I keep coming back to this thought. Maybe it’s how I was raised, but knowing that I’m doing something useful to other people / humanity is the entire point.
When a machine can do everything better than we can, then what do we derive meaning from?
I usually get out of the existential dread by thinking that we’re still some time away from the issue, and that there will still be some pursuits left, like space colonization. But it’s not fully satisfying.
He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry, or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who’d taken a notion to help out for a while.
“Of course I don’t have to do this,” one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. “But look, this table’s clean.”
He agreed that the table was clean.
“Usually,” the man said. “I work on alien – no offense – alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that’s my specialty… like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalog, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But… the job’s never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get reevaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled… but” – he slapped the table – “when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement.”
“But in the end, it’s still just cleaning a table.”
“And therefore does not really signify anything on the cosmic scale of events?” the man suggested.
He smiled in response to the man’s grin, “Well, yes.”
“But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway” – the man laughed – “people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,” the man said with a smile, “it’s a good way of meeting people. So where are you from anyway?”
It definitely is (and I would encourage that even).
But such resistance cannot be luddite if it actually wants to win. Therefore, its goal cannot be "no AI", but rather "AI used for the benefit of society".
I'm not worried about controlling ASI acting on its own behalf.
What we need is to prevent humans in position of power from using the fledging AI that they control to entrench themselves and stomp on the rest of us.
My grandmother-in-law especially enjoyed our visits, engaging her in conversation, she delighted in serving us a lovely hot pot of tea. We would give her a few days notice so she could bake a cake, later she just bought one.
Thanking of yourself as "redundant" limits your view of a human to that of a machine, and in doing so you are doing humanity a great disservice. I'd recommend reading the Culture series for a vision of a future where AI has essentially taken over and humans can live out their lives as they want instead of as they need to.
You don't need "companies". You need enough customers to buy/support your work so that you get a living out of it.
Being a software developer is a _facet_ of your work. You (unconsciously perhaps) do many other things around/with it that the most efficient AI today cannot do alone. And AGI is still far on the horizon, if not a mirage.
Hey we're talking about a future scenario where AGI actually exists and is vastly better at software development than any human, and can do it much cheaper than current developer salaries.
We're talking about science fiction which may become true much sooner than most people expect.
I would be competing with cheap AGI services so it makes no difference whether I am a freelancer or not.
> Being a software developer is a _facet_ of your work. You (unconsciously perhaps) do many other things around/with it
The non-development parts of my job are not interesting at all. If that's gone then my career is finished. I'm done.
> scenario where AGI actually exists and is vastly better at software development than any human
then humans deservedly should no longer be doing software development, and those who were doing it would necessarily be the economic sacrifices. This has happened to many industries before, and shall continue to happen to others. I don't think there's any necessity to stop it - just ease the transition via taxpayer funded schemes.
However, none of this stops anyone from persuing an artisanal craft - because otherwise, they would be persuing it for economic reasons rather than artistic reasons.
> then humans deservedly should no longer be doing software development
Then you could argue that humans won't "deserve" to exist when aliens show up with superior military technology. This isn't a matter of technology becoming obsolete. It's a matter of human beings becoming obsolete.
No need to call to aliens for that, this happened within human history several times... towards other humans, and towards other species (which some were considered as pest, until it was discovered they were crucial to the ecosystem balance).
That's definitely where the danger of some AI builders is, one more example of how technology _is political_ and the reason it's not so surprising some tech leaders are totally aligned with Trump/Project 2025 (if not funding it).
(all while there is a _real_, _documented_, _non fictional_, _short term_ ubiquitous threat that is global climate change)
You sound really jaded and close minded to me in your posts. If AI replaces software development, the only reason you are "done" is because you are jaded and close minded and seemingly unwilling to adapt to the world and life.
You are totally misunderstanding the point.
I am talking about the hypothetical AGI/ASI scenario where ALL jobs are replaced by machines. Not just software development. The economic value of human labour drops to zero. This is not just about me and my own little career. It would impact everyone.
This is a serious topic that is being discussed and debated at a high level. It is an existential threat to human society. It could be catastrophically disruptive. No one knows how it would play out. There could be severe economic inequality and stratification of society unlike anything we have seen in the past.
I am actually not worried about my situation. ASI is unlikely to arrive that soon.
HN is a place for nerds to discuss technology and its future impact. Nothing has more disruptive potential than AI.
"Governments worldwide (e.g., US AI Executive Order, UK AI Safety Summit, EU AI Act), international organizations (UN), leading AI researchers (including pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio who have voiced strong concerns), major tech companies, and dedicated research institutes (like the Future of Life Institute, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk) are actively discussing, researching, and debating the implications and safety of advanced AI."
"If ASI concentrates wealth and power in the hands of those who own or control it, while simultaneously rendering most human labor economically valueless, the resulting inequality could dwarf historical examples based on land, capital, or industrial technology ownership. It raises fundamental questions about resource distribution and societal structure in a post-labor world."
> What if you WANT to have a career or a job which is now done exclusively by AGI?
> If AGI takes my job as a software developer, my career is finished. I don't know what else to do.
Do you want to have a software developer career for the sake of having a software developer career (because you enjoy it), or are you worried about your livelihood?
Use your imagination a little... There are endless things you can do. I don't understand this mindset. Especially if you are intelligent enough to be a competent software developer, you have the capacity to do a LOT or at least in my experience you probably do.
It depends; if you do that job or career for fun, then keep doing it!
If you do that job because you like contributing to society and not because you like the job itself, then find another way to contribute to society.
Even in a scenario where all jobs are taken by AGI (a utopia if we can get rid of capitalism and wealth, but a dystopia if the billionaire class is the only one that benefits), you could do something as profound as raising children, or something as social as organizing music and art festivals.
But there are people who already doing what you are currently doing. Also they do it waaaay better. If this does not make you redundant, why would AI do it?
No they don't. There is a very limited supply of developers who are better than me.
I am talking about a future where we have a practically infinite supply of cheap AGI software developers that are vastly superior to the smartest human being who ever lived.
And where do you find the energy technology required for that to happen?
Hint: it's not on the radar, but if you account for several fundamental breakthroughs in energy production, storage and transport, and all that while having positive side-effects on Earth's ecosystem, within the next 50 years.
Totally agree, IF an AGI can fully replace/improve on the work of developers, it's definitely cheaper.
But: 1/ cheaper isn't always affordable either.
2/ who will engineer/maintain/steer AGI once AGI takes the job? once you make that leap, there's no way back, no one to understand the machine that makes the stuff we rely on.
And that circles back, in some way, with the debate about AI-generated art: there's no human component in it, there's no understanding, no feedback loop, no conversation.
> who will engineer/maintain/steer AGI once AGI takes the job?
Yeah that's the question. A reduced number of human developers may be privileged to work in these companies.
It's hard to imagine a world with cheap artificial super intelligence. It's like we are introducing a new artificial life form into society, whether it's actually conscious or not.
> debate about AI-generated art
I hope there will always be a majority of people who reject AI generated music.
In the UK people from Liverpool and Manchester are rivals until they meet someone from London when it becomes a North Vs South thing. That all changes again when they meet someone from Glasgow when it becomes England Vs Scotland and yet again when the British meet someone French. There is always a more foreign foe.
The concept of the everchanging {in-group vs. out-group} is especially present in Japanese culture. It strongly affects wordchoice, too. Within a family, father might be chichi or, in more formal families, otousan, but it speaking of fathers to someone outside your family, you might refer to your father as chichi, and any other father as otousan.
One suggested weakness of UBI is a lack of purpose. I wonder if the "solution" is somewhat as you implied: jobs without a strict return on investment. You get your stipend, but you're keeping your block clean by sweeping and mulching. They're getting theirs in exchange for cranking out sourdough at cost for the neighbourhood. Someone else gardens for elderly residents.
Not UBI per se, but this exists in rural parts of Southern Spain in some way, and is called Rural Employment Plan (PER in its Spanish initials).
The give simple jobs, like cleaning or painting, to people on the lower bottom of earnings. Most people in that plan are people with low formation, like those who left school in their mid teens.
More like a labor subsidy, backed by taxes... Which would need a minimum wage law as well.
This seems like a great idea to me! Making it cheaper for businesses to hire people for these jobs would lower prices for everyone, improving accessibility of the services.
How would this help lower prices? The taxes have to be paid for by someone, and that cost should largely end up landing on the consumer.
It seems like we'd be changing who's hands the money moves through, but it still has to be paid for one way or another. If that's the case we'd risk higher prices since taxes have to subsidize prices and cover all the costs of running the program in the first place.
Tax the rich, and use the funds to pay a portion of the wages in targeted jobs, reducing the amount that the business has to pay to hit minimum wage. Then businesses continue competing on prices, but have substantially lower labor costs, bringing down prices for everyone.
In the end, you use money from the rich to pay for socially beneficial jobs. Exactly the sort of thing government is for: ensuring that social goods are provided.
That's an extremely complex economic change, I wouldn't be so certain we know exactly what would happen.
Taxing the rich can have unintended consequences. First you have to change the tax code so they actually get taxed and can't dodge it, those rules alone would be difficult to write effectively and would likely mean changing other parts of our tax code that impact everyone. If the rich do get taxed enough to cover a good chunk of wages, demand for luxury items would go down so too then would the jobs that make those products and services.
Once subsidized by a UBI, at best workers will continue to work at the same levels they do now. There will be an incentive for them to work less though, potentially driving up the labor costs you are trying to reduce. How do we accurately predict how many workers will reduce their hours or leave the workforce entirely? And how do we predict what that would do to prices?
The idea of taxing the rich to bail out everyone else is too often boiled down to a simple lever that, when pulled, magically fixes everything without any risk of unintended side effects.
But the idea of not changing the tax code because it might affect others, continuing to let the rich pay 0 taxes, is foolish.
There's an obvious wealth gap that's increasing and the people up top are getting even less oversight as we speak. As you say in your post, you don't know what the effects will be because it's not simple. But I see no compelling reason to continue with the oligarchy
Sure that would be foolish, my point wasn't that taxes should remain as-is forever though.
My point was that we can change taxes to a system that we think will work better today, but we can't claim to know what the actual results will be years from now.
The claim made earlier in the chains was that taxing the rich to subsidize wages would lower labor costs and lower prices. I don't think we can ever know well enough how a broad reaching change will land, and claiming to know prices will go down isn't reasonable.
That's just a cultural bias blind spot. It can be easily cured by finding a child, pointing your finger at them then say the magic words: "You must feel useless without a job!"
A much more terrible issue we suffer from already is that without participating we forget how our civilization works. Having a job gives you at least a tiny bit of insight that may partially map to other jobs.
Funny, because lack of purpose is exactly the problem with monotonous shit jobs. Compared to being able to freely choose to do something that's meaningful to you and brings you joy. Merely being able to afford food and shelter is not a purpose. It's survival.
Oh but don’t worry I’m sure all the people who imagine these schemes assume they’ll be the ones who aren’t obsolete and forced to work menial jobs.
Very similar to how ultra hard core libertarians assume they’ll be the ones at the top of the food chain calling the shots and not be just another peasant.
But it doesn’t really matter because there is no way in hell any of these LLM’s will uproot all of society. I use LLMs all the time, they are amazing, but they aren’t gonna replace many jobs at all. They just aren’t capable of that.
If we come to our senses it should be obvious that everyone needs to be physically active at least a few days per week, we need to condition brain plasticity, have to keep learning new things.
The available work offers the entire spectrum but we have to divide and plan it.
Im sure I’m overidealizing, but I’ve wanted to live off grid, or maybe in a small community.
I watch these historical farm documentary tv shows, and they show how everyone in a town had a purpose and worked together, the blacksmith, the tile maker.
And I do often think the limiting factor to a life like this is the “market” so if you could create these communities, and could be an artist/artisan/builder, without strictly having to worry about making enough to live.
I met someone recently who lived in the Galapagos islands, and she seemed to sort of live this community oriented, trading anarchocapitalist lifestyle, and I think most people would be happier if they're small capitalist or socialist community involved direct interaction with people rather than dealing with soulless corpo's all the time.
I've lived off-grid for three long summers (late spring to early fall). It's tremendous work. Most of the same systems exist it's just that one has to research, design, build, operate, maintain, and revise them instead of somebody else doing all that. Everybody has different goals, but for me, maintaining my own potable water system is not a goal or something I'm interested in. Living off-grid did change my perspective on some things. For example, I know now that I produce about a 4-gallon bucket of poop each month and yet my house has a tremendous sewer connection.
Let people choose if they want to do something, but have a concerted effort to encourage/suggest things that might give them purpose and build a community. Leave them to decide their hours and effort. Maybe someone wants to clean the gutters for their entire block at 6am and then go tinker in the shed for half the day. I'm sure that sounds really lazy, but this concept is working up from a default UBI that is pay-for-no-job.
I can imagine loads of tasks or jobs that would be quite pleasant if it weren't for stressing over efficiency or business admin.
Nobody is going to choose to be a ditch digger without a financial incentive. Most jobs worth doing are unpleasant or difficult. Thats why people pay for the labor!
I mean think about it…when was the last time you heard of charity gutter cleaning services? People would much rather enjoy their leisure time on hobbies or with family/friends.
Why would there not still be gutter cleaning or ditch digging companies? Or people cleaning their own gutters? I'm not familiar with UBI proposals that do away with traditional enterprises; it's generally suggested as raising the floor. People would have more time to clean their own gutters or use the money they receive to pay someone else.
In terms of charity cleaning services, there are people who clean hoarder's houses or landscape unruly yards for free on YouTube... ;)
I'm talking about gutters on the street, beside the kerb. I thought this was implied after I said "keeping your block clean by sweeping and mulching". You routinely see older people in Asia sweeping and raking a communal area if you get up early to walk. There's a (probably obsessive-compulsive) 60 yo guy a few houses down from me in Australia who might've retired early and now goes around raking verges and cleaning the footpath/gutters meticulously. Near my office, there's a woman who bakes bread for the joy of it and sells it at-cost via an honour-box in a sidestreet. She also turns verges and front yards (with owners' permissions) into a community vegetable garden. If others were given an opportunity equivalent to early retirement, these sorts of things might be more common.
As for why: for purpose, for praise, for community, for mental health, for trade/contribution, for skill building, etc. Loads of examples of this already. Maybe none of these things are attractive to you but I don't think that's universal.
Like I said, it's just trying to add to the default UBI, not getting everyone volunteering in their community or else.
Most retirees, early or not, do not contribute to society with their labor nearly as much as they did during their working years. What makes us think that UBI beneficiaries would be any different?
Right! So everyone would choose to pursue passions/interests/leisure. We would be going into debt with no meaningful benefit to the taxpayer. Direct malinvestment.
This is drawing a line between "us" (tax paying citizens + the government) and "them" (people on benefits). I don't think it's that simple.
I imagine just like with existing benefits, the majority of people wouldn't feel great about being on UBI doing nothing, and they would pursue something that gives them a better social standing, a better sense of purpose, a good challenge, whatever motivates an individual. It's why lots of people do volunteer work, work on important open source software, and so on. Sure, there's outliers that actually proudly slack off, but you don't address specific problems with generic solutions.
But more importantly, having the _option_ to fall back on benefits means people need to take fewer risks to pursue their talents and likely be of more value to society than if they did whatever puts food on the table today. Case in point: People born into a family that can finance them through college are more likely to become engineers than people born into poor households. On the flip side, some people do white collar jobs vs something like being a medic to uphold their standard of living from the higher salary, not out of preference.
I think it would need careful management, but I believe there's every reason to be optimistic.
UBI isn't even needed if there's just universal housing, medical care, food and education. People will find enough work to get the rest, even if it's through barter.
Okay…now that we agree that UBI won’t produce any meaningful labor. What benefit do we get out of the trillions of dollars of debt we’d be accumulating?
It’s a classic economic blunder that dictatorships love to make:
1. Create money & rack up debt.
2. Produce nothing.
3. Create inflationary crisis and exacerbate wealth inequality.
4. Highlight your good intentions and relish your new position as champion of the people.
Isn’t the investment to avoid a revolution? To avoid those that cannot find work from dismantling and tearing down everything around them so they can get what they need. Some might consider that to be a benefit to taxpayers and not a poor investment.
Free money never works. It’s been attempted countless times. In fact, it exacerbates the wealth gap as the rich own assets that scale with inflation while the poor do not.
No, you just live in a bubble of smart and really driven people.
The vast majority of people's passions are partying, sex, alcohol/drugs, watching sports, gossiping, generally wasting time. Things that mostly
This whole line of thought to me is embarrassingly clueless, naive and basically childish.
It is just mind blowing to me how smart people can't see what a bubble they live in.
I almost suspect, the higher a person's IQ, the more susceptible they are to living in a bubble that basically has nothing to do with the majority of people with an IQ of 100.
How do you make sure that enough people want to do the necessary jobs?
And why do you need money at all in that scenario, at least for the basic items the UBI intends to make affordable to all? Why not just make them free and available to everyone?
No UBI proposal I'm aware of proposes UBI replaces salaries or is high enough to satisfy everyone. The "B" is for basic. Most people are not satisfied with earning a basic salary.
I was very surprised during the pandemic response to see how many people were happy to take government checks plus unemployment rather than working.
I know a few people with small businesses in various manufacturing industries. They all had a really hard time finding enough people to work while stimulus checks were going out.
People wouldn't make quite as much, but they were happy to stay home and have the basics for "free" rather than have a job.
Historically, jobs or professions always existed around the intrinsic motivation of the person working and around the needs of the society around that person.
So you could become a poet, but if you do not write poems that people like you would starve. Or you could become a farmer and provide the best apples in your city and you will earn a more than deserve income.
That's why free economies have developed historically so much better than any centrally planned economy.
No we don't. We have too many people who -- even despite having respectable jobs -- can't afford the basic necessities for the month, let alone save for their future and family. The problem they're facing is the lack of the guaranteed basic income, not the lack of a job to collect it.
> I can not believe this was voted down. It is simply an assertion of fact. Whether true or not, seems reasonable and most people would agree with it.
If it was voted down, I'm guessing it was because to the extent that it's a fact, it's trivially true, and there's nothing insightful about the defeatist take. It's possible to do more harm than good doing pretty much anything. And the world is littered with problems that are not "fully solvable" but that we've mitigated greatly.
I wasn't here to take a stance on UBI or argue over its practicalities, I was just explaining the intended outcome was not what the parent believed it to be.
But fine, I'll bite.
> will go up roughly in line with that
Could you at least explain the logic that you believe implies this would occur with such certainty? I've thought about this before and I couldn't see this as a necessary outcome, though (depending on various factors) I do see it as a possible one.
That doesn't follow. It's a reason to believe prices will increase, not that prices will increase roughly in line with the income increase. This distinction is not a minor detail, it's pretty crucial. If you give people $3k and the prices go up by $2k... that's a very different scenario from one where the prices go up by $3k.
As long as we’re in a deficit, spending for this program would directly increase the money supply. Of course there are other factors like velocity of money and elasticity of good/services but at the end of the day we’re increasing the amount of money (aka cash + credit) with no change to supply AND we’re going into debt to do it.
Capitalism is based on, among other things, an expectation that free markets are pretty good at balancing out in the long run. If demand goes up only because access to money goes up, prices will rise.
Any increase in supply over time will eat up some of that price fluctuation, but for most products prices are more flexible than supply and a majority share of any capital increase will go towards prices rather than supply.
> a majority share of any capital increase will go towards prices rather than supply
You actually made my point, I think: that the price increase need not necessarily be "roughly in line with that", but could be less.
This distinction is absolutely critical. Like I said in [1], if you put $3k in my pocket, and my expenses increase by $2k, that's a very different situation from if my expenses grow by $3k. It would mean there is a reachable equilibrium.
When I said "in line" I didn't mean 1:1 or 100%. I may have picked a bad phrase there, I was intending to say that there would be a strong correlation between the two and that a majority of the extra Monet would go towards price increases.
I forget the general rule when it comes to companies, but there's a general percentage that is often how much a price increase on a company is passed on to consumers. If a company's tax rate goes up by 10% something like 8% of that is passed on to the consumer through price increases. I'd expect something similar with a UBI.
> When I said "in line" I didn't mean 1:1 or 100%. I may have picked a bad phrase there, I was intending to say that there would be a strong correlation between the two and that a majority of the extra Monet would go towards price increases.
If so, then explain how you're making the jump from "prices increase some" to "you would need Marx style price controls" or "otherwise UBI will fail to cover the necessities"? If you give me $X and I spend $X * r of it due to price increases, and r < 1, then don't I have (1 - r) * $X left in my pocket, meaning it could be made large enough to cover the basic necessities? This isn't complicated math.
I don't get why "prices increase" is seen as such a mic-drop phrase that shows the system would fall apart. Prices already increase for all sorts of reasons, it's not like the economy falls apart every time or we somehow add Marx style price controls every time. Sure, prices increase some here too. And then what? The sky falls?
Price increases as a mic drop in my opinion and I don't mean to use it that way. As far as I can tell its just an inevitability with anything like a UBI.
With regards to my claim that we'd need strong price controls, a UBI needs prices to the basics to remain stable. I won't go down the road of trying to define what "the basics" are here, that's a huge rabbit hole so let's just leave it at the broad category in general.
If everyone can afford the basics, there is more demand for those items. Supply will likely increase eventually and eat up part of the demand increase, but the rest goes to prices. When those prices go up, the UBI would have to increase to match. The whole cycle would go on in a loop unless there's some lever for the government to control the prices of anything deemed a basic necessity.
> When those prices go up, the UBI would have to increase to match. The whole cycle would go on in a loop unless there's some lever for the government to control the prices
No. Just because something increases forever that doesn't mean it won't stabilize. Asymptotes, limits, and convergence are also a thing. You're making strong divergence claims that don't follow from your assumptions.
Governments already provide "free income" in the form of free or subsidized services.
Say you have a fire-department even though you personally might not be paying anything for it because you are so poor that you don't pay any taxes. You have police protecting you and the army. You have free primary school at least.
So I think the question is, would it help for the government to provide more, or less, or the same amount of free services as it does currently?
Would it "increase prices" if healthcare was free? Not necessarily I think. At least not the price of healthcare. Government would be in a much better position to negotiate drug-prices with pharmaceutical companies, than individuals are.
If you have a government that runs a balanced budget, those services aren't free.
> Would it "increase prices" if healthcare was free?
That depends, who's ultimately footing the bill? If its paid for with taxes on businesses, yes most of that would be passed on to consumers in the form of price increases. If its paid for by consumer taxes, ultimately you will find consumers demanding higher wages and prices would again go up. If its paid for with tariffs, well we'll fins out soon but prices should go up there as well.
They are free for poor people. For instance, basic education must be free, so we can have a productive work-force that can read and write and pay taxes in the future, which will make us even richer.
In a UBI situation demand would shift, not just go up. If there's two hypothetical people paying the tax, a very rich person (>300.000 a year) and a poor person (<50.000 a yr), money effectively shifts from the rich person to the poor person (at least the majority). The poor person will have very different demands than the rich person.
Finally, we already do price controls and subsidies in many places, like food production. It's just that a big part of the advantage is soaked up by big companies.
We already have "Marx-style" price control and regulations in many sectors, specifically food production. It's just that the advantages are arbitraged away by corporations using cheap corn to create highly addictive foods, and lobbying and marketing with the resultant profits.
But I also disagree with your assertion. Minimum wage increases are a great example. Opponents will constantly claim they will lead to massively increasing prices, but they never do. Moreover, a higher standard of employment rights and payment in first world countries like Norway doesn't seem to correlate well with higher Big Mac prices.
> We already have "Marx-style" price control and regulations in many sectors, specifically food production.
And our food quality in the US is garbage. We can't say if there is causation there since we can't compare against a baseline US food system without subsidies, but there is a correlation in timing between the increase in food subsidies and the decrease in quality.
> Opponents will constantly claim they will lead to massively increasing prices, but they never do.
The only times that really comes up is when an increase is proposed and the whole debate is over politicized. Claims on both sides at those times are going to be exaggerated.
Prices absolutely go up with minimum wage increases. How could they not? It'd be totally reasonable to argue the timeline that matters, prices aren't going to go up immediately. You could also argue the ratio, maybe wage is increased by 30% and prices are only expected to go up by 20%.
People earning a minimum wage almost certainly have pent up demand, they would buy more if they could afford it. Increasing their wages opens that door a bit, they will spend more which means demand, and prices, will go up in response.
You could also argue the ratio, maybe wage is increased by 30% and prices are only expected to go up by 20%.
And the point is that the income percentage increase is higher for those with lower incomes. Even if prices go up by 20%, somebody making $20k/year who gets an additional $10k from UBI is going to be much better off.
Yes, I think there was a few things going on with covid, most of all the fact that shipping got halted for a year and we're still unwinding the damage from that (although, mostly smooth now).
YES, this is exactly the case and why the Twitter layoffs and now the "DOGE" purge is a terrible thing (even in cases where it was totally legitimate to eliminate "waste").
"They had useless make-work jobs and sent 4 emails a week and watched TikToks the rest of the time"
So?
There's FAR too many people and nowhere near enough jobs for a large portion of people to do something that is both "real", and provides actual economic value.
Far more important that people have some form of dignity and can pay to feed their families and live a life with some material standard.
Anyone who's been in a corporate role knows there's loads of people that have a dubious utility and value--and people with "tech skills" are NOT exceptions to this rule, at all.
We should be striving to build a world where people don't have to feel forced into meaningless jobs, not a system that encourages it.
If meaningless jobs are important because its the only way people can make money to pay for all the shit we think we need to pay for, or because they haven't yet been offered the time and freedom to find their own sense of purpose, let's focus on fixing the root cause(s) there.
> _heimdall: We should be striving to build a world where people don't have to feel forced into meaningless jobs, not a system that encourages it.
> If meaningless jobs are important because its the only way people can make money to pay for all the shit we think we need to pay for, or because they haven't yet been offered the time and freedom to find their own sense of purpose, let's focus on fixing the root cause(s) there.
And that is why the human race is truly doomed (and well deserving of it). Nobody wants to fix the root cause of any problem. Instead, let's just keep ignoring the disease and only treat the symptoms... That'll solve everything.
We don't just have "bullshit jobs" (which is an actual term these days), we have a "bullshit economy" as well - centered around advertising because without advertising most of the bullshit just wouldn't sell.
Like, if you already got a car, you can drive it for 10-20 years easily, or more if you take well care of it. But advertising makes you think you "need" a new car every few years... because that keeps the economy alive. You buy a car and sell the old one to someone else who can't afford a new car but also wants a new one, so their old car goes off to Africa or whatever to be repaired until truly unrepairable. But other than the buyer in Africa who actually needed a new car, neither you nor the guy who bought your old car would have needed a car. And cars are a massive industry that employs many millions of people worldwide - so if you'd ban advertising for cars, suddenly the bubble would pop and you'd probably have a fifth of the size remaining, and most of it from China because the people in Africa can't afford what a brand new Western made car costs.
Or Temu, Shein, Alibaba and godknowswhat other dropshipping scammers. Utter trash that gets sold there, but advertising pushes people to buy the trash, wear it two times and then toss it.
A giant fucking waste of resources because our worldwide economy is based on the dung theory of infinite growth. It has worked out for the last two, three centuries - but it is starting to show its cracks, with the planet itself being barely able to support human life any more as a result of all that resource consumption, or with the economy and the public sector being blown up by "bullshit jobs".
We need to drastically reform the entire way we want to live as a species, but unfortunately the changes would hurt too many rich and influential people, so the can gets kicked ever further down the road - until eventually, in a few decades, our kids are gonna be the ones inevitably screwed.
I agree on almost all of your points, but what makes you think it's only/primarily the "public sector" that is being blown up by bullshit jobs?
I've worked for a fair amount of private sector companies and the amount of "bosses nephew", "copy data from one form to another twice a day" and "waste everyone's time by creating pointless meetings" jobs was already more than enough to explain the status quo.
No, "bullshit jobs" are everywhere--loads in the private sector as well.
Perhaps sleepy sinecures are more prevalent in the public sector (especially post FANNAG layoffs), but not unique to it.
In addition, there's plenty of jobs that are demanding, stressful, and technically difficult but are ultimately towards useless or futile ends, and this is known by parties with a sober perspective.
When i worked as a consultant, I was on MANY projects where everything was pants-on-fire important to deliver projects to clients for POCs and/or overpriced/overengineered junk that they were incapable of maintaining long-term (and in many cases, created more problems than it ostensibly solved)
All that work was pure bullshit; I was never once in denial of that fact. Fake deadlines, fake projects, fake urgency, real stress. Bullshit comes in many forms.
> I agree on almost all of your points, but what makes you think it's only/primarily the "public sector" that is being blown up by bullshit jobs?
"the economy" = private sector / everything not government; "public sector" = government / fully government owned companies.
And both are horribly blown up due to all the bullshit and onerous bureaucracy that's mostly there because apparently you can't trust people that you do entrust a dozens-of-millions-of-euros worth train carriage to correctly deal with the cash register of the onboard restaurant.
Cars from 20 years ago emit significantly more polluting substances. OTOH they are lighter weight and thus wear the roads less. On the third hand, none of them is electric or hybrid.
Some computers from 20 years ago are still in a good shap, but...
I think this is a different argument than the disposable, single-use economy being described.
The volume of things we buy but don't need (or necessarily want) drives a huge sector of the global economy. We're working to fill our lives with unnecessary things that bring us no happiness beyond the adrenaline hit when we hit "Buy Now" and the second one when the Prime box arrives at our door.
Consumerism masks the underlying problem and it's only going to get worse as more is automated. Producers will have an incentive to convince us we still need more.
Cars are - to me - a red herring in this argument except for the people who do literally trade in for a new car every few years. I drive whatever fairly boring Honda for as long as I can (usually 8-10 years) and don't feel a ton of regret about investing in comfort. But I've been as guilty as anyone about just buying stuff because it pops up in an ad or recommended on Amazon, etc.
Just because a whole industry is bullshit doesn't mean I should force it to not exist. I don't like musicals. I don't understand or care anything about their culture. But it has a right to exist. Some people are into musicals. Their existence or non-existence isn't my problem and it isn't my business. We cannot and should not try to engineer the world around what we personally find valuable and ignore what others find valuable, even if they got their opinions form an ad, or their parents did and they inherited it.
Manchester is slowly limping out the Bee Network (or whatever it's called now) which is modelled on Oyster. Tram and local train journeys can be mixed on a touch in/out system and the buses are to be included as the route contracts end.
Never thought I would see the Sleaford Mods mentioned in a Hacker News thread. As a 50-something UK male I agree the world has gone a bit weird when the rallying cry for revolution is a well articulated by my peers as by the youth.
They are an acquired taste, but I learned to appreciate how modern and punk their music feels. Not aimed at authority, like the 80s punk movement, but angry at how mediocre, mundane and unfulfilling our daily lives have become in the past 30 years.
It's about time punk started to turn on the rat race.
Absolutely. Another concern I have is the demonstrable incompetence of the UK government. If they have my data, which will only ever paint a partial picture of what I do, who knows what conclusions they may draw. I don't want to spend hours talking to nice policemen because my GPS data shows me regularly in the same park as some known terrorist just because they've never heard of a park run.
