[bbuut]

The criticisms have the same lack of information problems.

So modern anecdotes make the most sense. I grew up in 80s dairyland. None of the farmers worked a 9-5 but they rarely worked 40+ too.

We worked much much less in rural-landia before the last few decades gave rise to "service and knowledge" work with no concrete goal but "make line go up".

Knowledge work comes along with zero concrete termination points. Programmers grinding code 80+ hours are not stopping to see if it's useful or just repetition.

Sure from a physics perspective they're doing "work". From a lived experience, to real needs of biology, economy perspective they're just sitting at a computer juicing their hormones, while exploiting farmers labor, who now works more hours as more knowledge workers contribute less real outputs essential to biology. Same with why carpentry and other trades services are so expensive; supply and demand. Millennials wanted 24/7 office jobs.

While I grew up in farmland I later went into EE, and have a good sense for who is moving the ball. It isn't software people. Their biology is addicted to a stupid loop of zero real productivity. Playing abstract snake games in one's head, to count initialized memory registers and recording their data is some basic bitch work marketed to the point of fostering delusion it's cutting in 2010-2020 to use 1960s style syntaxes to manage machines.