Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

It's particularly import for people who are legislating minimum wage laws to read articles like this. Most of the legislation I've seen drafted, always has an exception for farm labor - and here is an example why. If you didn't have that exception, then it would quickly become the case that automation/machinery ends up being cheaper (or soon will), and those jobs will vanish pretty quickly.

Now, that might not be entirely undesirable, from the perspective of the legislator (I.E. Move people up the feeding chain to more productive, better paying jobs, and automate the drudge work like raking berries) - but at the very least, they need to be aware of the impact of what they are doing.

View on HN

Well no. The reason you and I are wealthy enough to pontificate on HN is because we as a society have mechanized most of agriculture. The sooner 100% of the back breaking labor involved in growing food is replaced with machines the better [1].

1. I am not counting home gardens as these are a fun hobby (I miss having a garden).

My local McDonalds is experimenting with touch screen menus. I guess automated kitchens won't be far behind.

It will be a shame when such an entry level job is no longer available to teenagers to learn about doing a job and working in a team.

No, it won't. The sooner we shift from labor to education as our source of social dignity the better. Let's pay people to go to school rather than to flip burgers.

I learnt just as much working low paid jobs while studying as I did in the study. Working with people you don't like, being punctual and responsible, accepting criticism and even nearly getting fired - all good lessons. Paying people to learn is a recipe for misallocation of resources.

Its ridiculous that people think the destruction of menial labour will be destructive given all the evidence to the contrary. Jobs have been render obsolete for centuries and the outcome has been an increase in education and skilled labour to do more rewarding jobs.

An exception is small scale local artisanal natural/organic market gardens and family farms that rely on skilled hand labor almost exclusively. You will never and should never consider replacing that with automation and machines. The quality products made available to the public from these operations benefit from the extra attention to detail and experience gained from a lifetime spent in this type of agriculture, sometimes called peasant farming. If you want to know more about peasant sovereignty read the following: Peasant Sovereignty? http://www.independentsciencenews.org/environment/peasant-so... By Evaggelos Vallianatos See also: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture Permaculture

I would take the opposite perspective - I would think that artisanal/organic gardening, in particular would benefit from automation. Automation will give us the ability to spend significant periods of time on each specific piece of produce, in a way that no human being ever could. In particular, with organic gardening, you can completely eliminate the need for insecticides and pesticides AND not rely on inherently insect/pest resistant produce (which can be innately toxic) by growing in clean rooms.

The key reasons to automate, is it allows us to make this type of food available to masses for fractions of the cost of what it would take for a human to grow it.

I'm now visualizing a micro drone that flies around and harpoons insects. Thank you for that.

Skilled artisanal work is by definition not low paid menial work.

There's nothing wrong with people doing low paid work. Those of us who can't stand it impose our values on others. I worked a lot of manual labor while studying. I worked on mowing crews who spend their lives mowing the same pieces of grass over and over. You'd think they hate it but they were happy to work a low stress, secure job and just do their hobbies in their off time, whether coaching kids or building model railways. Of course that's not everyone but it's wrong to pretend we can walk in everyone's shoes.

Low paid work in some countries may be fine - but in the United States it means that you won't have access to a high quality of health care and will not have quality legal representation (which is important, because if you are impoverished, you are more likely to be imprisoned); hell - you might even have trouble posting bail.

You will have difficultly securing quality education for your children, either because you can't afford private schools, or because you can't afford to live in a location where the public schools are of high quality.

You also are likely to be living pay-check to pay-check (sometimes even less, with pay-check lenders taking their vig), and only a small health-emergency away from becoming bankrupt, and quite possibly homeless.

So, no - I think there's a lot wrong with people doing low paid work. It might be okay for the young, or students, or the retired, but for most adults, low-paid menial work on a prolonged basis in the United States is a financial and personal disaster.

As long as that US system of inequality exists, I suggest we work hard to automate, eliminate, and as quickly as possible banish labor for adults that won't secure them a reasonable living for them and their household. Educate, Train, and move them up the feeding chain to something more sustainable.

>The sooner we shift from labor to education as our source of social dignity the better.

Twin studies suggest educational achievement is highly (over 50%) heritable. If you succeeded at replacing labor with education as a source of human dignity it would be surprising if the relative amount of dignity with which one was imparted did not depend on one's educational achievement. Combined with the first point it would lead to the formation of a kind of hereditary estates of the realm; you'd have the clergy (the academics), the nobles (the highly educated) and the commoners (everybody else). Would you find such an outcome acceptable? (Just to be clear, I mean this as a genuine, not rhetorical, question.)

Right, because we all know that Silicon Valley and STEM fields do such a good job hiring the type of minorities who typically work in the fields: "many of today’s rakers are of Latin American or Caribbean origin. Others are Native American or aboriginal people of Canada" http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/study-... *Half of all non-Hispanic Asian STEM degree holders go into a STEM job. But the likelihood is lower — 30 percent — among Hispanics and non-Hispanic Black and American Indian and Alaska Native workers

No messed up orders, no attitude. I'd rather have teenagers learn something else somewhere else.

Basic income is coming. Like it or not. Better if created with debt free fiat money. This way we can have nice inflation - 2-4% yearly.

Basic income is a bad idea. Idle hands do the devils work. People need to do something or they go crazy. Let's pay people to go to school. Better educated citizens means fewer Donald trumps. Add a consumption tax as well to discourage consumption so our economy can shift away from bullshit jobs.

Plenty of corporate drones, upper middle class, millionaires and billionaires have done the devil's work with 12hr+ work days, they just do it on such a grand scale and under the protection of corporations they are rarely punished.

While moving to a basic income might require a shift in society's values, it's no more likely to cause criminal behavior than the ever increasing income disparity here in the U.S. A basic income would also likely usher in a new age of entrepreneurship once members of all economic classes can entertain the thought of doing work they love rather than forced to take any work they can get.

But I guess it's better to just quote a folklore and pretend the idleness is bad (of course Donal Trump got an education because he could readily afford it, didn't make him less wrong).

isnt there already a consumption tax? ie sales tax.

It has lots of exemption. Eg consuming your own rental property is free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com