Are you paid to look busy? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#131

Post by keithpeter » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:25 PM UTC

ZenPro wrote: post #82

paulhauggis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds great, but you still need money to survive. This would mean that the few that did work would essentially be supporting the rest of society. Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from me by the government to support people that didn't need to do anything?? You don't have to get a crappy job and work for someone you hate for the rest of…

The classic fallacy is that everyone can be an entrepreneur. They cannot. A. Entrepreneurs need employees to scale B. If everyone was an Entrepreneur there would be very few consumers for goods and services.

Especially if everyone was bootstrapping.

Mildly provocative thought: what % of Ycombinator assisted companies have customers with 'real jobs' (by definition of OP, which I accept may be contested)?

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#132

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:25 PM UTC

TorKlingberg wrote: post #70

xr09 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When reading stuff like this I wonder, how do the Windows folks manage to do the same? A browser disguised as Visual Studio? doubledesktop.exe? I'm so thankful for my *nix with all these little toys.

http://codereddit.com/ Reddit that looks like source code. For opening in Visual Studio's built-in browser. I am not a Windows dev.

[deleted]

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#133

Post by kyllo » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:26 PM UTC

paulhauggis wrote: post #55

ryandrake wrote: post #22

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery becau…

This sounds great, but you still need money to survive. This would mean that the few that did work would essentially be supporting the rest of society. Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from me by the government to support people that didn't need to do anything?? You don't have to get a crappy job and work for someone you hate for the rest of…

How is supporting people by employing them in unproductive bullshit jobs any better than supporting them with basic income? They are getting paid to do nothing of value either way.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#134

Post by noonespecial » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:26 PM UTC

When all you pay for is butts in the seats, don't be surprised if the only thing you get is a bunch of asses.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#135

Post by vidarh » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:29 PM UTC

21echoes wrote: post #112

zo1 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And all of this runs anathema to the usual sort of libertarian financial-might-makes-right of the tech world, unfortunately."? Woah, hold on there. Did you really just imply that "financial-might-makes-right" is a Libertarian thing/concept? That is absolutely not true, and I challenge you to prove otherwise. I'm honestly curious why you would even think that. If you do, then you've been drinking some seriously nasty…

Libertarianism is the belief that the only valid rights are 1) private property, and 2) no initiated direct physical violence. The only time either of these rules can be violated is: the second one may be violated to punish those who violated rule 1 or 2 (notice: rule 1 can never be violated). a pretty direct, if over-simplified, outcome: someone with a lot of financial might (say, an apple orchard), can deny another…

> Libertarianism is the belief that the only valid rights are 1) private property, and 2) no initiated direct physical violence.

That's simply not true. Libertarianism is a group of related ideologies that includes libertarian socialism - often called "left communism" (and derided as such in Lenin's "Left-Wing Communism - An infantile disorder").

What libertarian ideologies share, is liberty as a prime goal. But many libertarian ideologies see private property as antithetical to liberty, as it intrinsically restricts access to limited natural resources, even when sharing access to the same would cause minimal reduction in liberty for someone who might otherwise have exclusive access to said property.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#136

Post by appreneur » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:30 PM UTC

I always felt most people in IT offices occur very busy, when their work is harldy any time consuming, just to keep their job, they act busy all the time...I felt this false pretense is the primary reason most people loose confidence in trying new things and being experimental.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#137

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:31 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #22

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery becau…

[deleted]

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#138

Post by Terr_ » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:32 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #127

turnip1979 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not someone who downvoted you but would like to discuss your points. Lets start bottom up. 1) You cannot legally collect berries in the woods. That may have been possible a few hundred years ago. For all my life, I've lived in concrete jungles where pretty much every shrub was manicured and every tree was allowed to survive for aesthetic reasons. More so that that, we don't have commons any more. In the stone age…

> Starting any business requires capital. Not really. A large number of businesses can be started with essentially nothing. Rowling wrote "Harry Potter" on a yellow pad, for one example.

Inversely proportional to your odds is success, though.

For many people the stakes are a bit too high: people who are already affluent with safety nets can tolerate more risk.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#139

Post by Filligree » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:34 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #128

decasteve wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bucky talked a lot about a world where there was enough food to go around, people were educated, and many jobs were being automated. I assumed he was party inspired by the Green Revolution/Norman Borlaug. On top of this, Bucky lived through an education transformation, going from a society in the late 1800s which had a global illiteracy of 85% to a complete flip to 85% global literacy--in his lifetime. He talked abou…

> Bucky talked a lot about a world where there was enough food to go around, people were educated, and many jobs were being automated. I assumed he was party inspired by the Green Revolution/Norman Borlaug. That notion dates back to the 1840's at least - the industrial revolution triggered ideological developments out of a growing optimism over the ability of finally doing away with poverty. The birth of socialism wa…

Interesting~

That? That sounds a lot more likely to be true than anything else I've yet heard attributed to him.

Re: Are you paid to look busy?

#140

Post by klunger » Sat, May 10, 2014, 7:34 PM UTC

vishnugupta wrote: post #119

chasing wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You appear to be getting downvoted, but you've struck at the heart of the issue: If we want to do away with meaningless jobs, people will still need resources to survive. And that "one-in-ten-thousand" (or whatever) will need to be taxed very heavily so the wealth can be spread. We can't have all of our financial resources siloed into an increasingly small number of people's wallets. A great benefit to this system wi…

> And that "one-in-ten-thousand" (or whatever) will need to be taxed very heavily so the wealth can be spread I think this is always going to be problematic because once wealth gets concentrated it's going to be very hard to redistribute it, short of some revolution or coup. And I sense that this is going to be especially hard in democratic countries where there's a very close nexus between elected representatives an…

Don't forget: 10. Wal-Mart and Friends: Paying your employees an extremely low wage with unpredictable shifts (so they can't get a second job). The end result being that your employees need food stamps to survive, so your profits are ultimately subsidized by tax payers.