Comment by Domenic_S | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Domenic_S | Hacker News Reader

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It is bad faith or sheer ignorance to think this isn't a hard question. Consider that even people spending their own money on their own housing often can't define their own parameters, which is why touring houses is a thing. Now scale this out to the population of a country and creating a single bar of "decent housing" is incredibly hard.

And then that's just talking about the structure. What about the location - if a person's entire support system is in one location but the available free housing is 75 miles away and they don't have a car, that isn't decent. This comes up all the time re the affordability of the Bay Area where locals get priced out, someone says "just move to stockton" and the resident feels it's not fair (or "decent") to have to leave where they were born and raised.

You could link location to workplace I suppose but then that would create massive downward pressure on wages since people would be willing to sacrifice pay in order to live where they prefer. This sounds like a net negative.

This question is only hard if you haven't thought about it for more than like 2 seconds.

> even people spending their own money on their own housing often can't define their own parameters

I can't believe I'm spelling this out. A person picking out their ideal home has trouble figuring out exactly what they want. Ok. We all don't ever know exactly what we want. It's the human condition. But I don't want to live in grinding poverty. I don't need to look within to figure that one out.

I don't want my home to be dilapidated, overcrowded, full of pests and toxins, or to not exist.

If you're still pretending to have a hard time with the definition of "decent," consult a dictionary.

This line of argument is absurd word chopping. "Oh my, I could never in good conscience try to lock down a subtle word like 'decent' into a singular meaning, guess drivers will have to stay earning a sub-living wage forever. Sorry! Definitions are hard!"

No.

I didn't say (and nobody in this thread except for your straw man said) that the definition is too hard to create and therefore we should just throw our hands up and walk away. Literally nobody is saying that.

What I am arguing against is your baseless assertion that defining "decent housing" is easy, and that everyone who thinks it's hard is simply being obstructionist/anti-poor/whatever.

The closest thing we might have today to an across-the-board definition of "decent housing" might be HUD's FHA standards which -- to your shock and amazement, I assume -- is much more complex than "must be decent"

This is a discussion about whether gig economy workers ought to be classed as employees by the government. The reason that is a salient question is because a lot of these workers can't make ends meet under the current structure.

The current structure treats them as serfs and says what really matters is the efficiency of the overall system, or its ability to generate a profit for its shareholders, or whatever. In short, the problem is these guys work too much in exchange for too little. Whatever theories anybody might have about the market, the role of the state in the market, etc, those are the basic facts on the ground: over-exploited workers seeking dignity where they currently lack it. The idea that they are "contractors," in the way that you or I might be contractors sometimes (I assume you are a tech worker), as experts in a technical field, is a sick joke. They don't have any power to get what they need, in that market, as individuals (they aren't even allowed to set their own prices!). If they could bargain collectively, they might. That's the context here.

When somebody enters the discussion and says, "Well, yeah, but what IS dignity, anyway, when you really think about it, man???" you'll have to forgive me if I don't believe they're doing it out of a devotion to clarifying terms but because they just want to take Uber's side in the fight. Yes, it's obscurantism.

This is a weird phenomenon that I see across discussion platforms - it's like reverse sealioning, where legitimate good-faith questions are taken as evidence of supporting the other position.

In deeply complex and high-stakes systems, the details matter a lot; I haven't thought about it too deeply but my intuition says that they're the only thing that matters. Unintended consequences (like my salary depression example above) need to be carefully considered. There is inherent inequality built into a naive system like you suggest: an apartment in SF is worth multiples of an apartment in OK, are we alright with that? (don't answer, just an example). The details and their impact are important.

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