[jimbokun]

In high school, I had a job driving a tractor and planting grass seed for a summer. I was working with a couple gentlemen near retirement age.

I made a comment one day about how this wasn't so bad, getting physical activity, breathing fresh air.

They told me to get a job in a nice air conditioned office. I wouldn't want to still be doing this when I was their age.

[quacked]

I've said it in a few other comments- everyone has a very, very standard rat-race vision of what a "job" is. You, other commenters that are downvoting me, and the gentlemen you worked with all have the conception that a "job" must be a 40-hour/week, 261 day/year commitment to a set of tasks. (I'm not sure that you agree with them or not, based on what you said.)

I do not agree that society must be set up in this manner. Each job produces a good or a service. In order to produce that good or service, a certain amount of raw materials and a certain number of skilled labor hours must be expended to produce it. It is more efficient, from a scaling perspective, to hyper-specialize and make the same people do the same drudgery day-in-day-out, which is why those gentlemen were stuck in that job. The market makers demanded efficiency, and things fell into place such that those gentlemen were pigeonholed into being grass-planters.

The point that I am making is that there isn't any particular reason (besides an incessant demand for shareholder value in dollars) that the raw materials and skilled labor hours must be allocated in the caste-method that we currently use in modern society. Those guys have to plant grass all day every day because if they don't, they can't buy food, afford shelter, have a doctor look at them, or receive medical supplies. I am certain that we must find a way to look past this system to achieve any of the high-minded goals that people like to argue over, like the 4-hour workweek, or equitable education, or mass literacy, or an end to hunger, or...

[s1artibartfast]

Specialization and increased efficiency is exactly what leads to the high minded goals you mention.

>4-hour workweek, or equitable education, or mass literacy, or an end to hunger.

It also allows the guy shoveling asphalt in the sun to live in an air conditioned house with fancy electronics and medical care.

[quacked]

Huh, I didn't realize that we didn't have any issues in the US with people having AC in their house or receiving medical care.

Come on, man. This is simple. I recently got a $10,000 hospital bill for an ultrasound, for which insurance decided I owed $1800. It doesn't cost $10,000 for an ultrasound, that's a made up ratio calculated by accountants trying to maximize their firm's ROI. An ultrasound costs {materials, refinement, assembly, shipping, and operation}, none of which require anyone to work constantly; the market has simply set it up that way because everyone working constantly yields great market valuations in the system that the owners of the markets set up.

A comfortable life-shelter, food, clothing, medicine, border security- for you, me, the asphalt guy, and everyone else does not require all of the labor hours that are presently expended in the world.

[s1artibartfast]

>Huh, I didn't realize that we didn't have any issues in the US with people having AC in their house or receiving medical care.

It happens, but the asphalt guy probably has coverage, like 92% of Americans. [1] There are a long list of simple solutions that can increase this percent and bring costs down, but people working less isn't on it as far as I'm concerned. I just don't see the connection.

>A comfortable life-shelter, food, clothing, medicine, border security- for you, me, the asphalt guy, and everyone else does not require all of the labor hours that are presently expended in the world

If anything, bringing the costs of goods down and increasing access to them will increase the number of labor hours needed. More and cheaper ultrasounds means more {materials, refinement, assembly, shipping, and operation}, not less.

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...

[quacked]

I think we're agreeing here too, and that's the point of my main comment. If we both agree that more ultrasounds may be needed, then let me stop on this hedonic treadmill of producing slight increases in code efficiency or tapping new markets that don't need to be tapped, and just work on the ultrasounds.

I don't need fast foods restaurants, television, professional sports, overnight shipping, cheap smartphones, endless software updates, new computers, new cars, etc. Cut the parasitic, hedonic treadmill of consumption and you free up billions of labor hours that could instead work on {materials, refine, assembly, shipping, and operation} and then just go home afterwards and talk to their families or work on their own projects.

Apparently there are presently 9.82 million unemployed Americans. Cut the ones that can't work (either because of character issues or because of disability issues), add the rest to the pile of people theoretically freed up by no longer producing piles and piles of useless crap and entertainment, and you've got a tremendous amount of intellectual capital available to work on real goods and services.

There's an indoctrination aspect to this; people would have to be convinced that they don't need all this crap, and I admit that's a hard sell.

[s1artibartfast]

>If we both agree that more ultrasounds may be needed, then let me stop on this hedonic treadmill of producing slight increases in code efficiency or tapping new markets that don't need to be tapped, and just work on the ultrasounds.

Their in lies the "Hard Problem". The unemployed and uninsured guy can't pay for an ultrasound, but there are millions of people willing to line up for the next candy crush clone or similar garbage product. Cash is the incentive to make more ultrasounds, but that guy doesn't have it.

You can tell someone that they would feel better after volunteering or working at a homeless shelter than playing candy crush, but like you said, it is a hard sell.

It is temping to say that the government should get into the ultrasound business, but IMHO, you will just get government brand ultrasounds at twice the price. Somehow we need to make a cultural change about how individuals spend their wealth and limited time.

[Scalestein]

I agree with your general outlook but would also question why we need to make "efficiency" a goal to be attained at all costs. Why not rotate who does the drudgery jobs so no-one gets stuck doing it day in and out? It might be less efficient but everyone would appreciate the work that needs to be done more and no-one would be pigeon holed. What sort of efficiency loss is that worth?

As long as we prioritize economic efficiency there will be an never ending treadmill of improving efficiency. Until we start bringing human factors into the equation we will stay on this path.

[jimbokun]

Sorry, but finding your arguments a little silly.

> The point that I am making is that there isn't any particular reason (besides an incessant demand for shareholder value in dollars) that the raw materials and skilled labor hours must be allocated in the caste-method that we currently use in modern society.

Maybe, but you don't have any strategy for changing the current system, or what kind of system should replace it, or how to demonstrate that system will be better than the one we have now.

[quacked]

That is a fair criticism; I don't have a perfect solution built out right now, so I can't paint you a picture of how a theoretical nation full of well-educated laborers and farmers building things and providing for themselves would look in comparison to our current nation, where everyone barely struggles to hang on financially as citizens of the wealthiest empire in the history of civilization.

I am finding it particularly difficult to convince people that they should even look past the current system. If you read through other comments on other chains in this thread, people are trying to explain to me that I could never convince someone to work half-time at a white collar job (where they endlessly produce code and then clock out) and half-time at a blue-collar job (where they endlessly shovel asphalt and then clock out), while at the same time I'm trying to convince them that it's possible to create an equilibrium of demand with output by simultaneously reducing aggregate demand and moving around aggregate output. If there's an end goal to your labor- produce this much and then stop producing until repairs or new units are needed- you don't have to work all the time at these horrible jobs.

Right now, people work in white collar jobs in order to justify their right to the results of the blue collar jobs. If you don't write code, you can't afford the berries that Driscoll's ships to your grocery store, so you write code and make $150k/year, and you buy your $6 carton of berries, and the migrant berry pickers make $18k/year, and the truck driver makes $80k/year. But you're the end user of the berries; if you instead knew how to pick or knew how to drive, you might have a chance at getting the berries to your table without needing quasi-slave labor.

I don't want to live in a country where I get stuff- materials, goods, etc.- from people who are always struggling. We can't just UBI our way to luxury space communism, because then no one will pick the berries, because right now the "berry-picking job" is defined as "12 hours per day in and out of the hot sun".

This is what I'm trying to say- find some way to make sure that I can provide myself with shelter and see a doctor when I need to, and I'll go pick the damn berries and drive them back myself. Many seem to be responding with "no, that's impossible."

[jimbokun]

I am very skeptical of any utopian-sounding scheme.

"I am finding it particularly difficult to convince people that they should even look past the current system."

Look past it all you want. But once you start using the power of the state to make it come about, the potential for devastating unintended consequences are very high.

If you want to be a well rounded human who picks berries and also writes code, knock yourself out. If you want to write Medium articles advocating for this lifestyle, knock yourself out.

But if the vast majority of people just want to specialize and pay people to perform other tasks, that's their prerogative, too.

As for the berry pickers, the UBI-like effect of the Covid stimulus programs in the US showed that giving people an income floor is very effective at raising wages rapidly, as people can turn down jobs that they don't think adequately compensates them for their labor.

[quacked]

> If the vast majority of people just want to specialize and pay people to perform other tasks, that's their prerogative, too.

Your sort of radical individualism, which is mostly accepted by the tech gentry, has proven absolutely disastrous for the less intelligent and other historically disadvantaged people. From birth, the modern American is subjected to the most refined consumer propaganda that has ever existed. The towns and cultures that our ancestors grew up with have been chewed up and spit out by mass tech and capital. People are constantly manipulated by cable news, advertising algorithms, television, computer programs- fast food restaurants are literally designed by "psychologists" and "product researchers" to induce hunger. The average American- not the average American you know, I mean the actual average American- is incapable of choosing culture or principles over the momentary rewards of money or satiation of various appetites because of the conditions imposed upon them by people like us, who have the ability to create controlling mechanisms.

One of the tools used to manipulate the other people in the U.S. is a model of society created in the 1900s, where you go to school for 16 years and then you work at the same career for the rest of your life, drawing a consistent paycheck and performing the same actions over and over again. In the 1970s, the IRA and the 401(k) were invented and pushed in order to free companies from the financial burden of providing pensions, and to siphon more cash into the investment market. Someone who has been convinced of this model of society is unable to argue about anything other than financial compensation. They are kept in a simultaneous state of envy for the rich and contempt for the poor. UBI makes sense to them because it would not require any change to their life, which is why everyone clamors for a higher salary, rather than for a life that they can be proud to live.

If you are content to live your own, satisfied, educated life and let the rest of our society fall victim to predatory markets and invasive habit control, because "that's their prerogative", then you are a coward.

[jimbokun]

And you think centralizing power even more will solve this problem?

People need to be empowered to individually make the choice to opt out of this system on their own. Persuasion to take that course is fine and noble.

But do you honestly think putting some group of people in charge of "protecting" people from all these bad influences, will truly lead to that small number of people acting completely altruistically in the best interests of society? Or they will be sorely tempted to use that power to manipulate society to the ends they personally deem most important?

One of the biggest problems I see with current discourse, is all memory of 20th century history seems to have been completely forgotten. There were large parts of the world that did away with all the consumerism and capitalism. They ended up killing 10s of millions of their own people, through starvation and enforcing their control by killing dissenters.