111–120 of 397 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I would certainly rather work and have my dignity... I've never felt any pride in busy work, I've always found it to be insulting. I would have thought everybody felt the same way, but I guess I would have been wrong.
Building a road isn't busywork; when it's done, there's a road where no road was before.
"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea." I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount of roadwork was being done by men with shovels and other fairly low tech. I asked about it, and was told, to paraphrase, "Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be u…
They could have employed even more people if they gave them spoons instead of shovels.
The last few posts from Sam Altman have been deeply troubling and make me worried for the future of YC. He presents leftist ideas as fact without evidence of serious critical thought or even basic economic education. "The previous one, the industrial revolution, created lots of jobs because the new technology required huge numbers of humans to run it." This is factually wrong, but its easier to demonstrate with a tho…
You have a curious definition of "leftist." This essay more or less boils down to "technology is awesome, except for the part where it makes the proles restless, someone really ought to figure out some way to fix that." Which is pretty bog-standard 21st century Davos-über-alles capitalist thinking.
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"Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be unemployed." And you believed that? It comes down to money -- there are plenty of people in India willing to work for essentially nothing, and so labor is cheaper than equipment. There's nothing altruistic here... businesses in the US or anywhere else would be happy to replace mach…
There's actually many government programs in India that are expressly designed to provide guaranteed employment for laborers for a set number of days each year.
"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea." I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount of roadwork was being done by men with shovels and other fairly low tech. I asked about it, and was told, to paraphrase, "Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be u…
At one point the US was primarily an agrarian society, and more than 90% of labor worked on a farm. Imagine telling someone from that society that some day, tech would allow less than 2% of the workforce to produce many times more food than the current total output. I'm sure they would express a similar concern, though we know they'd be wrong.
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Yes biology is complicated. But we are starting to understand it reasonably well,and more importantly ,we're starting to design it even without understanding. For example, there's a company that produces microbes that create certain materials(genomatica), and uses evolution(with the goal being yield per bacteria) to evolve much more efficient strains - even without deeply understanding how the cell work.And i believe…
I'm just going to say what should be obvious: One is not going to be able to engineer a dangerous plague that will wipe out the human race in one shot. One would have to do experiments, and those experiments will be noticed, because people will get sick and die. I did get lucky and design, from first principles, a 4-fold increase in enzyme activity once, but I am not sure that is something I could repeat.
"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea." I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount of roadwork was being done by men with shovels and other fairly low tech. I asked about it, and was told, to paraphrase, "Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be u…
Dignity!
Probably would have been better to give them the money, and tell them not to base their identity on their employment status. If one in a thousand invented something new, that's a net benefit for society.
"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea." I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount of roadwork was being done by men with shovels and other fairly low tech. I asked about it, and was told, to paraphrase, "Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be u…
I knew I would hear these objections... and I still stand by my assertion in general.
Your line "I hear these objections, but I still stand by my assertion" reminds me of the saying (translated to English) - "100 out of 80 (sic) people are cheats, yet my India is great"
"Trying to hold on to worthless jobs is a terrible but popular idea." I'm not sure I agree with this proposition. When I was in India, I noticed a large amount of roadwork was being done by men with shovels and other fairly low tech. I asked about it, and was told, to paraphrase, "Sure, we could do it better and faster with machines, but it is better for society to provide employment to those who would otherwise be u…
I don't think the alternative is to sit around and do nothing. Economies are much more dynamic than that, and while it's true some may suffer in the short-run, it's wouldn't be like that forever. At one point the US was primarily an agrarian society, and more than 90% of labor worked on a farm. Imagine telling someone from that society that some day, tech would allow less than 2% of the workforce to produce many time…
I'm not so sure. The work they did contributed to society. There are plenty of people now being paid high amounts of money for made up, bullshit jobs that provide no benefit to society and create little to nothing.
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Basic income. People may scoff, but this is one of the extremely rare ideas that can draw significant support from both sides of the isle in the US. There are pockets of strong opposition to the idea on both the right and the left, but I can only hope that the far left's opposition to basic income continues. That opposition in and off itself makes most politicians in this country take a serious look at the idea.
I'd say it's one of the rare ideas that almost no one supports. The right obviously objects to redistribution. The left prefers inefficient redistribution. It's hard to say there's much tangible opposition on the far left or that opposition causes consideration or that most politicians are taking a serious look. I think you might have just gone 0 for 5.
That's not quite true; just they want the main beneficiaries of redistribution to be the bureaucratic class rather than the working class. What you see as inefficiency (in terms of money reaching the end recipients) is in fact, the actual design doing what it was intended to do. Ideally (for them) ALL the money would go on civil servant salaries.