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A world where people pay for software

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#411

Post by TaylorAlexander »

PeterisP wrote: post #394
bee_rider wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to guess what people would work on without needing to worry about money. You might try your novel, and one of two things could happen: You find out you love it, you write a really good novel, and society wins. You try it, find out that the actual experience of writing a novel is a drag. No harm no foul, you move on and keep trying things until you find something you are really passionate about and good at,…

You can also find out that you love it despite the novels (or software or paintings or poems or whatever) not being interesting for almost anyone else or even being available to anyone, but as you don't need the money you can keep doing that (and only that) and society simply loses out on whatever you're doing currently. The key part of what people would work on without needing to worry about money is that there is l…

> there is literally zero reason to assume that the thing worked on would be useful to society in any way whatsoever, it can be useless or even detrimental to it - the current mechanism of monetary compensation is the thing aligning the work to interests of others, remove it and you can't expect that alignment to persist.

I think a strong argument can be made that the current system does not necessarily align the work being done with the interests of others in a broad or universal sense. Think about a corporation with a very useful drug whose patent is about to expire. Allowing the drug to go generic would be in the best interests of many poor sick people all over the world (patent harmonization means even poor countries must follow US patent law or get locked out of global systems). However companies often find legal tricks they can use to effectively renew the patents for their drugs. This aligns with the interests of some people - the shareholders for example, but is detrimental to the interests of sick poor people all over the world.

And this isn’t a hypothetical, this just happened again two weeks ago with Johnson and Johnson and only a coordinated pressure campaign from some high profile YouTubers was able to get the company to relax their plans: https://youtu.be/tMhgw5SW0h4

However when there is no profit motive, people often work on problems that they personally need to solve, and there is often good alignment with the work they are doing and the needs of others.

More broadly, we can say that the current system does not necessarily align the work being done with the needs of most people, and that alternative ways of aligning that work must be possible.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#412

Post by Niksko »

ilyt wrote: post #379
Niksko wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running the garbage system is a desk job largely I would expect. It might not be the most stimulating subject matter to you, but I think it's within the realm of possibility that you'd find people who found it an interesting system to manage. Cleaning the sewers sounds objectionable. I think you shouldn't discount the idea that in a societal structure that's different from ours you'd remove some of the social stigma…

> I think you shouldn't discount the idea that in a societal structure that's different from ours you'd remove some of the social stigma that comes from such a job. I can see you haven't done any of jobs like that ever in your life. "Social stigma", lmao, that shit smells > But at the same time, if you observed that very very few people wanted to clean sewers for whatever reason, and there wasn't enough supply to mee…

> I can see you haven't done any of jobs like that ever in your life. "Social stigma", lmao, that shit smells

I haven't, but I didn't say that shit didn't smell. My point was that one component of why some jobs are worse than others is social stigma. Working at a fish monger or in a butchers shop stinks, and you probably get way less PPE than a sewer cleaner would. But butchers and fishmongers have less social stigma.

> It's delusional to think every job that's undesirable but necessary could be automated and that it would be cheaper than ye olde good material compensation for doing something hard/unpleasant.

The fallacy here is that it _needs_ to be cheaper. Sewer cleaning is valuable. If it requires more investment to automate so that we have enough supply to meet the demand, so be it. The only reason we haven't already automated this smelly job is because it's easier to turn a profit if you just pay people peanuts. If profit is no longer motivating, you can make vastly different decisions.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#414

Post by Niksko »

hutzlibu wrote: post #375
Niksko wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running the garbage system is a desk job largely I would expect. It might not be the most stimulating subject matter to you, but I think it's within the realm of possibility that you'd find people who found it an interesting system to manage. Cleaning the sewers sounds objectionable. I think you shouldn't discount the idea that in a societal structure that's different from ours you'd remove some of the social stigma…

"But at the same time, if you observed that very very few people wanted to clean sewers for whatever reason" The reason might be, most people do not like to be in the literal shit of others? It comes with actual health hazards btw. "and there wasn't enough supply to meet demand, then you invest more in technology that reduces the shortfall. As others suggested, automation" But we ain't there yet at all. What do we do…

> What do you do until then?

Sure, but you iterate. We decided as a society that Polio was awful enough that we wanted to eradicate it. If we freed up enough effort that is currently wasted on chasing profits, we could eventually get to solving problems like "shit stinks and it sucks having to clean it".

Re: A world where people pay for software

#415

Post by Niksko »

martinsnow wrote: post #371
ForHackernews wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C'mon, robots obviously! Cleaning sewers doesn't sound like any fun, but designing or remotely piloting a fatberg-blasting sewer shark bot? That sounds kickass!

But it the meantime while there exists no such robots, or while the prototypes get stuck downthere. Someone has to manually fetch them, and do the job. It's not very enticing and I don't think there will be many software engineers ready to suit up, to dig one out.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. You iterate, as with everything.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#416

Post by TaylorAlexander »

jarjoura wrote: post #367
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #306

Computers have an unprecedented ability to reproduce value for free. Programmers need a relatively fixed amount of resources to thrive. (The value of resources varies by location but we all need things like food, shelter, transportation, clothing, tools, etc etc) If we can find a way to make sure every person has what they need to thrive regardless of their income, programmers can open source all of their software an…

Humans have tried all kinds of value transfer systems for thousands of years. Giving someone "tokens" (ie. currency) to convert that into whatever they want, or need has been the most flexible version of whatever has come before it. What one person needs to thrive is not the same another person needs to thrive, so who gets to set what that level is? I'd be skeptical of any system where there's no opportunity to get a…

Generally the broad concept I work with is “community ownership of the means of production”. What this means is that you are part owner in a cooperative of cooperatives that owns the machinery you depend upon for your well being. Of course your community trades with others and you and everyone have free choice to vote how you please and contribute as you desire. There is no “enforcement” that prevents you from accumulating more wealth but most of what you rely on is borrowed from a “things library” where you are permitted to use it indefinitely but not sell or destroy it, and in times of need the community may request that you return some items you are not using.

More broadly I would say that many people believe the current system actually does not serve people well. We have a very small portion of the society that owns the means of production and 99 percent of the population have to deal with the dictums of those owners with very little say in how production is allocated. This leads to a world where the output is heavily slanted towards the ownership class while everyone else is fighting for scraps. A world with community ownership of the means of production would mean MUCH more wealth for the average person, so concerns over resource allocation would be less of a concern.

The point anyway is that in the current system I certainly don’t get to decide what my “level” is beyond trying to work hard, but in a community ownership model I would have much more say.

As you have said we have been trying different value systems for thousands of years. No reason to believe attempts to improve the system should not continue.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#417

Post by 999900000999 »

ben0x539 wrote: post #358
pfannkuchen wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem is that most necessary projects aren’t fun, and most fun projects aren’t necessary. Does anyone design dishwashers as a hobby, as an easy example? How do you propose we motivate people to do work that isn’t fun? Currently the carrot of higher pay or ownership in a more valuable thing is doing that, so we would need something to replace it if that goes away.

I'm 200% convinced there are plenty of people out there who could easily be nerdsniped into building an open source dishwasher! Hackers get up to all kinds of stuff that doesn't seem traditionally fun!

Does QAing Dishwasher firmware sound fun to you ?

Even if you imagine software development to be generally fun, even the mundane, the rest of the workflow can be God awful boring. While Communism is a cool idea , it never works since you need incentives to motivate people.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#418

Post by arrosenberg »

ajkjk wrote: post #325
arrosenberg wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My question is: why isn't there yet a thing (or is there?) that works like AWS, but has the UX experience of a smartphone: you can install "apps" on it -- which you pay for hosting / bandwidth -- and it handles integration with all your devices, while leaving you in charge of how they're configured and what happens with the data? Heroku?

Not at all. I can't "install a cloud storage app on my Heroku and then access it on my phone" without significant technical skills. As an engineer I could figure it out, but I won't, because I don't want to deal with that. Instead I will fantasize about how it ought to work.

Maybe https://sandstorm.io/ then?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#419

Post by SequoiaHope »

valval wrote: post #354
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #306

Computers have an unprecedented ability to reproduce value for free. Programmers need a relatively fixed amount of resources to thrive. (The value of resources varies by location but we all need things like food, shelter, transportation, clothing, tools, etc etc) If we can find a way to make sure every person has what they need to thrive regardless of their income, programmers can open source all of their software an…

I mean, I’ve seen worse arguments for socialism, but you seem to be painting an overly rosy picture. Yes, computers can reproduce software at zero marginal cost, but there’s still a considerable investment in the initial creation and ongoing maintenance. While I’m all for a world where programmers and engineers are able to fully devote themselves to open source projects, it’s not as simple as just making sure everyon…

I certainly think open source under capitalism (work at the margins, engineers spread thin) will always be worse than open source under socialism (abundant workforce, lower stress, more time available).

As far as initial investment in the creation of the software - yeah, that’s programmer time. The point of my scheme is to lower the cost of programmer time because their needs are already met, thus lowering the cost of initial investment.

Hardware is a separate concern but I have a whole thing about how open source hardware tends to bring the hardware costs down to the lowest physically possible cost. Just look at 3D printers under patent ($25k) versus ten years after the patents expired and open source took over the low end ($250).

I’m not sure how Occam’s razor would suggest that the status quo is close to the ideal situation here. Those seem unrelated.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#420

Post by carlosjobim »

smolder wrote: post #340
pfannkuchen wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem is that most necessary projects aren’t fun, and most fun projects aren’t necessary. Does anyone design dishwashers as a hobby, as an easy example? How do you propose we motivate people to do work that isn’t fun? Currently the carrot of higher pay or ownership in a more valuable thing is doing that, so we would need something to replace it if that goes away.

There are potentially other carrots aside from material wealth that can motivate people to do unpleasant work. Currently it takes significant pay to get people to do certain important but thankless jobs. We could thank them. A legacy is important to many people. They may enjoy an immutable commemoration of their work, if they're secure in a material sense.

The USSR honored their hardest and most productive workers with huge billboards and monuments to their eternal glory and legacy. Could you name one?
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