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Comment by notduncansmith | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't basic income take care of that? The idea being that once companies have to compete with the entire world (as opposed to a few other companies) for your time and attention, flexible hours (and many other changes to the relationship between employees and companies) will become the default.

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I hope so.

I try to live in that way, and I try to encourage those around me to live in that way (refusing imbalanced employment conditions). I think if enough people did, we could start to help each other, rather than relying on capital and private property so much.

Basic income is one sort of stepping stone towards that. Ultimately I think the ideal is people actually having real choices, not the huge bias we have towards salaried employment at the moment.

If life were an MMO, then salaried employment would be the cookie cutter build, hourly work would be the odd hybrid, and otherwise you've decided to not bother with your talent tree, and you're just gimping yourself. Can we tweak the rules of the game a bit, or are they just emergent?

We totally can change the rules. We made them up. Most modern modern value systems are rooted in the scarcity mindset - the idea that there isn't enough (of whatever) to go around. The people that created those systems weren't bad, their ideas are just outdated. Now that technology has changed the calculus, and there IS enough to go around, it's just a matter of overcoming the momentum of the old value systems. You're right, basic income is a bridge measure. It demonstrates abundance for the skeptics, and shows us what pretty much full autonomy for every member of a society could look like. I'm not sure what comes after that, but if you've read Manna, the Australia Project as described at the end seems to have a lot of desirable qualities. It's a short read, and well worth reading (and has been on HN a few times, I think). Obviously we're not quite there, but it's not hard to envision if enough smart people were free to work on the various elements of that future, unrestricted by manufactured pressure to pursue more immediately-profitable endeavors.

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