Being a little cynical here: man discovers human condition and is unhappy with it. Writes many words about it. Snark aside, people have to be incentivized to do all of this automation. From a philosophy standpoint I agree and we should always be asking these questions about society and productivity. I think intrinsic motivation is great and money is a poor extrinsic motivator as the author points out after a certain point, but... I just can’t see innovation happening the way it does without some sort of massive societal reorganization. And it smacks of needing some sort of central control of everything to achieve this orchestration. My basic argument on why this probably won’t work is that people as a whole are simple in that we have been doing roughly the same things and having the same struggles about as long as we have existed. Yes it’s gotten better, we live in better less violent world (the least violent world we have ever known, in fact). Almost entirely due to technology and the industrial revolution. This is an interesting piece but nothing we haven’t been observing in terms of productivity gained and who is benefitting from all of this productivity (and why are people still working 40+ hour weeks in an ever more productive society?). I think it will take another order of magnitude technology revolution before the average person really questions any of this.
I find articles like this just as I find r/lostgeneration and r/antiwork totally ridiculous.
Why is it “fair” that you have to work? We live in a society. Someone has to keep the water running, the lights on, and the food growing. You can wave your hands and say “robots!” as if there doesn’t need to be anyone to create, manufacture, program, maintain, and improve them. But the bottom line is someone has to do SOME AMOUNT of labor. If you want to sit on your ass in front of the Netflix box, play video games, and eat fast food 24 / 7 there is still someone that has to put in some modicum of effort to let you be a self indulgent useless entity.
In my opinion, the people who still do work should be rewarded. And IMO lazy people who don’t want to work should be stigmatized, but that’s apparently a brutal violent opinion for 2020 tech forums.
Why should you find a job you like? It’s human nature to want to contribute. It’s why we have crazy complex civilization rather than hunter / gather subsistence. You shouldn’t feel “accomplished” for doing jack shit other than masturbating and laughing at content others created.
Think about who you respect. Who are your heroes? Musicians, artists, filmmakers, inventors, politicians, etc.? Not a single one of these people you respect sat around all day doing jack shit and writing articles about how unfair having to work is.
How about you do something worthwhile with your life and stop leeching off of society? You get one life, don’t waste it bitching about having to work. Find something you like doing and work towards that, or die having done nothing but consume what others created.
I don't like the fact that I have to work, but the sad reality is that I have to. There is no other option available to me. And if I have to do it, shouldn't I learn to find some enjoyment in it, rather than angrily gritting my teeth until the bitter end?
In my ~10 year career so far, I have found that this idealism can actually make things worse.
It seems that jobs in general can at best only offer short windows of time where the stars line up for you such that you can honestly say you enjoy working that job. But for one reason or another the window always closes. (Reorgs, you master the work so it gets boring, people come and go etc ...)
If the baseline level of pay in a field is high enough, it seems net detrimental to be highly engaged.
Who is better off? A checked out Engineer who collects 90-100k and is able to cruise at 6/10 levels of happiness under most conditions or a "striver" Senior Engineer who gets 130k but is pretty much always unhappy at work for one reason or another?
I'm truly surprised that companies have not made better use of their "striver" engineers or compensated them enough to keep them striving. The people in charge of running businesses are somehow not interested in these things.
This person seems to put forward a number of provocative theories[0], take a scenic route through the various defences and objections, then leave substantive conclusion as an exercise to the reader.
Put another way, this might be more accurately titled, “Have you considered talking yourself into hating your job?” Maybe this is the job of the philosophy lecturer, I don’t know.
> AI is not going to render everyone jobless anytime soon
EXACTLY. From what I've seen, I don't even think self driving cars are remotely viable for another 10~15 years (honestly we'd probably need general purpose AI first, and if that's even remotely possible, there's no way you're going to get a thinking sentient machine to put in the effort to do something so mundane as driving your damn car).
There are still so many things machines cannot do. They can't pick products of different sizes in an Amazon warehouse. They can't make carbon fibre (most of that stuff is still shaped by hand) .. hell even a lot of space rocket shells are still bent into shape by hand.
Ideally we'd want to see the world move away from goods and more human beings living more sustainably producing content and art for one another. But who am I kidding, we're totally going to run out of resources and/or cover our planet in plastic slurry of sludge and pollution long before then.
Many of that look quite US-specific, like all the required extracurriculars for university applications, obsessing over CV building during the studies, the tuition debt, then having to earn a ton to pay for childcare and education for your kids, long hours, little vacation time... In most Western countries except the US it's not that cutthroat and competitive.
Except those with high stakes standardized testing. Having to invest a little bit of time into extracurricular doesn't look so bad as compared to cramming for years for an arbitrary exam.
Are people cramming hard in Germany or Scandinavia for example?
If you can't clear the German Abitur related to your studies, you'll have a rough time at university anyway. Some filtering makes sense at the door. Else you end up having to recap high school material at university or have tons of extra auxiliary classes to bring people up to speed, who then have this extra load or need to take longer for that reason. Whether I was president of some fancy society in high school has less bearing on how good a physicist I'll be. We don't value the concept of "well-roundedness" here. It's not the job of the university to evaluate people's "character". It's their job to educate people who are capable of getting through the required material. All else is about the upper middle class wanting to push little Bobby in there who has no actual competence versus someone from a poorer background who is good at math or history or whatever but couldn't afford extracurriculars and didn't have connections.
> Thanks to advances in robotics and AI, we may be close to building a society in which work, as we currently know it, is no longer necessary for either of these things.
I'm curious what a modern society that didn't need to work would look like. Especially a heterogeneous society like the US without a single driving culture. Would it be a golden age of philosophers or one of ever more insane (and violent) cults? After all, people with a lot of free time, guaranteed "income" and a lack of driving goals seems the perfect candidate pool for cults.
What makes you think the spoils of a society that doesn't need labor would be distributed evenly?
Today, most of us are controlled by our need to work to live. "Guaranteed income" would mean the people who control us today lose some of that control. Do you think they will give that up without a fight?
Bingo. Billionaires and large corporations are what's holding us back from the future Keynes envisioned, where we'd be working ~15 hours a week. The reserve army of labor is necessary to keep the numbers going up and to the right, and our financial paperclip maximizer overlords can't be bothered to see it any other way.
Is it not the case that we could work 15 hours per week and maintain the lifestyle that was prevalent during Keynes' day?
That is, isn't our inflation-adjusted total compensation more than 3x what it was in the mid 1930s?
The average inflation-adjusted salary in 1935 was only in the realm of $10,000 (in 2020 dollars).
So you could work 15 hours per week at that standard of living if your take-home wage was $13/hour.
Of course, there are other obstacles to making this work. You can't, for instance, get housing for as cheap as was possible then due to increased construction standards. But that (and other similar obstacles) are not the result of some cabal of billionaires.
Some costs in the US, medical being the primary example, are more expensive than they should be due to financial and political scheming. But most things are not.
I'm from the state of Arkansas, where housing is quite cheap. When I lived there (until 2014), my total cost of living was around under $800/month (rent+utilities+food). This comes out to $9600/year.
It is not possible. Housing, medical care, movie tickets, college tuition, prescription drugs, and a host of other things have gone up in price far faster than inflation since then. You can't even buy a house that was around when Keynes was for the inflation adjusted price it was then.
What would your cost of equivalent housing have been in Keynes' day?
It's 3 miles from the downtown of a half-million person metro area. If you're willing to go up into that $50-100K range, you will find plenty of fine houses in mid-sized cities throughout the Midwest/South.
The apartment I rented was an 1100 square foot, 2 bedroom townhouse a block from the bus stop -- $350/month.
But, that's not the "typical" house anymore. You're equating the very cheapest houses and apartments today with the median/typical house from then.
You can't even live where you could in 1930 for the same money you could then. You can't rent for what you could in 1930. You can't go to the doctor. You can't buy a car. You can't send your kids to college. There are more things you just can't do today on 1930-equivalent money. Need I go on?
"Is it not the case that we could work 15 hours per week and maintain the lifestyle that was prevalent during Keynes' day?"
I'm explicitly talking about living as if it were the 1930s. No internet. No cable. No air conditioning. No eating at restaurants multiple times per week. Small house. No college. Maybe no car.
So you say I am equating the cheapest houses today with the median back then, which is absolutely correct. That is exactly what I am trying to say. You can live a median 1930s lifestyle for dirt cheap today.
That house was built in 1948 and is basically the same as most other middle class houses built in that time period.
In 1930, fewer than 1% of people graduated from college. So if you want to live a median 1930s lifestyle, you probably don't have to worry about sending your kids to college. You don't need college to command the $13/hr wage that is necessary to live this lifestyle anyway.
Only 48% of households owned a car in 1930, so if you want a median 1930s lifestyle, that may involve not owning a car. And if you do own a car, a used car from 2005 can be had for $1000 and trounces any middle class 1930s car from that era in every metric.
Okay, sketch out a 1930s New York City lifestyle in New York City, then.
Tell me how I can go to the doctor.
Tell me how I can continue to live, if I'm a diabetic.
Tell me how I, personally, can live, considering I have asthma, and albuterol wasn't discovered until the 1960s (and is much more expensive now than it was then).
I guess I can save money by not buying a radio, because there's nothing worthwhile on there anymore, anyway.
Obviously, major cities' housing costs have increased beyond the rate of inflation due to a variety of reasons, chief among them being the finite amount of land and the growing number of people (not just population of the city, but rather the growing number of people who want to move to the city, which raises prices due to supply and demand).
But the general point still stands that if one wants to live on 15 hours/week, as Keynes' suggested, it's certainly possible to do so (essentially everywhere but major metropolises) if one maintains a 1930s lifestyle.
Okay, so, you can't live in NYC like you can in the 1930s. Where else can't you live? Or, rather, must one live in the middle of nowhere to live the 1930s idyll?
If that's all you want to claim, then I claim I can live like a hunter gatherer from 19300 BCE in the middle of the woods. Big deal. You haven't shown me anything.
Did you want to even begin to address how I can go to the doctor? Or are we conveniently leaving that out? I don't think you have even begun to touch the "general point."
As I stated in my previous comment, most major cities (i.e. national or global hubs) are probably implausible due to increased demand. But there are literally hundreds of mid-sized cities and thousands of smaller cities where it's as simple as described.
Of course, you know this, and you know that's what I was saying, so I'm going to assume you're not really debating in good faith (or are seriously misreading what I'm saying).
Edit: I had a peek at your comment history and saw this pattern repeated with other people. I regret getting involved in this thread.
Okay then. Let's look at a 1930s salary, and tell me how you afford all that stuff:
> From 1935 to 1936 the median family income was $1,160. An annual wage of $1,000 or more placed a family in the middle-income range. The middle-income family did not have a surplus of income but did have a fairly comfortable standard of living. [0]
Show me how I can pay a mortgage, eat, go to the doctor (still ignoring this one, I see), have a little entertainment every once in a while, etc.
Actually, I'll make it easier on you. From the very same source:
> Average Family Budget, 1935
> Income Amount, $
> Average annual income $1,348
> Expenses
> Food and alcoholic beverages 472
> Housing, utilities, furnishings, etc. 456
> Clothing 136
> Automobile purchase and maintenance 73
> Medical care 53
> Recreation, reading, tobacco 72
> Taxes 5
> Miscellaneous expenses 5
> Total Expenses $1,272
Let's go ahead and inflate this typical 1935 family budget to today and see how we do. Note, these numbers are per year. It's easy, right?
Let's simplify it a bit and just say it's a household of one, but you only get to live on ~1/3 of a median US individual income, currently around $43K. I'll give you $15K to work with.
Hint: do medical care and housing first.
Sorry, not my fault you regret biting off more than you can chew. You knew you couldn't do what you were claiming from the beginning.
I regret getting involved in the thread, not because I "bit off more than I can chew", but because having conversations where one person doesn't read what one says is kind of pointless.
For instance, with regard to medical care, in my very first comment, I clearly stated:
"Some costs in the US, medical being the primary example, are more expensive than they should be due to financial and political scheming."
That said, if your income is < $15K/yr, you qualify for Medicaid. Insulin costs < $500/yr on Medicaid.
I've already shown you in a previous comment how it's possible to live so cheaply in the modern day, because I and millions of other Americans literally have done it.
Hey, so, quick question... if I'm not debating in good faith, how do you explain my total lack of downvotes in this thread, and your multiple downvotes? Seems like someone understood what I was saying and agreed, yeah? Maybe I'm not the problem.
'They' is the 'magical evil ruling class' that is the bane of every such fantastic ideology.
There really isn't much of a 'they' trying to 'control you'. Frankly, mostly, rich people are more conscientious, and just want to 'make money' for the most part.
The most cynical I think we could be would be to say that 'they' - meaning the business community at large - want you mostly to 'consume stuff'.
But the level of irrational cynicism here is a little disturbing, a see a lot of people who might be depressed and could be reaching out for help.
Notes on the creation of the consumer economy in the US towards the start of 1900's [1]
> After all, people with a lot of free time, guaranteed "income" and a lack of driving goals seems the perfect candidate pool for cults.
From my own experience with a borderline cult, the people most vulnerable to cults are ones that have had trauma of some sort. Economic prosperity was kind of all across the board, now that I reflect on it. I do agree that "lack of driving goal" is a big factor.
Not an expert on this topic; I just think it's an interesting tangent: what exactly are the biggest factors that make someone susceptible to joining a cult?
Humans don't need work as we know it in the 21st century, but humans don't do well without work in the general sense. There are plenty of things to do that could even be useful to society that aren't modern wage work.
Insane violent cults. I use to believe in UBI, but I'm really not so sure now. I think it would be less Star Trek and more The Expanse. You take away peoples' agency and people degrade. We also haven't solved resource scarcity, so you do have to have a production cycle (or find a way to totally close the production to recycling loop) before you can really worry about a work-less society.
But I go back to the underlying theme of the original Star Trek series with Kirk and Spock. Countless times they were presented with paradise, only to find humans were not quite ready for it. Even in a Federation which had solved resource scarcity, removed money and harvested limitless energy, the desire to explore and seek out new life, and even new dangers and disaster, could not be quenched.
A man without work will produce evil, on his lips a fire will burn. - Proverbs 16:27 (more commonly know by translations like "idle hands are the Devil's workshop, his lips make the Devil's mouthpiece")
Economic engagement is not, shall we say, as "pure" in outcome as direct civic engagement / volunteering / philanthropy. The question for a post-scarcity society is how to motivate civic engagement, even without the prospect of financial reward.
> After all, people with a lot of free time, guaranteed "income" and a lack of driving goals seems the perfect candidate pool for cults.
I think there's a pretty decent argument to be made that most people who are working don't have time for real personal goals. The realities of life often take priority over personal pursuits.
In a world without mandatory work to survive, people would be free to pursue frivolous interests. If everybody who wanted to play guitar could just play guitar all the time, the world would be full of music.
The article describes how automation is eating away at low-skill/experience jobs, but doesn’t provide any insight on how we transition from the the collapse of minimum wage work to all the things are automated.
If food cultivation and harvesting are completely automated, who maintains machines when they break or err? If we leave all of that work to the machines do we lose a skill that’s fungible for sustaining life?
Assuming we can completely automate healthcare and AI is responsible for developing new diagnostics and treatments without human oversight. Who acts as a check on these systems and who is responsible for correcting issues when they arise?
If we can automate 90% of manual and low-skip labor, who makes up the remaining population responsible for completing those tasks and how are they incentivized to continue performing those tasks?
I like the idea of utopian automation, but we don’t have completely automated transportation (maybe one of the closest possibilities). This seems to be putting the cart before the horse.
> If we can automate 90% of manual and low-skip labor, who makes up the remaining population responsible for completing those tasks and how are they incentivized to continue performing those tasks?
Well, supposing it's all automated, who cares if people perform the tasks or not?
More seriously, however, what's the actual incentive to automate "unskilled" labor? Computers are terrible at tasks we find simple, like folding laundry, and the labor of laundry workers is cheap.
I think the rest of your hypotheticals are really not of much consequence. If we develop AI diagnostic machines, why do you assume there won't be human doctors, if only to act as researchers? When horses were retired from farming, what was the incentive to maintain the combines and harvesters?
The incentive to automate unskilled labor is the same as automating anything else - not having to pay employees who are limited by biological needs like food and sleep or protected by labor laws.
Laundry workers may be cheap, but automated laundry workers working 24/7/365 will eventually be cheaper at scale. Amazon is as efficient at exploiting human labor as it's possible to be, but they're absolutely working to put those humans out of work as quickly as possible.
There has to be a certain point where maintaining the machines becomes more expensive than the labor they would replace. That's just simple supply and demand, as the very act of automation would vastly increase the supply of labor. The question is whether it's even ethical to allow humans to work for such a pittance.
At the point where the value of human labor drops so low that humans become viable over machines again, why even bother with money at all? You'd be looking at essentially a post-scarcity world, although subject to the finite resources of the Earth and the amount of energy it gets from the Sun.
This kind of article — provocative without providing substantial alternatives — rarely seems to produce a good discussion even without the word hate on the title.
I don't think it's a problem. It's another symptom of the min/maxing culture this article is taking aim at. There's a culture shift that's taken place in the last few years which says no one's allowed to complain unless they have a better solution. Seen it rearing it's head more recently in very rigid ways. From my observations, it kills creativity in it's tracks and instead of making everyone carefully consider what they complain about and solve problems better, it quashes anyone's ambition to say anything for fear of becoming a target. I've seen the targeting happen in such childish ways too. "If YOU think it's so shit, then YOU fix it."
I don’t need a change in perspective. I need original research (or a summary thereof) on the implementation of universal basic income, controlled deflation of the housing and education loan bubbles, redistribution of resources (money, income, “wealth”, land, power), and a one hundred year plan to deal with the loss of NYC and London to the oceans. Something a little more substantial.
> The problem is that the kinds of jobs they often work in — customer services, food service and other forms of low-skilled labour — are now becoming increasingly susceptible to automation. This lays the foundations for a potential ‘cycle of immiseration’: machines increasingly substitute for young unskilled labour, which limits the ability of young people to invest in their own skill acquisition (education) and physical capital (housing etc.). This means they face a double disadvantage: increased susceptibility to automation and decreased capacity to upskill and uplift themselves.
> This needs to be stopped. The economic progress of the past 200 years has brought many unquestioned benefits. But we should question whether compelling humans to work is essential to the continuation of that progress.
The article doesn't say it clearly, but it seems to be recommending a Universal Basic Income, on a large scale. Or at least enough to allow for students to continue studying without having to work.
A common response I've heard about the above proposal, is some variant of work-valorization. "People these days are just lazy and expect a handout. People should have to earn their keep. Working a job builds character, and is essential to a meaningful life." Presumably the author is responding to such statements.
Another solution that we don't seem to be seriously working on is educating more of the population, so we have more doctors and engineers. There's not a surplus of doctors.
But it's more than just making the classes available. We also need to change the culture that is still somehow vaguely anti-nerd, anti-geek, anti-studying, even though everyone has smartphones and tablets and laptops open 24 hours per day. That's a harder task.
Lots of truth here. I’ve always wondered “to what end” do humans and economies compete. Everyone dies in the end. I’d rather not slave away my limited time in this universe thinking that my work in design systems is really doing anything other than automating parts of a designer/developer’s job.
It seems stupid to toil. Humans should be smart enough to invent an economic system that provides for everyone, leaves none unhoused, and doesn’t force 40+ hour weeks on us. The problem is that someone will always run against the grain of standardization of something like this to exploit someone and profit outside the lines.
By the fact that modern political and social theorists continue to refine and develop the theories behind this form of government. By the fact that the reason it frequently doesn't work is that capitalism can't allow it. A country where workers aren't exploited is essentially an untapped resource according to capitalism. Thus, the grey goo-like tendency of capitalism to take in all that is not it leads to an imperialist takeover of our little sanctuary of worker bliss.
Marx may very well have been right that we need a worldwide revolution in order to create this form of government in which workers receive the full value of their labor, and work is done according to what is socially necessary. Purge capitalism, and it all works nicely.
I've never seen a purely theoretical solution work the first time it's applied in practice, even in the simple, straightforward context of programming a computer.
I think the word "invented" has to mean something more than "proposed and refined a theory without any successful real-world applications".
Furthermore, Marxist theory has been tested. I think it managed to turn out worse than capitalism, which is quite an achievement.
Surprised how this is in the front page. I had a similar feeling of bewilderment that I had when reading Das capital- fancy in theory but after several decades of wasting your/others life, discover it’s unimplementable
I agree with the author, but I think he is railing against a very specific type of mindset. The people he describes have confused "trying to be successful very hard" with "being successful". This is something people do with many things, where they believe their external show of effort is somehow more meaningful than their internal push to achieve the thing.
> At the very least, I think you should be uncomfortable with the fact that you live in a system that compels you to have a job, particularly if that job is neither necessary for your own well-being nor the well-being of others.
Believe me, I have. And, my conclusion has been that, so far, every software engineering job I've ever had has been a bullshit job as defined by Graeber. And, if your job is to get people to click on ads, or other socially detrimental (forget unnecessary) things, you, too, have a bullshit job.
So what would be a non-bullshit job? Animal cafe for lost pets? Handing blankets out to homeless people? Planting trees? How many of these jobs do you think are needed in the world?
I mean, if you are really into this stuff, nobody prevents you from going down this road... If not, then the main concern is this:
Do I like my job? When I wake up, do I think about what I was stuck on last evening and how am I going to tackle this? If you wake up thinking "Oh fuck, I need to work", yeah then that's a bullshit job for sure. But even then, I don't see how more than 1% or 10% of the population could have a job they enjoy. Work needs to be done, most of it is boring, dirty and doesn't earn money.
Until that changes, this is how it will be. No point in crying after it, just think about where you want to position yourself in this system.
Not to mention that this whole discussion brings us back to the question: Who's fault is it that people die? The arms researchers or manufacturers? The army? The people who are mean to us and own resources we want (I mean they could just surrender)?
Are the people building Facebook responsible for the social decline? Or is it the government, not applying proper regulation/laws? Or is it the people using Facebook (nobody is forcing you)? Or are humans just like this and Facebook shows us their true color?
I think those could be considered non-bullshit jobs. And, if social necessity were how work were allocated, rather than what makes capitalists the most money, we'd almost certainly see more tree planters and animal rescuers and homeless person assisters.
But, I'm afraid you're wrong about the main concern, if only in my particular case. I see it as "if I don't do something someone will pay sufficient money for me to do, eventually, I will find myself in a financial bind due to insufficient savings and suffer for it."
And, I would much rather work a non-bullshit job. It's just that the realities of capitalism make that a nonviable alternative. Thus, if I want such luxuries as a roof over my head and food in my belly, I'm deprived of my voluntary choice of how to allocate my own labor, in addition to having the fruits of said labor mostly taken away from me.
> Not to mention that this whole discussion brings us back to the question: Who's fault is it that people die? The arms researchers or manufacturers? The army? The people who are mean to us and own resources we want (I mean they could just surrender)?
Everyone's at fault, according of course to the degree to which they themselves are able to shape the object, in this case mostly culture and incentives, responsible for the decline.
> Are the people building Facebook responsible for the social decline? Or is it the government, not applying proper regulation/laws? Or is it the people using Facebook (nobody is forcing you)? Or are humans just like this and Facebook shows us their true color?
You're misunderstanding the term "bullshit job" (originally from the late David Graeber [0]) which has a specific meaning and has nothing to do with
> boring, dirty and doesn't earn money.
Or even
> If you wake up thinking "Oh fuck, I need to work", yeah then that's a bullshit job for sure.
Instead, it refers to employment that is "so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence". Prototypical example is the layers upon layers of superfluous middle management.
..and you know what, I use to hate bullshit jobs. I really did. I've worked in everything from a sysadmin at a debt collection firm to developing data entry software for a travel agency, to health insurance data science to identity management for a University with 20,000 students (actually, that one was rewarding. Working for a Uni didn't feel like a total waste).
I dreamed of getting back into a University and getting my PhD so I could earn way less, but at least try to get grants for research I wanted to do and have summers to develop the classwork so I could lie to--cough-cough--I mean "tech" students. I got my masters, but PhD programs were much more challenging to get into, and my GRE scores are terrible. With the way Universities have turned so ideological and anti-free thought, I doubt I'll ever actually go back.
I lived in some other countries (did software there too), took a year off to backpack, ran out of money, took more tech jobs ... and now, I feel like I'm okay working tech for the rest of my life. I'll probably be 100% remote from here on out (I have before 2020 at one place) and plan on moving out as far away from the city as I can (and still have decent enough Internet to work).
Sure my life might be wasting away playing video games, blogging or attempting to learn banjo while working for another firm soaking up money ... but I've had adventures. I've literally traveled around the world. I might not hit a lot of my goals .. but man, I've done quite a bit and I'm not even 40 yet.
I'm sad due to the pandemic, but at least I'm not bitter. I know if I was stuck locked up in Chicago with younger me, that kid would not have made it. My old project owner at a job sent me an e-mail about how her Italian roommate had committed suicide during the UK lock downs. Could have been me. It's only luck and timing that it isn't.
> And, if your job is to get people to click on ads, or other socially detrimental (forget unnecessary) things, you, too, have a bullshit job.
What?
In the last 10-15 years so many people have been able to start their own businesses, passion projects and venture into new areas just because of Facebook and Google ads. I have jeweler friends, cloth makers, leatherworkers, people making cakes at home — all of which get their clients on Instagram and other social networks. Also: therapists, astrologists (yes, I'm not a fan, but it's still an occupation), gaming dice makers, photographers, caterers, limo drivers, DJs, hair stylists... And those are just people I personally know that I could remember from the top of my head!
The engineers that "make people click on ads" did it. They enabled more small-scale commerce to compete with the giants, gave a lot of people an opportunity to earn a living doing what they love. Without this "bullshit jobs" all these industries would still have been dominated by centralised gatekeeping institutions that have a budget to advertise in print media, radio, TV and billboards. Now, you can get your first customers with a $10 budget.
If there is such a thing as "making a world a better place", this is it.
There are many jobs that feel like "bullshits jobs" because you don't get to have personal interaction with the person whose life you're improving: you work in a giant system, and the cause-and-effect link between your work and their life is not close. But it doesn't mean that it's not there.
Do you really think that cloth makers, leatherworkers, bakers, therapists, astrologists, dice makers, photographers, limo drivers, DJs, hair stylists, etc. can't exist without Facebook ads? Obviously they can. In fact, most of these occupations you mention function on word of mouth, anyway.
Sorry. Getting people to click on ads is still bullshit. The harm Facebook has done to society, especially over the past 5 years, completely outweighs the fact that someone you know used it to boost their astrology business.
> Do you really think that cloth makers, leatherworkers, bakers, therapists, astrologists, dice makers, photographers, limo drivers, DJs, hair stylists, etc. can't exist without Facebook ads?
That's a scarecrow: I've never made such claim, it's just something that is easy for you to disprove.
These professions obviously existed before. But now the barrier to reach their audience had become significantly lower, and is not tied to a centralised institutions or companies.
Then, why do you ascribe value to Facebook and its ads for enabling the people you know to enter those occupations? That was literally your point, wasn't it? You just told me I could do the same thing, and get started by spending $10 to get my first client, right? Or am I misreading?
Because lowering those barriers is what enabled the people I know to enter those occupations.
I have to admit, I'm really confused by your question: are you under an impression that these professions either don't exist at all, or exist in one immutable state and cannot be democratised? This is not a binary dichotomy between two state. It's a continuum, and while Google and Facebook didn't create those occupations, they still have done a huge deal to improve them. There's no contradiction here.
No. You are claiming that Facebook ads are a mechanism that lowers those barriers. I claim the barrier isn't that big to begin with for most of them (photographer, baker, astrologer, limo driver), and that, even if some of the others benefit from said ads [0], that the harm Facebook has created outweighs that benefit.
Nay, this is the opposite of making the world a better place. Shame on thee, ye supposed best and brightest, ye best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, who spend your days trying to get 1% more people to click on an ad.
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[0]: Which I actually doubt -- the internet as a whole is what lowers the barriers, not Facebook ads per se.
> I claim the barrier isn't that big to begin with for most of them
Can you kindly back this claim up? I already brought forth a comparison between traditional and internet advertisement that you have not disproved. How would you get your customers for your one-person business without internet ads?
> the harm Facebook has created
You keep claiming it, and yet I'm to see any examples of that harm. Internet, including Facebook and Youtube enabled wider political discourse that existed before, all around the globe. If you happen to dislike some of that political discourse, then your problem is with other people's political opinions, not with the medium that they choose to exchange it.
It's like being mad at a printing press because you don't like what's written in the paper.
> the internet as a whole is what lowers the barriers, not Facebook ads per se.
What is the internet if not the websites hosted on it? Facebook IS a part of the internet, so distinction between it and the internet "as a whole" is quite meaningless here. All properties that Facebook and Google have that we are discussing, are logical consequences of the internet. If it would happen to be Altavista and Livejournal, we would still have a pretty similar conversation about the very same software engineers working to optimise CTRs.
I don't have to show you how any of those businesses get customers without Facebook ads. You granted me that they exist without Facebook, therefore they must have customers.
Yes, Facebook is a part of the internet, but it's a part we don't need, and a part we should cut out and burn to the ground, just like we don't need fascists and racists and their so called "discourse."
"Doubling down on the work ethic in an era in which an increasing number of work tasks can be automated is likely to make things worse for future generations."
Says the farmhand about to be replaced by coal powered engines?
Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, there have been wave after wave of automation - and yet material prosperity has exploded and unemployment is relatively low.
Here are some highlights from UK unemployment rates for the last 150 years. Note 2018 was one of the top years for employment - even after 1.5 centuries of automation of various kinds. [1]
There are no glorious jobs, it's all mostly a grind, our civilization depends on people doing their work well.
Whether it is serving coffee, taking out the trash, or writing code - take pride in doing whatever it is well, and do your part.
Of course - we want to make sure we are not abused, we want to make sure we are not 'taken' - but we have it better than anyone in history, and the opportunities we have now are almost unthinkable to someone just two generations ago.
For the vast, vast majority of people, it's not that bad, in fact, relative to most humans who have ever lived, it'd downright utopian.
Within reason try to do a good job, be conscientious and proud of your work, get along and take care of those around you.
> Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, there have been wave after wave of automation - and yet material prosperity has exploded and unemployment is relatively low.
I'm familiar with the US, not the UK.
In the US, the labor participation rate for adults is about 60%, meaning 40% are not working for whatever reason, and that non-participation rate is increasing annually. It will be sobering to see what it is after corona. Perhaps half of adults will be unable to find work.
Additionally, for the first time in history, we are close to "general vision AI", which will have an effect on unskilled labor. (In Silicon Valley, OpenCV is already commonly used to elimainate QA staff.)
So I don't see how looking at stats from 150 years ago is relevant at all.
And the US has a horrible track record on job re-training, as in virtually none.
Your optimistic post applies to US coastal computer programmers, but is completely tone-deaf to most other people who actively switch employers for even $1/hour more.
The US has also created a self-inflicted wound on college students with debts that will destroy fertility and financial progress for most young people. Western society is ill from a thousand cuts, but worst of all in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if the birth rate halves in the next decade.
I like my job. I'd probably do it for free; and indeed, I programmed things for free before entering the workforce, because it was fun.
There's a difference between general work ethic, and the specific belief that paid commercial work is the only ethical kind. It is self-evident to me that, personally, I should be writing computer programs or drawing for at least some of my time instead of playing video games and posting on HN. It is less self-evident that I should pick only one computer program to work on based on the needs of my boss, and then do it for 40 hours a week between the hours of 9am to 5:30pm with an hour for lunch.
"and the specific belief that paid commercial work is the only ethical kind."
? People in general don't believe that.
Everyone recognizes that there's tons of great work being done that's not commercial, or even commercially-related.
This is not a 'deep insight' of a modern ideal either - people have been very active in their communities since the dawn of time and very well aware of the difference between paid and unpaid work - though admittedly, not always 'fully appreciated'.
"It is less self-evident that I should pick only one computer program to work on based on the needs of my boss, and then do it for 40 hours a week between the hours of 9am to 5:30pm with an hour for lunch. "
??? Again, it should be 'fairly evident' because that you are getting paid, is a measure of the value you are creating for a lot of people.
It's not 'the needs of your boss', it's the 'needs of the client that your boss is communicating to you'. It's your bosses job to intelligently make sense of those needs and to divide up the work responsibly.
Your 'interest work' is probably more like 'art' - it may have some function, but that doesn't mean it's useful to anyone at all. There's nothing wrong with doing something useless, and always some 'good' in doing something speculative that may prove to be worthwhile ... but 'payment' is usually a decent measure that the work being done is valuable for someone else.
When you serve a coffee or clean a toilet in the cafe you're definitely creating some value.
When you work for a company that helps the coffee shop do their accounting ... again, value creation.
1. Universal basic income: in the longer term, this is more or less unavoidable if we don't want total chaos and social unrest; also see below.
2. Bigger objectives: As automation grows in terms of its prevalence and the efficiencies it produces, we need to divert more resources on bigger projects that are focused towards long term goals for humanity like scientific exploration/space/energy/medicine etc BUT instead of relying fully on automation to achieve them, we should have a balance of both human and automated labor to ensure that people who want to stay engaged, have the avenue to do so. If that makes things less than fully-efficient, so be it because i) the gains from automation elsewhere offsets that ii) the aim isn't to increase shareholder value.
This probably produces following groups (and there likely will be overlaps/grey areas):
a. Those who are driven by monetary goals: they can continue to pursue their ambitions in profit driven ventures that relies on automation (though automation itself might eat their jobs so this will be a constantly moving target)
b. Those who are driven by humanitarian goals/recognition etc: this is an area that is underfunded and more investment of effort and resources will both help humanity and bring satisfaction to people in it. These problems are so big that even with more and more automation, we can practically throw the entire humanity behind them and still be short of the goals.
c. Those who are unable/unwilling to participate in either corporate or humanitarian projects: I'm sure there will be a significant lot of people in this group but they should/will still have a reasonable standard of living because of #1. People in groups a. and b. shouldn't complain about them because they can join this group too (though based on human needs, I don't think suddenly everyone will jump to this even if they are able to). Similarly someone who is in this group can get inspired and move to a. or b.
For those of you in industries like software: it’s very easy to stop working. At $1m saved, you can comfortably withdraw 3%/year forever. $30,000/year stipend on top of whatever passion thing makes you money is more than enough to live a modest life almost anywhere in the world. You won’t be eating at Michelin star places and you won’t have a palace, but you can comfortably live a decent quiet life in an out of the way place with a tiny rental, home cooked food, and maybe a cat. Want to be a tour guide in Iceland? All the other tour guides are surviving without that $30k stipend. Want to plant trees and sell homemade pots on Etsy? Same deal.
If you save to $2m, then that’s $60,000/year, already you are beating the median American family. This is the point where, for me, I had to make peace with the fact that I wasn’t working like a dog to survive. I was doing it to have more stuff.
If you graduate college at 22 making $200k/year and never get a raise; $1m by 30 should be no sweat.
So now that we’ve disposed of engineers, finance folks, and a few other white collar disciplines, what about everybody else? It seems clear that the big problem facing us on an economic perspective is that most people are economically extremely low value. Somehow, before all people are economically extremely low value, we have to figure out how to get to the Star Trek future. That, I have no idea how to do.
I wish this was true but it isn’t. The main reason I cannot do this is because health insurance is prohibitively expensive. The main reason I have to continue working is because I’m a T1 diabetic and I need to have health coverage.
Although, even without diabetes I still would want to have health coverage.
The claim that one is unable to afford health insurance with a salary between $30k and $60k is... Factually incorrect. Do you mean that the medication for T1 diabetes is unaffordable at that salary range even with health insurance?
I agree with you, and to give some numbers as examples for other readers to respond to, I've seen good individual health insurance in the $500-1200 range, and there may be tax advantages associated with paying it. That's not a huge amount per year if you are getting the $30-60k hypothesized interest income.
> I've seen good individual health insurance in the $500-1200 range
Where should I start:
1) That's per month per individual. So $6,000 - $14,400 per year, plus any family members. That's a huge chunk of a "$30-60k hypothesized interest income."
2) That's if the ACA pre-existing condition exemption is in place. If not, you have a pre-existing condition, and #1 doesn't apply. You'll be lucky to be offered any insurance.
3) I suggest you look at the price of insulin in the US - any recent formulation is sky-high, as in if you're not the 1% then it's not sustainable if you're required to pay for it yourself. Since the era of Martin Shkreli, nothing is affordable.
You're right. After doing some research I could actually pull it off, but it would be pretty tight.
There's some decent insurance options for ~$700/mo. That's still $8400/yr. With $60k/yr income, that might still be doable but I don't think it's realistic on a $30k budget.
I suppose the parent poster's response could be, with $2M you could consider that $30,000 per year plus health insurance.
Or, at $1M you could have $30,000 per year to subsidize working in some job that provides health insurance but otherwise is something you enjoy. Being willing to work for $30k less than anyone else, for example, would probably give you ways to convince the hiring managers to let you do things your way most of the time.
> If you graduate college at 22 making $200k/year and never get a raise; $1m by 30 should be no sweat.
Citation needed. Just back of the envelope, you're looking at $52K in federal taxes. To get that kind of starting salary you're almost certainly in CA, NY, or another high COL area with state income tax, so let's take another $15K. If you live in a car in the parking lot and eat work-provided meals every day and save every penny, you're at $133K * 8 or just barely over a million.
But rent's not free, nor is it even cheap. Even if you split with roommates the whole time, you're probably looking at $12K a year in rent or more. If you live a life of abject poverty you could perhaps meet those thresholds, but what's the point? Throwing away the best years of your life where you are almost certainly at the peak of your health, attractiveness, and ability to meet other people for the hope of.....subsisting in the future?
For one, you don't just toss that $133k into a savings account at the end of every year to just let it rot. You invest it and have it grow with compounding interest. You'll be amazed at the difference that makes to your calculations.
I claim you can save $100k/year on a $200k/year compensation. SmartAsset pegs you as right on the money as $133k take home. Let’s say you live in a $1400/mo place like I did for years (no roommates, but how often are you in your place in your 20s anyway?), that’s $17k a year. Now you’ve got $1300 a month for food and luxuries, and $100k/year going into investments. That is not roughing it. If you hit a financial rough patch you sell a little stock. If the market does 7% inflation adjusted per year (its average for the last 50 years), you end up over a million in the first eight years without a problem. And again, this is assuming you never get a raise or a bonus.... anything extra is gravy.
This is a very insane statement. You need experience first. Fresh out of college, I was making $25k/yr in 2005. Within 4 years I was in the $40k~$50k range, but I also valued ... life, and living. I applied and got a holiday work visa (if you're under 30, they're ~$300 and you can live an work in another country for a year. Different countries have different agreements and age limits) and lived in Australia for a year and NZ for three.
I also took a year off once and lived off of savings (and out of two bags and hostels). It wasn't until I lived in Seattle I was making six figures. It took a lot of experience and research and work to build up that level of expertise. It also took being in the right market (the west coast). If I had stayed in my home town, it wouldn't have been possible. (I wrote a post about tech markets for those who are interested: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/tech-culture-shock-from-ameri...)
What you're describing is a tale that may be true for you, but it's the tale of someone who is determined to work at all odds to be at the top. If you want to live and do other things and have real adventures, you're not going to be in the same spot.
Let’s just throw out one company as an example: let’s say you graduate from undergrad today and join Google as a fairly unremarkable new hire. Your average first year total compensation is $187k/year. If you negotiate well that can easily exceed $200k. If you do well in your career, three years later you’ll be an L4 earning an average of $263k/year. There are a number of companies that pay this well. All of FAANG is >$150k/year fresh out of undergrad.
What I am saying is: if you decide early enough that you don’t want to be a wage slave your entire life, and you are talented and a bit lucky, you can wage slave for ten years and call it good, then spend 30-death doing whatever you want. The biggest danger, and one I’m wrestling with now, is that you get addicted to it.
Thanks for providing the interesting article - sounds like you’ve lived a fun and variety-filled life so far. That’s fantastic and I’m a little jealous of you, but you compromised real economic utility by doing so. I think it’s a popular model, lots of people spend their 20s having adventures and making little money. Nothing wrong with that - but if instead you spend your twenties soullessly grinding away, thanks to the time-value of money you can have the rest of your life to have adventures.
There are plenty of entry level jobs for people with bachelors degrees that pay $150k-$200k. You might have to make a lot of sacrifices to get them.
For me, I didn’t graduate making this kind of money but ended up in the can-FIRE bucket anyway due to saving and market performance. But it wasn’t like it wasn’t possible, I was unaware that such jobs existed.
twenty years ago it was common to make this argument about investment banking. I know a bunch of people who went into investment banking, claiming to intend to quit after a decade. A few did, but most did not.
The problem seems to be that humans acclimate, and so spending ten years on an enormous salary puts most people in a place where they don't feel like they can live on the modest salary they'll have if they retire.
Your original post was about "industries like software". The category of people who work in industries like software is much larger than the category of people who are hired by Google right out of college.
If you are hired by Google right out of college, first of all, you are willingly participating in an evil organization. No excuses. But yes, if you are hired by Google right out of college you should have no problem doing FI/RE.
Most of the software industry is writing CRUD apps for banks, insurance companies, and other similar large established corporations. You can still do FI/RE, but cut all the numbers in your examples by half, probably more.
Mainly, he conflates the question of whether work will continue to be necessary and whether we should enjoy working.
To the extent that we work, hating it simply brings another source of misery into your life. It then makes you poorer because you can't succeed at a job you hate.
So the advice is basically to increase your misery and decrease your wealth.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 305 ms ] threadWhy is it “fair” that you have to work? We live in a society. Someone has to keep the water running, the lights on, and the food growing. You can wave your hands and say “robots!” as if there doesn’t need to be anyone to create, manufacture, program, maintain, and improve them. But the bottom line is someone has to do SOME AMOUNT of labor. If you want to sit on your ass in front of the Netflix box, play video games, and eat fast food 24 / 7 there is still someone that has to put in some modicum of effort to let you be a self indulgent useless entity.
In my opinion, the people who still do work should be rewarded. And IMO lazy people who don’t want to work should be stigmatized, but that’s apparently a brutal violent opinion for 2020 tech forums.
Why should you find a job you like? It’s human nature to want to contribute. It’s why we have crazy complex civilization rather than hunter / gather subsistence. You shouldn’t feel “accomplished” for doing jack shit other than masturbating and laughing at content others created.
Think about who you respect. Who are your heroes? Musicians, artists, filmmakers, inventors, politicians, etc.? Not a single one of these people you respect sat around all day doing jack shit and writing articles about how unfair having to work is.
How about you do something worthwhile with your life and stop leeching off of society? You get one life, don’t waste it bitching about having to work. Find something you like doing and work towards that, or die having done nothing but consume what others created.
It seems that jobs in general can at best only offer short windows of time where the stars line up for you such that you can honestly say you enjoy working that job. But for one reason or another the window always closes. (Reorgs, you master the work so it gets boring, people come and go etc ...)
If the baseline level of pay in a field is high enough, it seems net detrimental to be highly engaged.
Who is better off? A checked out Engineer who collects 90-100k and is able to cruise at 6/10 levels of happiness under most conditions or a "striver" Senior Engineer who gets 130k but is pretty much always unhappy at work for one reason or another?
Put another way, this might be more accurately titled, “Have you considered talking yourself into hating your job?” Maybe this is the job of the philosophy lecturer, I don’t know.
[0]: https://philpeople.org/profiles/john-danaher/publication_att...
All I can tell you is that AI is not going to render everyone jobless anytime soon.
EXACTLY. From what I've seen, I don't even think self driving cars are remotely viable for another 10~15 years (honestly we'd probably need general purpose AI first, and if that's even remotely possible, there's no way you're going to get a thinking sentient machine to put in the effort to do something so mundane as driving your damn car).
There are still so many things machines cannot do. They can't pick products of different sizes in an Amazon warehouse. They can't make carbon fibre (most of that stuff is still shaped by hand) .. hell even a lot of space rocket shells are still bent into shape by hand.
Ideally we'd want to see the world move away from goods and more human beings living more sustainably producing content and art for one another. But who am I kidding, we're totally going to run out of resources and/or cover our planet in plastic slurry of sludge and pollution long before then.
If you can't clear the German Abitur related to your studies, you'll have a rough time at university anyway. Some filtering makes sense at the door. Else you end up having to recap high school material at university or have tons of extra auxiliary classes to bring people up to speed, who then have this extra load or need to take longer for that reason. Whether I was president of some fancy society in high school has less bearing on how good a physicist I'll be. We don't value the concept of "well-roundedness" here. It's not the job of the university to evaluate people's "character". It's their job to educate people who are capable of getting through the required material. All else is about the upper middle class wanting to push little Bobby in there who has no actual competence versus someone from a poorer background who is good at math or history or whatever but couldn't afford extracurriculars and didn't have connections.
Is the rest of it this bad too?
Today, most of us are controlled by our need to work to live. "Guaranteed income" would mean the people who control us today lose some of that control. Do you think they will give that up without a fight?
That is, isn't our inflation-adjusted total compensation more than 3x what it was in the mid 1930s?
The average inflation-adjusted salary in 1935 was only in the realm of $10,000 (in 2020 dollars).
So you could work 15 hours per week at that standard of living if your take-home wage was $13/hour.
Of course, there are other obstacles to making this work. You can't, for instance, get housing for as cheap as was possible then due to increased construction standards. But that (and other similar obstacles) are not the result of some cabal of billionaires.
Some costs in the US, medical being the primary example, are more expensive than they should be due to financial and political scheming. But most things are not.
I'm from the state of Arkansas, where housing is quite cheap. When I lived there (until 2014), my total cost of living was around under $800/month (rent+utilities+food). This comes out to $9600/year.
What would your cost of equivalent housing have been in Keynes' day?
To use my hometown as an example, consider this 1948 house that Redfin believes is worth $30K: https://www.redfin.com/AR/North-Little-Rock/707-Gardenia-Ave...
It's 3 miles from the downtown of a half-million person metro area. If you're willing to go up into that $50-100K range, you will find plenty of fine houses in mid-sized cities throughout the Midwest/South.
The apartment I rented was an 1100 square foot, 2 bedroom townhouse a block from the bus stop -- $350/month.
You can't even live where you could in 1930 for the same money you could then. You can't rent for what you could in 1930. You can't go to the doctor. You can't buy a car. You can't send your kids to college. There are more things you just can't do today on 1930-equivalent money. Need I go on?
"Is it not the case that we could work 15 hours per week and maintain the lifestyle that was prevalent during Keynes' day?"
I'm explicitly talking about living as if it were the 1930s. No internet. No cable. No air conditioning. No eating at restaurants multiple times per week. Small house. No college. Maybe no car.
So you say I am equating the cheapest houses today with the median back then, which is absolutely correct. That is exactly what I am trying to say. You can live a median 1930s lifestyle for dirt cheap today.
That house was built in 1948 and is basically the same as most other middle class houses built in that time period.
In 1930, fewer than 1% of people graduated from college. So if you want to live a median 1930s lifestyle, you probably don't have to worry about sending your kids to college. You don't need college to command the $13/hr wage that is necessary to live this lifestyle anyway.
Only 48% of households owned a car in 1930, so if you want a median 1930s lifestyle, that may involve not owning a car. And if you do own a car, a used car from 2005 can be had for $1000 and trounces any middle class 1930s car from that era in every metric.
Tell me how I can go to the doctor.
Tell me how I can continue to live, if I'm a diabetic.
Tell me how I, personally, can live, considering I have asthma, and albuterol wasn't discovered until the 1960s (and is much more expensive now than it was then).
I guess I can save money by not buying a radio, because there's nothing worthwhile on there anymore, anyway.
But the general point still stands that if one wants to live on 15 hours/week, as Keynes' suggested, it's certainly possible to do so (essentially everywhere but major metropolises) if one maintains a 1930s lifestyle.
If that's all you want to claim, then I claim I can live like a hunter gatherer from 19300 BCE in the middle of the woods. Big deal. You haven't shown me anything.
Did you want to even begin to address how I can go to the doctor? Or are we conveniently leaving that out? I don't think you have even begun to touch the "general point."
Of course, you know this, and you know that's what I was saying, so I'm going to assume you're not really debating in good faith (or are seriously misreading what I'm saying).
Edit: I had a peek at your comment history and saw this pattern repeated with other people. I regret getting involved in this thread.
> From 1935 to 1936 the median family income was $1,160. An annual wage of $1,000 or more placed a family in the middle-income range. The middle-income family did not have a surplus of income but did have a fairly comfortable standard of living. [0]
Show me how I can pay a mortgage, eat, go to the doctor (still ignoring this one, I see), have a little entertainment every once in a while, etc.
Actually, I'll make it easier on you. From the very same source:
> Average Family Budget, 1935
> Income Amount, $ > Average annual income $1,348
> Expenses
> Food and alcoholic beverages 472
> Housing, utilities, furnishings, etc. 456
> Clothing 136
> Automobile purchase and maintenance 73
> Medical care 53
> Recreation, reading, tobacco 72
> Taxes 5
> Miscellaneous expenses 5
> Total Expenses $1,272
Let's go ahead and inflate this typical 1935 family budget to today and see how we do. Note, these numbers are per year. It's easy, right?
Let's simplify it a bit and just say it's a household of one, but you only get to live on ~1/3 of a median US individual income, currently around $43K. I'll give you $15K to work with.
Hint: do medical care and housing first.
Sorry, not my fault you regret biting off more than you can chew. You knew you couldn't do what you were claiming from the beginning.
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[0]: https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-and-education-ma...
For instance, with regard to medical care, in my very first comment, I clearly stated:
"Some costs in the US, medical being the primary example, are more expensive than they should be due to financial and political scheming."
That said, if your income is < $15K/yr, you qualify for Medicaid. Insulin costs < $500/yr on Medicaid.
I've already shown you in a previous comment how it's possible to live so cheaply in the modern day, because I and millions of other Americans literally have done it.
It's kind of interesting that we have to rely on a social program that didn't exist until 1965 to live like the median 1935 person, though. Hm.
There really isn't much of a 'they' trying to 'control you'. Frankly, mostly, rich people are more conscientious, and just want to 'make money' for the most part.
The most cynical I think we could be would be to say that 'they' - meaning the business community at large - want you mostly to 'consume stuff'.
But the level of irrational cynicism here is a little disturbing, a see a lot of people who might be depressed and could be reaching out for help.
Notes on the creation of the consumer economy in the US towards the start of 1900's [1]
[1] https://www.ushistory.org/us/46f.asp
Do you have more control over the dog you feed every day or the wolves that feed themselves?
From my own experience with a borderline cult, the people most vulnerable to cults are ones that have had trauma of some sort. Economic prosperity was kind of all across the board, now that I reflect on it. I do agree that "lack of driving goal" is a big factor.
Not an expert on this topic; I just think it's an interesting tangent: what exactly are the biggest factors that make someone susceptible to joining a cult?
But I go back to the underlying theme of the original Star Trek series with Kirk and Spock. Countless times they were presented with paradise, only to find humans were not quite ready for it. Even in a Federation which had solved resource scarcity, removed money and harvested limitless energy, the desire to explore and seek out new life, and even new dangers and disaster, could not be quenched.
Economic engagement is not, shall we say, as "pure" in outcome as direct civic engagement / volunteering / philanthropy. The question for a post-scarcity society is how to motivate civic engagement, even without the prospect of financial reward.
I think there's a pretty decent argument to be made that most people who are working don't have time for real personal goals. The realities of life often take priority over personal pursuits.
In a world without mandatory work to survive, people would be free to pursue frivolous interests. If everybody who wanted to play guitar could just play guitar all the time, the world would be full of music.
If food cultivation and harvesting are completely automated, who maintains machines when they break or err? If we leave all of that work to the machines do we lose a skill that’s fungible for sustaining life?
Assuming we can completely automate healthcare and AI is responsible for developing new diagnostics and treatments without human oversight. Who acts as a check on these systems and who is responsible for correcting issues when they arise?
If we can automate 90% of manual and low-skip labor, who makes up the remaining population responsible for completing those tasks and how are they incentivized to continue performing those tasks?
I like the idea of utopian automation, but we don’t have completely automated transportation (maybe one of the closest possibilities). This seems to be putting the cart before the horse.
Well, supposing it's all automated, who cares if people perform the tasks or not?
More seriously, however, what's the actual incentive to automate "unskilled" labor? Computers are terrible at tasks we find simple, like folding laundry, and the labor of laundry workers is cheap.
I think the rest of your hypotheticals are really not of much consequence. If we develop AI diagnostic machines, why do you assume there won't be human doctors, if only to act as researchers? When horses were retired from farming, what was the incentive to maintain the combines and harvesters?
Laundry workers may be cheap, but automated laundry workers working 24/7/365 will eventually be cheaper at scale. Amazon is as efficient at exploiting human labor as it's possible to be, but they're absolutely working to put those humans out of work as quickly as possible.
This article offers a change in perspective, is that not enough to be worthy of HN?
> This needs to be stopped. The economic progress of the past 200 years has brought many unquestioned benefits. But we should question whether compelling humans to work is essential to the continuation of that progress.
The article doesn't say it clearly, but it seems to be recommending a Universal Basic Income, on a large scale. Or at least enough to allow for students to continue studying without having to work.
A common response I've heard about the above proposal, is some variant of work-valorization. "People these days are just lazy and expect a handout. People should have to earn their keep. Working a job builds character, and is essential to a meaningful life." Presumably the author is responding to such statements.
But it's more than just making the classes available. We also need to change the culture that is still somehow vaguely anti-nerd, anti-geek, anti-studying, even though everyone has smartphones and tablets and laptops open 24 hours per day. That's a harder task.
It seems stupid to toil. Humans should be smart enough to invent an economic system that provides for everyone, leaves none unhoused, and doesn’t force 40+ hour weeks on us. The problem is that someone will always run against the grain of standardization of something like this to exploit someone and profit outside the lines.
Marx may very well have been right that we need a worldwide revolution in order to create this form of government in which workers receive the full value of their labor, and work is done according to what is socially necessary. Purge capitalism, and it all works nicely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_revolution
I think the word "invented" has to mean something more than "proposed and refined a theory without any successful real-world applications".
Furthermore, Marxist theory has been tested. I think it managed to turn out worse than capitalism, which is quite an achievement.
Believe me, I have. And, my conclusion has been that, so far, every software engineering job I've ever had has been a bullshit job as defined by Graeber. And, if your job is to get people to click on ads, or other socially detrimental (forget unnecessary) things, you, too, have a bullshit job.
I mean, if you are really into this stuff, nobody prevents you from going down this road... If not, then the main concern is this:
Do I like my job? When I wake up, do I think about what I was stuck on last evening and how am I going to tackle this? If you wake up thinking "Oh fuck, I need to work", yeah then that's a bullshit job for sure. But even then, I don't see how more than 1% or 10% of the population could have a job they enjoy. Work needs to be done, most of it is boring, dirty and doesn't earn money.
Until that changes, this is how it will be. No point in crying after it, just think about where you want to position yourself in this system.
Not to mention that this whole discussion brings us back to the question: Who's fault is it that people die? The arms researchers or manufacturers? The army? The people who are mean to us and own resources we want (I mean they could just surrender)?
Are the people building Facebook responsible for the social decline? Or is it the government, not applying proper regulation/laws? Or is it the people using Facebook (nobody is forcing you)? Or are humans just like this and Facebook shows us their true color?
But, I'm afraid you're wrong about the main concern, if only in my particular case. I see it as "if I don't do something someone will pay sufficient money for me to do, eventually, I will find myself in a financial bind due to insufficient savings and suffer for it."
And, I would much rather work a non-bullshit job. It's just that the realities of capitalism make that a nonviable alternative. Thus, if I want such luxuries as a roof over my head and food in my belly, I'm deprived of my voluntary choice of how to allocate my own labor, in addition to having the fruits of said labor mostly taken away from me.
Everyone's at fault, according of course to the degree to which they themselves are able to shape the object, in this case mostly culture and incentives, responsible for the decline.
> Are the people building Facebook responsible for the social decline? Or is it the government, not applying proper regulation/laws? Or is it the people using Facebook (nobody is forcing you)? Or are humans just like this and Facebook shows us their true color?
I repeat, everyone's responsible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility
> boring, dirty and doesn't earn money.
Or even
> If you wake up thinking "Oh fuck, I need to work", yeah then that's a bullshit job for sure.
Instead, it refers to employment that is "so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence". Prototypical example is the layers upon layers of superfluous middle management.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
I dreamed of getting back into a University and getting my PhD so I could earn way less, but at least try to get grants for research I wanted to do and have summers to develop the classwork so I could lie to--cough-cough--I mean "tech" students. I got my masters, but PhD programs were much more challenging to get into, and my GRE scores are terrible. With the way Universities have turned so ideological and anti-free thought, I doubt I'll ever actually go back.
I lived in some other countries (did software there too), took a year off to backpack, ran out of money, took more tech jobs ... and now, I feel like I'm okay working tech for the rest of my life. I'll probably be 100% remote from here on out (I have before 2020 at one place) and plan on moving out as far away from the city as I can (and still have decent enough Internet to work).
Sure my life might be wasting away playing video games, blogging or attempting to learn banjo while working for another firm soaking up money ... but I've had adventures. I've literally traveled around the world. I might not hit a lot of my goals .. but man, I've done quite a bit and I'm not even 40 yet.
I'm sad due to the pandemic, but at least I'm not bitter. I know if I was stuck locked up in Chicago with younger me, that kid would not have made it. My old project owner at a job sent me an e-mail about how her Italian roommate had committed suicide during the UK lock downs. Could have been me. It's only luck and timing that it isn't.
What?
In the last 10-15 years so many people have been able to start their own businesses, passion projects and venture into new areas just because of Facebook and Google ads. I have jeweler friends, cloth makers, leatherworkers, people making cakes at home — all of which get their clients on Instagram and other social networks. Also: therapists, astrologists (yes, I'm not a fan, but it's still an occupation), gaming dice makers, photographers, caterers, limo drivers, DJs, hair stylists... And those are just people I personally know that I could remember from the top of my head!
The engineers that "make people click on ads" did it. They enabled more small-scale commerce to compete with the giants, gave a lot of people an opportunity to earn a living doing what they love. Without this "bullshit jobs" all these industries would still have been dominated by centralised gatekeeping institutions that have a budget to advertise in print media, radio, TV and billboards. Now, you can get your first customers with a $10 budget.
If there is such a thing as "making a world a better place", this is it.
There are many jobs that feel like "bullshits jobs" because you don't get to have personal interaction with the person whose life you're improving: you work in a giant system, and the cause-and-effect link between your work and their life is not close. But it doesn't mean that it's not there.
Sorry. Getting people to click on ads is still bullshit. The harm Facebook has done to society, especially over the past 5 years, completely outweighs the fact that someone you know used it to boost their astrology business.
That's a scarecrow: I've never made such claim, it's just something that is easy for you to disprove.
These professions obviously existed before. But now the barrier to reach their audience had become significantly lower, and is not tied to a centralised institutions or companies.
I have to admit, I'm really confused by your question: are you under an impression that these professions either don't exist at all, or exist in one immutable state and cannot be democratised? This is not a binary dichotomy between two state. It's a continuum, and while Google and Facebook didn't create those occupations, they still have done a huge deal to improve them. There's no contradiction here.
Nay, this is the opposite of making the world a better place. Shame on thee, ye supposed best and brightest, ye best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, who spend your days trying to get 1% more people to click on an ad.
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[0]: Which I actually doubt -- the internet as a whole is what lowers the barriers, not Facebook ads per se.
Can you kindly back this claim up? I already brought forth a comparison between traditional and internet advertisement that you have not disproved. How would you get your customers for your one-person business without internet ads?
> the harm Facebook has created
You keep claiming it, and yet I'm to see any examples of that harm. Internet, including Facebook and Youtube enabled wider political discourse that existed before, all around the globe. If you happen to dislike some of that political discourse, then your problem is with other people's political opinions, not with the medium that they choose to exchange it.
It's like being mad at a printing press because you don't like what's written in the paper.
> the internet as a whole is what lowers the barriers, not Facebook ads per se.
What is the internet if not the websites hosted on it? Facebook IS a part of the internet, so distinction between it and the internet "as a whole" is quite meaningless here. All properties that Facebook and Google have that we are discussing, are logical consequences of the internet. If it would happen to be Altavista and Livejournal, we would still have a pretty similar conversation about the very same software engineers working to optimise CTRs.
As for harms of Facebook, here are 6, from the most cursory google search ever: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2017/06/30/a-run-d...
Yes, Facebook is a part of the internet, but it's a part we don't need, and a part we should cut out and burn to the ground, just like we don't need fascists and racists and their so called "discourse."
Says the farmhand about to be replaced by coal powered engines?
Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, there have been wave after wave of automation - and yet material prosperity has exploded and unemployment is relatively low.
Here are some highlights from UK unemployment rates for the last 150 years. Note 2018 was one of the top years for employment - even after 1.5 centuries of automation of various kinds. [1]
There are no glorious jobs, it's all mostly a grind, our civilization depends on people doing their work well.
Whether it is serving coffee, taking out the trash, or writing code - take pride in doing whatever it is well, and do your part.
Of course - we want to make sure we are not abused, we want to make sure we are not 'taken' - but we have it better than anyone in history, and the opportunities we have now are almost unthinkable to someone just two generations ago.
For the vast, vast majority of people, it's not that bad, in fact, relative to most humans who have ever lived, it'd downright utopian.
Within reason try to do a good job, be conscientious and proud of your work, get along and take care of those around you.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoracco...
I'm familiar with the US, not the UK.
In the US, the labor participation rate for adults is about 60%, meaning 40% are not working for whatever reason, and that non-participation rate is increasing annually. It will be sobering to see what it is after corona. Perhaps half of adults will be unable to find work.
Additionally, for the first time in history, we are close to "general vision AI", which will have an effect on unskilled labor. (In Silicon Valley, OpenCV is already commonly used to elimainate QA staff.)
So I don't see how looking at stats from 150 years ago is relevant at all.
And the US has a horrible track record on job re-training, as in virtually none.
Your optimistic post applies to US coastal computer programmers, but is completely tone-deaf to most other people who actively switch employers for even $1/hour more.
The US has also created a self-inflicted wound on college students with debts that will destroy fertility and financial progress for most young people. Western society is ill from a thousand cuts, but worst of all in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if the birth rate halves in the next decade.
There's a difference between general work ethic, and the specific belief that paid commercial work is the only ethical kind. It is self-evident to me that, personally, I should be writing computer programs or drawing for at least some of my time instead of playing video games and posting on HN. It is less self-evident that I should pick only one computer program to work on based on the needs of my boss, and then do it for 40 hours a week between the hours of 9am to 5:30pm with an hour for lunch.
? People in general don't believe that.
Everyone recognizes that there's tons of great work being done that's not commercial, or even commercially-related.
This is not a 'deep insight' of a modern ideal either - people have been very active in their communities since the dawn of time and very well aware of the difference between paid and unpaid work - though admittedly, not always 'fully appreciated'.
"It is less self-evident that I should pick only one computer program to work on based on the needs of my boss, and then do it for 40 hours a week between the hours of 9am to 5:30pm with an hour for lunch. "
??? Again, it should be 'fairly evident' because that you are getting paid, is a measure of the value you are creating for a lot of people.
It's not 'the needs of your boss', it's the 'needs of the client that your boss is communicating to you'. It's your bosses job to intelligently make sense of those needs and to divide up the work responsibly.
Your 'interest work' is probably more like 'art' - it may have some function, but that doesn't mean it's useful to anyone at all. There's nothing wrong with doing something useless, and always some 'good' in doing something speculative that may prove to be worthwhile ... but 'payment' is usually a decent measure that the work being done is valuable for someone else.
When you serve a coffee or clean a toilet in the cafe you're definitely creating some value.
When you work for a company that helps the coffee shop do their accounting ... again, value creation.
1. Universal basic income: in the longer term, this is more or less unavoidable if we don't want total chaos and social unrest; also see below.
2. Bigger objectives: As automation grows in terms of its prevalence and the efficiencies it produces, we need to divert more resources on bigger projects that are focused towards long term goals for humanity like scientific exploration/space/energy/medicine etc BUT instead of relying fully on automation to achieve them, we should have a balance of both human and automated labor to ensure that people who want to stay engaged, have the avenue to do so. If that makes things less than fully-efficient, so be it because i) the gains from automation elsewhere offsets that ii) the aim isn't to increase shareholder value.
This probably produces following groups (and there likely will be overlaps/grey areas):
a. Those who are driven by monetary goals: they can continue to pursue their ambitions in profit driven ventures that relies on automation (though automation itself might eat their jobs so this will be a constantly moving target)
b. Those who are driven by humanitarian goals/recognition etc: this is an area that is underfunded and more investment of effort and resources will both help humanity and bring satisfaction to people in it. These problems are so big that even with more and more automation, we can practically throw the entire humanity behind them and still be short of the goals.
c. Those who are unable/unwilling to participate in either corporate or humanitarian projects: I'm sure there will be a significant lot of people in this group but they should/will still have a reasonable standard of living because of #1. People in groups a. and b. shouldn't complain about them because they can join this group too (though based on human needs, I don't think suddenly everyone will jump to this even if they are able to). Similarly someone who is in this group can get inspired and move to a. or b.
If you save to $2m, then that’s $60,000/year, already you are beating the median American family. This is the point where, for me, I had to make peace with the fact that I wasn’t working like a dog to survive. I was doing it to have more stuff.
If you graduate college at 22 making $200k/year and never get a raise; $1m by 30 should be no sweat.
So now that we’ve disposed of engineers, finance folks, and a few other white collar disciplines, what about everybody else? It seems clear that the big problem facing us on an economic perspective is that most people are economically extremely low value. Somehow, before all people are economically extremely low value, we have to figure out how to get to the Star Trek future. That, I have no idea how to do.
Although, even without diabetes I still would want to have health coverage.
Where should I start:
1) That's per month per individual. So $6,000 - $14,400 per year, plus any family members. That's a huge chunk of a "$30-60k hypothesized interest income."
2) That's if the ACA pre-existing condition exemption is in place. If not, you have a pre-existing condition, and #1 doesn't apply. You'll be lucky to be offered any insurance.
3) I suggest you look at the price of insulin in the US - any recent formulation is sky-high, as in if you're not the 1% then it's not sustainable if you're required to pay for it yourself. Since the era of Martin Shkreli, nothing is affordable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli
There's some decent insurance options for ~$700/mo. That's still $8400/yr. With $60k/yr income, that might still be doable but I don't think it's realistic on a $30k budget.
Or, at $1M you could have $30,000 per year to subsidize working in some job that provides health insurance but otherwise is something you enjoy. Being willing to work for $30k less than anyone else, for example, would probably give you ways to convince the hiring managers to let you do things your way most of the time.
Citation needed. Just back of the envelope, you're looking at $52K in federal taxes. To get that kind of starting salary you're almost certainly in CA, NY, or another high COL area with state income tax, so let's take another $15K. If you live in a car in the parking lot and eat work-provided meals every day and save every penny, you're at $133K * 8 or just barely over a million.
But rent's not free, nor is it even cheap. Even if you split with roommates the whole time, you're probably looking at $12K a year in rent or more. If you live a life of abject poverty you could perhaps meet those thresholds, but what's the point? Throwing away the best years of your life where you are almost certainly at the peak of your health, attractiveness, and ability to meet other people for the hope of.....subsisting in the future?
I also took a year off once and lived off of savings (and out of two bags and hostels). It wasn't until I lived in Seattle I was making six figures. It took a lot of experience and research and work to build up that level of expertise. It also took being in the right market (the west coast). If I had stayed in my home town, it wouldn't have been possible. (I wrote a post about tech markets for those who are interested: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/tech-culture-shock-from-ameri...)
What you're describing is a tale that may be true for you, but it's the tale of someone who is determined to work at all odds to be at the top. If you want to live and do other things and have real adventures, you're not going to be in the same spot.
Let’s just throw out one company as an example: let’s say you graduate from undergrad today and join Google as a fairly unremarkable new hire. Your average first year total compensation is $187k/year. If you negotiate well that can easily exceed $200k. If you do well in your career, three years later you’ll be an L4 earning an average of $263k/year. There are a number of companies that pay this well. All of FAANG is >$150k/year fresh out of undergrad.
What I am saying is: if you decide early enough that you don’t want to be a wage slave your entire life, and you are talented and a bit lucky, you can wage slave for ten years and call it good, then spend 30-death doing whatever you want. The biggest danger, and one I’m wrestling with now, is that you get addicted to it.
Thanks for providing the interesting article - sounds like you’ve lived a fun and variety-filled life so far. That’s fantastic and I’m a little jealous of you, but you compromised real economic utility by doing so. I think it’s a popular model, lots of people spend their 20s having adventures and making little money. Nothing wrong with that - but if instead you spend your twenties soullessly grinding away, thanks to the time-value of money you can have the rest of your life to have adventures.
There are plenty of entry level jobs for people with bachelors degrees that pay $150k-$200k. You might have to make a lot of sacrifices to get them.
For me, I didn’t graduate making this kind of money but ended up in the can-FIRE bucket anyway due to saving and market performance. But it wasn’t like it wasn’t possible, I was unaware that such jobs existed.
The problem seems to be that humans acclimate, and so spending ten years on an enormous salary puts most people in a place where they don't feel like they can live on the modest salary they'll have if they retire.
If you are hired by Google right out of college, first of all, you are willingly participating in an evil organization. No excuses. But yes, if you are hired by Google right out of college you should have no problem doing FI/RE.
Most of the software industry is writing CRUD apps for banks, insurance companies, and other similar large established corporations. You can still do FI/RE, but cut all the numbers in your examples by half, probably more.
To the extent that we work, hating it simply brings another source of misery into your life. It then makes you poorer because you can't succeed at a job you hate.
So the advice is basically to increase your misery and decrease your wealth.