[quacked]

But you still think that someone should do outdoor jobs where you live. Why them and not you? Their jobs are open to you, but your job is not open to them.

How do you reconcile expecting the rewards of other people's labor if you wouldn't be willing to do the same labor yourself?

[brippalcharrid]

They probably aren't willing to do outdoor work in the cicumstances, seeing as they have previously delayed a lot of gratification by spending time and money developing skills that now enable them to do work in an air-conditioned office in a field that they find intellectually stimulating, with good remuneration. If they hadn't made good use of the opportunities that life had presented them with, if they were dealt a bad hand in life, or if the developed world was plunged into a new dark age, then I'm sure they would be more than happy to till the earth, tend to livestock or perform tree surgery if that was what it took to avert starvation or penury.

[s1artibartfast]

>How do you reconcile expecting the rewards of other people's labor if you wouldn't be willing to do the same labor yourself?

I pay them directly for their labor, as simple as that. I guess I'm not sure what the confusion is. Everyone wants the best job they can get given their skills and luck. Nobody is going to be shoveling asphalt in the sun for fun if their part time astrophysicist gig covers their expenses.

[quacked]

Everyone has been tricked into believing that the best use of their time is to "get the best job", and the "job" is working at a hyper-specialized set of tasks, day-in, day-out. They claw at each other like crabs, dismayed when they lose a position, elated when they eke out a few more dollars or gain an extra few days of free time as they shuffle jobs. On HN, there's an archetypal hero's ascendency crawl where you finally find that $300k product manager job and retire at 45 with crazy stock options.

It's a slave mentality. Do you believe that we, the people in society, set up the component parts of society and thus have the right to rebuild those component parts as it suits us, or do you believe that concepts like "jobs" and "laws" are naturally occurring phenomena that we are owned by?

I am immune to the siren call of endless improvements in the amount of money I receive. I have reached a high enough standard of living that I don't need any more goods or services than I already can get, and I'm not particularly rich as far as Americans go (about 65th percentile according to a recent income distribution calculator).

My goal is to convince as many people as I can to start thinking about what quality of life they would be satisfied with, figure out what labor and materials are required of them and their community to provide that quality of life, and then cut everything else out of the picture. We don't need the rat race, we don't need our elders worrying about how they'll afford the doctor, we don't need people working 80 hour weeks at minimum wage so they can afford a crappy apartment. We just need the materials and the labor.

The more people buy into "I've got to get the best job" mentality, the more impossible realizing any sort of overall improvement in our labor-time-to-reward ratio is.

(I know I sound like a communist, but I don't believe in the labor theory of value, and most self-described communists I talk to call me a right-wing extremist.)

[s1artibartfast]

So I 100% agree with everything you said, but don't see how it connects to the points you raise above.

As you say, people should think long and hard about their life goals, and in my opinion, would probably be happier with a different work life balance where they can afford it.

However, I don't see a world in which I would work part time at a job less enjoyable with worse pay than my current one. I would rather optimize to work the minimum hours at the best compensated job I can find. (e.g. why work 50-50% at white collar job and terrible job, when I can just work 51% at the white collar job).

Sure, there are major challenges to most people doing this, but removing those barriers is a lot more realistic that introducing job swapping that people don't even want. The simple place to fix the problem is uncouple health and other benefits from employers. The current system discourages part time work because employers have fixed costs per employee. Once you break this link, more people will work part time.

[quacked]

Hm, well, I appreciate you pointing out that you agree with me, I got snippy in another response to you on a different comment chain.

I still don't think I've successfully explained this concept of changing the job-as-endless-labor to job-to-produce-specific-amount.

Have you ever gone out and built something for yourself, like a shed?

[s1artibartfast]

>Have you ever gone out and built something for yourself, like a shed?

Yes, I love building things for myself and my friends, but I wouldn't want to do it as a low paying job. In fact, doing it as a job would give me less time and money to do it for myself and friends. For me, that is just hopping off one economic hamster wheel and onto another. My job is complex and hard enough as it is, doubling the required skills and cutting the time to learn them sounds horrible. I'm fully aware that sharing jobs might be more attractive for the guy shoveling asphalt 100% of the time

> I got snippy in another response to you on a different comment chain.

No worries, at least to me it seems like you are engaging in good faith, listening to answers, and responding to what people are saying instead of talking past them. I can live with a little snippiness as long as people are coherent.

[AnimalMuppet]

How am I "expecting the rewards of their labor"?

And, reversing your logic: If my job is not open to them (presumably because they don't have the skills), and I do their job, who's going to do mine? They aren't. And they aren't going to do their job, either, because I took it. How does that make anything better?

[quacked]

Outdoor jobs: growing food, infrastructure repair, dock loading, police work, etc. If there's a big crash on the highway and it's 100 degrees out, someone's still got to go direct traffic, clean up the glass, etc. If you expect the cleanup to happen, you expect someone to do the cleanup, therefore you are expecting the rewards of the labor of people who do outdoor jobs.

My apologies for not explaining my own thoughts clearly, but when you and I say "job", we're talking about two different concepts. You are talking about a 261-day/year 8-hour/day commitment to a set group of tasks, and I am talking about "the collection of tasks that end up providing a quantity of goods or service" without any of the expectations that it's full-time or year-round attached to it. This may seem like an asinine distinction, but I'm not proposing a vision of society where you leave your current profession and work full-time at some mundane outdoor job, but rather a vision of society where you are capable of rendering some assistance in order to offset the bulk of labor required to produce the goods and services that unpleasant "non-brainy" jobs currently produce. I don't want you to give up your current amount of free time, or your medical care, or your access to entertainment and food, but neither do I want you to remain satisfied that other non-smart people labor for you while you do smart-guy stuff that you enjoy.

If you could learn the tasks that they perform, you theoretically could offset the amount of time they have to spend outside by occasionally performing those tasks. It likely wouldn't take away from your ability to perform the tasks at your current "job", whatever that may be.

I am not a socialist or a communist, and as I've said in another comment I don't really have a full-stack solution built out in my head that would make all of this magically work out, but it seems very wrong to me that the electronic-gentry portion of society is comprised of people sitting in air-conditioned offices thinking "god, I'd never work outside", but still tweeting angrily when the power goes out during a heat wave and the city employees don't fix it fast enough.

[jimbokun]

> but it seems very wrong to me that the electronic-gentry portion of society is comprised of people sitting in air-conditioned offices thinking "god, I'd never work outside"

I had a part time job planting trees in high school. I knew I got into a good university and part of me was feeling like I was privileged to be able to go to college when the other people I was working with might not have the same opportunity.

But then I heard one of them say "thank God I'll be graduating soon and won't have to do school work anymore."

And realized they had zero interest in pursuing the path I was on.

[AnimalMuppet]

So there's a crash on the freeway, and someone needs to direct traffic. Yeah, I could probably do that, if I needed to. I even would, if I thought it needed doing, until actual authorities showed up.

But, to use your other example, the power goes out. You don't really want amateur me trying to restore the power. You want a professional doing that, because it's much more likely to work, and much less likely to have negative consequences. So having me "render assistance" is not likely to be either welcome or useful.

In the same way, you don't want me wandering around a construction site looking to be helpful. I'd be more likely to get killed than to do much good.

So... Yes, I'm willing to pitch in, outside, if needed. No, for many jobs you don't actually want me doing that, no matter how much sympathy we have for the people having to work out in the heat.

And none of that takes anything away from my initial point, which is that no, I don't wish that I did manual labor outside instead of my nice air-conditioned job. Right now I'm really grateful for my nice indoor cubical farm.

If you want to go anywhere with this, maybe the direction is that we ought to pay people better who have to work outside, rather than paying them less than indoor people.

[quacked]

But your conception of "amateur you" is fed by your (again, I'm assuming) 16 years in school, when you could have spent 200 of those hours learning how to clean up freeway crashes. You don't have to be an amateur, unless you accept that as your station in life. You're correct that I don't want <you as you exist in the present> to repair power lines, but I have full faith that if you set your mind to it and had the right access to training you could learn how to repair power lines, or at least provide entry-level assistance to a power-line-repair master.

Just as you went from unskilled in your domain to skilled in your domain, so could you theoretically go from unskilled in construction to skilled in construction. I know you don't want to become an expert in construction, but how much of that want is based in the fact that in the current build of society, the only way to become a construction expert is to accept years of low pay in terrible conditions with awful coworkers in 100-degree-heat? Don't you think that somehow, using the combined man- and brain-power of the billions of people alive, we could form some kind of society where you might be able to learn and perform some construction without needing to accept the complete sacrifice of your quality of life to do it?

The problem with "paying people better to work outside" is that the entire concept of paying people to do anything, ie rewarding people with money, require that the most unpleasant jobs be done by people who must choose between the job and starvation/exposure or violence (serfs or slaves). That's why the easiest, most brutal jobs are always done by the lowest-IQ immigrants. If you were to pay them more, per your suggestion, the price of the reward of their labor goes up (berries go from $6/carton to $38/carton), the demand for the reward of their labor goes down, and they get laid off and are back to having no way to secure food, shelter, and medical care. (There are some exceptions to this rule; construction workers in the US are usually decently-compensated, but the US is an anomaly because we subsist based on the efforts of serfs and slaves in Asia, who mine and refine our rare earth minerals, assemble our tech, etc.)

[jimbokun]

Why is his/her job not open to "them"?

[quacked]

IQ, education experience, the oppression of society, take your pick. Take an average programmer and an average backhoe operator. Give them both 120 hours to train at each other's jobs, monitored by an expert. Who will be a more suitable replacement for the other?

As a writer I like said- "you get upset when a toll booth operator takes a long time to count your change, but if they could count change, they'd be an engineer like you are."

[jimbokun]

Well, yes, software engineer takes a lot more than 120 hours of training to do that job.

But that's not to say if you gave the backhoe operator the same number of years experience learning programming as the software engineer, they wouldn't be just as good at software development.

[s1artibartfast]

Do you honestly believe that? They could be as good, but I would wager that they wouldn't on average. There is fair amount self sorting based on aptitudes.

[anonfornoreason]

Having known a large number of manual labor professionals my whole life, there is no difference between the good-at-heavy-equipment and the good-at-writing-a-crud-app crowd. You do get a wider variety of intellectual capacity on the blue collar side depending on the trade, but electricians, plumbers, heavy equipment operators, etc are all just as good at problem solving on average as any group of developers I know.

"Blue collar", "the trades" are just so broad in scope it's an unfair comparison. It becomes much easier when you look at specific manual labor professions and specific developer professions.

[s1artibartfast]

I totally agree that most good tradesmen are great problem solvers. I'm just not convinced that the types of problems and the aptitudes required to solve them are interchangeable.