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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

My fear is that the future of work for most people is not unemployment, but shitty jobs like this.

My feeling is that in order to avoid this and prosper, the people need to own the robots that do all the work (Marxism heyy). If robots provide huge productivity gains, then they will provide those gains for their owners. If it’s the big corporations that own them, they will see the gains. But as long as people are treated like machines, they will be left out of this prosperity. Instead, if the people own the machines collectively, then they can enjoy the productivity gains themselves as a group.

What do you all think of this?

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Well, Marx and Engels did accurately identify that a large reserve of under-employed workers, or people who didn't previously participate in the labor force, is what enables the most exploitative jobs.

All necessities in life cost money: food, housing, childcare, healthcare; and those in the most precarious social positions are the people most willing to accept abusive employment for reasons directly tied to their survival. This is a natural consequence of a socioeconomic system that asks everyone to fend for themselves.

Please, the world had 94% extreme poverty in their time, and its down to less than 10%. The model of exploitation they have cannot possible account for that.

I have tremendous sympathy for the empathic pain they had by seeing those levels of exploitation. Das Kapital's first volume is basically 50% accounts of child labor and exploitation. But they had no way to know that when the state holds the capital the results are even worse, had marx seen the soviet union at its prime he would have probably revised his own theory.

Marx's reserve army doesn't hold water. And he himself denounces that one of the most common ways of the exploitative model was precisely how much the aristocrats ignored private property rights and pushed people to extreme poverty and marginalization.

He had and still has many interesting ideas, but he was very much wrong about many of them. Which is fine, all these economists got things super wrong.

And another interesting point Marx made: Look how well America is doing! Europe should be like that.

> The model of exploitation they have cannot possible account for that.

No, what accounts for that is access to incredibly cheap energy, in the form of fossil fuels and electrification.

Energy is what lifted people out of poverty, not any of that other nonsense. Without coal, oil, and hydro power, most of us would still be subsistence peasants, regardless of whether or not we would live in Communism, Feudalism, Capitalism, Fascism, or some other -ism.

Out of curiosity, what is your model for the dramatic examples of India and China, which were faced with relative stagnation and incredibly dire, largely-intractable poverty for decades after WWII; followed by liberalizing (incrementally) their markets and explosive growth+massive declines in extreme poverty thereafter?

I don't know a ton about the economic history of these two countries, but prima facie this seems to belie your claim that it was simply energy availability.

There are counter examples to India and China that resulted in high standards of living without liberalizing markets, generally from valuable natural resources and low populations. There are zero examples without access to cheap energy.

PS: The China boom looks 'good' mostly due to how terrible the country was run prior to that. Expand the time scale and compare to other countries and things don't look nearly as good.

India's explosive growth [1] followed electrification, not lead it. [2] It's 'intractable poverty' following WWII was only 'intractable' because of colonial exploitation - the British Empire squeezed it for cheap resources, labour, and wealth (By forcing Indian markets open to imports, and by banning some forms of local production - Gandhi's salt march was an example of resistance to that.) At the same time, the empire did not actually invest in the same kind of infrastructure that Europe enjoyed for close to a century.

China's a bit of a different case - but for contrast, compare it to the USSR. Despite three decades of war, civil war, near-genocidal purges, and some more war, by the 60s and 70s, it has lifted millions of people out of a similar level of intractable poverty. Again, not on the back of its economic system, but on the back of industrialization.

It's hard to stay poor (Compared to world poverty in the 1800s) when you have running water, indoor plumbing, and electricity.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/india/gdp-per-capita

[2] https://www.slideshare.net/ashishverma061/growth-of-electric... - Slide 16.

> It's 'intractable poverty' following WWII was only 'intractable' because of colonial exploitation - the British Empire squeezed it for cheap resources, labour, and wealth (By forcing Indian markets open to imports, and by banning some forms of local production - Gandhi's salt march was an example of resistance to that.) At the same time, the empire did not actually invest in the same kind of infrastructure that Europe enjoyed for close to a century.

You are extremely confused about the history here. The British left India in 1947; WW2 ended in 1945. India and South Korea had a similar GDP/capita in 1950; they were on opposite ends of the spectrum 50 years later after 50 years of a wide GDP growth gap (during none of which time did British India exist).

I believe more than most people in the path-dependency of politics, especially with respect to things like colonialism. A lot of the sclerotic, Soviet-influenced, bureaucratic strangling of the Indian economy during this period is at least partially attributed to (reasonable) democratic political backlash against the abusiveness of the British economic system, in the form of eg labor laws that have been harming the economy for half a century.

Energy wasn't sufficient, but it likely was necessary. That said, the energy was lying around all through history, so something exogenous got people to use it. And to develop the technology to do so.

> so something exogenous got people to use it. And to develop the technology to do so.

That was James Watt's steam engine, which was efficient at turning combustion into mechanical motion, and it was happenstance that it was invented in 1780, and not 1580, or 1980. People didn't suddenly develop a need to move heavy things in 1780 - it came around then because of advances in steelwork, precision manufacturing, and general refinement of the idea (Such engines were around for over a century, but were not compact, or efficient enough to be very useful.)

All of a sudden, the labour of a coal miner was enough to feed a 10, then a 50, then a 100 horse-power engine. It was the AGI of its era.

Though why were they in development? This article says an early one was developed in 1698, to pump water from a coal mine:

http://www.his.com/~pshapiro/steam.engines.html

Why was there a coal mine? Why not use wood or charcoal? Why didn't the Romans go down this path? They invented a toy steam engine.

These things have many causes. Obviously watson's invention was a big inflection point.

But, as for the question "were liberal markets necessary?" my suspicion is yes. But, I don't actually know. I think the answer begins before James Watt.

Because people have been trying to invent ways to mechanically augment human power since someone had the bright idea to make a lever.

Why the steam engine did not succeed because Watt, was because the same reason that tri-deck galleons and gunpowder did not exist in the bronze age. Non-trivial practical inventions require a massive pyramid of other non-trivial practical inventions, each of which requires a pyramid of other non-trivial inventions, all of which have to solve a contemporary problem - cheaply then their alternatives.

If liberal markets were necessary for the invention of the steam engine, why was it invented in England, and not in Renaissance Italy? It had liberal markets, access to capital, and was a center of technological and cultural progress for hundreds of years.

There's no particularly satisfying answer to that, other then 'happenstance.'

Right, this is close to my model too, but it's in contradiction to the GP claim that energy is the reason and economic structures are behind the point.

It's almost tautological to say that energy is behind growth, but it's also independent of economic structure, which effectively boils down to "the manner in which we convert energy to utility".

Extreme poverty is defined as someone living on less than $1.25 a day. Do you think that exploitation isn't occurring as long as someone isn't living in extreme poverty?

The exploitation model needs self-generating poverty. If it is lifting people out of poverty then it is destroying itself, as it will run out of the required poor people.

You can argue its not going fast enough, but the direction is unequivocally upwards so far.

Well now you're conflating extreme poverty with poverty. There are millions of people living in poverty in the united states. And you don't really need someone to be in complete poverty to exploit them.

Also, the direction currently is towards stagnating wages and growing wealth inequality.

> Well now you're conflating extreme poverty with poverty. There are millions of people living in poverty in the united states. And you don't really need someone to be in complete poverty to exploit them.

After extreme poverty ends, you get poverty to uplift and so on.

> Also, the direction currently is towards stagnating wages and growing wealth inequality.

The problem with such nice catchphrases that are repeated over and over by interest groups is that they are inaccurate, and often end up advocating for even higher inequality.

> The problem with such nice catchphrases that are repeated over and over by interest groups is that they are inaccurate, and often end up advocating for even higher inequality.

What specifically is an "inaccurate catchphrase" in what I've said?

Stagnant wages are the cause of multiple effects, many of them that are extremely localized. The US has had this effect, but the world has had it go extremely upwards in the last 5 decades. And along lower wages, have come increased value. The internet, for example, is super cheap and might not count as much into the budget of a person todaY: but tv and entertainment was a much higher cost between cable, newspapers, etc etc.

Smartphones, safer cars, cheaper travelling. Have to be very careful to look only at nominal bills to make economic judgement.

And maybe the most problematic and expensive things americans suffer generationally, housing and healthcare, are the defacto most intervened and regulated markets of all. It is the state, in its magnificent regulatory capture, that its pushing poverty unto people.

Also inequality has always been a topic of conversation, what is new is income inequality, and its still an open problem, not something there is economic consensus about. There are other things that have economic consensus, for example, getting rid of corporate taxes. But you dont hear that coming from "high inequality and stagnant wages" guys.

So "stagnant wages" was what you called an inaccurate catchphrase?

>housing and healthcare, are the defacto most intervened and regulated markets of all. It is the state, in its magnificent regulatory capture, that its pushing poverty unto people.

I won't defend much of anything about the state of housing or healthcare in the US. The government is certainly a huge part of the problem, I have no issue accepting that.

Here's the thing: I don't think that all government programs are good. Some are designed to push poverty unto people like you said. But the solution isn't to get rid of all regulation or the idea that government can be used as a tool for the masses.

We need to have a government that is much more aligned with the interests of the people than the interests of large corporations and capital. To me the way to do that is to expand the limits of democracy to include how the economy is run, how natural resources are used, and what the relationship between capital and workers should be.

Expand the limits of democracy as a way to vote expropiation?

When democracy is used to plunder, there is no way back. It will be living for the purpose of robbing others, and the poor have never fared well in such systems.

We live in a world with relative freedom but still very constrained. Look at the US spending 25% of its GDP through the state. And european countries reach 40 and even 50%! Half of every thing produced consumed by the state. The State is the enemy. It really is.

The most positive effect I can imagine is people being stroung enough to resist the powers of states and pit them against each other. The most scary future I see is the collaboration of countries. Concentration of capital is bad, but concentration of power is the true danger. And the State garners its concentration with the power of might.

What has more concentration of power, monarchies or representational democracies?

I'm suggesting that we can create a new form of governing that further decentralizes power.

Democracies are not powerful with a strong central government. If everyone votes something the state cant enforce, it would be pointless.

>had marx seen the soviet union at its prime he would have probably revised his own theory.

Actually I don't think so. Even Marx saw that socialism was a stage of history which followed from capitalism. In the same way that feudalism's aristocracy provides the conditions which create a merchant class that eventually overthrows the aristocracy, Marx sees capitalism and capitalists as providing the conditions which create a working class which eventually overthrows the capitalists. He would probably be annoyed with the soviets for trying to skip most of a phase and he would probably be annoyed with us, modern westerners, for not recognizing where in history we are - with rising inequality, increasing productivity but stagnating wages and the general increasing returns to capital.

>Marx's reserve army doesn't hold water.

Doesn't it? With chronic unemployment persisting since our most recent crash and now that we're finally reaching low unemployment ten years later, wages haven't moved much. If you explained the idea without mentioning Marx I think most people on the street would intuitively agree.

You don't think stagnation in wages can be attributed to the massive increase in women in the workforce?

Supply and demand, after all.

Overall I think the point is who cares what caused an increase in labor supply? It doesn't matter from where Marx's reserve army originates, just that capitalists desire and ensure that it exists to the detriment of the working class.

You really think that women as a group qualify as a reserve army?

Again, the composition of the industrial reserve really isn't the point. They're the able to work and unemployed. Whether we have at times integrated previously unused reserves on the basis of race or gender or class is basically irrelevant. The point is the fact of the reserve - that it exists. Look at 2008 on, we've had quite a substantial reserve with quite a diverse composition. But it's there, ensuring that wages won't rise (or rise much) during the boom times.

Perhaps we might have a better discussion if you told me what it is you're actually driving at because I'm not quite sure I see it.

It might have had some effect but decline in Union membership and collective bargaining power are much more important. After all, we're seeing record profits and a massive transfer of wealth to the top 1%. If workers could effectively organize, the increase in workforce wouldn't matter.

Ridiculous, thats not how unions work. Look at the history of argentina, where unions have constitutional protections, and tell me thats what help grow the economy.

Unions can only raise a workers wage in two ways: by increasing productivity (which they seldom do) or by restricting the amount of workers.

I don't really know anything about the situation in Argentina but I don't think Unions are an unequivocal good no matter what form they take. Unions in many cases have leadership that don't have the interest of the workers at heart. What I really mean is that workers organizing together and using collective bargaining is a proven way to increase worker conditions and pay.

  leadership that don't have the interest of the workers at heart

  workers organizing together and using collective bargaining

So what you're saying is we need decentralized unions on the blockchain?

Uber for Unions :)

That was a result of the incorporation of one of these reserve armies. Over time, new centers of industry will be born to serve the decentralized burbs that aren't cost-efficient to serve by existing infrastructure and the cycle repeats. We just happen to be living in one part of the cycle.

They do account for some, but not for all the changes. This is significant though, and often avoided to be spoken because of its pseudo-sexist interpretation.

He would have revised his economic modeling I mean, not his historical argument which is still sensible to me, albeit potentially irrelevant.

I dont think the reserve army makes any sense in todays world. But it did in his were labor was so interchangeable that people migrated for labor in masse all the time. I dont think out of work janitors put a lot of pressure on software engineer jobs. That unemployment in general drops wages, or that full employment increases wages, is a much older concept than Marx's.

The model said that

> large reserve of under-employed workers, or people who didn't previously participate in the labor force, is what enables the most exploitative jobs

This still holds.

I believe it is technically possible to construct machines that produce most of life’s basic necessities at zero marginal cost. I am generally interested in finding others who want to work with me to design the first prototypes of these machines.

We can build any system we’d like.

The "marginal" costs come from gathering and refining the raw resources that the machines operate on, and maintenance.

We already have machines that produce food. Why do you think they are still manned by an entire workforce? Out of sadism?

So you have whatever mental model you have dreamed up for zero marginal production costs. Does this zero cost production include zero spoilage during the zero cost logistics to move the zero cost food, water, and shelter?

Of course, we can build all of those things because we'd like it. Zero marginal cost world peace awaits us!

I encourage you to chase this! I also encourage a backup plan.

I find these guy inspiring:

Backyard aeroponics: self-sustaining farm for Wisconsin cold - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4gsnFJRAB0

Internet of Farming: Arduino-based, backyard aquaponics - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wWTadsBDA

I don't think it is completely true. In shitty countries, most people have a "job" working for the local dictator. They are exploited by force. It works because most work is just manual labor, they don't need highly skilled, well educated workers.

It is not the case in developed countries. For example, we don't increase food production by just adding more farmers with hand tools. We have mechanical engineers making more efficient machines, chemists producing better fertilizers, scientists studying plant growth, etc... These people need a high level of education, which mean they need the time and resources to study. People starving won't make the skilled workers employers need.

What really enables exploitative jobs is the need for exploitative jobs.

Please explain this "need" for exploitative jobs. Edit: No, I'm serious, I want someone to supply an internally consistent rationale that explains why corporations or society in general requires someone getting fucked over to function.

I think what the parent post is saying is that exploitative labour practices enable the existence of elites with enough leisure time to create philosophical and technological progress. It's basically the argument that there would be no great classical civilization without slavery, so slavery is justified by the achievements of the civilizations that used it.

I would like to think that in the 21st century we could have idleness for many, and abusive exploitation for none.

In OP's parlance, a shit job is an exploitative job.

He is saying that through progress there are fewer "shit" jobs, so there are fewer people exploited.

It never has been and never will be economically viable to pay a ditch digger the same amount as a doctor. So as long as jobs like ditch-digging exists, people must be "exploited" to fill them.

I don't think this meets specification. "it never has been and never will be economically viable" scans as handwavy, and I've yet to see anyone calling for "ditch diggers" (job automated out of existence by heavy equipment several decades ago, btw) a wage equivalent to what an MD makes. Your assertion, in essence, appears to be that people get paid low wages because low wage jobs exist. That does nothing to explain why a job sufficiently important to require a human being to perform is low-paying and so far nobody has advanced an explanation that takes into account historic levels of corporate profits and income inequality while wages have been basically stagnant since the 70s.

>accept abusive employment

My friends and I tried to "end game" the conservative mindset and I hadn't thought of this option.

Our exercise was: if hard conservatives achieved their goal of, say, eliminating food stamps, what would happen? Presumably private churches etc couldn't pick up all the slack so the only thing we could think of was skyrocketing crime. What, are people going to just starve to death when they could simply walk out of Safeway with ten loaves of bread and a jar of peanut butter?

Causing a rapid increase in gun sales. Two tenets of the platform hit with one stone.

Why is getting a job not an option?

Do you think the only people on food stamps are the unemployed?

But,

Felony conviction, kids that need watching, physical disability, mental disability, age, lack of language skills, lack of any working skills, lack of available jobs for education level, lack of jobs at all, explicit or implicit racism, off the top of my head.

If you think "laziness" belongs on the list, pm me and I'll send you a digital copy of "Evicted."

All of those things make getting/holding a job harder.

None of them make it impossible.

I never claimed life is fair, but does unfairness really justify criminality?

Also, as the underlying discussion is "why might honest people need to steal food?", it's not very reasonable to include felony convictions as the first item on your list.

I know honest people with felony convictions. Do you think a marijuana smoker can't be honest?

I'm not arguing morality, I'm arguing reality. Just like a stock broker would be a fool to expect rationality in the markets, so too would a government be foolish to expect everyone to fall in line when the screws start to turn.

If you grow up a black kid on a street in Atlanta, and you watch your friends get snatched up by the cops for smoking pot, or shot in drive-bys or harassed for standing on corners, and you don't get to go to school cause they don't do bus service in your neighborhood, would you care about "fair?" You care about eating. You're a human. You need to eat.

I guess by honest I meant "law abiding". Obviously someone that committed and was convicted of a felony does not qualify.

From your example, it sounds like the real issue would be behavior from law enforcement / public officials that encourages criminality. The issue there is not "no food stamps". It's a bad system. Fix the system that you think is broken, and then you won't need food stamps, no?

Yes, exactly. But, I don't hear arguments to fix the system. And, the system must be fixed before dam plugs can be removed.

Another note, I think it's dangerous to simply conflate "law abiding" with "honest." The system that creates and upholds the laws is simply too flawed to allow it to be considered 1:1 with the country's moral code. See: rich people getting away with sexual assault for ages, the useless "war on drugs," illegal and immoral activity by federal agency followed by the persecution of whistle blowers exposing that activity, etc etc etc.

A system of laws is necessary, but not necessarily good. It should always be questioned and evolving.

It's interesting because Marx was writing in a time where automation was considered to even more imminent than it is today. Most intellectuals of the time were of the opinion that work weeks would reduce to 20 hours in a few decades, and people would live in leisure.

One thing Marx got right was this: He said that as long as Capitalism is the dominant system, there will always be full-time employment for the masses. There will be new jobs created in new fields which are far removed from producing goods(jobs like advertising, insurance, etc.). Marx thought that humans as a whole will never work for significantly fewer hours as long as capitalism exists.

Incidentally, Marx was vehemently opposed to things like Universal Healthcare, better Labour laws, Mandatory Vacation and a higher minimum wage. He famously said that if these things were considered Marxist, he himself was 'not a Marxist'. The reason? Because these measures are beneficial to capitalism in the long run because workers are more likely to stay working under a capitalist as their life is bearable. When conditions deteriorate, that is the time that workers are going to revolt and try to own the means of production.

So in reality most of the stuff liberals advocate like better pay and healthcare are decidedly anti-marxist and pro-capitalist. It is opposed by some corporations because they care more about short term profits rather than the long term sustenance of capitalism.

Yup, ideologically, liberals are the enemy of leftists unfortunately. And much closer to neo-cons. It’s why you’ll never see an actual Marxist anti-Imperialist on the masthead of so-called left-leaning (by some) pubs like NYT, WaPo, the Atlantic, etc. But they’ll happily hire tons of right wingers in the name of “ideological diversity” (see Kevin Williamson, Bari Weiss, plus the ones that have actually stayed on)

What's interesting is if you look at percentage household spending, food and healthcare are really the only recurring ones that are not trending downward:

- housing - trending downward when not attempting to live in dense urban area (i.e. prefab modular homes)

- energy - trending downward once renewables and battery technology catch up

- transportation - trending downward when looking at non-luxury cars as well as on demand (Uber, etc.) and electric cars powered by renewables

- childcare/education - trending downward when combined with homeschooling and MOOCs like Coursera, Udacity)

- clothes - trending downward when you focus on store brands

- entertainment - trending downward (Youtube)

What happens if you could build an automated machine that you owned that farmed for you in your backyard and its cost trended downward?

Then really the only cost that needs to be managed is healthcare.

But I do already own some of the robots. I have Amazon stock in my 401k. That's what "the people owning the robots" looks like.

What you're getting at is that there are many people right now who are too poor (and are going to be too poor) to ever own any part of the robots.

This century's great debate is forming up to be whether or not we should give them some anyway even though they can't "earn" it for whatever moving value of earn society is currently accepting.

In a few centuries students in history classes will look back and try to understand why we let our people die in the streets.

I too am afraid that our future descendants will look at our actions with disdain.

But I am even more afraid that our future descendants will live in the same rampant callousness and cruelty that we've created and perpetuated.

If they live in a better world than ours and look at us like savages, then I think overall things will have gone pretty well.

I disagree

Care to elaborate?

They didn't - so no

I don't think so, reading real statistics on this kind of thing instead of alarmist and politically slanted headlines paints a very different picture of how the world is doing.

https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

As global average quality of life trends upward, the American lower and middle class are dying quietly in the streets.

https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/o...

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/12/21/5720803...

That's a very niche problem in comparison - we're talking hundreds of millions of people leaving poverty across the globe compared to under hundreds of thousands dying of opioid overdoses. Perhaps it's because I'm not American, but I just don't find it that concerning when put into the larger picture.

Perhaps you not finding it concerning emphasizes the problem. As an American, it greatly concerns me. It’s also why populism and nationalism have taken hold in first world countries.

That some tiny portion of the deaths in your country are from opioid overdoses? People voluntarily injecting themselves with drugs and fucking up? Why exactly does this concern you so much? It's hard to see it as representative of a larger systemic problem beyond the American drug enforcement and medical systems resulting in over-prescription of opioids and fenantly entering common usage. Not much beyond that, is there? I don't see a larger trend to extrapolate from that.

The opioid epidemic is a symptom of underlying socioeconomic and societal issues. That is why it concerns me so greatly. It’s a canary in the coal mine, if you will.

I don't think so - over-prescription of opioids and more common usage of fentanyl seem to the be the key factors in the death increases. Nothing to do with underlying socioeconomic conditions nor societal problems. I don't understand how you're making that leap - care to elaborate?

The Guardian has an excellent piece far better than me rehashing it.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/28/deaths-of-de...

“Is the US facing an epidemic of 'deaths of despair'? These researchers say yes”

So you're thinking that people in the future will wonder why we weren't more parochial in our sphere of concerns? More precisely, they'll be morally shocked at the notion that we were too close to treating all humans as of equal moral worth, instead of prioritizing those that are located closer to us geographically?

Don't get me wrong, I'm very aware that most moral systems have somewhat-principled reasons to prioritize those that are geographically closer to you. This is intended more to illuminate that side of the argument than as a full-fledged suggestion for how to set our priorities. But the claim being discussed here, that the future will wonder why we let people die in the streets, is still bizarre to me in the context that you're framing it in.

You act like we're putting in enormous efforts overseas to improve life, when we really aren't.

No, I'm not. You're projecting your overly simple-minded model of the economy and the world onto me.

toomuchtodo pointed out we're not doing enough about a problem that exists locally.

You argued that thinking globally is more important than thinking parochially, which is fine by itself. But it's totally unrelated to what toomuchtodo is saying unless we were taking global action in lieu of local action.

So I assumed you meant that, because it's critical to your comment being relevant.

If you didn't mean that, then your argument falls apart. toomuchtodo is not arguing for being parochial, they're arguing that we should be making it a priority to fight this problem at all.

The whole lower and middle classes? What do you mean by this? What does "quietly" mean -- there's been a ton of activity on the opioid crisis in Washington lately?

It is fascinating how frequently modest increases in quality of living in third world countries is wheeled out as justification for the predations of capitalism. If we're going to have a serious conversation about how the world is doing that has to include the fact that the global economy is predicated on continuous growth despite finite natural resources. There is also a few environmental issues that might be relevant.

I'd advise reading the article I linked, the increases are far from modest in many cases.

I'll agree with you on the environmental issues, but I think we're well on the way to solving those too and largely via the same mechanisms, Chinese solar is close to pushing coal out of business on price. That's not to say there's no role for regulation in the environmental direction though, I certainly think there probably should be, but how to do so globally and fairly is a bit of a catastrophe.

I would be honestly delighted to know through what mechanism you believe collapsing marine fisheries, coral bleaching, the Pacific trash gyre, global warming accelerated desertification, aquifer depletion, topsoil depletion, and a whole host of other issues I can't name off the top of my head are on the cusp of being "solved".

Who is dying in the street in substantial numbers?

Go to San Francisco. You'll meet them.

Poor people die earlier. More importantly though their quality of life sucks, especially in a country with tens of millions without health insurance. They may have rotten teeth and loads of stress, but hey, they are not dead yet so what's the problem?

Sorry that it's all The Guardian but they had a series that I happened to remember, and I think that publication has a good enough reputation:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/15/america-extr...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/21/seques...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/01/un-extreme-pov...

Of course, if we find the slightest mistake or hyperbole (if there even is any) in an article or comment about the plight of the poor we can discuss THAT instead and dismiss the entire thought. Another form of bike-shedding, instead of using good faith for the discussion use every tiny opening of the "opponent" to sidetrack the discussion and to dismiss the issue.

So, where are the people of the masses of dying in the streets? None? Even in San Francisco they look shabby but very much still alive? Well, case closed I guess.

You're moving the goalposts. The person I replied to implied that people are literally dying in the gutters, so of course future humans will look at us with genuine confusion -- who steps over a dying person in the street? How does that make sense? It trivializes the problem and handwaves away the millions of people who help the poor/homeless, and the millions of dollars we spend on that.

If future historians look at any part of this with confusion, it'll be the part where we ignore mental health and think dumping cash/housing/whatever on a person will solve everything.

we just halved poverty in the world in the past 20 years. Time to check your facts again.

halved != eradicated.

Given the incredible amount of energy and resources being wasted by some of the richest countries this level of inequality is far from acceptable.

You're assuming it will get better in the future.

SF spends 240 million dollars every year to help the homeless. That's more than most city's entire budget. The reason that money doesn't help anyone is because it won't go very far in a city where housing costs 2000$ per square foot. And it really doesn't need to be like this at all. It's an entirely man made disaster of colossal proportions.

There's plenty of blame to go around. You can thank all the NIMBYs and countless housing regulations that prevent cost effective shelter from being created.

It's within our technological power to create housing for a tiny fraction of what it costs today in SF: just look at the tiny house movement. Just imagine how much cheaper it would be if something like that was built but stackable. Housing, A potentially multi-trillion dollar industry, completely unassailable, very few companies or investors are investing in this, all thanks to: Regulation.

Regulations and land use policy hamstring developers, increasing costs endlessly. Instead of working against them, we should be working with them to streamline and reduce their costs and finding ways to create more competition between them, to ensure that people get the very lowest prices. It can be done. Places like Dallas are growing every bit as quickly as SF/bay area and can still create housing for 100$/sq foot. I suspect even lower prices are possible with the removal of regulation: which would finally allow humanity to innovate in this area, rather than creating yet more cat video apps.

This harmful idea that real estate is something that should go up and up forever is wrong: morally and economically. In a world that is progressing, things should be getting cheaper, even real-estate.

Right now, your options in SF are a 200$ tent under a bridge or a 2 million dollar condo. There, really ought to be more options between those two extremes.

> just look at the tiny house movement. Just imagine how much cheaper it would be if something like that was built but stackable.

Say, did you ever read or see "Ready Player One"?

I see your point. but, I'd rather live in a small apartment trailer (which could have heating, water, electricity, etc) than a tent.

I think there are some differences between owning stock and owning the machines. Stock gives you abstract control through voting, and the board has much more power than you. When you own the machine, you can physically operate it yourself. It’s like owning a car versus owning stock in Uber - when you own a car you reap the benefits of cheap travel much more directly and in a very different way than getting a dividend check.

I think stock schemes can work as an abstraction, but only when combined with other bylaws that grant clear powers to shareholders (like a bill of rights). I write a little about that in one of my speculative fiction stories on automated society here:

http://tlalexander.com/corporation/

>When you own the machine, you can physically operate it yourself.

Can I? I've got no clue how to run a Kiva, I just know that somewhere, there's one making me a few pennies right now being run and maintained by people who know what they're doing.

Following the car analogy, many people don’t know how to change their oil, but they could if they wanted. That is a freedom a piece of normal stock does not give you. If your stock truly represented an equal share of the operation, you could work with other shareholders and manage the local warehouse to your liking. It sounds like you’re satisfied with Amazon, so perhaps you won’t get involved. But it would give the warehouse workers a voice if they felt they were being abused.

I'm not exactly disagreeing. I'd absolutely explicitly dump my Amazon (the whole mutual fund its in actually) if a robot-owning stock with a "shareholder bill of rights" as you describe existed.

A product/brand independent "means of production" type investment is an interesting idea. It still doesn't fix the fact that there are people who are just never going to have the resources to buy into such a thing, which I think is really the core of the issue.

> I think there are some differences between owning stock and owning the machines. ... When you own the machine, you can physically operate it yourself.

i... sure?

if i'm not an expert in using (and maintaining) that equipment (who also happens to own a space which is large enough and zoned for that equipment, and proximate to the customers or raw inputs for the equipment), owning the corporation that owns the equipment is better than owning the machinery, because it means i also employ people to run (and maintain) the semiconductor fabs and wire bending machines and shit (which have been located in cost effective places) for me, so i can go off and do the things i know how to do well.

> ...when you own a car you reap the benefits of cheap travel much more directly and in a very different way than getting a dividend check.

i also accept all of the risks and responsibilities directly. if i buy into a hypothetical publicly traded ride sharing company, i don't have to worry about any of that.

Yes, shareholder voting can be heavily manipulated just like political voting can. It's between guy A who does what the board wants and guy B who does what the board wants a lot of the time.

Of course if you are a common stock holder you are at the bottom of the barrel as far as value goes. Preferred stock holders get all their money first, and then common share holder get what's left (at least in a liquidation).

That assumes the profits go to the shareholders. I don't think that's a safe assumption and I don't think that will necessarily persist.

> But I do already own some of the robots. I have Amazon stock in my 401k. That's what "the people owning the robots" looks like.

Is it though? Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't stock only generates value if it increases in price (or the company decides it wants to pay dividends), and not directly from the productivity of robots?

To put it a bit more clearly, your stock only makes you money if Amazon keeps growing. Let say Amazon were to reach a theoretical maximum size: profits and value stop growing. It would still generate massive amounts of money but would it be obliged to give you a cut of it?

Due to population increase the revenues would grow. When a company stops growing and increasing revenue its not keeping up with population increase and may as well be dying.

There are also stocks with high dividends, which are paid out based on profit and not by the stock increasing in value.

This is obviously ignoring the fact many people either make horrible financial decision or are too poor to invest in stocks.

> Due to population increase the revenues would grow. When a company stops growing and increasing revenue its not keeping up with population increase and may as well be dying.

I'd like to retort this because I think it's important to have a bit of perspective here:

1. Population growth doesn't imply market growth.

If I sell polio treatment, my market are the number of people with polio, which thankfully hasn't been correlated with population growth.

2. Market growth doesn't imply revenue growth.

Competition.

3. Revenue growth doesn't imply profit growth.

Say, for example, I run a company building cheap computers for the children of low-income families. As I move into new countries and expand my revenue I might want to, instead of increasing profits, make my computers cheaper so more children have access to them.

2 and 3 are usually not true when companies are trying to maximize profits, but I don't think 1 should be at all rare.

Anyway, this is besides where the discussion was meant to go, but thought I'd share.

If it stops growing and the "massive amounts of money" it generates result in a profit, then shareholders like the parent could vote that the company starts paying dividends to shareholders. So to answer your question: Yes.

To put it a bit more clearly, your stock only makes you money if Amazon keeps growing

No, I think you have it incorrect. As long as revenue > costs and internal expenditures, you make money by dividends. That's the whole reason we buy stocks. Price growth is ultimately just a projection of the belief in higher future dividends.

Many tech stocks pay very little in dividends or none at all, even if the company is quite profitable. In tech it's all about share price.

That's because they are growing at a large rate. When that growth stops the only option they will have is to pay dividends. The investors make money either way.

There's also buybacks, which has mostly been tech companies' weapon of choice when it comes to capital return.

I don't want to split hairs because you are correct, and this isn't really directed at you.

I'd just like to point out that if you believe in roughly efficient markets, if your enterprise maintains its value, if you amass a pile of cash, that will be reflected in your share price.

The dividends come directly out of that share price whenever issued. You can theoretically amass a pile of money that would make Smaug blush, and this will increase your share price to reflect. But that cash isn't being reinvested, it's only going to increase linearly with respect to that cash position. Which is why in many circumstances investors frown upon it.

Yes.

The revenue is used somehow. The board decides how. And shareholders elect board members.

Thus, if growth stalled, but there was excess revenue, the board would need to decide where it goes. It could be used to help growth revive, by using it to invest in future prospects, it could choose to use it towards employee compensations, maybe if it believes its required to retain talent, or it could choose to give it to shareholders as dividend.

If the board does make decisions the shareholders don't like, they can eventually be booted out and replaced by a new one.

Yes it would.

This isn't a new problem you are talking about. Stocks have worked like this since they have existed.

Go take a look at any major company that "stopped growing" but is still making money, and see how it works.

With truly advanced multi-purpose robots (like in sci-fi), it would take just one donation of a robot to a charity to start a 'robot self-replication for poverty movement', where one robot build another with its own labor, doubling, and doubling again, until every down and out has their own pool of robotic laborers.

This implies a world with unlimited energy and natural resources?

I didn't mean to imply doubling forever. Also, yes I assumed that the robot would have to be employed at least initially to earn a wage, so that it could buy materials and components off alibaba.

How much do you think raw materials are going to cost in a world with free labor? What's to stop rich people from just buying up all the resources? With free labor they can use as much resources as they get their hands on.

There are structural problems in our society that cannot be solved with new technology.

Space is big. The asteroid belt plus robotics. There is a lot of energy from the sun. There is a lot of iron.

Fully Automated Space Communism.

Around 80% of stock is owned by the top 10% wealthiest individuals[1]. More recent work[2] puts the percentage even higher. You might own some of the robots but most people don't.

[1]: https://appam.confex.com/appam/2012/webprogram/ExtendedAbstr...

[2]: http://time.com/money/5054009/stock-ownership-10-percent-ric...

But you know what most people DO own? Unnecessary consumer debt that stunts their ability to save and invest. When the average car payment in America is around $500 a month, it's clear evidence that people have a spending problem rather than an income problem. Here's an idea: Teach people not to finance $500 worth of car each month (plus gas, plus insurance, plus maintenance, plus healthcare costs) and suddenly people will be able to amass multiple millions of dollars in investments over their working career.

Teach people not to finance $500 worth of car each month (plus gas, plus insurance, plus maintenance

How? Keep in mind, I drive a car I bought for $1700 cash and I've restored and maintained it with my own hands.

Most people don't have the time, knowledge, tools, or space to maintain an older car, so a new car with a warranty is a smart move.

New cars are safer and more fuel efficient. They last longer than ever before. Not having a car is not an option for most Americans.

I don't see how a car payment is indicative of poor decision-making.

You can buy excellent cars that will last a long time for far less than $500 a month. $500 a month for much more car than you need is a very poor decision because you can get by with much less and invest the rest.

I've never personally owned a car, but I did grow up in a pretty car-centric area and am generally aware of my parents' purchasing decisions, in an environment where there wasn't a lot of money to go around.

If you must have a new car (we bought used fairly often, with good results), there are a dozen cars you can buy for around $15k, which works out to $270/mo with a 3.1% loan. I'm really stacking the deck here: I ignored cars that are too small, since I assume a family with children, I'm using a pretty high interest rate, and I'm ignoring used cars. Bear in mind that the _average_ payment means that it's ignoring the substantial amount of people who don't have kids and would be fine with a smaller car, or those with better credit who can get a better rate.

That being said, I don't know enough about the distribution of the discussed figure to say whether it makes sense in the way we're using it: $500 is the mean payment, not the median, so it would be a mistake to assume that there's an "average person" who pays $500. It's just as likely that some people have higher payments (that they can afford easily) and poorer people have lower ones.

I have concluded that, in the USA, most ordinary folks have, much to their detriment, never heard of Dave Ramsey.

https://www.daveramsey.com/blog/the-truth-about-car-payments

He's a mixed bag. Some sound advice, in particular the parts about living within one's means; but there's also things that are utterly unrealistic, like:

> If you were to invest that (...) into a good mutual fund with a 12% rate of return, you would have over $100,000 in 10 years! At 20 years, you would have made $470,000. And at 30 years? That mutual fund would be worth $1.6 million!

Maybe I'm not savvy enough but I have not encountered mutual funds that will reliably sustain 12% over three decades.

"Cash for Clunkers" took a lot of wind out of this particular sail. It crippled the used car market for years, and propped the door wide open for predatory "buy here pay here" auto sellers.

Nevertheless, I haven't had a car payment for so long that I can't remember the last time I paid one. Trips to the mechanic are frequent and costly, but at least I'm not uselessly paying interest.

I'm surprised Ramsey can have a successful national brand saying little more than infinite variations on "spend less than you earn", but there he is, and I guess some people need to hear it like that.

Can you post a reference to that $500 number? I find that hard to believe. I was leasing a luxury car for around $400/mo a few years ago. What kinds of cars are average Americans leasing? Rolls Royces?

Quick google search: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2016/06...

$500 a month is basically a 4 year loan on a $20k car. That's a lot in a real sense but not a lot today in terms of a car. The only good thing is that cars post 2002 seem to be more way more reliable on average, however, finding low mileage cars is difficult. Suburbans/minivans and other family transport vehicles tend to hold their value fairly well (except maybe Dodge minivans)...

> The only good thing is that cars post 2002 seem to be more way more reliable on average

The manufacturers needed to make them last more than 100K because most of the manufacturers are closely if not directly tied to the financing, and if they wanted to make loans at high interest and 96mos they needed a car that would last at least long enough to cover the majority of new 65+ mo loans people are getting.

The figure is for purchase, not lease. You can get more car for your lease dollar because at the end of the lease, you have no asset that you own.

You've replied to multiple posts about these poor people with $500 month car financing. Prove it. And show what they should be doing instead.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2016/06...

Instead, buy a used car for $5,000 to $10,000 and use it. Invest the rest. Hell, financing a car for $200 and investing the rest would be much better than financing $500 worth of car per month.

The OP said prove it. You didn't do that.

Poor people aren't financing cars for $500 a month. $500 a month is the average monthly cost for a new car loan. Poor people aren't financing cars for that much.

You're really misusing that figure, here is the quote from the article you linked below:

>The average new car payment in America has crept above the $500 per month mark for the fist time, settling in at $503, according to a recent study by Experian.

and here's your statement:

>When the average car payment in America is around $500 a month

See the mismatch? This is not evidence that people (especially poor ones) are overspending on cars. It doesn't say anything about people without car payments, people with used cars, people who bought outright or even how many people exist in those categories. Besides I just put $500/month on a 5 year auto loan into googles calculator and I got a cost of $27,751. This isn't exactly an extravagant purchase for a new car.

Besides this notion that most people will ever be able to cut their expenses enough to "amass multiple millions of dollars in investments over their working career" is just painfully out of touch.

Isn't education the government's responsibility?

So, the American people don't have a spending problem, America has an education problem. (America has many education problems, really)

People only do what they know how to do. If you let a street worth of kids grow up on the street without giving them another opportunity, how are they gonna put food on their table? The ways they learned on the street. Same idea.

Owning stock is really a very messy proxy for wealth. What do you think would happen if they all sold their stock? They would plummet their paper networth..

And its also not given that such a money, well gotten, has been produced by giving something in exchange, so it has removed tat money from less inefficient hands. It was still owned by someone, just changed hands.

Bastiat was right about something, using money as a measure of economics is just an invitation to confusion.

> I have Amazon stock in my 401k.

It's weird seeing someone writing this in a thread about how Amazon exploits its workers for profits (ie. in part for its shareholders).

As a thought experiment I wonder if it will be better or worse when Amazon eventually automates all those jobs (yes, maybe even the programmers' jobs one day).

Its not lost on me... I first thought "those bastards", then had a flash of insight, checked the breakdown of the biggest mutual fund I'm invested in and realized, I'm one of them.

The average working class American is financing their car. The average car payment is $500. That is way too much car, yet people are financing that. Over the average working career, this $500 per month represents a foregone multi-million dollar net worth at retirement. So the average working class American is poor or struggling for cash not because of income issues, but because of spending issues. We have a spending problem in this country. If everyone working in Amazon's warehouses prioritized wise financial decisions, like not financing a car for $500 a month or more, they'd be able to demand better work conditions because they wouldn't be as dependent on the job.

Amazon needs to do better, but working class Americans also need to do better with their finances so they don't spend themselves into awful situations like this. Ultimately the idea that the average working class American will never be able to afford stock is just a fairy tale peddled by Marxists. The average working class American is more than capable of amassing a multi million dollar net worth by retirement by making wise decisions and investing, instead of crapping away all their income on things they don't actually need.

> Americans also need to do better

Blaming any problem of this magnitude on individuals is not reasonable.

There's a systemic pressure toward overspending through advertising, etc., and we've created a society where many people make an amount of money, that, if spent "wisely", procures a stressful and unfulfilling existence.

Clearly Marxism is not the right solution: our system isn't inherently and completely broken, but it needs adjustment. I think Piketty has the right idea. A progressive tax on capital would do a lot to equalize this inequality — if we could ever amass the political will to implement it — though it wouldn't correct our current situation where everyone is constantly manipulated to think they'll be happy if only they buy this one more object.

> Blaming any problem of this magnitude on individuals is not reasonable.

This is just anecdotal, but I see this a LOT. The stubborn insistence that blame is paramount in any discussion and that the world should be made fair before action can be taken to improve one's life is a pretty substantial barrier to said improvement. Sometimes the deck is stacked, and working on unstacking the deck can happen in parallel with reacting to the world as it is now. Out of college, I had friends who made half as much as me and spent twice as much; income aside, we were both exposed to pretty much exactly the same environment, and somehow we made purchasing decisions that were completely swapped from what you'd expect. As the parent comment said, "Amazon needs to do better" too, but putting personal behavior outside of the realm of control of the individual isn't helping anyone, it's harming them.

I agree with your general point that simply wishing that people would do better for a behavorial issue at this scale is unlikely to do much, but I don't think that's implied by the GP comment's suggestion. There have been successful campaigns to cause large-scale behavioral shifts before[1], and recognizing personal choice as a potential mechanism of improvement doesn't mean we can't approach the problem in an intentional, structural manner.

Just an aside, but in all of this I'm taking on faith the power of advertising that the HN community at large seems to consistently think that we're helpless before; this has never been my experience; I don't care much about ads, I don't see any mechanism in which they could drive my purchase decisions, etc etc. To wit, I buy the cheapest option (that I haven't already tried and disliked) for cheap items and extensively research medium to high priced ones. There's no question that brand advertising affects my level of brand awareness, but it's _really_ not difficult at all to remove that factor from your purchasing decisions. If anything, my prior would be that all the people who blindly purchase based on brand awareness are shifting the value prop towards brands that are _less_ well-known, since theoretically they need to compete on something else (price, features, quality, whatever).

[1] Spend any time with Europeans and you'll appreciate how impressive the American anti-smoking campaign was.

I think my actual position here is a little more nuanced than it came across before, and I pretty much agree with you.

I find it silly to blame individuals (if only they would do better!). The law of large numbers applied to these cases guarantees that there is a systemic issue, not an individual one — however — I think this sort of "you all should do better!" campaign can be a perfectly viable solution to a systemic issue in some cases, if it can effectively shift enough mindsets to turn a cultural tide.

Blame is a ridiculous concept when talking about large-scale social dynamics, and effectively shuts down the search for any systemic adjustment that would constitute a fix.

Thanks for the response. I guess my main point of contention was assuming that the GP commenter was saying that it's 100% an individual blame problem, when that's belied by "Amazon needs to do better too".

> Blame is a ridiculous concept when talking about large-scale social dynamics, and effectively shuts down the search for any systemic adjustment that would constitute a fix.

I agree with you. Frankly, I rarely find the concept of blame to be all that useful for improving matters. For an example from the other side of the politically-coded spectrum, terms like "victim-blaming" are most often used as thought-terminating clichés, selectively applied to avoid having to justify one's point. For example, telling women not to dress provocatively when going out and telling tourists to keep their passport close to them and watch their bags are both just as "victim-blaming" as the other, but only one of these is given that label. (FWIW, the reason I disagree with the former and agree with the latter is that being able to dress as one pleases is a lot more core to my conception of fsirly fundamental rights than being able to avoid paying attention to one's belongings).

The people who whine about systemic causes will never admit that there's elements of personal responsibility in these choices.

Personal responsibility on a large scale is a systemic factor. It's like quantum and classical mechanics. A single quark has probabilistic behaviour, but a million quarks behave in an aggregate, predictable way. You can tweak personal responsibility en masse through new systemic inputs, but I don' think personal responsibility nor individual blame map well onto discussions of issues involving large groups of individuals.

That average payment is for all Americans, not just working-class. The bottom 20% of American households spends only $3559/year on transportation (overall, not just on car payments). So either their car payments are much lower, or they just don't own many cars, but in any case they don't have many $500 car payments to forgo.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/how-high-income-and-low-income...

I can't find a way that $500 per month adds up to "multi-million dollar net worth". Even at a very optimistic 10% return rate, it comes to just over 1.1 million over thirty years. What assumptions are you making in your calculation to come up with 2million+ at retirement from $500 per month of savings?

$500 a month is $6000 a year. $6000 a year invested from 26 to 66 at 10% interest per year is $2,921,110.87. At 12% it's $5,154,854.34.

Keep in mind this is just from a single decision the average person is making.

And isn't that 10% and 12 % growth assumption the reason all pensions are in trouble?

Just for clarification, where is 10% interest coming from? Mutual funds? 401k? Something else?

Serious question, I am not financially knowledgeable but I know you'd never get 10% interest in a savings account (for example).

Mutual funds / index funds / real estate

WTF kind of fairy land is this? 10% is already a dream, but at least it's a round number, unlike the 12% you just arbitrarily threw out there.

So you're expecting people to make 10-12% in after-inflation returns?

Making 7 to 10 percent after inflation is possible and it is sufficient to amass more than 1 million dollars by retirement just from changing this one habit. The point was that the average financed car is worth a massive amount in opportunity cost.

Ok so you're assuming 40 years instead of 30. That's where the discrepancy is. Thank you for clarifying.

Yep. You can also assume 45 years if someone starts working at 20 and retires at 65.

Not many places offering 10% ROI to people who can invest $500 a month.

So invest it as $6,000 per year. Doesn't have to be $500 per month.

... and how is spending $0 on transportation a reasonable solution, anyway?

It's not. Even if you walked to your job. The additional money you would pay in rent / time / uber is not worth it. Just buy a car unless you live in an actual pedestrian city.

In order to finance a dollar of monthly spending, you need roughly $300 invested. Actual returns are generally somewhat higher, due to requiring a lower amount of variance to handle sequence-of-returns risk in distribution, but the rule of thumb holds. Which suggests the car-buying habit puts you roughly $150k in the hole.

Well maybe the problem is that you own part of the company instead of the people who actually work there.

The future of work is shitty jobs like this, but a la Uber you "get your side-hustle on" AKA have no rights or security as an employee ever anywhere.

e: Which, speaking of Marxism, this situation will keep you permanently alienated from your coworkers and will forever prevent community bonds from forming with them.

Which is basically the MO of those who are in power and control resources since forever, or at least in the U.S. - divide and conquer, project fault on outsiders, etc. For all that the internet has done, it has made weakening local communities easier.

The sad irony of Uber et al is that it's only a matter of time before those drivers are replaced by AI.

The point being, those drivers are doing more for the (short term) future of that company than any other entity. In the long term? For those drivers? The long term is not being an Uber driver.

What do you think these people were doing being being drivers for uber?

Probably struggling from the previous 40 years of union busting, rights erosion, offshoring, financial manipulation, and discrimination.

Struggling doesn't pay. What where they doing with the productivity before Uber, thats the question. Are you saying they weren't doing anything at all and uber lifted them out of extreme poverty?

Not the GP, but my guess is that they mean that they were doing equally bad jobs, but without Uber's pretense that it wasn't a bad job.

Poor them, being deluded from a job they had to a job they wanted. IF we could only enact legislation that forbid changing jobs.

> AKA have no rights or security as an employee ever anywhere.

I get what you are saying, but somehow this attitude also rubs me the wrong way sometimes.

It's like "Hey, I'll pay anyone a nickle per piece of trash they pick up in the local forests"

Soon: "NiceNature is the worst company ever! They exploit their workers to pick up garbage without proper protection, the employees have no rights or securities and are forced to pee on trees because no bathrooms are provided! Worst of all, they aren't even paid a living wage! /u/ythn is the worst CEO ever, he gluts himself off of the labors of the socioeconomicly desperate!"

Like, all I really wanted was to fix a problem I saw with our local forests, not become a human trafficker...

That's not a good analogy to something like Uber, because there's no profit motive. What you described is essentially a government works program, which is a great idea! But that's not what anyone seems to be talking about.

You're right, the analogy is not good. I was more thinking about making an app for fun that solves some problem, makes you and your users a little money on the side, mostly intended for teenagers/college students, etc., but then the masses move into to squeeze every last cent out of it and I get demonized and accused of exploiting workers, etc, when it was never meant to be a life-sustaining employment opportunity to begin with.

I.e. "biting the hand that feeds you" syndrome. Can't we just make cool things that don't require you to give 401k matching to everyone who touches your cool thing?

Again, maybe this doesn't apply to Uber and they totally could be giving full benefits to all drivers, etc., but I'm just saying in general

Someone has to provide necessities to society. In absence of government directly providing it, we force companies to do it. What you want is, essentially, socialism, with a little bit of the market carved out for market capitalism. Sounds good to me!

this mentality becomes a problem when its pushing real jobs that people rely on out, especially when we are talking about the founders getting immensely rich off this.

The problem with your framing is that a lot of companies like to pretend they are about making the world a better place, when what they are actually about is making their owners money.

This is a ridiculous comparison. How would you be enriching yourself by paying people to pick up trash? Did you get a contract from the government or the owner to pick up the trash? If you did, then yes you should probably take some of that money you made and hire some people to do the work or do it yourself.

> How would you be enriching yourself by paying people to pick up trash?

You get to have nicer forests to walk in?

I’m responding to their comment...

> /u/ythn is the worst CEO ever, he gluts himself off of the labors of the socioeconomicly desperate!"

From the point of view of creating a society with least inequality all must own an equal share of production. This is straight up Marxism, and anywhere anything like it has been attempted, it made everyone equally poor.

The problem is capital owns production, and capital is not distributed equally. And if you forcefully try to change that too much, capital leaves for greener pastures or is no longer put to work.

I don't think equality is a good goal. I think a good standard of living for all citizens should be the goal. After that's been achieved, I don't care how rich the 1% are.

I think this misunderstands economics. The day robots are in the market the value of what they produce will drop to nothing, much like most things done in high scale by machines today.

The value of things are proportional to the human labor expended to make them, if robots do free shipping and all of that, their cost will tend to drop to the cost of making the robots.

The public narrative that robots should be taxes is as logical as saying we should tax computer, or hammers. Its not economics. A more compelling argument is that the shift of work in the future will be even more detrimental than what we know, which might be true, but it has also been true in the past.

>The value of things are proportional to the human labor expended to make them

That's one theory of value--there are many others.

Shitty jobs is already spreading. Uber driver, Deliveroo biker, and their hundreds of copycats, all of them where "you're not an employee, you're a contractor".

Wait until the realize that the strip-club model of independent contractor would allow them to charge their contractors for the privilege of working in their environment.

My baseline intuition is that trying to jam equality into production instead of just doing so explicitly and intentionally doesn't make a lot of sense. To be concrete, I've never understood why (esp in America), we're so obsessed with trying to force social welfare solutions into the labor relationship instead of simply doing so directly, government action.

Your example of collective ownership of capital happens to horsehoe back to not being all that different from my suggestion, but what's the advantage of collective ownership over simply high tax rates (on capital gains, if you like) and redistribution?

The usual argument against something like this (e.g. a UBI) is the psychological effects on those who don't work, but that seems moot for the purposes of this comparison, since the exact same would be true of collective ownership of capital that you have no real-world experience with or connection to.

Thinking about what "owning the robots" might actually look like, the easiest way I can think to solve it would be for the government to buy index funds and use the proceeds to fund basic income.

This wouldn't own any robots from privately-owned companies, though.

Privately-owned companies not having publicly available shares for sale isn't really a barrier for the government - they write the tax laws. If the US government wants a piece of their profits, they can get it.

>Instead, if the people own the machines collectively, then they can enjoy the productivity gains themselves as a group.

Isn't this basically a corporation?

I think we need to democratize the means of automation.

Building blocks spanning microcontrollers to motors to power converters to lighting to the rapid fabrication of small parts have never been cheaper or more accessible. And why would you buy remote-controlled lightbulbs from BigCo if you could make one yourself (or get a friend to) for the cost of a sandwich?

Because you can't spare the extra $3 to buy a fair-trade organic lightbulb every few months, would probably be the answer. And that would probably be because you're stuck in jobs like these. So maybe I'm just spouting baseless optimism.

>Building blocks spanning microcontrollers to motors to power converters to lighting to the rapid fabrication of small parts have never been cheaper or more accessible. And why would you buy remote-controlled lightbulbs from BigCo if you could make one yourself (or get a friend to) for the cost of a sandwich?

I think you need to step out of the engineer shoes.

The majority of people struggle to understand their computer works, let alone building their own robots and writing the software.

Sure, but education on those topics has also never been cheaper or more accessible. And these days, you could use something like MakeCode to automate simple tasks without ever touching a programming environment.

There still aren't many people muddling through the introductory online courses on those topics, but there could be. Encouraging participation in learning about useful subjects seems like another good goal which could be helped by the low cost-at-scale of things like MOOCs, and showing people how to make useful things actually happen in the real world seems like a good way to reinforce that encouragement.

These people are working in very stressful environments, often for 10-12 hours/day, and making a pittance (which also adds to overall stress). Add a kid, and the idea of having time and mental energy for learning programming starts to sound a bit far-fetched.

Fine, but what can anyone do to reach someone in that situation? Could we maybe start with people who work 8-10 hours/day, make enough for beer money, and can leave their children with friends or family to make room for maybe 4-8 hours out of a month?

Or should we just look at the situation, throw up our hands, and

You're not the only one afraid.

However look at all the factories closing down and manufacturing jobs lost, plus coal mines etc. Many of those jobs weren't that great either.

I don't know if ownership of the actual robots is a key component. But certainly, have full access and power to customize the machines in use is important. Something similar is already happening now in the developing world where the first access to the internet and computing for most people is a mobile phone. There is a growing number of people who don't know how to type on a keyboard but know how to use a computer. Voice commands are a large part of their input. As great as voice command can be, there is power and flexibility you simply can't access without a keyboard.

The only way I learned to program and now have a career is because I had easy access to the internals of a computer. I could start tinkering. I started messing with the internals of the computer even before I started programming. My curiosity led me to the file system of games and I started replacing sound and image files to mod my games. If someone's access to computing is a mobile phone they download and install prepacked bins. The can't and don't get to look at anything under the hood. No matter how strong their curiosity is they can't just discover.

Personally I'm a proponent for basic income, and I think we're moving toward that in a more and more automated society. When we reach a point where more people can't work without high skill levels, the choices are either to let them die, live on welfare, or provide basic income.

Yeah, yeah, people own the robots, etc. You mean investors who own the shares of the company who own the robots? Because, frankly, I don't see any other model that works as society currently operates.

You'd have to shift to a model that, much like REITs, requires revenue to be distributed to the holders. By which point, you've just created an automation trust fund, and companies start selling ATFs.

In the absence of strong incentives to start employee owned businesses, I don't see the problems that creates those jobs being assuaged...

Sounds interesting, but also like a lot of bureaucracy. What happens when the people want to change the way the robots are operating? What if the robots don't do exactly what they're told? Who manages manufacturing robots vs transportation robots vs communications robots? Would the people have to elect representatives to deal with the robots?

If you replace "robots" with "employees", does that make your questions any easier to answer?

I assume that the engineering would be run like an open source project. Debian is a good example, or the Linux kernel. The best stuff is decided by the contributors and anyone is welcome to fork and compete. Actual labor of manufacturing and distribution is handled by competing companies (which may be democratically operated) but the tech is open source so “lock in” (which is a man made inefficiency in the market) can’t do easily occur.

Life always takes work to run. Getting to work every day to pay for food at the store and run errands etc just to do it all again tomorrow feels like beaurocoracy too. I’d much rather have a world where the work I do to support myself is to vote on local community matters (the next merge request, etc), instead of commuting through a zoo and looking out the window at the sunshine.

For every good piece of open source software there is an awful lot of crap. For every good open-source organization there are a lot of dysfunctional little groups that work at cross purposes and never get anything done. You're talking about appropriating vital infrastructure here. How do you know your open-source corporation will turn out to be productive?

This is why it is important for the robots to be open-source & open-hardware, to drive down the cost so that everyone can own their own robots. Imagine everyone having their own solar-powered FarmBot.

What we don't want is a society where the governments/corporations exclusively own all the robots, such that we have to go through them.

>>What do you all think of this?

Most of the software world made its choice. Remember the Open source movement is a political movement and not a software movement.

The point of Open source is to control the source or precisely 'Own the means of production'.

In reality, Open Source often ends up being charity for corporations. So many projects run by developers who can barely keep the lights on, which are then used by huge corporations for free.

Or maybe simpler if companies own the robots and people own the companies?

Ultimately, yes. Assuming also the people have control of the companies, rather than a board of directors.

The board is elected by the shareholders. The system could change, but I don't see how it would scale not to use a representative strategy like a board. How would shareholders micro-manage everything?

Subsistence farming and coal mining were shitty jobs too.

Most jobs have always been shitty, this is less shitty than most and pays somewhat better (I believe Amazon is harder work than Walmart but pays more). And you can't find Americans to work in the fields, mines, slaughterhouses anymore.

If it was really shitty the US would get foreigners to do it. So much of the stuff Amazon ships is made overseas we almost might as well cut out the middleman and ship it directly from abroad, put a few giant warehouses just offshore or in Mexico. (I kid)

Automatic default reply whenever I see "can't find Americans to work..."...

...at the rate of pay offered.

Speaking as a software engineer, if you offered me double my salary and secure employment for a couple years to work in a field or mine, I'd do it. Test me. Make me an offer. Slaughterhouses I don't know if I could do, but I'll bet plenty of people would for my current salary or less.

About a decade and a half ago I probably would've done the same for maybe $50/hr.

Oh, I totally agree... if you can get $13 an hour working at Amazon how much would you need to work in the field or the mine, harder, more dangerous, exposed to toxic stuff. $25 or $50 isn't so crazy.

By the same token, the fact that Amazon retains hundreds of thousands of employees at $13 an hour means working conditions can't be in a different league from Walmart etc. Of course Amazon should be managing this stuff so it's not a Dickensian sweatshop. But of course they know that and they know the worse it is the more they have to pay, and these stories are maybe a little overblown.

Or at least I don't see buying at Walmart instead of Amazon to be a humanitarian necessity or particularly welfare-enhancing.

I kind of see it as a FedEx vs. UPS situation, FedEx pays more and is more brutal, pick your poison as a customer or employee.

Everything you buy that's cheap is cheap because people worked hard in shitty jobs.

> the people need to own the robots that do all the work

What happens when a private party (or a competitive public party, like China) designs cheaper and more efficient robots?

The conflict is explored in Ayn Rand's "Anthem", where the society is a collective owner of a candle factory and therefore resists advance of electricity, or Mike Judge's "Idiocracy", where half of the workers in the country are employed in various capacities by Brawndo beverage company.

Then the Chinese also have robots? I haven't read those two works of fiction, maybe you could expand on what you think happens?

Society just ends up owning a bunch of obsolete tools whose products are of no interest to any consumer.

shitty jobs will disappear first (robots/automation will take care of it)... and if universal income becomes needed, it will be paid for by the robot-taxes.

The problem with Marxism is that in many of the places where it's been implemented in earnest, it's killed millions of people. Think of Russia under Stalin, China under Mao, and Cambodia under Pol Pot.

People try to rehabilitate Marxism every so often, but the problem of the murderous regime pops up again and again, for a simple reason: when the state arrogates to itself enough power to remake society according to some Marxian vision, it opens the door for abuses far worse than anything Amazon will ever perpetrate.

Are you sure you're not thinking about Social Democracy instead?

> The problem with Marxism is that in many of the places where it's been implemented in earnest, it's killed millions of people.

That’s the problem with Leninism.

The (biggest; there are others but this prevents even useful discussion of those) problem with Marxism is that people (even those who oppose Leninism and disbelieve everything else associated with it) accept Leninism’s propaganda that it is Marxism, rather than a system which adopts the rhetoric and stated end goals of Marxism, but abandons both it's mechanisms and explicit preconditions.

All Lenin did was decide that the dictatorship of the proletariat should be headed by an actual dictator. It's kind of an inevitable conclusion, given where he was starting from and some of the realities of people working in groups.

You are, of course, free to say that the murderous regimes that have popped up again and again are not the true Marxism. But then you have to explain why the false Marxism has appeared so often, and then to explain, given that millions of lives could be at stake, how to prevent a recurrence.

> All Lenin did was decide that the dictatorship of the proletariat should be headed by an actual dictator.

That's only a small piece of vanguardism, which while it is a big change isn't the only significant change (and is, in fact, an adaptation to the fundamental change, which is abandoning the prerequisite of the development of a broad working class identity under developed capitalism.)

> You are, of course, free to say that the murderous regimes that have popped up again and again are not the true Marxism.

Well, I mean its self-evident true, and I didn't need your permission, but thanks.

> But then you have to explain why the false Marxism has appeared so often

I don't see why I should, since I am not advocating Marxism and, even if I was, the reason a system designed to be workable and leverage existing dissatisfaction in undeveloped, precapitalist conditions keeps doing so is neither nonobvious nor germane to discussing the merits of a different system in the developed world. Leninism has done horrible things in the environments which it was carefully crafted to thrive in, but even with the assist given by it's opponents fear mongering equivalence-drawing that painted all opposition to capitalism as equivalent to Leninism, it's done stunningly poorly at gaining any traction in places that don't have he conditions for which it was adapted from Marxism.

Ayup, lets remember that the original councils of soviets in Russia were overthrown by the bolsheviks and dissolved when they came to power.

Indeed. All power to the soviets!

If you're going to play that game, you can very easily make a case (and probably a much stronger one) that capitalism's body-count is much, much higher. For starters, you'd have to credit it with the extermination of the Native Americans, the blood-soaked history of 19th century European colonialism, and the First World War.

Dude, this isn't a game. Show some respect for the dead.

You're comparing apples to oranges here. The crimes you mention are all about subjugation of or violence against foreigners. Ill will towards foreigners is the human ur-prejudice -- it's older than our species, in fact. Giving in to this prejudice is something that could have happened under any politico-economic system. It happened under capitalism because capitalism is what we had then. If the world becomes a Marxist utopia tomorrow, and we travel to the stars, and find technologically underdeveloped aliens, it will happen then under Marxism too. It was certainly the case that the Soviet citizenry, however far advanced along the road to true communism they actually were, were perfectly happy to join the Red Army and oppress the hell out of the people of Eastern Europe for fifty years. And they did it they were told they were protecting the world from imperialism from the West!

The problem with Marxism that I'm talking about is much more specific. Communist leaders have a habit of liquidating populations that they deem insufficiently loyal. That's why Stalin killed the kulaks, Mao killed the educated middle class, and Pol Pot ordered the killing fields. Under capitalism there is no comparable tradition of massacring political enemies. And since political enemies are going to be a fact of life under any political system, thoughtful Marxists should worry a lot about how to protect them from the attentions of the state.

> Under capitalism there is no comparable tradition of massacring political enemies

Are you saying there has never been a dictatorship or authoritarian government with a capitalist economy?

Capitalism and socialism are economic systems, not necessarily ways of organizing a government. You can have capitalism with or without democracy. Democracy is the true tool against authoritarianism, not capitalism. And I don't think the people in this thread that are arguing on behalf of marxism want to do away with democracy.

I'm crimes I'm talking about all come from the rapacious desire for either land to speculate on or new markets to exploit, both of which are quintessentially capitalist in character.

Again, to play this game, we could just as easily say that your crimes are all about authoritarian dominance hierarchies, which certainly occur under capitalism, as well (how many people did Pinochet throw out of helicopters?)

I would not call the army conquest of land a result of capitalism...

That's not the problem with Marxism.

or learn electronics and coding and be the guy/person who fixes the robot.

Yes, though that doesn't fix "the problem", only puts you on the better side of it.

This is such a massive oversimplification as to be ridiculous, and it's so rampant in these discussions. Even if every person working a factory floor job was capable of doing this: They aren't supported whatsoever through such a transition, meaning minimum 2 years of living on basically savings, something most people who know "electronics and coding" would have a hard time doing, let alone someone on the poverty line, and the few who manage to do it, say five, can now oversee all four hundred machines that replaced them and their former coworkers. And all of that isn't even going into the fact that they machines they'd be maintaining in your ideal dream world are probably an ocean away being maintained by people who know that skillset already working for slave wages.

When these robots arrive, you will most likely have plug and play electronics inside. There will be no user serviceable parts inside.

Without a fair amount of equipment there isn't that much that's user serviceable in modern electronics.

I was mulling that today as I worked on C# code to talk to a Sony camera over WiFi via JSON-RPC.

The fact that this unit has a wireless adapter, an entire TCP/IP stack and a webserver that can parse/generate JSON.

Basically the camera has processing power hundreds likely thousands of times more powerful than my PC and if it breaks there isn't anything on it that would likely be fixable with a soldering iron.

That's a naive way of thinking about economics, finance, and business. Marxism will never work. You can have robots that increase profit and decrease costs for customers at the same time. Take autonomous driving, for example - it can be both profitable and affordable at the same time, meaning that the average person will be better off.

https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/general-motors/2017/1...

The average working class American is financing their car. The average car payment is now an insane $500 per month. Over the average working career, that type of monthly payment represents a multi million dollar net worth at retirement. So if people are afraid of shitty jobs, they should prioritize wise financial decisions over short-term spending so that they can build their wealth and get leverage over shitty employment opportunities.

>The average working class American is financing their car. The average car payment is now an insane $500 per month. Over the average working career, that type of monthly payment represents a multi million dollar net worth at retirement.

This is completely wrong.

1. $500 is the average, averages are easily distorted by outliers. Most people who are worried about shitty jobs don't have $500 a month car payments.

2. Not spending $500 a month on a car doesn't mean you get $500 to invest. Most people need to spend > $0 on transportation.

3. $500 a month doesn't get you a multi-million dollar net worth. $500 a month at a realistic 7% gets you $1.2 million in 40 years. A more realistic $300 a month (from financing a cheaper car) gets you $700k.

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