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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> Of course, if you saw it in your own country, you’d recognize it for what it was—people working their asses off, even well into old age, not out of some perverse industriousness, but simply because they’ve gotta eat.

Until we invent replicators, everyone’s gotta work to eat. Even folks on HN are separated from that reality by a year or so of cushion, if even that. What people in the US admire about Japanese culture is their attitude to the work they’ve got to do to survive. It’s not like folks in the US don’t have to work to eat. But if you’ve ever been in an airport security line in both places you can tell the difference.

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Not true for everyone though, is it? There are people that get the privilege of existing without working anything. Besides, I say that the term you mentioned for solving this issue, "until we invent replicators" makes it sound like we are bound this way and could not solve this problem were that we wanted to. No, I think that is not true, we simply don't want to and some of us are rather concerned of the side effects of doing so. But I don't think that this issue would be insurmountable, if we would want to fix it.

The beliefs about replicators and transforming planets like mars are just a futurist fantasy about how our problems will all be magically solved in the wonderful future, its great escapism to avoid caring about real issues we really can solve right now, and a very convenient dismissal if issues we can address right now with "The future will fix it"!.

Note, many of the people that don't need to work are extraordinarily wealthy, hundreds of thousands of times over what would be required to lead a reasonable life, their wealth bases usually built, directly or indirectly, from the efforts of the same people that have to work until they are 70.

But yeah, in the future, somehow this arrangement will change into a magical utopia, not a situation where those same wealthy horde an even more absurd amount of power, while everyone else struggles to scrape by, or is just discarded entirely in the face of cheaper and better automation that is owned by the wealthier rentier class.

You see this callous disregard on HN every time an article about Uber or Amazon treating their employees like shit, remarks to the effect of "they shouldn't be complaining, cant wait till they are replaced by robots", and I think its disgusting, but its a telling remark about how employees are going to be viewed increasingly in the future.

If we don't even want to bother broaching the serious wide-cutting issues we have right now with poverty and inequality in our society, I fail to see how the hell technology that effectively massively magnifies the economic power of whoever can afford them the most will do anything but make the situation far, far more dire.

I don't think the OP post was being serious about replicators. It was a geek version of 'until money grows on trees'.

And then the next reply was saying we don't necessarily need replicators to solve this problem.

not all replies are a refutation or dispute with what was being said.

You are correct, and in company of intelligent people. It's just that most of the HN crowd really really doesn't like being caught cheering on naked emperors.

> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

-- Stephen Hawking

And I'll add this, in light of how the comments that have value regularly get greyed out, while the gimmicks get discussed endlessly:

> Of course, the terrible things I heard from the Nuremberg Trials, about the six million Jews and the people from other races who were killed, were facts that shocked me deeply. But I wasn't able to see the connection with my own past. I was satisfied that I wasn't personally to blame and that I hadn't known about those things. I wasn't aware of the extent. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out.

-- Traudl Junge

Any bright teenager can notice the rising inequality and extrapolate trends, and do quick thought experiments about throwing hi-tech into the mix. Any decent (and intellectually honest) adult would have to concede it when pointed out to them even if they didn't already see it themselves.

Continue to chose quality over quantity. Continue to "weep with the wise rather than laugh with fools". You may not be able to save the world, but you can prove with every breath what cowardly traitors to themselves and life so many people are, and that in contrast to them at least some people would deserve living in a better world. I salute you.

We cannot solve this issue with existing technology. People have to work to feed and shelter everyone. Not everyone has to work, but a lot of people do. Let’s say you wanted to eliminate all the “work to live” jobs (the bottom 75% of all taxpayers, those making less than $67,000). To replace their income, the top 25% would have to pay half their income in additional taxes (for a total tax burden of about 85%). Then you’d have to figure out how to replace all the Uber drivers, cashiers, bank tellers, etc.

You don't have to replace them, you just assure a minimum standard of living available to all individuals. That should be enough for basic necessities but who wants to work will still work.

I’m not talking about safety nets. I’m talking about this assertion by the author:

Even if Japan had a more robust safety net, people would still need to work to eat (and they have welfare). Not necessarily any given person, but people generally. Indeed, we would be counting on exactly the opposite point from what the author makes: that most people would be industrious enough to work these jobs notwithstanding the fact that they could eat if they didn’t. Particular in Japan, which is facing an unprecedented imbalance between working age and non-working age people.

One American bombing campaign in Libya or Iraq would be enough to feed and shelter the children and elderly in need(and additional bonus of not creating millions of refugees )

Would you mind showing me the actual math on that? I think your estimation is dramatically out of line.

The US for example spends hundreds of billions of dollars each year on all of its poverty & welfare assistance programs at the local + state + federal level. The total cost is greater than what is spent on the US military (and most of that isn't spent on bombings or weapons, but on soldier housing, salaries, VA benefits, etc).

One bombing campaign in Libya or Iraq wouldn't cover the cost of just the SNAP food program for one day. That one program costs as much as all US military war-related operations in eg 2016.

Maybe not "one bombing campaign," but it does seem like the Iraq War has cost more than SNAP over the same time period:

> SNAP benefits cost $70.9 billion in fiscal year 2016 and supplied roughly 44.2 million Americans (14% of the population[2]) with an average of $125.51 for each person per month in food assistance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assista...

> NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, a study released on Thursday said.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-war-anniversary/iraq...

In 2007 the total estimated cost of the Iraq War was $720 million a day.

"The $720 million figure breaks down into $280 million a day from Iraq war supplementary funding bills passed by Congress, plus $440 million daily in incurred, but unpaid, long-term costs." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09...

"SNAP benefits cost $70.9 billion in fiscal year 2016 and supplied roughly 44.2 million Americans (14% of the population) with an average of $125.51 for each person per month in food assistance. ... Each month, SNAP food stamp benefits are directly deposited into the household's EBT card account." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assista...

70.9 Billion / 0.72 Billion (720 million) is 98.4722

So ... basically, 100 days of the Iraq War could cover all of SNAP for a year. So, for a year, supply 14% of our vulnerable fellow citizens with food versus 100 days of ... what did we get out of the war again? For some reason I can't remember.

The comment you're replying to asserted that: "One American bombing campaign in Libya or Iraq would be enough to feed and shelter the children and elderly in need."

You're changing the goalposts on both ends. Instead of "one American bombing campaign in ... Iraq" it's the cost of the Iraq war overall. And instead of "feed[ing] and shelter[ing] the children and elderly in need," it's the $125 per month average SNAP benefit. That's not even enough to feed children and the elderly, much less house them. SNAP supplements peoples' income, as well as school lunches (for children) and Social Security (for the elderly).

This thread isn't about whether the Iraq money could've been put to better use. It's about whether people need to work to eat. And we do. Just to feed and shelter the 14% of the population on SNAP we'd need to spend six or seven times the cost of the Iraq war. (That's not counting education, medical care, etc.) To do the same for service workers like waiters, baristas, cashiers, cab drivers, and garage collectors (who earn around $20-30k per year on average), we'd have to support fully half the population with the labor of the other half. That'd be twenty times the cost of the Iraq war, just to maintain those folks in poverty-level conditions. To pay for that (and nothing else), you'd have to tax the other half of the population 64% of their income.

We're not in a post-work economy. Far from it.

I was not talking about any social programs, just about people in need of food and shelter not people getting government handouts right now. Saying that 14% is hungry and homeless will be very shocking information to me, basically US is failed state then. I was generalizing common knowledge that everyone at least subconsciously aware. Don't want to go the route of stats/ meaningless numbers unless we start including the cost of wars on food and oil prices

Even a high estimate of the total cost of Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq is about $5 trillion over 13 years. Divided by the 45 million people at or below the poverty line, that’s $8,500 per person per year. Not enough that those people wouldn’t have to work.

And that’s just the really poor people. The McDonalds employees and Starbucks baristas we’re talking about here make almost double that. Making it so they didn’t have to work to eat would take much more money than the defense budget.

> What people in the US admire about Japanese culture is their attitude to the work they’ve got to do to survive. It’s not like folks in the US don’t have to work to eat. But if you’ve ever been in an airport security line in both places you can tell the difference.

Well, yeah, they like that because they're the customers and not the workers who have to make it happen. I guarantee you those same Americans would not like to work in a typical Japanese work environment.

Unlike money, food really does grow on trees. Efficient agriculture means that we need very little labour to feed everyone to a subsistence level. Getting everyone to do some labour for their food is a societal choice, not a logical necessity.

Or if you want to come at it from the other direction and analyze in terms of the current economy, what fraction of one's budget really needs to go to food? It's actually more like "everyone's gotta work to pay rent to the banks".

Re: "Even folks on HN are separated from that reality by a year or so of cushion."

How could you possibly know that? It's certainly not true of everyone (retired people exist), and there's no way to get an average unless someone does a survey.

More generally, nobody is in a position to compare the US and Japan based on personal experience. These are both big countries. An airport security line is a highly biased sample.

He's talking about old folk. In most industrialized non US countries, people have pension plans that allow them to retire

>Even folks on HN are separated from that reality by a year or so of cushion, if even that.

Not sure why you would assume that. I know people in their late 40s who could retire.

he didnt say "all folks on HN, without exception"

I'm sure you do, but I for one would be on the streets with my family within six months of losing my job and not finding another. A lot of that is poor financial planning in my younger years which I'm slowly rectifying, but even so not everyone here has a stack of cash behind them.

well, yeah, if you train people from childhood to never show their emotions, put the group's desires above their own, and accept working 12 hours per day, 6 days a week, you might have some decent customer service yes. If you are ok with that work drowning out everything else, while making that pitiful wage just to eat and go home to a shoebox after an hour commute that has no central heating, go nuts.

But hey, people are nice to you when you stand in line to go to your high status job, that's all that matters eh?

So the difference in the far superior West is what? That most people get to make a pitiful wage just to eat and go home to a shoebox after an hour commute that has no central heating, but with rude customer service instead?

> never show their emotions, put the group's desires above their own

I get really tired of these smug judgments of East Asian cultural values.

> Until we invent replicators, everyone’s gotta work to eat.

And after we've invented replicators, we would no longer live.

http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/Replicator

(That was just my first thought. For balance, I think you meant Star Trek; http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Replicator)

I think it's the correct thought either way. Current trends staying the same, replicators, automation or what have you will not entice those who already use what power they have to trample on and exploit people to suddenly even things out and play fair.

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