[fao_]

> That might be the core disagreement here. There are a lot of people doing activities that are useful. I struggle to think of them as value creators because what they are actually doing is whatever someone tells them - there is a lack of agency in deciding what they do, so I have difficulty attributing outcomes to them. They are fungible, but the people telling them what to do are not. If you tell them to do something stupid, they will do it (as seen with Uber).

I think this speaks to your own lack of understanding of these jobs. Just because the general goal is set by someone higher up, does not mean that there is not hidden variation for the exact task, as well as a lot of places for 'hidden mediocrity'.

Take cleaning the toilets, for example. The general order given is "clean the toilets". Think, however, about how this task has to be broken down. The small things like cleaning the tap heads, under the rim of the seat, etc. that most people might not explicitly think of without being reminded. The person has to do those small tasks, possibly hundreds of times, while dealing with any unexpected obstacles.

Or take something less unsavory, like baking bread. Anyone who has baked bread understands that, while the general instructions _sound_ simple, there is a lot of complexity that is not accounted for, and a lot of room for variability of skill.

Sure, anyone can train for a month and play X tune on the guitar, but are you going to pay for someone who has spent simply one month training, or someone who can really play the tune that has been playing for years? If they are interchangeable then there needn't be thousands of threads submitted to hacker news about how to hire "10x developers".

> Small businesspeople in particular are a backbone of society in a way that most workers really are not.

The matter of fact is that once a company has been established, it can float for a long time without the business owner contributing much whatsoever. I can think of more than a couple of companies that have changed CEOs three times in the last 5 years, while the actual inputs and outputs of the company remain steady. Direction only matters in a vague sense until you hit bad economic times. The ultimate truth is that 'fungibility' has nothing to do with 'value'.

[gnarlee]

I clean trains (includes lots of toilets) the hilarious story to share is that long long ago one would just show up at the trainstation and be hired to clean by annother cleaner. Paid in cash every friday. Over time a truly insane number of madly overpaid deskjokeys was tagged onto the process to do countless completely nonsensical tasks. From a really well paid job and really good cleaning, in 70 years, things moved to really shit pay and half the employees. The work didnt change at all but everything is measured to the detail. Apparently the combination of shit pay and more work than one can do makes employees unreliable enough to justify tons of desk work. The hr and countless job agencies are completely overworked. The measurment of bad results triggers countless meetings. The ppl making work schedules are tasked with a completely and utterly impossible mission. But it gets truly hilarious where the cleaners bring new employees into the 3rd party job agencies, when we dont like it change the work schedule and carefully compare salaries with hours worked. So nothing has really changed at all. The only new thing is that for every 1000 euro in actual cleaning there is now 2500 euro in administrative tasks.