manual/mechanical harvesting method that’s much more labor intensive than a combine mowing down endless acres of wheat.

      The hammer however has seen a massive decline in full time use across construction sites in developed nations. It’s still a useful tool and most workers carry one, but pneumatic nail guns dominate new construction in developed countries that use wood as their base material.

      I’d also push back on your claim that hard manual labor in developed nations is automated. Mechanically assisted to varying levels, like a pneumatic nail gun instead of a hammer, or a haybaler instead of a sickle and building a stack, but it’s still got humans putting hours of physical effort into using those machines to achieve the finished product. There’s people behind home construction or remodels, strawberry picking, road construction, and wildland fire fighting to name a few.

      • ...m...@ttrpg.network
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        8 hours ago

        …i used a framing hammer to build a wood fence last weekend; it felt good but also surprisingly old-fashioned by comparison to the nail gun the builder used for the original construction…

        • backalleycoyote@lemmy.today
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          11 hours ago

          As the narrator says “the future farmer might not be holding a shovel, they might be holding a remote control”. Technology changes the means by which the humans do the labor, but there’s still a human behind the machine, not an automaton.

          • Maeve@kbin.earth
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            11 hours ago

            The difference is how and why AI labor is utilized from one nation to another.

        • Return_of_Chippy@lemmy.worldOP
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          11 hours ago

          This is “the temptation of saint Anthony” that’s not God its a human man being tested. Study more art and scripture, say less dumb shit.