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by Rangi42
3458 days ago
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I'm all for some kind of social support system to help people through automation. Unemployment benefits, basic income, subsidized retraining, those have their merits. But how does giving someone a do-nothing job, where everyone (including the worker) knows they're dead weight, respect their dignity? |
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The only real example that springs to mind is the job of casino riverboat captain.
At least in Mississippi (and maybe it's changed since I left the area) -- gambling is illegal, at least on land, but out of respect for tradition, riverboat gambling is not illegal... or at least that's the stated reason, scuttlebutt indicates that the reason might have been to limit gambling to only the wealthy who could afford riverboat cruises, and to prevent the working class from falling prey to their own vices.
The laws on riverboat gambling, as laws tend to do, slowly evolved. Nowadays, 'riverboat' gambling in Mississippi is done in massive casinos. They're actually very large buildings that look like this[1], but that technically float. The loopholes in the law that allowed for riverboat gambling have now morphed into 'river gambling', and that large, mall-sized building in the picture is technically a boat. It's effectively moored to land for practical reasons, but because the laws are the way they are, it has to be capable of casting off. Some casinos have a small, detachable section that isn't a part of the permanent mooring, others are detachable from their moorings, etc., but basically, you've got a casino that meets some technical definition of 'boat' upon which it is legal to gamble, whereas if it were incapable of being definable as a boat, it would be illegal to gamble in.
That's a long story, but here's the interesting part -- because it's technically a riverboat, by law, it must have a captain. The captain has few duties; he must be able to ensure that the boat is capable of passing a coast guard inspection, and on exceedingly rare occasions where the casino must aweigh, he will pilot the boat as it does so. The other 363 days of the year he does effectively nothing but sit in his pilot house and stay on payroll, for which he makes a pretty handsome sum.
I don't know what the industry average is, but a friend of mine (the only reason I know these details) actually got a job for one of the smaller casinos in Tunica Mississippi based on his experience as a dinner cruise captain. His was a 'junior captain' for years, and then got promoted to actual captain, for which he did nothing and made almost 6 figures a year, which is a damn lot of money in Mississippi. He passed the time by learning programming on the internet.
[1] - http://www.mississippi.com/portals/0/casino%20images/Harrah'...