381–390 of 685 posts
>In a recent analysis, we found that 53 million workers ages 18 to 64—or 44% of all workers—earn barely enough to live on. >The majority of low-wage workers (77%) have less than a college degree, So there are 53 (1-0.77) = 12.2 million workers with college degrees who are only able to earn "barely enough to live on". Poor instruction or irrelevant majors in college? Or drug use, criminal convictions, disabling diseas…
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> People do unpaid work all the time. Ask your mom. Humans have compassion. They want to cooperate and collaborate. Free work is for people close to me or for special cases like FOSS projects I want to win. It's not for strangers. When the Soviets collectivized farms, output crashed. Let's not so quickly forget the lessons of the 20th century. > have a system that takes from the productive (workers) and gives it to t…
> Profit is not a sin. What work do shareholders actually do within the confines of the company? If you gave a poor unemployed person the investment capital that shareholders have, then from the company's perspective, how do you distinguish them from other shareholders? That was the parent poster's point. > Tech treats its workers better than practically any other industry, and there's never been an industry with few…
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Huh? No it’s not. He is exactly right that we’ve invented a lot of “bullshit jobs” that don’t add anything of value to society and would not change anything if they were gone tomorrow e.g. How many jobs out there just prop up rent seeking?
The whole idea of “bullshit jobs” is ignorant. You’ve got armies of managers and bean counters trying to squeeze nickels out of processes, and yet we are supposed to believe that we’re keeping all of these people employed for no reason? It’s the same sort of juvenile thinking that causes someone to look at a vast legacy codebase and decide “oh we could easily rewrite that.” The reality is that automation is progressi…
Yes, at least in a sense. Coordination failures are a thing. (See e.g. https://equilibriabook.com/toc/ for a readable introduction to the issue.)
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> People do unpaid work all the time. Ask your mom. Humans have compassion. They want to cooperate and collaborate. Free work is for people close to me or for special cases like FOSS projects I want to win. It's not for strangers. When the Soviets collectivized farms, output crashed. Let's not so quickly forget the lessons of the 20th century. > have a system that takes from the productive (workers) and gives it to t…
> Profit is not a sin. What work do shareholders actually do within the confines of the company? If you gave a poor unemployed person the investment capital that shareholders have, then from the company's perspective, how do you distinguish them from other shareholders? That was the parent poster's point. > Tech treats its workers better than practically any other industry, and there's never been an industry with few…
I’m skeptical that these are uniquely tech problems; I suspect they occur in relatively even proportion in other industries, but other industries have bigger problems that tech largely doesn’t have, and so they aren’t preoccupied with “toxic personalities”. In particular, the “tech is terrible” proponents need to explain why tech selects for toxic people more than other industries, and so far all such explanations depend on (toxic) stereotypes of whites, Asians, men, and people interested in technology (“nerds”).
I see the future as grim anti-utopia: Further advancements in AI and automations will make more and more jobs obsolete. Therefore, we will end up with high unemployment, low pay jobs, and fierce competition for decreasing number of available positions. The owners of businesses will mostly benefit from the automation. It would be a good solution to introduce convenient life long education and universal basic income. S…
In 1000BC men and women did flour of wheat manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete.
In 1000AD men and women did butter of milk manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete.
In 1500AD men and women did threads of fur manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete.
In 1940s women did manual calculations and typing for military, science departments, newspapers. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete.
The whole history of humanity was full of obsolete jobs. Could people in 1000BC ever thing that women would write programs in Python instead of beating wheat? No, they could fancy neither Python nor computer.
People will simply explore other possibilities being free from obsolete jobs, making more services available, more possibilities open.
Two hundred years ago a massage would be totally unavailable for an avg peasant. Today you could have a massage any day because automation let more people do it getting the price down, as well as overall welfare up.
Future is pretty bright exactly because automation, technology would make some jobs obsolete, so more people could navigate spaceships or do other stuff we couldn't even fancy yet.
We're headed in the right direction. With low unemployment, rising blue collar wages, and strong equity markets it would be absolute foolishness to make a big change in any direction.
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The whole idea of “bullshit jobs” is ignorant. You’ve got armies of managers and bean counters trying to squeeze nickels out of processes, and yet we are supposed to believe that we’re keeping all of these people employed for no reason? It’s the same sort of juvenile thinking that causes someone to look at a vast legacy codebase and decide “oh we could easily rewrite that.” The reality is that automation is progressi…
> Grocery checkout automation is atrocious, which is why higher end chains like Whole Foods don’t have them, even though they’re better able to afford automation. No, Costco for example I expect to not have automation because I'm bulk buying and don't want to deal with trying to fit all that on their weight scale for self checkout. Also, Whole Foods doesn't SKU on all their produce products which makes this a pain fo…
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Or, perhaps, has society failed to adapt to present technological reality due to entrenched interest in the social status quo? When so many people in the world live happily on so little, it is undeniable that we could provide for all of our basic needs if there were political will. Without education, that would likely result in a population boom, however.
I mean yes, we could all live like people do in Bangladesh and reduce the work force dramatically. I fail to see how this would be desirable.
Here are some more optimistic ideas. If we reconsidered vehicles, everyone could have access to them when desired. If we reconsidered city layouts, everyone could have a home with desired proximity to others without needing to sacrifice either nature or privacy. If we reconsidered education, medical care and communications infrastructure, they would be universally available and effectively free (indeed, in many places these are already the case). If we reconsidered politics, we could encourage global industry toward environmentally sustainable outcomes without irreversible disaster.
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The whole idea of “bullshit jobs” is ignorant. You’ve got armies of managers and bean counters trying to squeeze nickels out of processes, and yet we are supposed to believe that we’re keeping all of these people employed for no reason? It’s the same sort of juvenile thinking that causes someone to look at a vast legacy codebase and decide “oh we could easily rewrite that.” The reality is that automation is progressi…
> In fast food, for example, self-order touch screens are vastly inferior to a trained order taker. In my experience, once you get used to the interface, it's actually faster to just use the touchscreen to place the order. > There’s not a single job I can think of that qualifies as a “bullshit job.” Any job that involves taking a handwritten form which then is processed or oral instructions could be eliminated by pro…
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You can't run a whole economy on altruism --- and the more we transfer wealth from the productive to the unproductive, the closer we get to an altruism economy. Your bio says you're the leader of a 1,000 person startup: would you expect your employees to show up without getting paid? No? Then how can you call pointing out the consequences of a no-pay economy "sociopathic"? Is it wrong not to want to live in a global…
> You can't run a whole economy on altruism You don't need altruism. You just need autonomy , mastery , and purpose . Those are incentive enough for meaningful work so long as the worker's basic needs are met.
So just the one teeny tiny detail of meeting everyone’s basic needs then?