Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A nation of slaves

antipope.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 258 posts

Re: A nation of slaves

#191

Post by seestheday »

wmt wrote: post #70
rjzzleep wrote: post #11

funny i was talking about something similar with a friend last night. think about this: in a lot of professions it's common to study about up to 10 years before you start working. that's after 12-13 years of school(unless you're a professional athlete) you study for a quarter century. think about it. a quarter of a century. that's the height of your youth. then you're allowed to work for 40 years so you can "enjoy" y…

Studying for a quarter of a century during the height of your youth a reward on its own, and it's unfortunate that for so many it's just a path to employment. I wouldn't change that even in the imaginary utopia I can dream about. What's BS is having to pay for that is the less fortunate countries, and a pressure to churn people through it as fast as possible.

I wish I could just study new things constantly.

I do it as a hobby. Every once and a while I find a completely new rabbit hole to dive into and I find it exhilarating. I wish I could spend all of my time learning and making new things, ranging from computer systems/programs to rebuilding old motorcycles/cars or learning how to draw.

I did find my physics degree a little tiring by the 4th year, but that was mostly because I had discovered computer science.

Re: A nation of slaves

#192

Post by angersock »

dang wrote: post #181
angersock wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? That's quite silly. On the internet/TV for example, you are failing to take into account the spread of tech and efficiency. We can have factories produce TVs automatically, and internet infrastructure doesn't require a huge number of people to keep it running--and most of them, I wager, would be happy to keep doing what they're doing, because it's fun . As for fancy restaurants or organic groceries...that's jus…

What? That's quite silly. [...] I'm sorry, but your assertion isn't borne out by thought. This comment would have been better without its hostile preface and its hostile appendix. Please don't use such language on Hacker News. All: Please re-read what you've posted and, if it contains phrases that contribute hostility to the discussion, edit them out. This is really important, because (speaking metaphorically) our br…

This is meant in all seriousness (and posted here instead of private mail because it is something that others could probably benefit from reading):

The preface is the gist of my post ("I disagree with your reasoning, and find it absurd."), and the appendix summarizes the conclusion ("The conclusion you've come to does not follow logically once you take into account other factors").

I agree (having written some bad posts in my time) that writing "You're a fucking idiot, how the hell did you come up with this?" is not good discourse.

At the same time, avoiding any flavor or diction in our writing here would make it tedious to read and worse still boring to write.

There's got to be some middle-ground; I assure you that it wasn't written to be hostile (consider the corrective reply and my acknowledgement elsewhere in this subthread).

EDIT: Also, where do you come down on the "meta discussion kills" theory of communities?

Re: A nation of slaves

#193

Post by bausson »

jerf wrote: post #175
conanbatt wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BI requires lots of experimentation, cant go from 0 to BI nationwide in one day. The "wealth creation" argument is flimsy, but recognizing that the consequences of BI are unknown is not. Also, i found this phrase really upsetting: "A society that is paying more for its basic needs is a poorer society" It would have been a perfectly applicable argument against abolishing slavery. I can assure you that all low-end jobs…

"It would have been a perfectly applicable argument against abolishing slavery." It would have been wrong, though; slavery is an abuse of power to force people who could otherwise be very productive members of society to do relatively low-value tasks. I'm pretty sure most historians agree that slavery was either not a net economic win, or on its way to not being an economic win, by the time it was abolished. You then…

The objective of basic income is not to increase everyone's wealth, but to increase overall quality of life.

Restaurants wouldn't disappear, but it would be a bit more expensive. Also, I suppose restaurants which treat their personal badly would quickly disappear. (You can say that's wishful thinking, but the lever effect would be quite effective against those).

If you really love your job, and that's everything for you, ok, not much of a change, you may even get a bit less money. Chance is that you work with people who enjoy it too, and basic income wouldn't be much of a change for you.

But if you have a side project you want to launch, it could be what makes the difference, even if it wouldn't be possible in the current economy. Or you could take a few years off to raise your children (or help them go through a difficult period, I heard it can happen).

"Established" company have a lot to loose in that proposal, mainly those we depend on cheap labor. But it would also create a lot of opportunities on the market, so the economical aspect wouldn't be that bad.

What kind of opportunities? Let's say, if people have a bit more free time, child education through fab-lab would be pretty neat (complement or replacement of school, IDK). This is just one "on the spot" idea, it could be done today... if people took the time, or could take it.

Re: A nation of slaves

#194

Post by josephschmoe »

mjmahone17 wrote: post #14

One of the biggest views I see in my parents and grandparents: work provides purpose and dignity, and without work, you have no purpose, and therefore, you are a failure. This is really hard to respond to, especially with people who have spent 50 years working with this mindset, because they feel "invalidated" or "worthless" if their life's worth isn't measured by their work output. I don't think that's necessarily a…

[3] is mostly unemployed right now from what I understand.

Re: A nation of slaves

#195

Post by marcosdumay »

mrow84 wrote: post #161
crusso wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value: not so much for them. How is a "dramatic reduction in poverty" not of much value? http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/stats-on-human-rights/sta...

I think pessimizer was saying that the relative return to the labour at the bottom end is low. It is like (to be hyperbolic) living a life of luxury, but on giving the starving man who labours for you a bit of food, suggesting that that is ample reward for his efforts, because of how much value that bit of food has for him. Then, you can top that off by saying that it doesn't matter how much food he produces for you,…

> People reject the labour theory of value, probably correctly in fundamental terms, but the marginal and subjective theories of value both seem to promote (and justify) this kind of structural inequality.

Economics is (at least most of it) a science. It doe not promote or justify anything; it tries to describe the real world, and tell you what consequences any input would have.

The Labor Theory of Value is just not real.

Re: A nation of slaves

#196

Post by saraid216 »

pgeorgi wrote: post #86
rayiner wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I have with your viewpoint is that it's contrary to what we've seen empirically. Sub-cultures where people don't work, but have their basic needs met aren't exactly flourishing. Work doesn't just give people purpose and dignity, it creates essential social structure without which communities dissolve. I think it's quite possible that we could organize communities around something other than work. Colleges…

I think it's because such subcultures are self-selecting - why would a Wall Street banker (of which most seem to be terribly motivated) become part of such a group? There are a number of experiments (eg. across Africa) where a BI-like model made relatively desolate towns flourish. Basic Income needn't provide luxuries- as long as it eliminates the threat of physical harm out of the job market (thus allowing everyone…

> There are a number of experiments (eg. across Africa) where a BI-like model made relatively desolate towns flourish.

Can you provide citations? I've suggested this kind of experiment as a proof-of-concept for BI, but I've never actually heard of it being done except for That One Neighborhood In Montreal or wherever it was.

Re: A nation of slaves

#197

Post by pdonis »

mrow84 wrote: post #161
crusso wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value: not so much for them. How is a "dramatic reduction in poverty" not of much value? http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/stats-on-human-rights/sta...

I think pessimizer was saying that the relative return to the labour at the bottom end is low. It is like (to be hyperbolic) living a life of luxury, but on giving the starving man who labours for you a bit of food, suggesting that that is ample reward for his efforts, because of how much value that bit of food has for him. Then, you can top that off by saying that it doesn't matter how much food he produces for you,…

> just under 12% of the cost (6% of the sale price) went to the people who made the yarn, cut the cloth, and sewed it all together.

And what about the people who took the completed T-shirts and moved them to where they were wanted? That somehow has no value? People who ordered the T-shirts didn't order T-shirts sitting piled up in a factory; they ordered them so they could wear them. That means making the product is only the first step: then you have to move the product to the end user (shipping and handling), but before you can do that you have to figure out where the end user is and make sure he has paid for the product (order fulfillment).

For those three activities (production, order fulfillment, and shipping/handling), I get, respectively, $2.00, $1.79, and $2.36 (note that I've included both stages of shipping in the shipping/handling cost)--i.e., all roughly equal. That seems fair to me. In fact, if we include "printing" in production (which seems reasonable--people ordered a T-shirt with a design printed on it, not a plain one), that cost goes up to $2.90, more than the total shipping/handling cost. (Note, btw, that graphic design was only $0.12 per shirt, basically negligible.)

The real message of the cost breakdown, to me, is how much overhead there is: $1.21 per shirt in Kickstarter fees, $1.04 per shirt in Amazon payment fees, $0.33 per shirt in tariff, and $2.67 per shirt in "jockey costs" (presumably meaning company overhead for Jockey itself). That adds up to $5.25 per shirt in overhead, or about 42% of the cost.

Re: A nation of slaves

#198

Post by alexeisadeski3 »

tunap wrote: post #170
alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What I mean is, when everyone has a baseline amount of money, the relative scarcity is diminished and the market prices will inflate as the value of money(real & perceived) decreases. "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"?

I had to Goog it, but I guess you're questioning whether I refer to... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetarism I guess so, I am not an economist. That seems to be the cycle repeated since the dawn of human interactions, however. With scarcity comes demand, market sets price... and the rest of the spiel. A game that has been gamed long before we came along, but yeah, that seems to be how it works historically.

Your previous post claims that guaranteed minimum income may cause inflation. I replied with a quote that inflation is always and everywhere caused by monetary changes.

My point thus being that a guaranteed minimum income would not cause inflation.

Prices change in response to market forces, yes.

But micro price changes are not inflation.

Inflation is a macro level phenomenon, caused "always and everywhere" by monetary changes (debasement etc).

Re: A nation of slaves

#199

Post by handzhiev »

jal278 wrote: post #93
fidotron wrote: post #38

This looks like a lot of words to disguise the fact it's neo-luddism. With technological progress worker roles are eliminated, but the idea is that the market has demand for new currently non-existent things and as the progress enables those things to come into existence creating new jobs as it goes. The much larger problem is people are genuinely getting conditioned to receiving a lot for nothing, and this has disto…

> With technological progress worker roles are eliminated, but the idea is that the market has demand for new currently non-existent things and as the progress enables those things to come into existence creating new jobs as it goes. The author is arguing that this isn't always the case. You can't take it as an axiom that the market will always have need for employing everyone . For example, as automation becomes mor…

Why do people have to be employed at all? If computers/robots become as good (I don't see this in close future), people will just use them to produce what they need and they will not need money.

Re: A nation of slaves

#200

Post by JasonIpswitch »

thedufer wrote: post #79
hnnewguy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But education industry (and universities) would have to change their methods, because nowadays peoples are willing to commit 100,000's of $ to get a well paying job, this incentive would be gone, the better paying one being the physical labor, with low education requirement. Why would the incentive disappear? A basic income means that people don't make zero when they don't work; filling jobs would still be based on…

People are willing to commit to unfulfilling, exhausting minimum wage jobs because the alternative is to not have a home/decent food/a little spending money. If those needs are already fulfilled, its going to take more to convince people to do something economically necessary but unfulfilling/difficult. So, the supply drops (many people choose to simply sit out the whole job thing if its going to be unfulfilling). At…

Or, to paraphrase, fast-food and big box stores might not be viable business models in such a world?
Post reply on HN