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Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

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Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#111
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody wants to talk about how bad the sweatshop is. Nobody wants to talk about the poverty that was so bad, people jumped at the chance to work in the sweatshop.

Paul Krugman literally wrote a notorious article about this. https://slate.com/business/1997/03/in-praise-of-cheap-labor....

The more I think about the current state of things, and the more I learn about the ugly truth behind the industrial revolution prior to workers rights and such, the more I understand how Marx came to his conclusions. And why the communist movement developed.

Last time, the industrial revolution ate the artisans. Then automation ate the blue collar jobs in the industrialized world. It seem digitalization is going to eat the white collar jobs, kind of starting, it seems, with the lower level dev jobs that helped to bring this whole thing about in the first place. Early on it was workers forming unions that brought change about, not sure if white collar employees, currently being highly paid, will do the same thing.

Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#112
post #51

As companies continually erode employee benefits and aggressively seek out ever cheaper labor, we have to continually be reminded how innovative and great this "massive shift enabled in large part by new technology" is going to be. Now you're going to get paid in unregulated tokens, isn't that amazing! And guess what? Not using actual money also let's them access "millions of talented freelancers live in countries wh…

Is your solution to keep the walled garden systems we currently have that benefit proportionally very few people on earth? Why not give the rest of the world access to the tools for economical freedom too? And please let's not even debate if they work or not yet, I am more interested in the reasoning behind preserving the current status quo where billions of people literally cannot access these tools.

> Is your solution to keep the walled garden systems we currently have that benefit proportionally very few people on earth?

Almost every single person on Earth benefits in some way from the current systems over not having them at all. Yes, they tend to let power and resources accumulate with a select few, which is not necessarily the best or most moral outcome. I'd be interested to know why you think this wouldn't be the case with the alternatives - regardless of the intentions of well-meaning ideologues, the powerful tend to get what they want in the end.

> Why not give the rest of the world access to the tools for economical freedom too?

If the issue was as simple as this sentence, then sure. In reality it isn't, though. I could flip it and ask "why abandon regulations that limit how capital can exploit labor and prevent criminals from evading laws"?

> And please let's not even debate if they work or not yet, I am more interested in the reasoning behind preserving the current status quo where billions of people literally cannot access these tools.

What line of thinking is this? Of course the reasoning behind preserving the current status quo, which is a known quantity, over something new, could well be that you don't yet know if or how the alternatives work? That doesn't mean that they can't be better or shouldn't be implemented at some point, but it's totally valid not to want to run head-first into something unknown and potentially detrimental, just because what we have now is imperfect.

Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#113

It is a massive mistake that Stripe is offering anything in the crypto space as everyone and Stripe knows it is full of fraud, money laundering, scams and it is completely unregulated. I look forward to the day that Stripe will get investigated for all of the above with this and end up like Paypal, eventually freezing or banning these accounts. Crypto does not offer anything new at all. EDIT: It seems Stripe and Cryp…

> EDIT: It seems Stripe and Crypto apologists have downvoted & flagged my comment since Stripe is somehow a HN / YC darling that is immune from valid criticism even if they venture into crypto scamming, with no usecase that is better than the current financial system. > It is a massive mistake that Stripe is offering anything in the crypto space as everyone and Stripe knows it is full of fraud, money laundering, scam…

> Using the same argument, it could be said that cash should be banned because its private & semi-anonymous nature allows for its use in transactions for gambling, drug use, child porngraphy, assasinations, & slave trafficking.

If we somehow magically had come up with a cashless system first, and cash instead was introduced now, I am quite sure that yes there would be calls to ban it for those reasons. It is however an ancient legacy system that's deeply entrenched in our societies, so we're living with it for now, although perhaps not forever.

Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#115
I stopped reading at “in 5 years the majority of workers will be freelancers”. Am I missing something? Seems like an incredibly naive article. The statement I mentioned, for example, either doesn’t know what a freelancer or majority is. Or am I totally in the dark regarding how the world is employed? Basic functions of society around the world will still require traditionally employed people as the majority, yes? Not to mention that the corporate workplace isn’t going away anytime soon in the developed world.

Take your typical painting/handyman/landscaping/small-scale-construction business as an example. In the US at least: you could call the owner a freelancer, but the majority of the small business is traditionally employed workers.

Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#116

I stopped reading at “in 5 years the majority of workers will be freelancers”. Am I missing something? Seems like an incredibly naive article. The statement I mentioned, for example, either doesn’t know what a freelancer or majority is. Or am I totally in the dark regarding how the world is employed? Basic functions of society around the world will still require traditionally employed people as the majority, yes? Not…

I read it less as a prediction and more like a goal of the, pardon the French, capitalist elite for future employment. Amazon's constabt fight against unions, the Apple-Google-Facebook cartel around SV dev salaries, they all fall into the same bucket.

Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#117
post #51

As companies continually erode employee benefits and aggressively seek out ever cheaper labor, we have to continually be reminded how innovative and great this "massive shift enabled in large part by new technology" is going to be. Now you're going to get paid in unregulated tokens, isn't that amazing! And guess what? Not using actual money also let's them access "millions of talented freelancers live in countries wh…

I don't understand your reasoning. So you are saying paying privileged workers is better than paying underprivileged workers. Labor laws are non existent only because of economy. There hasn't been any country in history with good economy and bad labor conditions for citizens.

Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#118
post #51

As companies continually erode employee benefits and aggressively seek out ever cheaper labor, we have to continually be reminded how innovative and great this "massive shift enabled in large part by new technology" is going to be. Now you're going to get paid in unregulated tokens, isn't that amazing! And guess what? Not using actual money also let's them access "millions of talented freelancers live in countries wh…

You get paid in unregulated tokens which you can trade for hard cash money, if you so need. What's bad with having the option to do so?

Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#119
> Then he went on Braintrust and met Stardust, a US-based NFT gaming company. They paid Singh to work remotely, ... In his first three months on Braintrust, Singh earned $50,000

I wish the best to the guy, yet i'm wondering does anybody think it is kind of fishy?

Re: Expanding access to the future of work with crypto payouts

#120
post #51

As companies continually erode employee benefits and aggressively seek out ever cheaper labor, we have to continually be reminded how innovative and great this "massive shift enabled in large part by new technology" is going to be. Now you're going to get paid in unregulated tokens, isn't that amazing! And guess what? Not using actual money also let's them access "millions of talented freelancers live in countries wh…

Or maybe everyone could have a more prosperous life, if we didn't have so many people, like you, scared of losing their priviledged positions, and using exploitation as an excuse to quell any potential competition. If you're so afraid anyone will get exploited, spend your time telling them how much you make, so they dare charge a bit more.
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