“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 because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” -- Buckminster Fuller
The Things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done.
Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done — that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.
1) the majority of the population would just sit at home, either in front of the TV or on drugs. For one of two reasons : disappointment in their own abilities or because they just don't aspire to anything else.
I think you'll agree this is undesirable, so how would you prevent it ?
2) Look at a few rich kids in college/university who are doing this now. There's two problems :
a) what they find important is worthless (e.g. nobody will ever design, say, an xbox, or a tesla in a society like this. But we'll know a hell of a lot more about theoretical matrix multiplication. No implementations whatsoever, of course)
b) the few that do have worthwhile pursuits don't get any more funding than the worthless ones (e.g. kiva systems got started as a university project, but they couldn't even build a single robot. In a society like the one you're describing that would have been it. Yet from this perspective they made inventory management less human-intensive, which from this perspective would be really good)
3) what about the jobs that need doing, but nobody wants to do. Garbage collection is the poster-child here, but it's not alone. Mining. Sailing cargo ships across oceans. Crew members on ships. Oil drilling. Calling library patrons threatening them into returning books.
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 about this a lot. He also saw that many jobs, even in his day, were being automated, i.e. that humans were no longer required to be "muscle-reflex" machines. A lot of these ideas inspired that quote.
In a world where our political, financial, and corporate infrastructure supports "doing what needs to be done", in terms of benefiting all of humanity, we can then apply the "earning a living" quote. But only when we have a system setup to support the last sentence in the quote.
If you are not one of the "one in ten thousand..." then you should be studying or preparing to develop your own breakthrough that benefited humanity and become a "one in ten thousand" in the process.
> 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 was basically rooted in this optimism. Marx made the point in The German Ideology (1845) that a sufficiently well developed capitalism to ensure a level of production that would allow redistribution to eliminate basic wants would be essential for a successful socialist revolution, or the old class struggles would be reignited (Soviet Union being a good demonstration of exactly this)
He saw the "endgame" of capitalism as being when production was so extensive and so automated that the automation would cause massive unemployment, while production capacity outpace what is needed to sustain everyone. Without redistribution, this would then cause increased poverty, and unrest, was his thinking.
This is the part in question, from part I (A) 5. (you can see the whole book here - it's not one of his most accessible works, though: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideo... ), with some inline comments (the quoted text is all one continuous section):
> This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development.
This is a recurring theme with Marx: Revolution is not a political goal, _per se_. Class struggle is not something to strive for, _per se_ - it, according to Marx becomes a necessity when (if, but Marx believes it will inevitably occur) the governments of the current system becomes an "intolerable power", and for this to happen under capitalism, it must not just cause poverty, but cause poverty in contrast with greatly increased wealth.
> And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced;
The above is the specific line I had in mind.
You'll note that Lenin spent quite literally years before he succeeded in convincing enough of the (then) Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party that there was sufficient reason to basically ignore this, and that it would be possible to "short-circuit" this process in Russia. In retrospect, of course, we can see just how wrong he was: It took just until the early 1920's until the Bolshevik's had picked up all the Czarist regimes oppressive tricks and started firmly establishing the Party as a new upper class in the face of the consequences of redistribution in a poor agrarian economy, and we've seen that pattern repeated over, and over.
Marx saw a well developed capitalism as both inevitable, and an absolutely necessary precondition for the development of socialism.
> and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established,
Global trade. Or to take it to its logical conclusion, globalisation:
> which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious position of labour – power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-historical” existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.
> Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
This is one of the parts of Marx that is most often "lost": While on one hand Marx had ideas about immediate political goals (his "Critique of the Gotha Programme" is one of the most accessible, short works on that - it was a letter written to tear to shreds a proposed new party programme for a German socialist party), he wrote very little about the "end goals", as he saw socialism and communism not as something to fight to achieve, but as something that will inevitably happen as a consequence of the development of capitalism.
We've had systems where not everybody had to work to eat & make a living.
It was called monarchy, and you will notice it didn't go over well.
The problem is one in ten thousand still leaves a very disgruntled & disenfranchised 30,000 people in America slaving away so everyone else can do as they wish. And until we can automate all the dirty work, the hard laborious work, these aren't 30,000 people working white collar desk jobs.
Now, it's much easier to uphold that status quo than the old monarchies, because nearly 300 million people are pretty fond of the arrangement and can successfully keep the other 30,000 down. Maybe you realize that, and maybe you're ok with throwing 30,000 people under the bus "for the good of the country", but be upfront about that.
A major flaw within old monarchies was that the workers' jobs were essential and the bulk of their output went to the higher ups who merely watched over their work. The growing issue today is that people who are "lowly workers" are doing pointless jobs so that the higher ups whose primary purpose is to watch over workers doing nothing can justify paying those workers.
It is possible to distribute wealth and supplies without forcing someone to sit at a desk and fold paper airplanes for eight hours a day, five days a week.
Or, we will just reward those that do the dirty jobs MORE. I keep seeing this argument that if we didn't have to work we'd have no one to do the dirty jobs... Something tells me we'd be better off if we were in a system where those doing the dirty jobs weren't in poverty and they were doing them because they paid really well.
>The problem is one in ten thousand still leaves a very disgruntled & disenfranchised 30,000 people in America slaving away so everyone else can do as they wish.
Presumably those who were enabling the leisure of others would be reasonably economically rewarded. I think the idea is that you should ensure that everyone has their basic needs met, so that they can use their time solely on things that increase their quality of life in some way, not that you should force 1 in 10,000 people to work. If that means that some "necessary" jobs don't get done because they're so unpleasant that only people who need the money from them to survive would do them? Then that just puts even more pressure on automating them away, which is a net win for everyone, because those are /exactly/ the jobs that we should be automating away first.
I think that 1 in 10,000 might be a bit unrealistic at this point in time, but I think the level of automation in our society could easily be increased greatly... and probably will be. We've already started doing just that: a super easy example that comes to mind is automated checkout, which replaces 6-10 workers with one person making sure the checkout line is running and checking identification and the like. Even if the economy still more or less needs 1 in 10 people contributing, that enables 9 people to learn, make art, or just sleep all day. If whatever they're doing instead of the unnecessary job improves society? Then that's a net win, and presumably they would then receive economic benefits because of that. If it wasn't? Then they would still have a place to sleep, access to healthcare, enough food, etc.
Why would it be throwing 30k people under the bus? If you can support 300M people off of the work of 30k, you can give a damn good lifestyle to about 45k people who also happen to have to do shitty jobs.
If you set it up right, people would be trying to have the jobs.
I can appreciate this line of thinking. I'm willing to endorse this philosophy. But only if it's not enforced on me. I'll take care of my family. I make enough to "employ" my children to pursue their passions. I'm unwilling to provide support for total strangers to just live lazily. Someone else who's single and making good money wants to supports this system? Excellent, he can donate to (or found perhaps) an organization designed for supporting it.
There's no reason either of us in this example should be compelled to support those we are not willing to support. The major difference is that he can create a non-profit foundation to contribute to (and gain a tax break) and I need to form a for-profit business (in the US one cannot create a non-profit for the sole benefit of one's own family.)
I like the main point being made here and think it is partly valid because there really is a lot of waste. (but some of it is stuff consumers really create due to convenience purposes and impatience) But I think the idea that nobody needs jobs is downright wrong. Even the idea that it would be relatively few who need jobs is probably false. But maybe we are operating with like a 20-30% extra workforce than what's essentially needed.
I would like to see more investment into people and their skills. Also general planning for community...with people's individual,specific goals/ideas/dreams at the core.
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 your life. I started a business 2 years ago and I don't plan on getting a job anytime soon.
You have the freedom to do this..or work for someone..or you could even live in the woods on berries.
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 ages, I could go and cut a tree or hunt deer. Doing that - without paying for permits and usage rights - would get you in a heap of trouble. Now, in the stone ages, you'd have to worry about bears and neanderthals coming and ending your existence. We don't have to worry about that since the state has a police force, courts, laws, animal control, etc. And that's the same state that's requiring permits. So it is a choice the current and previous generations have made.
2) I hated the idea of the welfare queen growing up. My parents never took welfare and I'd take it as a failure if I ever had to do the same (personal choice). If you do a bit of research, you might be surprised to learn that welfare queens don't exist in the vast numbers you think they do. Not anymore and not for a while.
3) Starting any business requires capital. You were lucky because you had access to it. A lot of people have no savings at all. That's the reason they work hard jobs (typically unskilled) for very small compensation.
4) Thought experiment. Lets say, you go to Africa. You see a village that's suffering from famine. You can take 10 bucks and that feeds them for the day. Would you feel disgusted that these people are mooching off of your hard earned cash? I don't think you would. I think you (and I) would feel grateful that we had the opportunity to help our fellow human beings.
This is a complex topic that's not black and white. I wish people didn't downvote you. This is the kind of stuff that should be discussed.
> You cannot legally collect berries in the woods.
A minor point, but this is generally legal in the UK if you're doing it for personal consumption [1]. I expect other countries have similarly permissive exceptions.
And to strengthen that: We're talking not just on public land, but in privately owned forests too.
When I grew up in Norway, the notion of whether or not a forest area was owned was moot - many of the places we went for walks or went to collect berries and mushrooms probably were, but I can't tell you which were and which were public, as it was totally irrelevant to us as we have the same legal rights of access either way.
You are free to pick black berries in much of Friday Harbor and the rest of the San Juans (and they are everywhere). Many people hunt shrooms in national forests, and then there is the sea. The Pacific Northwest is a nice place for these kinds of things.
Oh please. Yes, if land is posted "No Trespassing" you shouldn't be, well, trespassing. And, indeed, if you're doing something like hunting you could get in trouble, arrested even. Otherwise I expect if the property owner saw you, you'd simply be asked to leave. And that would be it unless you refused to leave or made a habit of it.
That said, there are lots of places where there is a mix of public and private where no one is going to bother anyone if you're just walking around. There's plenty such property in my town in the US.
As for getting shot, maybe if you run across someone's marijuana crop, still, or other illegal activity. But any property owner that starts shooting at a trespasser is going to be in very deep trouble. And I'm quite confident in saying it's not standard practice.
> If you do a bit of research, you might be surprised to learn that welfare queens don't exist in the vast numbers you think they do. Not anymore and not for a while.
I was under the impression that they never really existed in any meaningful way. The example that Reagan used, which is when most people think the idea entered the popular lexicon (although there's no record of him actually using the term) was of someone who was essentially committing identity theft on a large scale in order to collect welfare for something like 30 different people.... which just makes an argument for good oversight and unified systems to prevent that kind of fraud, which the kind of large scale networked computer systems we have now could make much more difficult.
Did she live in a house made of yellow paper, and eat yellow paper as well? Who paid for the yellow pads? And how did her scribblings on the yellow pad become a best-selling novel? Did she just leave the pad in a bookstore and charge people to read it there?
Maybe starting a business doesn't require much capital, but running it until it becomes self-sustaining (or fails) sure does.
JK Rowling was basically on social security payments from the government which paid for accommodation, food and the like. I'm not sure that would normally be considered capital.
It's income without the need to work for it, which is basically the same thing as having an investor or being able to live off savings, in the sense that it allowed her the time and opportunity to write. If she didn't have those social security payments, she would have had to get a job, and she probably wouldn't have had the time and energy to create the vast amount of wealth she was able to create.
This is a great argument in support of Basic Income. How much wealth is currently not being created because the people who would create it are trapped scraping a living from useless low-pay work?
Or alternatively (more accurately?) praying for the good fortune that someone will invest in your idea. Who knows how many almost-Harry Potters there are in the world?
Rowling was an unemployed divorced single mother who had to rely on welfare to support her whilst she wrote Harry Potter.
She is quite socially conscious and has always supported the welfare state that gave her a leg up.
> Inversely proportional to your odds is success, though.
I seriously doubt that is true.
> For many people the stakes are a bit too high:
Starting a business with little capital has little downside risk, especially if you are already unemployed.
BTW, I started my business with nothing more than an ordinary computer. A friend of mine started his own businesses tuning up peoples' cars in their driveways so they didn't have to go to a shop. His investment and risk was essentially zero, he already had the hand tools needed.
Etsy.com and Ebay.com are packed full of people who started their own businesses with nothing.
Heck, the other day I was at the local public library when they had a book sale. There were people in there scarfing up boxes of books, and checking the value of them with an iphone app. They were clearly intending to resell those books online and make money.
> Starting a business with little capital has little downside risk, especially if you are already unemployed.
You're confusing (A) labor-focused self-employment with (B) get-rich-eventually entrepreneurship.
Not everyone has significant savings, family nearby who they can crash with if they got evicted, or the confidence that grandma won't have to start skipping her medication to keep the power on, etc.
BTW, I started my business with nothing more than an ordinary computer.
Really? Nothing more? You were out in the middle of an empty field, with a computer that you somehow acquired for free, and with that you were able to start a business? What kind of business was that?
I'm rude? WalterBright is being rude and dismissive to everyone who must work at a job that consumes all of their time and energy just to survive, saying that they should just go ahead and quit and start their own business, because it's so easy and you can do it with nothing. His statements are ridiculous, completely ignoring the need for income or pre-existing savings to eat and live while trying to create a business that can be self-supporting.
WalterBright was being quite blind (maybe even a bit passive-aggressive) about what's actually required to start a company: one's gotta eat. DougWebb eventually lashed out, and now he's being perceived as the rude one.
He was not. He was just frustrated.
---
By the way, the situation would be very different if we had sufficient basic income. If you can count on the state (or the community, or whatever) to give you enough to eat, then starting a company suddenly becomes much less risky, if at all. Then speaking about needing "nothing more" than an affordable device stops being ridiculous.
Of course, but you assume starting a company as immediate comprehensive self-employment. If you start a company out of your spare time, then you really do need almost nothing for the company.
I only see two of WalterBright's comments but they don't seem passive-aggressive at all. DougWebb is right only to the extent that he ignores WalterBright's actual meaning, so lashing out is not appropriate. But even if it was appropriate, it's still rudeness. You can be right and rude.
I'd wager that starting a company in your spare time is very hard. Even harder if you have a family: you must make time for your day job, your family, and your new company. This can easily turn into a recipe for burnout. This approach is risky too. (I'm not mentioning family out of the blue. Most people wait to have some experience in their field before they start a company. That means sailing past 30, and often having children.)
Now you can try and balance things out: instead of working full time or not at all, you can work part time. You make less money, but you have more time. That's probably the most sustainable approach. Still, you're split between two jobs, which may or may not drag you down. Now the problem is finding that part time job.
There's also consulting, but that's its own kind of risky.
WalterBright made it sound like sustaining yourself while you build the company isn't difficult nor risky. Like the only difficulty is building the company itself. It's not.
Now if we had Basic Income, that would be a different story.
The problem with Walters' comments, and yours, and the reason I made the statements I made is the assumption that people have spare time.
The discussion started with a statement that you don't have to work at a crappy job for someone you hate; you can just start a business and work for yourself. That was followed with a comment that most people can't do that because they don't have any capital (savings specifically) with which to start a business. Then Walter made a couple of comments saying that you can start a business with 'essentially nothing', and that there is little downside risk to doing so.
What I was trying to point out is that this is not true for the majority of people "working a crappy job for someone they hate", because those people need to work that job to feed and house themselves. They're often working multiple jobs, in fact. Spare time is a type of capital when it comes to starting a business; if you don't have it (and most lower-income people don't) than you're trapped.
One job at minimum wage is significantly over the poverty line as long as you're not a single parent receiving no child support. I would assert that under normal circumstances, with no massive hospital bills, with either one child max or someone helping to raise your children, that you can manage 10 hours a week starting a business.
The median US income of a household, was about 50K in 2012. It's not poor, possibly even comfortable, but if we assume this is 2 parents with one or 2 children, quitting a job means cutting that budget by two. Unless of course you can rely on unemployment insurance —I don't know the US system.
But most interesting is the mode of the distribution: meaning the most common income. Income distribution is not a bell curve, and the mode happen to be much lower than the median: about 20K per year. The bottom 25% is already kinda struggling. They're not going to quit their day jobs, nor take a pay cut to work part time. They're also probably too worried about making ends meet to try and build a company on the little spare time they have left.
Also, even if you don't have a massive hospital bill, you may have one later, especially if you have a crappy insurance (thank goodness I live in France). That's not very reassuring, and is one of the many things that just rouse fear. When you're afraid you don't take risks. Building a company looks risky. There's an emotional risk at the very least.
Then there's peer pressure. HN is a very unusual place, talking about building companies all over the place, Paul Graham speaking about entrepreneurship replacing employment, how we look up to the failures even (that last one is a good thing, by the way). Most of the rest of the world just tells you to get a "real" job instead. Over and over. Moms, friends, media… Many politicians even try to solve unemployment with incentives to the unemployed! (Pro tip: if they are 95 jobs and 100 unemployed, searching harder won't work.)
Finally, there's a general sense of depression and helplessness. People expect their children to be worse off than they are, and they generally feel there is nothing they can do about it. Collective action is possible, but our culture tend to emphasise great individuals —see for example the Steve Jobs semi-cult. Unless they think of themselves exceptional as well, they are not likely to figuratively leave the pack, and build their company.
And there's school, who rewards being on time, obedient, and ignores creativity, when it doesn't actively stifle it. It's meant to produce the workers the elite need to stay rich. It's not meant to produce entrepreneurs and other such free thinkers. They don't even teach us the most important stuff! (I know it sounds conspiratorial, but it's really just powerful people and institutions protecting themselves, as they always did. For instance: the most important aspect of our economy is monetary policy, and the most important aspect of monetary policy is Fractional Reserve Banking, which is best translated by "private banks print most of the money". If schools taught that, we'd risk a revolution.)
Really, in such a hostile environment, it takes an unusual kind of person to even dare start a business.
I wasn't suggesting anyone quit their main job. If they have a second job then yeah quit that to the point of being merely full-time. Now that you're an employee for no more than 40 hours a week, how would you not have spare time in which you could start a business, perhaps spending one hour a day or half of the weekend? Again I'm temporarily excluding single parents with sole custody and more than one child.
I'm not saying it's fun to be poor, I'm saying it's possible to avoid burnout.
And for every 'Harry Potter' there are a hundred more books that barely break even or lose money for publisher. For eaxh of those there are a hundred more manuscripts sitting in slush piles or desk drawers that will never see the light of day.
If the government is taxing a significant majority of your income you'll still be rich. Allow me to reframe the question, why bother starting a business where you'll only earn three million dollars a year? One good reason is because you want to take home three million dollars, even if it was theoretically 25 before taxes. Even if every slacker in the world gets a $20k stipend, there's plenty of incentive to solve problems and make money.
> 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??
Why do people start million dollar businesses now when they can work at McDonald's or work at a call center or or teach schools or be a policeman or or or...
It's almost like some people are naturally motivated to do certain things for reasons beyond just the desire to have food and a roof over their heads.
I don't understand why people think if you offer everyone, say, $20k a year to do nothing that nobody would ever want to work to achieve more, earn more, improve people's lives, etc. Sure some people would (especially people who currently live on minimum wage). But many would not be satisfied with such a minimal existence. And with nobody having to worry about surviving without a job, it also frees up many people to explore ideas they otherwise would never have had time for.
And with nobody having to worry about surviving without a job, it also frees up many people to explore ideas they otherwise would never have had time for.
Well, even universal healthcare would have this same effect in America. There would be a veritable Cambrian explosion as hundreds of thousands of people quit their jobs and started doing something interesting, something they cared about. A lot of these interests would turn into businesses and we would all be far the richer for it, never mind the 50% taxes.
Exactly. I don't know why some people think that economic stability is everything to humans. Fame and recognition are so much stronger motivators than money.
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 will be that people can do important work that might not necessarily reward them financially. The downside is that, well, those who do financially well will have to share their earnings. And we'll have to detach the notion of financial success with the notion of power, which will be difficult.
And all of this runs anathema to the usual sort of libertarian financial-might-makes-right of the tech world, unfortunately.
[Edit, since I can't reply to zo1, yet, below: No, I wasn't trying to tie libertarianism to "financial-might-makes-right." I meant that the tech world seems to slant libertarian, and people in this world seem to aggrandize money as the supreme metric of success.]
> A great benefit to this system will be that people can do important work that might not necessarily reward them financially. The downside is that, well, those who do financially well will have to share their earnings. And we'll have to detach the notion of financial success with the notion of power, which will be difficult.
You've basically restated Marx' view on what communism should be. His most famous quote on the subject is probably this from German Ideology:
"in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wished, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic."
A large part of Marx' point is that for socialism to become possible - and necessary - capitalism must first drive technological advances and production to a point where nothing near the full production capacity of humanity is needed for redistribution to be possible while eliminating poverty entirely, and in the process freeing society up to be extremely flexible about how people contributes.
Libertarians would actually be against many policies designed to keep people in jobs - pushed by many of both major parties today. In fact full employment is a goal mostly supported by policies and politicians decidedly anti-free-market.
Voluntary giving and charity and voluntary communal groups could easily grow. The notion that taxes are the only way to spread wealth is flawed. The nuclear family is already one example almost everyone can relate to where one or two people support a whole - in some cases old and young alike.
It will take social change to make a less work based society work - forcing people into that route is silly and a long step on the road to totalitarianism.
Libertarianism is the opposite of might-makes-right. Libertarianism is the view that coercive power should be incredibly limited in scope and that an individual's decisions and contracts are what makes right.
> Voluntary giving and charity and voluntary communal groups could easily grow. The notion that taxes are the only way to spread wealth is flawed.
Except now you've created a situation where only the wealthy get to choose society's direction. We need taxes so that even those without financial resources can have a say in what our collective money funds. This is made even more extreme if only a small part of the population is doing work with immediate financial reward.
You've actually created a situation where only those who provide value to others get to choose society's direction - and only in non-coercive ways. Thought leaders, religious leaders and other individuals can all have power as well - although non-violent power.
In a heavy tax-scenario those who get to choose society's direction can do so with military level force and attain power through politics and favor trading unrestricted by limits of the law (i.e. they can rewrite the laws). Also, those with influence can influence the law and write favorable, coercive, policies for themselves (as evidenced by the banking crisis and bailouts and current low interest rate environment).
Either way someone accumulates wealth - in one case its through forced redistribution (which will benefit a specific class, and which is unlikely to be the class that doesn't have the funds to contribute to politicians) and in once case is through voluntary redistribution. Dr. Dre gets to be a billionaire because people want to give him money in exchange for his music and social cred and Steve Jobs gets to be a billionaire because people want to give him money for his company's technology.
Taxes and regulations are needed in some cases - but the more power they get the more people will attempt to use them for anticompetitive purposes. 1000s of banks shut down during the financial crisis - but the worst offenders got cheap loans to make record profits in the succeeding years.
It would be nice to think a central authority can have our best interests in minds. That central authority has killed more civilians than combatants in current wars: https://www.iraqbodycount.org/
And the first lady and President openly pronounce disgust with Boko Haram while ordering airstrikes and military actions that have directly caused the deaths of far more children and left more than half of Iraqi children orphans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_Warhttp://www.cnn.com/2013/12/12/world/meast/yemen-u-s-drone-we...
(Notice US Officials declined to comment on actions they could have prevented - but are more than willing to comment on crimes in other countries far beyond their jurisdiction)
On the "home front" non-violent and non-lying offenders in prison account for nearly 60% of incarcerated because violence has been used to punish these crimes of choice rather than social stigmas and education.
As yummyfajitas says, marginal utility not overall value.
The first superman in Metropolis can charge a huge amount for his services, the second, perhaps half that. Every subsequent superman will add less utility to Metropolis and be paid less.
Every Superman is paid an amount equivalent to his marginal utility to Metropolis.
Plus this was effectively the situation for several centuries. So we know perfectly well what happens. It is decidedly different from equality for all.
But it goes back to the basic motivation for everything. People are motivated by one of two things : political goals (promoting something, can be themselves, but that just makes it a small goal, not non-political), or economic goals.
The problem is that today, the economy, if left 100% to it's own devices would probably kill somewhere north of 50% of the human population for being an economic net-negative.
The problem with political motivations ... we all know that one.
"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 statist koolaid, and we're here for you if you need some help getting over that addiction. With reasoned arguments, no less!
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 person with less financial might (say, nothing) access to food, leading to their death. as the second person was looking to violate rule number 1, and the first person didn't violate rule number 2, Libertarianism is totally fine with this chain of events.
Libertarianism, phrased a different way, says "the only time you can hurt someone is when they take your stuff. if you hurt someone by having stuff while they have nothing, that's totally fine." In other words, financial might makes right.
> 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.
> 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 and wealth holders; US, India being prime examples that I could think of.
An alternative is to have systems and institutions such that wealth concentration doesn't even happen in the first place. Also I believe wealth gets concentrated by systemic and institutionalized transfer of wealth from middle and poor class to a selected few rich and not because those who are wealthy are geniuses or are contributing proportionately to society.
I can think of a few examples of systemic, institutionalized wealth transfers that are happening right now.
1. Riding on others hard work: A labor working in inhuman conditions with peanuts for wage producing textiles which are sold with profit margin of a few thousand percentages.
2. Privatizing essential services: Poor/middle class persons having to pay out regular health premium and still live in fear of getting their claim rejected and end up paying through their nose for smallest of diseases, medicines.
4. Crony Capitalism: Govt bail outs for failed private institutions that have caused massive financial crisis which in itself was a wealth transfer from poor to rich of a scale that was perhaps unheard of.
5. Crony Capitalism: Tax payer's money getting transferred to weapon's manufacturers and private military contractors who in turn are going to protect the interest of private oil corporations.
6. Riding on others hard work: Illegal or institutionalized collusion among private corporations to suppress the wage by not allowing free labor market.
7. Resource transfer: Government snatching massive tracts of farming land from the poor farmers and giving them away to private corporations for pittance.
9. Erect massive blockade to democratic institutions so that the common citizen, for whom they were meant for in the first place, will have no choice but to resort to middle men and shell out huge sums. Courts (lawyers, out of court settlements etc.,), parliaments (lobbyists) etc.,
If I look at the list of wealthiest people, rent seeking behavior and riding on cheap labor jumps out!
Sure, they probably deserve to be wealthier than above average, but does the wealth they have accumulated is proportional to their social contribution?
The intersection between those who have contributed to advancement of our civilization in whatever small way and the rich people is almost an empty set. That's a clear enough indicator that those who are very wealthy really don't deserve it and in fact snatched the wealth from others to start with!
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.
On the topic of 5, my view on this has always been that military investment is the governments R&D investment. So I'm not convinced that the military is a worthless investment.
"And all of this runs anathema to the usual sort of libertarian financial-might-makes-right of the tech world, unfortunately."
Is that the right usage of that word? It means to vehemently dislike or a papal curse. I think something along the lines of, 'but this is anathema to the libertarian ...' would be correct.
I'm sorry, but you really did not make good points.
> 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??
To help people. Maybe you don't feel like helping others, but most people do. To question even the existence of that motive is... pretty scary
> You don't have to get a crappy job and work for someone you hate for the rest of your life. I started a business 2 years ago and I don't plan on getting a job anytime soon.
Starting a business requires capital, talent, and a lot of luck. Obviously, not everyone has access to these things, nor should we expect them to.
> You have the freedom to do this..or work for someone..or you could even live in the woods on berries.
No, living in the woods on berries is really not realistic.
>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?
Because the business itself is important to you, or because that's the only way to get more than other people have.
It seems like this is essentially the case today and people still build million dollar businesses and still get rich, in America and in Europe and in a lot of places with more or less aggressive wealth redistribution policies - but all of them do the thing that is taking a large share of your earnings and giving it to non-working people.
> 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?
Because you'd still have millions of dollars, obviously!
This is such a weird, sour-grapes style of thinking. Why do you bother running your business today when the government is just going to take X% of the money? Are you really going to take your ball and go home, just to prevent the "unfairness" of somebody else benefiting from your labor?
Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face...
> 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??
Are you suggesting that the only motivation to start a business is to "make millions and keep millions"? What about:
- Making the world a better place
- Improving the lives of others
- The personal satisfaction of building things and solving difficult problems
These are all motivators to do something which creates "economic value".
If all three of those are strong motivators then the government would not need to get involved with charity and welfare either - because individuals could get satisfaction from charity and providing opportunity for others by making the world a better place, improving the lives of others and gaining the personal satisfaction from helping solve a problem.
One reason I'm not giving a good chunk of my money to charity right now, is because I'm afraid.
Afraid.
I have saving, which I could give away, but cling to because they could come in handy. Could lose my job (oops, I did lose my job), and I can't count on welfare to keep my standard of living forever. Something bad could happen to me, and I may need my savings.
If I could count on a sustainable basic income, it would remove that fear. I would probably give more to charities. I'd probably be less afraid of freelance work. And I'd probably work on something actually worthwhile, such as research in programming techniques. I may even volunteer for a bit of menial physical work for a change.
1. You need money to survive - Nope. Money is a medium to exchange for goods. All the money in the world can't save you if there's no food/water.
2. Starting a business solely on personal gain - A million dollar business, I assume, is you're example of a successful business. Though it will be true for a lot of people, please pose the question "Would you start a successful business if it would save millions of lives and billions of work hours?"
3. Supporting people that didn't need to do anything - There's an assumption that people that don't need to support themselves will be unproductive. Is this neccessarily true? Though it might be a small fraction of the population, there are people's interests that they pursue that would greatly automate jobs or help their society. Theoritical work that people pursue are abstract, but the research findings could give great insight into physics, biology, social dynamics, etc.
The heart of your statement is more philosophical in why communisum won't work. But would a purely capitalistic society be better? Where you know that near every action is derived from personal gain?
> This would mean that the few that did work would essentially be supporting the rest of society.
It is already like this, only those who do valuable work support the resto of sociaty, so this wouldn't change. The only change would be that the other people, who now do bullshit jobs wouldn't need to do them anymore.
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.
Well, you only need money to buy the things you need to survive.
Many jobs are already "few doing work to support the rest of society", the only difference is that today we happen to be paying the few to do it.
If you had people willing to do the work anyways, since it's what they like doing (e.g. farming) then why shouldn't the rest of society benefit? It's the same principle that drives open source programming. Not everything you do has to be based on maximizing your net worth.
However I do think this is where Fuller's principles start going astray. There are so many jobs out there which people don't want to do, but are absolutely necessary. It's easy to say that people should see what needs to be done, and go do it, but people simply don't work that way. All other things being equal, we do what we want to do, not what needs to be done.
Fuller would be right on track if people wanted to do what needs to be done, and with those two sets in proper proportion with each other. But I've seen no evidence to show that is what society does for us (and a whole lot of evidence to the contrary). Failing that, the quest for money helps to provide a forcing function to align society's needs with worker's wants, but this system has a lot of flaws as well.
> You don't have to get a crappy job and work for someone you hate for the rest of your life.
Indeed. I think you and Bucky are more in agreement than you realize. Bucky isn't suggesting that people go home and drink beer and watch TV for the rest of their lives. He is urging them to think, to be creative, to find themselves. Starting a business, for those so inclined, would be an outcome I think he would celebrate. Others might invent, or compose music, or write, or paint, etc.
I think we are moving toward an economy like what Bucky envisioned, where there may be fewer jobs, but many more people find their true work.
Is there some test that we could perform to identify whether we are living in that type of world? Would someone from say, 1848 think that we're already there, and most people would apparently prefer to work crappy jobs than live a life measureably better than the majority of people who lived in 1848?
Mildly provocative thought: what % of Ycombinator assisted companies have customers with 'real jobs' (by definition of OP, which I accept may be contested)?
It makes perfect sense. You still need goods and services you have nowhere near the consumption habits or total required by individuals working in steady, paid employment.
The majority of entrepreneurs have precious little time for broadcast media, socialising, reading for pleasure or other time-filling habit. Major purchasing decisions such as housing, vehicles and children are drastically affected and often delayed by entrepreneurs. Such purchases may even find themselves mortgaged if funds are tight. (Hopefully not the children...)
Where would the purchasing power stem from in a world of bootstrapping entrepreneurs?
I am struggling to find any rational reason why you think B does make sense...
You can challenge the validity with data but claiming it is does not make sense is fallacious.
> 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??
Our time to actually get on with better lives is running out while you capitalists poison the planet and quite literally work the human race to death. Climb the Hierarchy of Needs to higher levels, or we will drag you up there by force ;-).
>Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from...
>you could even live in the woods on berries...
It's not necessary to go as far as berries - in most of the developed world you can not work and be supported automatically by the government. But it's boring! Most people would much rather be building million dollar businesses even if the pay was much the same. In fact many people working for corporations build multi million dollar businesses where 99% or so of the value goes to the corporation but you don't see them complaining much.
not another:
- Lets just steal from the productive and we all be just fine.
- We just need lots of armed guys that will keep the productive in check.
leading to:
- Government decided that I have to go to gulag?
"We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed"
You make it seem like there is some entity or group of entities that thinks "Hey, let's go make up jobs". For what reason, you ask? Well, because he has to "justify his right to exist". That puts your argument in the same bucket as "karma", "quantum wellbeing", "deepak-nonsense" and "homeopathy".
Seriously though. What is that rant even about? People don't have a right to exist. They just do. What they do have a right to is to be left alone and unharmed.
If you can come up with some general system where 1 out of a thousand individuals willingly gives up his productivity so that the rest can "go back to school", then by all means go ahead. The keyword there being "willingly", and it pretty much means you won't ever come up with such a system.
Until then, please stop telling other people what they should or shouldn't be doing. It's none of your business.
Are you really suggesting that not even 0.1% people are willing to support the rest if they can?
Are you really saying that we're such moral monsters that not even 0.1% of the population wouldn't help 1000 people if they could?
Besides, with such a ratio, we could have a more equitable repartition: such as, having, say, 10% of the people volunteering a hundredth of their time to support the system. Do you really believe that if it was possible, it wouldn't be done anyway?
Such cynicism on steroids would be ludicrous. Did I miss something?
What my neighbors are up to is incredibly relevant to my life. We share the same space and we affect each other's lives in important ways. On a bigger and more abstract scale we share the same Earth with every other living human.
Stop pretending like you don't live in an organized society and that we all don't have the ability to change the dynamics of our culture through government. We've been doing so for millennia.
Nothing you says contradicts the parent. The parent doesn't say that you should only care about yourself. The parent says that you shouldn't force people to act as if they care about others.
Gee, way to cherry-pick. How about you go back and read the two sentences that come after the one you quoted.
Is that really how you have discussions with people? Blow up and scream bloody murder when you see something you remotely think is objectionable? It's very disingenuous.
This reminds me of a study focusing on soccer games. It analyzed A) how often players shot goals toward the left, middle and right sides of the net; and B) how often goalies responded by jumping toward the left, middle and right sides.
The stats revealed a surprising phenomenon. Though opposing players shot toward each area of the goal evenly — about 33% of the time — goalies jumped toward the left or the right 80-90% of the time.
So what explains the irrational behavior of these highly skilled goalies? The researcher who presented this to me and others at a conference argued that it came down to the appearance of productivity. If a goalie leaps left or right and fails to stop the goal, he can claim that he tried his best. But if a goalie remains in the center, even if doing so is the most effective option, he risks looking like he did nothing.
I call this "productivity theater." In other words, there's sometimes a disconnect between what it means to be an effective worker and what it means to appear effective.
To offer just one example from the workplace: in some offices, the culture dictates that employees must stay from 8 to 6 each day. Their schedules may make them look like hard workers, but some are probably checking Facebook or email much of the day. Contrast this with offices that emphasize owning and completing projects rather than working an amount of time. With the second policy, you're likely to find some workers who appear less busy but make more meaningful contributions.
That discussion gets a number of things wrong and trivializes the odds against the goalkeeper. Any goalie preparing for a match in the sudden death stages of a tournament, like the World Cup [1], would study previous kicks from the opposing players. The players also study goalkeepers past shootouts. So any pattern the goalkeeper chooses to adopt influences the direction of future kicks by opposing players, and vice versa. In other words, if I know that the opposing goalie stays in the center, as a rule, 30% of the time (heck even 10%), there's no way I'm going to shoot down the middle. I'm going to go for the right or left corner to increase my odds.
Going down the middle actually requires more skill than the linked article credits it with. As a player, you'll have to disguise the direction and you'll want to aim for the upper half (if it's too low, the goalie can save with the feet), meaning you could miss and hit the bar or worse, row Z.
The reason goalies don't just stay in the center is that it's more likely that the opposing player would aim for the bottom left/right corners. And if a goalkeeper spent more time in the center, he/she increases the odds further that shots against that particular goalie would go to the bottom left/right corners.
I think the reason most penalty kicks go to the bottom left corner (left from the player's perspective) is that most players are right-footed and they can strike the ball with more force to their left than (with the open foot) to their right. With enough speed and accuracy, a shot to the bottom corner (just sneaking by the post) will beat the goalie even if the goalie dives in the right direction. A shot to the upper corner will always beat the goalie; just can't get there in time. But shots to the upper half of the goal are tough, especially when you consider that the player is very likely suffering from nerves at the time.
1. 32 days, 8 hours and 45 minutes from now, yay!!
Thanks for reviewing the study and offering your take on goalies' behavior. As someone who knows very little about soccer, I was mainly interested in how it might serve as a metaphor for productivity in the workplace. But it was interesting to learn more about the context for the study as well as how goalies and other players anticipatw moves.
Conversely, there are offices where someone "not being present" can shut down the productivity of the entire firm. People are paid to "be available" as well as to do tasks. The importance of "availability" on "task performance" is not imaginary--witness how computatuional hardware shows performance variation based on cache architecture.
As a counterpoint, I remember being taught in a Game Theory course that both the shooters and the goalies acted in accordance with the Nash Equilibrium which (IIRC) happens to be equal amounts to each option. You would think that if such a vulnerability actually existed, coaches and analysts would have figured it out and it would be exploited.
Thanks. I hope someone could look up a discussion on this soccer goalie example: I never really understood it.
Is the example above saying goalies would do the "more productive" thing of standing still more often if they didn't feel the pressure to look like they were doing something? If kickers evenly spread out their shots, you got a 1/3 chance no matter what you do. It wouldn't matter if the goalie went always left or always right or just stood there every time. And if goalies are being irrational, why aren't kickers exploiting it?
Though I agree that you shouldn't be penalized for standing still, that doesn't make jumping right or left "fake work".
"And if goalies are being irrational, why aren't kickers exploiting it?"
Two reasons I can think of. First, if you shoot to the left or right (particularly top or bottom corner of goal) then the goalkeeper has further to travel to reach the ball, therefore if it is done with sufficient accuracy and power it is harder, or even impossible, to save even if the goalkeeper guesses correctly. In contrast, a central shot, even if hit with high power is often easy to save if the goalkeeper keeps central. Therefore, shooting left or right more often than centrally can be a rational choice if the goalkeeper distributes evenly between going left, right and center - especially for high level players. Secondly, shooting centrally can look a bit silly if the goalkeeper guesses correctly, since it is usually an easy save, therefore it is seen as a bit of an arrogant, or show off, move. Therefore players may be reluctant to shoot centrally - this is somewhat related to the reasoning given for the goalkeepers in that the players want to be seen to be doing something.
Or: you have to jump if you want to reach a ball kicked on a goal corner
So if you guess that the ball is going to one of the sides, jump
If you don't jump you're defending 1/3 of shoots
(Of course, soccer is more complicated than that - for instance not all shots are perfect, and some are made to trick the goalie especially in penalty shoots - but you get the idea)
My employee next to me is working hard. I'm in elinks in terminal on HN and on IRC, with vertical split of htop in tmux. He thinks I'm working hard too, with all those numbers, columns, scrolling output and blinking cursor.
I feel so bad right now. I'm going to go actually work.
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.
I keep RDCMan open on my 2nd screen, always connected to an administrative RDP server in the production domain, usually with Perfmon pulling occasional counts of IIS users and connections from our clusters. Sometimes I'll have ADUC or DNS or DFS or WSUS or SSMS up instead.
Half of my monitoring tools and error logs, and all of my ticket systems, use web interfaces. So do Sharepoint and parts of TFS and Office365. I use Chrome and keep a dozen tabs pinned, most of which are work-related. HN and Imgur are among those.
And then there's the spattering of Office applications (Outlook, Word, Excel), and Lync and other chat clients, and Notepad++ and Snip tool and Fiddler and Putty and other utilities...
When I was stuck in a meaningless office job with too much time, I took to learning myself a perl (that was used for some login scripting so there was an interpreter lying about) using notepad to edit, and the windows cmd.exe to execute the scripts. One other (more senior) employee did get curious and asked me what I was up to, but I did have a script that was actually useful to get part of my job done, so I just showed that off. Then I went back to teaching Perl to play scrabble!
there was a site called readingatwork.com (I think) where classic novels were formatted as powerpoint presentations. I think that's what windows people do.
>The network administrators know how lazy you really are.
Not always. The clients net admin can't see it (encrypted VPN) and my own companies net admin would catch hell for looking at my traffic too carefully (NDAs). Everything is logged though...so people behave.
Not sure if you are just making a joke or not, but please, if you started to drink more due to a boring job (including drinking before/while on the job) either talk to someone for help (a sibling/wife/friend if you don't want to go the professional route) and try to change jobs as quickly as possible (if you feel the drinking is related to the job). I've seen some colleagues becoming borderline alcoholics (even if highly functional) by using alcohol as a coping mechanism for work.
Nothing wrong with a few drinks, or a night out where you get plastered, but if the drinking is related to the job, please ask for help/do something.
Well, resolution to a situation where I'm pretending to work, from an ethical point of view, is to, well, stop pretending to work. I can do that by either starting to work, or stopping to pretend to work.
I now at least have a clear consciousness, if not productive output. And it is Saturday night after all. I offered him quality free beer of his choosing. He refused. I also linked him to this thread.
I'm just trying to understand, why be at work on the weekend or after hours unless you need/want to get something done? (Man, I wish HN had a private messaging system, because I usually have questions that interest me but aren't really appropriate to ask publicly. Thinking of writing one...)
Maybe! but sometimes the net productivity win comes from letting the frantic person spin their gears down until you reach a velocity where thinking clearly is possible
"And then I thought, well, maybe that explains some other things, like why is it there’s this deep, popular resentment against people who have real jobs? They can get people so angry at auto-workers, just because they make 30 bucks an hour, which is like nowhere near what corporate lawyers make, but nobody seems to resent them. They get angry at the auto-workers; they get angry at teachers."
I thought people were angry at these people because of their unions - all the other jobs he listed are nonunion and thus the higher wage is actually a market wage.
Lawyers are not unionized but the bar exam definitely does limit supply.
You are correct though - one major reason why teachers and auto-workers might get criticism is because they pay an organization to make sure companies and other individuals cannot contract freely.
The book is poorly written to the point it seems less than credible but it has some interesting takes on the situation.
The author postulates something he calls "waste distribution territories" that have risen to take advantage of technological advancements. The basic gist is that instead of people working less as technology advances, unnecessary jobs are added to society and people work the same or even more at selling insurance, filling out forms in HR etc. etc. He points out numerous specific examples of this waste and there are many more he misses. He does offer some specific solutions to this problem that are very unlikely to be rationally implemented without a major structural collapse first. Overall, a poorly written book with some very insightful concepts.
5 years ago I worked as a consultant at a large enterprise software company. There were definitely large periods of time (months long) where I was averaging 3 hours a week of actual work. Insane, insane work hours. There would be a 5 person team (Analysts, QAs, developer) spending 5 weeks on a release that consisted in 45 min worth of text changes. I don't usually hear people on HN talk about not having work to do. I guess it's different at start ups. It's just fucking unbelievable to me though that I would get paid so much to do so little. And I feel like some kind jerk complaining about it.
There's a saying in my country for this: "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work" - meaning the salary isn't great, and they're getting what they're paying for.
I've had this concept rolling around in my head occasionally...the best path in becoming a better programmer is to sincerely desire to automate yourself out of your job.
Instead of backing up a system via GUI every week, figure out the API calls needed to hook up via a script. After a few weeks of triggering that script by hand, write a cron job and a logger that logs the relevant transactions. After awhile of manually SSHing into the backup server to verify the existence of those backups, write some kind of litmus test that fails if the backups were corrupted. Instead of checking the log every once in awhile, have it email you (and just to be safe, use other kinds of push notifications too ) when success or failure happens. And instead of lackadaisically running emergency drills to see that the backups do work, write a automated deployment system that runs off of those backups, and put that in a cron job.
At the end of all that, you still should want to be "the human". You should still want to SSH in manually, check the checksums, deploy from backup on a lazy Friday just to make sure...but those are intentional actions...not just some repetitive drill you do because you have to. And if something does go clusterfuck, you're still there to handle things.
So the test is: now that you've automated the robot-part of your work...which, the fact that you could automate it means it would have been automated some day...what do you feel free to do now? Does your company have the foresight to reward you, both in salary, and in discretion to pursue projects that truly require human insight and expertise? Or is the culture such that it's just better to keep your automated-workflow to yourself, and spend the day surfing the internet? Not that either of those choices are wrong...I mean, when I'm near retirement age, I will definitely choose the latter happily...but if that first option of moving ahead isn't available, then that's a sign that you might have to open your horizons.
Of course, if you can't automate any of your work...congratulations, it just might mean you're working on exciting, non-repetitive things that (...for now) require the best of human insight and intelligence.
edit: forgot to add the best bit...no matter what the outcome at the end of the automation process, you'll still have become a better developer by just building it out. I think 99% of my experience and knowledge of the command-line (and also, much-needed appreciation of functional design) grew out of an impatience with perfectly good GUIs. Just one of the other upsides to being a programmer...you can appreciably lessen your own workload so directly through improvement of your personal craftsmanship.
> Does your company have the foresight to reward you
More like to they have the foresight to patent your ideas in their name, take your IP and restrict it via copyright, and then make fortunes off of it while the rest of the world withers in squalor.
There is a huge market movement in the IP industry not just because of how it is an obvious quick buck today to just sue everyone and put money down the legal black hole, but that in the long run when the means of production are wholly automated, you rule the world if the men with the guns give you exclusive rights to those ideas.
Sure, I think this is a legit fear -- which is why keeping it to yourself and whistling while you work may be the path to take.
But again, if you were able to automate it, then someone who is not you will be able to. And more likely, that someone will be a SaaS who really doesn't give a shit about fair labor as it pertains to your situation.
It's likely automation will eat the world...but my hope is that rather than virtual enslavement (or SkyNet), society will have reached a political point where living wages is a popular, enforceable concept, and the human race overall has risen above the economic rat race...but that's a long path (or may require World War 3, in the case of the Star Trek universe). In the mean time, for that political environment to even become favorable, more individual agents -- who are also hopefully, forward-thinking and not-entirely-selfish -- have to push the idea that humans have real value even after their initial grunt work has been automated.
edit: also, this is why I meant "automate" in the most pedant, grinding way...as in, take care of the crap work, even if it means learning how to write a script that has surely been done before (the GUI app is likely based on such a script)...now, if in your automation of the backup routine, you are hit with a Eureka moment and come up with an incredible, unrivaled compression scheme to store your backups...consult a lawyer before writing your idea on paper.
If you are developer or some sort of IT engineer, don't automatically think your job is not BS. Like job of developing thin client to a windows server running licensed software to get around license costs of software, where price is based on number of users... Yes, this types of businesses generate TONS of money from essentially the fact, that supplier and customer could not get in agreement for more reasonable license...
I'd argue (as would most of the free software community) the creation of proprietary software is entirely bullshit. Because you have to eventually reinvent it with either permissive or copyleft licenses to just avoid the huge black hole that is legal bullshit and bureaucracy around licensing rights to a number that is not even scarce once its made. And until it is foss, you are just denying the users their freedoms to the stuff they are paying you for, and until it is sufficiently free it really isn't even a working product in my book.
Hell, even projects like Tizen vs Android and ZFS vs BTRFS vs XFS and KVM vs Xen vs Vmware vs Virtualbox are all bullshit jobs and unnecessary work reinventing the same wheel over and over to either satisfy a boss need out of the chief developers, the inability for the forerunner to accept others opinions into their project, or just raw license and legalese incompatibility bullshit.
It is, though, 99% bs. And every time someone tries to reinvent IMing after xmpp (without being able to, in a paragraph, describe the intrinsic flaw in xmpp you can't fix through amendments to the standard, and how their alternative immediately fixes them) it is just more BS. All the photo sharing websites, all the web apps, 99.99% of them are all bullshit because someone already did it before, and you just want to tweak a few knobs (which you could have easily done if all involved projects were open contribution and pliable to change and forking) and had simple results, but no, you have to start from scratch and spend a million LOCs reinventing wordpress. And you still write it in Lua! If you wrote it in, say, python, I'd be all over that because that presents a tangible benefit - "Lua is awful, I don't like it, and as a user of my software, you don't like it either, and you can't just patch fix that, so here is a replacement in python".
While I'd agree with that sentiment for most sold software, there's another aspect to consider. There are some jobs that don't ever really go away, and software is one of them. It's similar at times to the traditional "trades" such being a plumber or electrician.
So while "proprietary" (i.e. closed source or limiting who has access to it) may not be the precise description, a LOT of software is (and will be) "in-house" stuff. This is because while commodity solutions are great in many way, the are general tools, and will never map exactly to the current task and needs of a business.
Just like how the plumber is happy to buy common solutions to piping problems (e.g. standard sizes, common specialized parts that solve problems that show up all the time), a software engineer can pull from Free Software as his "standard parts". In the end, though, because every need is at least slightly different, a business will always need to hire somebody to put those parts together - just like they hire an in-house plumber or other specialist.
A consequence of this, though, is that all that specialized work is not going to be particularly useful outside the place where it was originally used. The occasional useful features can be pushed back upstream, but that still leaves a lot of glue around.
As time goes on, and the collection of "standard tools" grows, I expect the ratio of "glue" to "useful new feature" to increase.
My guess is that the ratio of custom to glue stuff should be more constant over time. As old custom stuff becomes standard, it simply enables people to start tackling harder problems and create more custom stuff.
That's where I see place for local integration companies for business model around open source software. They essentially provide tuning for stock software and if certain "tune" look like nice generic feature - release it back to community to leverage.
Initially I wanted to write about proprietary/opensource software, but knew people here will downvote it, so brought up different example. But I am glad you got message :))
I don't care if people downvote me, the only reason to read the comments anyway to is to get other peoples insight into the matters of whatever the threads subject is. Doesn't it defeat the purpose of being here if you are afraid to speak your mind? I have plenty of unpopular opinions, but until someone can persuade me with facts and reasoning and not an arbitrary Internet number that I'm wrong I'll keep espousing them and taking those downvotes with pride!
Each community have its own customs. It wouldn't make any positive effect if I come over to forum about Catholicism and start talking about big bang.. Similar here, i wanted to deliver my point and chose example which should be received well, instead of trying to confront with people here.
I'd argue (as would most of the free software community) the creation of proprietary software is entirely bullshit. Because you have to eventually reinvent it with either permissive or copyleft licenses to just avoid the huge black hole that is legal bullshit and bureaucracy around licensing rights to a number that is not even scarce once its made.
Game engines are a counterexample. There are probably dozens of others.
I'm trying to figure out what people are arguing against. Would you help me understand? Let's assume your argument is true: creation of most proprietary software is entirely bullshit. Ok, so?
I would argue with you that games are not most of the software. Even if it would be, it would benefit a lot from standardized game engines which could be used by workers of art (designers, writers, etc) to build creative games to entertain people.
Most software today is basically CRUD and reporting on top of it. Sadly, all this crap re-implemented so many times each day instead of focusing on inventing. How many corporate time spent on creating login form? retrieve password form? input form validation? In my short life I seen it re-implemented so many times already (and often very poorly btw.) This is one example of engineering BS job I mentioned above.
Or create own protocols only to avoid competition and lock in customer. And there are people who actually engineer it all day long every day. And customers who essentially paying for this person's BS work. It almost feels like corporations are interested in hiring as many people as possible, force them to do non-standardized stuff just to be able to siphon money though corporation bank account to be able to take a cut. It totally make sense to do that for corporation, but for their customers? I am not sure...
From humanity standpoint as a whole, there is place for proprietary software, but way-way less prevalent as it is right now IMHO.
The only game engines that have lasted decades are the id ones. Coincidentally, they are about the only engines open sourced. But even today, games (of foss and not variety) are still being developed for them. Directly.
All the proprietary engines get iterated on, they keep (usually) the same core, but all that old code has gone to rot and waste because of its proprietary nature.
Every game developer is reinventing huge amounts of the wheel. Or more particularly engine developers. Because they all in house whole stack do the thing themselves, rather than work together, and waste everyones time.
> creation of most proprietary software is entirely bullshit. Ok, so?
So the OP was talking about how software is rarely a job without being paid to look busy when actually coding. But really, by reinventing the same wheel thousands of times over, because everyone wants to be a literal 3 year old hiding their toys in their own sandbox and not letting the other kids share with them, it is all a huge waste of time.
In the same way that we have perpetual employment of a lot of people for no reason than to keep them in an office to justify giving them money even if they aren't productive, IP as a whole exists for the same purpose in the modern information age - it is wasting everyones time to add false valuation to something that should not have any. I'm not saying information isn't valuable, but individual copies and licenses and crap like that are not - they are artificial, to prop up a false economy, so it is all bullshit.
No, I'm not, and it's one of the things I enjoy about programming. Some weeks I work 30 hours, others I work 60. But if I did the things I committed to doing this week, then I go home. Why sit in the office and pretend to be working? It makes no sense.
>Why sit in the office and pretend to be working? It makes no sense.
Only if you think of it from the "accomplishing tasks" perspective.
For example where I work, we are there even if we are not actively working to be available in case we need to immediately respond to demands of leadership. For example this week I had to answer an off the wall question about our project that they needed an answer to RIGHT NOW because they have a meeting with their boss in 15 minutes and anticipate that their boss would ask that question.
Should your leadership be aware of the answer to the potential question without having to ask you about it 15 minutes before the meeting? This seems like something that ought not be a problem, if your leadership is attending standups and there's clear communication.
I agree. This is an organizational issue, not a legitimate job duty, irrespective of whether the rank and file should be allowed to leave when they've finished their work.
Most managers would not accept this. Since most developers are paid salary (as opposed to hourly), many feel like if you were leaving early, you aren't working hard enough.
I've seen it at every place I've ever worked. At one place, my manager directly told me I needed to stay until 6 or 7 every night or the boss will think that I'm slacking.
I'm in the same boat. Some weeks I simply do not have enough work to fill the 40 hours I should work according to my contract. I'm just sitting around, looking busy, and billing those hours to the project I'm assigned to. If I report fewer hours than that I'm in trouble, because my billable hours go down and that means I'm getting a smaller bonus at the end of the fiscal year..
That seems completely backwards. You are being paid salary but treated as if you were hourly. If your managers think it's important for you to be in the office 9-5 every day, why don't they just set up an hourly rate and make you punch a timecard? To me, the reason to have salary is that you are paying a worker to do a job. Highly paying jobs usually require highly skilled workers, and those workers should be judged on their results. Completion of the job and all of its duties is worth $XXX,000 per year, and it is up to the employee to determine how best to allocate their time and resources. The fundamental mistake of the approach you describe is that software development is not a profession in which merely showing up and putting in labor is of great value. I can pay Jim the Janitor $10/hour to show up and sit in front of a computer. He is never going to write me a distributed map-reduce powered vectorized graph search in Erlang (or whatever).
Let's say my boss tells me to write a TPS report collector. So I come in for 10 hours every day for a month and slave away on a bunch of crufty repetitive boilerplate code which is low on creativity and high on required hours. I eventually manage to hack together a custom report finder and parser, and generate the necessary solution as described by his email. What if my coworker wakes up after a good night's sleep, comes into the office and talks to everyone involved about the project, then realizes that what the VP of MarketResources really wants is some nice graphs of the TPS trends? He finds an open source TPS report analysis framework, spends a couple days integrating it into the workflow, learns a great solution for dynamically generating graphs while out for drinks after a local dev meetup, submits it all to the boss after two weeks and then takes a vacation. Who has really provided more value to the company here? My point isn't about frameworks vs custom software, it's about good solutions to hard problems. Salary employees, especially software developers, should be evaluated on their ability to come up with great solutions to hard problems and provide value to the team and company. Not whether they showed up at 7am or 10am.
Programming is not like digging a ditch, where 17 man hours are required to dig a ditch of length 14 and width 5. It is quite possible and even common to spend a lot of time working on widgets, features, and implementations which are completely unnecessary, non-optimal, or completely wrong. It is well understood that one great programmer can be worth many, many novice programmers because even 20 novice programmers given twice the time will not come up with the brilliantly simple and elegant solution of the veteran expert. So the more you can do to make the programmers you do have happy and as effective as possible, the better.
Have you ever seen cost plus government dev projects? They make more money the more pointlessly complex and slow to develop your solution it. If only the world was a sensible meritocracy.
That's shocking. No manager I've ever worked for had this kind of mentality. If you needed to show up late or leave early, as long as you were getting your tasks done for the week, it was fine. Forcing people to stay until 6 or 7 is the fastest way to get developers to burn out.
that is a perspective issue - my salary is annually negotiated , in compensation for an idea of what work will come up and how i will better myself and the company. It is not how many hours worked in a week. I don't get a "weekly" salary. having this different perspective in mind allows acceptance of the time shifting that comes along with knowledge work - inventing and creating are not on a linear scale.
The bulk of my clients pay me hourly, on an as needed basis.
I've had a few clients; where it sometimes it feels like they are making stuff up for me to do just so I'll be available when real work comes down the pike.
I have mixed feelings about this.. on one hand--billable hours. On the other hand--it is not satisfying to do things with absolutely no business value.
If your client is a medium to large sized company, it may also be a case of needing to use budget or have budget reduced the next year.
A place I once worked one year had a big budget surplus. They bought a Winnebago, affectionately named the Waltabago after Walt, the guy who ran the team. The next year, Walt bought a Sunfire V1280 with his leftover budget. Walt was a good manager and generally a good guy. It's just that the nature of his business had unpredictable ups and downs, so he was incentivized to make justifiable but wasteful purchases in order to avoid over-spending in peak cost years.
We call this need to spend the budget thing 'slippage' in the UK. Once we had a little bit of slippage, about £1k, so we bought some Sony Mavica floppy disk cameras when they were new and exotic. We just lent them out to staff to learn how to take digital pictures. That lead to digital editing, storyboards &c and quite a lot of upskill. Much better powerpoints.
>I've had a few clients; where it sometimes it feels like they are making stuff up for me to do just so I'll be available when real work comes down the pike.
Have you tried approaching them with a proposal for actual work? If they are willing to spend money on BS work then you might as well propose something solid. Either way you're billing, either way you're working...but you might just deliver some extra value in the process.
I'm miserably reminded every week when I do my TPS^H^H^H timesheet just what proportion of my job is bullshit activity that I have to get through so that I can get to the part where I am actually going to work on something that will matter to someone. ("Look! I actually spent almost 10 hours this week [designing/] writing [/testing] code!") Knowing what needs doing is of course important, but after the third time of hearing it, it's time to shut up and go to work, people!
So many meetings, so many... (sobs bitterly in corner)
My employer pays for my internet connection but requires you to file an expense report, I never do because it feels like part of the job responsibilities to get a fraction of the salary is to file the damn thing. I'm basically giving my employer a discount in order to avoid paperwork.
I had one client; where I stopped working for two weeks because of an administration issue. Throughout that process; I was pressured heavily to continue working without resolution. Things were falling through the cracks and it looked bad on the department [and me and my manager] to have these problems.
Well, we eventually sorted out the administration issue on a late Friday; and as a customer service gesture I worked over the weekend to catch up.
I caught up on the two-week backlog that was crippling the department in four hours. It was at that point I realized how much time I actually 'work' for this client verse how much time I spend in meetings with them.
I'm supposed to be working about 30% time on a project at work. That translates to about 12 hours. This project has two meetings a week and the meetings almost always take 2 hours each. That means that out of my 12 hours/week on this project, I'm already spending 1/3 of it listening to people debate what conferences we should apply to (rather than, you know, what work we should do to make something conference-worthy)
Does your manager know that so much of these meetings a redundant? A good manager insulates other employees from this kind of meeting brutalization and avoids adding to it if at all possible. Unfortunately, there are many managers that think they exist to hold meetings.
There's an aspect of this frustrating, forced busy-work behavior that can get baked into software development, and it isn't going away anytime soon.
Technology innately gives rise to a behavior called yak shaving, and it's not limited to software development, but pretty much any form of technology-related behavior is prone to it, when layers upon layers of technology compound one another and accumulate their own accretion disks of cruft.
A very simple example is needing anti-freeze to drive a car. If there were no chemical companies producing millions of gallons of anti-freeze a year, and no auto-stores to distibute periphery car necessities, and gas stations, and auto mechanics didn't supply anti-freeze, because it's beyond the scope of their expertise, how would I produce the right anti-freeze for my car on my own? Well, what are the requirements for producing industrial grade ethylene glycol?
In order to accurately compare the two applications, how would you take advantage of the fact that these are open-source projects, and actually review the source code, and then build from source?
Each application is built upon many other independent software projects, each sub-project with it's own disciplines, specializations and dependencies. It's time consuming and painstaking behavior to dig into the source trees for these programs and all their dependencies.
I don't think that's the point at all. Even low-wage work would be more satisfying, in the author's view, because your labor is directly beneficial. You can see the results of it. Of course we'd all like to make more money than a store clerk, but in the quest for money we might end up doing things that satisfy us much less than simple labor would. For my part, as a developer, I'm among the fortunate.
Have you ever unloaded a truck with a group of teamsters? I did one summer. I was shocked how aggravated they became at me for hustling. I got sent back to my department because "at that rate we'll have it unpacked in an hour and we've got 4 hours to do it."
On one side, we have low-wage work which is many ways the least-bullshitty. People at the bottom of the hierarchy are often the ones actually getting the work done.
Then, on the other side, we have the layers of HR reps and people who exist only to mind the hierarchy—in many cases, being very well-compensated to do so.
Between the two, there are few meaningful and well-paid positions left.
I was in Houston for a couple of years in 2011-2012 for a big bank in the capacity of a Software Engineer. The environment there was caustic and anti-relaxation. The people introduced artificial stresses to sound and seem important (mostly to avoid being laid off). There's one manager especially who reminded me of a wolf on prowl. He roamed about in the office from time to time and shouted orders arbitrarily at people. Most of them ignored him, but he seemed important to many. I got tired of the constant bickering and unnecessary meetings, left the job.
This reminds me slightly of the scene in the movie "Office Space" when the consultants were interviewing one of the employees and he was discussing "People Skills".
The guy I work for really has no idea how easy certain tasks are once you automate them. I have done nothing to correct his misconceptions.
(I'm a CS grad student, working under a professor who somehow got tenure despite being unable to program his way out of a cardboard box. I swear, half of this job is tricking him into thinking I'm doing his work, so I can focus on doing actual research. ...I really need to find a new advisor.)
well they sure have a point. then i work from home (telecommute then) i dont work "as long" but i certainly get much more done AND i am also happier.
thats mainly because i dont have to "look busy" or "browse sites for a moment until my brain is able to function decently enough to work again"
instead i can go for a job, do the laundry, what not. works much better than sitting on the computer.
This is it. We have been fed a lie that "work" has intrinsic value and that people who don't want to work constantly are somehow inferior or immoral. Worse, "work" has come to be associated more with occupying a particular area in space during particular times than with actually accomplishing anything.
I work relatively little (I'm 31 and I've literally never worked 40 hours a week) and I've actually had people ask me, incredulously, what exactly I DO all the time if I'm not working. As though there aren't a million wonderful things to do at any given time and I'm wasting my life by NOT "working" more. Very sad.
To be fair, I worked nearly full-time for several years (37.5 hours per week, government job which also had a ton of paid time off) and then I've been back in school for the last couple years, which pays me a stipend. I also work part-time as a software developer. But, basically, I just don't have a ton of expenses (I don't own a car, I have lived in cheaper areas, I have no children). I will likely end up with a full-time job in the near-ish future. If I had it my way, I would always work part-time, but it is quite difficult to find good part-time work, and that is sad.
Full-time is generally 40 hours per week in the US, although there are always exceptions. The vast majority of "office" jobs, however, insist on 40 hours per week.
It helped that I could truthfully claim that I pursue a college degree on the side (distance learning, so it's possible to schedule work and study), but it went through with surprisingly little effort.
Meanwhile my coworkers are wondering that this is even possible (and sound mildly envious, in a good way).
Just two weeks ago I was talking to a guy in the military. His government job was to monitor military test taking. At times only 2 people would show up in one day to take a test. He gets paid $20+ an hour. I didn't ask how many hours a week he worked, but I got the impression it was his current main job.
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.
