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A world where people pay for software

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#491

Post by TaylorAlexander »

raincole wrote: post #447
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…

Quite a lot big open source projects are backed by big cooperations.

Actually all open source projects are big cooperations. :)

Re: A world where people pay for software

#492

Post by carlosjobim »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #444
carlosjobim wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yuri Gagarin Also I was born in 1984 in the USA so I don't have a lot of experience with billboards in Soviet Russia...

The USSR is the only example I can think of where they ever tried for a long time to elevate workers in this way instead if paying them better, like the parent commenter asked for.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#494

Post by pfannkuchen »

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.

> immutable commemoration

Are you saying that we can make communism work with… NFTs?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#495

Post by pfannkuchen »

smolder wrote: post #453
lend000 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem smart and it always amazes me how popular communist concepts are with smart people on HN. Didn't you have some assigned group projects in school? Perhaps some people are easily satisfied by carrying the burden of other people who they don't know and who don't appreciate them, but I'd wager a ridiculously high majority of value producers would not be. Humans are social animals, but we're individuals first and…

I think people misunderstood where I was coming from a bit. To be clear, I wasn't commenting in support of communism, or against rewarding merit, or against rewarding merit with money. Status in life and legacy in death are still motivators that matter, though, and with the right set of shared values, they are powerful. We still generally have a culture in the US of respecting our veterans and service members, for ex…

Respect for military is probably well aligned with instinct though— I’m guessing most tribes have respect for their warriors. Can we repeat this for an arbitrary behavior that is not so aligned? Maybe, maybe not?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#496

Post by pfannkuchen »

Niksko wrote: post #414
hutzlibu wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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".

Absent corruption, profits must by definition come from money paid by people who determined that, according to themselves, the work being paid for has value. This is why capitalism works. It is a mass, distributed, value computation engine.

Considering this, I don’t see how effort is wasted on profit, since the effort produced something that someone considered valuable. Do we have another way of computing value at scale? To date, I haven’t seen any realistic proposals.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#497

Post by CMCDragonkai »

myk9001 wrote: post #456
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We only have structures like this due to the class system, where some people never shovel shit and some people do it all week long. A great suggestion for this incidentally brought up by Noam Chomsky in 1976 is to rotate people through these jobs, so everyone spends maybe two days a month on the task. People appreciate a little bit of difficult labor, it just sucks when you have to do it every day for survival. I lin…

Without any intention of snark or confrontation whatsoever, can I ask you 1) Have you personally tried to put this idea to practice? If yes, for how long? Would you be willing to share some details? If no, why not? It doesn't take changing the entire society, you can do something like that literally now. Be creative, travel to a different random town twice a month and offer to clean toilets in a couple of buildings?…

I believe this concept was tried out in communist states. They sent intellectuals out to farms in china so they could get some hard manual labour.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#498

Post by pfannkuchen »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #469
TylerE wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, 3d printers are a special case. People aren’t building a washing machine at home. That takes industrial machinery.

Yes and to make my vision a reality we need community ownership of the means of production, which would 100% mean access to these tools. With appropriate access to tools, bored engineers under such a system can get a LOT of shit done.

> community ownership of the means of production, which would 100% mean access to these tools

I’ll bite. Who builds the tools?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#499

Post by pfannkuchen »

drekipus wrote: post #481
JoshTriplett wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious answer is "pay people more". If we had UBI, for instance, and people did not have to work in order to have basic needs (food and shelter) met, then the willingness to do unpleasant jobs like sewer cleaning will go down, and it'll be necessary to pay people more to do that work. And the need to pay people more will then drive technological innovation that may today not be worthwhile because "just hire some…

> UBI plus a free market If there's a ubi, then there's price floor that is higher than a non ubi price floor, meaning that the median prices of goods go up, less taxes to find the ubi, and the ubi must then increase to meet the increased costs for a basic standard of living. Well done you invented inflation.

Maybe, maybe not. It does depend on how efficient we could make basic necessity items, and those are only a tiny portion of the modern economy, I suppose. Though I don’t trust the government to not simultaneously screw with the incentives for producing those items, whether by accident or not, which would make a situation like the one you describe more likely. Also it’s not at all clear how housing would work— I’m guessing people would complain about the sort of housing you could get for a workable UBI amount (i.e. one that is actually in equilibrium with the rest of the economy, as in being a tiny rider-on). This would realistically politically cause the amount to keep going up (and thus cause inflation).

Re: A world where people pay for software

#500

Post by maest »

scarface_74 wrote: post #203
gizmo wrote: post #21

Software has no marginal cost. You can make something that's used by untold millions of people. Even if many people pirate enough people won't for you to recoup your development cost and then some. Software is easier to produce, sell, and distribute than any physical product. You don't have to worry about warehouses filled with unsold inventory. You don't have to worry about quality control and returns. It still blow…

> still blows my mind how much easier it is to run a business that deals with bytes instead of atoms That must be why most software startups succeed.

You must have misread. GP said "easier" not "easy".

Hard tech startups are notoriously harder to get off the ground than software companies.

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