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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.) |