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Not really sure why this was originally flagged (or this is possibly a dupe of the original post which was flagged?), but even though the comments that I've seen so far are giving it a negative spin I think there are quite a few important points in the article about the way in which our (I'm generalizing about the broad HN demographic) quite privileged lifestyles do have a concomitant cost for somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants.

This ranges from everything like online shopping (I bought a pair of trainers yesterday on a Sunday afternoon, and they were shipped from the warehouse 2 hours later), to the people who are used in low-wage countries to make those trainers at a price I feel is 'affordable'.

I'm reminded of a newspaper interview with a bank director here in Sweden a few years ago. She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home. The obvious implication to me was that it was other people's children she was talking about not her's. On the contrary, they would obviously be sitting in the back of the cab, on their way to their well-paid career in banking, just like their mother.

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> She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home.

This just sounds so staggeringly inefficient. A person doing one full-time job well is gonna easily beat out many people doing that job part-time (and thus poorly). Plus, think of all the extra unnecessary commuting that comes with doing lots of little jobs spread throughout the day vs just the one job. I don't know how anyone can seriously advocate that this state of the world would be an improvement for anyone, except possibly the employers.

What about boredom, and the advantages of being less beholden to a single source of income?

It is called a mid-life crisis in popular culture. Many people do get bored and switch to a new job track once or twice in their life. They in general do worse overall monetarily (there are other factors that might be important) than someone who focuses, but it isn't unheard of to do this.

If your single source of income is a good choice, the experience of doing it for years makes you much better at it than a jack-of-all-trades who can do anything but none of them well.

You need to make the right choice for your situation. Don't knock someone else for making a different choice.

What if they don't like the color of their uniforms?

In this world, there are first-order effects, second-order effects, and a further deep hierarchy. Estimating which is which is a useful skill.

It will be worse for the employers than anyone else. McDonald's can train anyone to flip a burger, but if they are only getting 2 hours of work from someone they are net negative as the person training could do the job. With just a little experience though the new person can flip burgers on his own leaving the trainer to do some other station.

The same for every other job - you are either hiring someone who already has the experience to do the job right, or you are hiring someone for long enough that the time spent teaching them to do the job is paid off by all the work they do after they learn how to do it.

If you ever read "Supersize Me", you would know that fast food is designed around very high turnover. Walmart does that as well.

Instead of paying more or providing a better workplace, these companies just figure another sucker will come along.

High Turnover within certain boundaries. 1:1 training to time on job would be disastrous. And it does take training to work at McDonald's.

Right, it is better to say McDonald's is oriented around fast training. If you speak the local language they can turn you into an employee worth having in just a few hours. Then over the next months they will teach you more and more things as you prove you worth.

This is where technology comes to the rescue, by de-skilling jobs.

McDonald's probably can be automated enough to do without any burger flippers.

It wouldn't surprise me if the programming, repairing, and regular maintenance of automated burger flippers cost more than a fleet of humans (that are versatile enough to also be able to take orders and clean tables.)

It's a very common mistake to reach for automation because it makes things locally more efficient but forget all the things it makes less flexible and thus less efficient.

And don't forget that governments will subsidize your low wage employees with things like food stamps and WIC but they won't subsidize the capital cost and ongoing maintenance of your robots.

They can - but robots are expensive, and so probably they can't afford it yet.

I know flipping burgers is the colloquial term, but Mcdonalds hasn't been flipping burgers for more than 20 years. They cook their burgers in heated clamshells, which cook both sides of the burgers at once. Half the cook time, no flipping required.

In most companies the cost for full time workers is higher per hour, since often you need to pay for additional leave, pension, rights etc

Short term workers usually cost more per minute, but they may be cheaper overall since you can get away with only paying them precisely when they are contributing to your bottom line.

The point is that it's very efficient to have an underclass of people that are ready to step in and pick up the slack. If you have a traditional company you need to pay a monthly full-time wage, but there will always be peaks in demand, and if you then can hire people on a minute by minute basis that's going to be very efficient for you as a capitalist...

Do keep in mind that, beyond a certain point, efficiency is the enemy of resiliency.

Plus, it has tax and regulatory consequences. /s

There is a third option: most people work a menial, part-time job (not "part-time", but 20 hours a week, tops) that is paid a decent full-time wage, which supports their aspirational contribution to society - their "creative" or "professional" work. I know, qué horror that a world-class engineer, architect, or artist would not be able to devote themselves fully to their craft. However, the truth is that most of us are not world-class, and get maybe 4 hours of good, intensive professional work done a day - work, as you know, that can be done in no small proportion from a home office, no "second commute" required. Even among the best of the best, it is acknowledged that only a few are able to nose -> grindstone ad nauseum (and often to just that - see the recent, untimely passing of infamously workaholic manga artist Kentaro Miura).

So, you do your client meetings, work on your highly-technical project, and after lunch, head to your retail sales job, or food service, or customer support, which you work for ~4 hours. This engenders humility and community engagement, while also flooding those spaces with workers so that no one employee has to put in a 12-hour shift (increasing the quality of their work and decreasing the risk of injury). And everyone gets paid enough to live on.

I understand that this dashes the paradigm of expertise or other specialized quality (like social connections...) deciding one's level of income, but it has always confused me that we pay LESS money to do the things people DON'T want to do. Most professionals and academics don't enter their fields for the high pay; aside from the necessity of meeting material needs (including student loan payments), it seems that the primary drivers of entrance into and achievement in such careers are intellectual interest and social prestige. Perhaps our attitude to compensation should reflect these truths. It means giving up the privileges and structures we've heretofore considered indelible, certainly, but it solves a lot of the problems mentioned above.

> Most professionals and academics don't enter their fields for the high pay

Those careers still have to pay enough to compensate for the effort involved in acquiring the relevant skills.

This is the main limiting factor to labor supply in these fields, and also a reason why putting one's "nose to the grindstone" once working in the field may actually be efficient. Even accounting for the fact that some or even most of this effort may not be as "good, intensive or professional" as the first few hours in the workday, it might nonetheless be more socially beneficial than merely working some generic, unskilled job.

(In fact, since one of the factors behind wages is the inconvenience of the marginal unit of work, we also shouldn't be surprised that pay can be high even though on average one might be willing to work for less!)

>Those careers still have to pay enough to compensate for the effort involved in acquiring the relevant skills.

Do they? The effort in acquiring those skills goes to the desire to be proficient and do a job well, which is independent of compensation when needs have been previously fulfilled. You might speak about the material costs of training, but that's more of an institutional issue; the instructors, who likewise already have their needs met, aren't an added cost.

Anecdotally, I can speak to the willingness I would have to train for a tehnical profession, without compensation, assuming that my basic needs were met. Like everyone else, I'd be spending 4ish hours fulfilling some social or business need, so it's not a free ride. After training, if the institution hasn't covered the cost of materials/facilities/etc, then that becomes an issue for which extra compensation might be required, but the ballooning administrative and personnel costs that drive the rising price of post-secondary education in this country are rendered moot.

I want to push back a bit, also: the limiting factor to supply in many professional fields are often artificially narrow pipelines that wash out a number of candidates who would be competent. The ones who get through face the issue of there being a shortage of credentialed practitioners, which drives up compensation but also workplace stress, abuse, and error. These aren't open markets to begin with.

The big irony about the 4 hour work week is that if it were true one person can 10 of these jobs, thereby obsoleting 9 other people because it is more efficient. That person then proceeds to pretend that the other 9 are lazy and not doing their part demanding that everyone should work at least as hard even though all 10 people could get away with working 4 hours a week.

Therefore a 4 hour week is impossible even in an utopia.

But this is how it is, today, I know people who stock shelves at target part time and then do a little Uber before doing a maid service. It’s not like they want this, it’s the only option to scrounge enough money together. And this isn’t a coastal city, it’s just somewhere in the Midwest. It is indeed the employers who benefit.

At this point these "employers" are not much more than glorified middlemen who take a cut and make the work landscape just a little more cutthroat

Isn't this the dream of automation, though? That all those shitty jobs are replaced by robots, and the humans are left with only the interesting, creative, ones?

Those old pictures of banks, where there were huge rooms full of 100's of clerks, all busy doing double-entry book-keeping. Now that's all done by computers and the clerks are doing something else, almost certainly something more interesting.

The problem, of course, is that the benefits of automation are accruing to the owners. If Amazon manages to replace all their warehouse staff with robots, then the benefits go to the Amazon shareholders. Which is OK, because the shareholders funded the creation of the robots. But as a society, we need to spread this more. We need UBI.

Jobs are automated only and only if:

If it increases yield by magnitudes while also improving quality by magnitudes.

Example from the Pickle factory:

You have 4 people putting and screwing lids on pickle jars. 4 people. 2000 Lids a day. With around 40 faulty lids. Lets say you pay those 4 20k a year: total 80k.

An automation solution would cost you at least 400-500k. So unless this automation can do 20 000 lids a day and with only 10 faulty lids per day. Then Maybe it will be worth it. But most of the time it would not be automated.

That's implying that automation costs that much every year, or that you must get an ROI of 100%. Almost in all cases, automation has a high setup cost but a low maintenance cost.

No no. What I meant was that, the automation usually costs around 15x-20x annual salaries of the workers, one time cost maintenance comes after . So unless you get MORE THAN 20x - 30x yield per year, no one is gonna care about automating the process.

This is one reason why "knowledge worker" jobs like accounting and legal were the first to be disrupted by automation and AI. It's a heck of a lot cheaper and easier to automate manipulating a spreadsheet than it is to automate manipulating a pickle jar.

The Industrial Revolution begs to differ

Capital investments occur when the cost of labor is greater than the cost of automation.

The rate at which these investments occur is complex.

Here is a short example from the agricultural industry.

https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/44561/Man...

As a manufacturing automation engineer, I can say that this is an incorrect view.

First, employees are way more expensive than their takehome pay. You have benefits, liability, managerial overhead, training, turnover, and facilities costs for every employee. Someone making 20k/yr might easily cost a company 50k/yr to employ.

Second, automation is rarely done to simply replace people. You automate tasks, not jobs. Most customers are looking for improved consistency, not increased yield or quality. That improved consistency means they can better predict their supply chains which leads to savings which dwarf the costs of labor. The other major reason for automation is reducing skill requirement - this frees up skilled employees for more valuable tasks, and removes a major impediment to scaling production.

Finally, most companies have no problem investing in automation. Interest rates are low so its easy to get cheap financing, and robots are in vogue so many companies will invest in automation even where it makes no sense to portray themselves as efficient. Indeed, most companies are more concerned with their valuation than their profits, and the more automated a company is, the more valuable it is in a sale. It's actually really hard to convince customers that they'ed be better served by a cheaper, simpler solution.

Yes. Everything you said is exactly on point.

I was just trying to make a very simplified example that automation is never done to save human labour.

>Isn't this the dream of automation, though? That all those shitty jobs are replaced by robots, and the humans are left with only the interesting, creative, ones?

Hopefully. But what are the values that we hold that will allow that to come true? It's not just a matter of technology. Engineers, designers, and inventors will be the ones building that world. Do they believe their support staff (direct and indirect) deserve to benefit? How about the financiers, who often feel like they are the ones who deserve to benefit primarily, and give both the support staff and engineers short shrift? Deciding that those who work less important jobs than us do not deserve the benefit of our hard work is a race to the bottom.

Whatever the case may be, we can start putting those values into action now. Especially as we see work weeks increasing for people even in an age of abundance.

And even beyond UBI. UBI provides a way for people not to be completely washed away in a world with a lot more automation. But in a country like the US, where money is readily translated into political power, having increasing differentials of wealth and poverty, even with a UBI floor, will mean that a select handful of people will increasingly be able to shape the information ecosystem and political landscape in the service of their private interests.

The past year has convinced me that UBI would be an unmitigated disaster.

i mean it definitely would be a giant disaster, for certain business owners who's business model only works if they pay absolute poverty wages and thus UBI would force them to actually invest in either people or automation.

Ok I'm curious... in what way?

There are a lot of people wandering around who really shouldn't have this kind of free time on their hands.

How so?

The very generous unemployment benefits that were part of the US Covid relief bill has led to companies having to rapidly raise wages in order to attract employees. I think this is the fastest growing wages we've seen since the 90s boom.

UBI could have a similar effect, but permanently. Push up wages across the board as not working is a viable option.

It raises the negotiating power of labor and negates some of the advantages of capital, potentially reducing wealth inequality.

[...] companies having to rapidly raise wages in order to attract employees.

Where does this money come from? Increasing prices?

[...] as not working is a viable option.

What kind of life would that be? It can not be too comfortable or everyone might decide not to work which will bring down the entire scheme.

> Where does this money come from? Increasing prices?

Reducing profits for shareholders, increasing prices on the higher end items favoured by high-earning clientele. Keep the soup & salad the same, raise the steak.

The poorer people will skip the guac when it goes from $1 to $2 but richer people will just grumble and pony up. Maybe they just get Frapps for Fridays, but their manager will just grumble. This way the burden can be gently and consensually shifted up bracket.

>What kind of life would that be? It can not be too comfortable or everyone might decide not to work which will bring down the entire scheme.

Yeah, this is why I am against a UBI that is based on living costs. If you are going to divide society along those who work and those who don't you can't mix and match them in the same region. They'll have to live in cheaper places with less opportunity to make it easier for those who do decide to work. The idea that people live in SF on UBI without working while they push workers out is absurd. It would be a dysfunctional system that collapses on itself.

Sure, if you want to live on a UBI exclusively go to Florida and find a nice and quiet community in a cheap location.

> Where does this money come from? Increasing prices?

Shareholder reserves. Or do you think they have trouble paying for their groceries? Some wealth inequality can be fixed rather painlessly. I think we can all hold our collective tears that they won't get $10M yearly bonus and "only" $9M.

> What kind of life would that be?

That's not for you or me to decide to don't impose your life philosophy on others. For the record I too can never sit idle but I am not judging others that can and do that all the time.

> It can not be too comfortable or everyone might decide not to work which will bring down the entire scheme.

This is based on a Protestant Work Ethic kind of viewpoint that I think we need to get over.

Work is fulfilling. Sitting at home on benefits sounds great but isn't. I know, I've done my share. It's fine for a few months, but then I always got to the point where I'd take any job just to get out of the house and do something. And even "sitting at home doing nothing" meant working on creative projects.

In the UBI trials they've had so far, people didn't stop working. They do stop working two jobs to make ends meet, which is good.

Increasing the negotiating power of labor would reduce inequality. I don't understand your logic.

It's just a slightly broken sentence. It should've read:

> It raises the negotiating power of labor, which negates some of the advantages of capital that lead to growing wealth inequality.

Oops. Edited to be clearer.

I'm sure there could be some problems with UBI depending on how it's implemented (such as a cash deposit vs stipend vs negative income tax etc.) but "unmitigated disaster" is almost certainly hyperbolic

UBI is different from enhanced unemployment benefits. People can collect UBI & get paid from a lower income job. With unemployment they give up those benefits if they work which is part of why we have a low-income labor shortage.

I'm curious what country you live in. Certainly here in the United States we never tried anything like UBI. The few things we did do continue to be successful, although the Republican party at state levels is trying to sabotage them as much as they can.

This wasn't an experiment with UBI. It was an experiment with guaranteed minimum income. A true UBI wouldn't go away once someone is employed.

Your misconception is quite widespread, though. I fear that this experience with guaranteed minimum income will politically kill UBI, anyway.

> If Amazon manages to replace all their warehouse staff with robots, then the benefits go to the Amazon shareholders. Which is OK, because the shareholders funded the creation of the robots.

I pretty much agree, but Amazon do a lot of piggybacking on the work of others - so even those hypothetical robot - how much of them did the Amazon shareholders actually fund? And should they bare some of the societal costs of it?

The people ultimately set the rules that capitalism works within - even if it does feel like the power is incredibly unbalanced

> Those old pictures of banks, where there were huge rooms full of 100's of clerks, all busy doing double-entry book-keeping. Now that's all done by computers and the clerks are doing something else, almost certainly something more interesting.

The clerks are now writing CRUD banking apps. Better than monotonous bookkeeping, I guess, albeit less accessible.

the problem is having too many people and too few interesting and creative jobs. Everything will become writing in the end; there won't be enough people to pay people to be creative, and increasingly winner takes all will be the norm. At best you hope there is a UBI where people will just be on welfare for the rest of their lives until birth rates stagnate enough to where population matches the opportunities.

But there simply aren't enough interesting, paying jobs being created, and increasingly we have too many people for boring jobs.

But that's not what actually happened when the banks automated. If what you are saying is true, then there should be a fairly large set of educated but unemployed people. There isn't. Unemployment rates are about the same now as they were then.

Which is astonishing because we've also added women to the workforce since then.

It looks like if there are too many people, more jobs get created. Presumably this is why average salaries have stagnated since 1970 - there are more jobs because employees are cheaper.

I disagree, there are thousands of rabbit holes to explore, including some that are interesting only to the individual exploring them. Wish I had enough free time.

> I'm reminded of a newspaper interview with a bank director here in Sweden a few years ago. She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home. The obvious implication to me was that it was other people's children she was talking about not her's. On the contrary, they would obviously be sitting in the back of the cab, on their way to their well-paid career in banking, just like their mother.

I sometimes question whether finance people (particularly those in intermediary institutions like banks) in general have the knowledge to understand how organizations actually operate. They seem to derive most beliefs about organizations from accounting statements, but don't seem to know much about "human resources," operations, organizational structure, management. Even areas like organizational strategy and legal compliance seem a bit out of reach. All of this is to say, from an accounting statement and naïve extrapolation point of view, maybe her prediction makes sense; when considering all of the other myriad factors that must be reckoned with across all organizations, I'm more skeptical.

> I think there are quite a few important points in the article about the way in which our (I'm generalizing about the broad HN demographic) quite privileged lifestyles do have a concomitant cost for somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants.

That's true, and I've thought about it a lot. But it's odd that the author writes about this and yet can't see how they (and most people in developed countries) are part of the privileged consumer class as well. The author includes themselves as a member of the normal working masses that provide for 4 hour week workers:

> Their authors are so far removed from the reality of normal people, they don’t even see us anymore.

But the author isn't harvesting bananas or sewing clothes in a factory, they are a writer and editor. This isn't to say they don't suffer. Or, for that matter, that people who work 4 hours a week don't suffer. But if we're simply looking at who consumes more than they produce, then the net would be much wider than what they're casting and include many of the people they're advocating for (such as people in the west who work in restaurants or coffee shops).

Why does it matter if she is a part of the privileged consumer class or not? It doesn't affect the quality of her arguments, does it?

I checked out her profile and one of her posts implies that she is a teacher: https://jessicalexicus.medium.com/nobody-will-ever-give-a-fl... I couldn't find much other information about her and Jessica Wildfire is obviously a pen name. I think you are quite incorrect in claiming that she is in the same class as people earning $70,000/month.

It sounded to me like she was saying she's part of the privileged class.

> somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants

What I think this discussion often overlooks is the large class of people - a third of society and rising, in the West - who aren't working and instead have their needs and wants serviced by other people because they are retired.

Now, obviously retirement isn't a hard cutoff, and retirement in general is getting later, but more and more work will be done in future for the retired rather than by themselves directly. A lot of this is currently done unpaid by their family members.

The other distortion here is that retired people are more likely to be property owners.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately how structured development programs, in the US workplace versus university, are not as popular as they should be. Pipelines like this are less common for young people in the post-4HWW world, where people strive for independence versus collective success. The latter to be had via hard work and building.

I agree but I also think focusing on collective success allows us to all benefit from the increase in productivity and all stop working so many hours. In an age of abundance and ever increasing productivity, the work week should be getting shorter, not longer.

>She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home. The obvious implication to me was that it was other people's children she was talking about not her's.

You make a very good point here. All this positive spin on "the gig economy" seems to completely gloss over on who on Earth are supposed to be "the gig customers" in this new paradigm, and where they will source their income. Is it gigs all the way down?

While I am not particularly fond of capitalism as an ownership model (but I am generally in favour of free markets, I'm not anti-capitalist, just capitalism-sceptic), if there is one good thing about a clear dividing line between entrepreneurship and hired labour is a division of risks and rewards. Entrepreneurship is for betting on a big reward, while accepting big risks and taking responsibility for them. Labour on the other hand is for prioritising stability and taking less responsibility, while sacrificing the chance of a big reward. Somehow the gig economy is selling the worst of both worlds: take all the risk and responsibility, but with no chance to make it big.

> somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants

Someone chooses to provide a service.

> people who are used in low-wage countries

Where wages would be lower without manufacturing like shoe making.

> well-paid career in banking

Here's hoping software eats that part of the world earlier.

"I usually just choose to not pay artists for music, software developers for games and software libraries, made some millions from an mobile game, using some suckers open source libraries and free assets. Also movies, I chose not to pay for those, you can get em free anyway.

Also I get to keep more cash if I just don't pay licensing fees.

I just found out that I don't have to pay taxes since I am making so much money not paying for all the other stuff, I just call it non profit.

I mean it is not hard. Made my first million before I was 20 with only 80k initial funding from my dads emerald mine."

> our quite privileged lifestyles do have a concomitant cost for somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants.

But it stands to reasons that those who service our needs are doing so because it’s better for them than the alternative. If there is a systemic problem which results in lack of viable alternatives then attack those systemic causes, but it’s not obvious to me how those of us who who benefit from these services are the main cause of this issue. This seems tantamount to blaming Oscar Schindler for underpaying his Jewish factory workers rather than seeing the bigger picture in why those workers were happy to take low paying factory work.

You almost make it sound like the people who service our needs are forced to do so. It’s not like they’re giving up life of comfort and leisure because they’re forced to do our laundry.

To clarify the Schindler analogy, I’m obviously not suggesting that we deserve medals for providing low paid work, just that the work we provide is not causing harm, on the contrary it’s a slight improvement on the alternative options for those who take the work.

If that were the case, I would expect the number of hours that people work would be going down, the conditions would be getting better and the pay would increase.

There has been a lot of improvement in some parts of the world, especially some of the (formerly) worst, but a lot of workers are experiencing the opposite even while profits and productivity skyrocket.

I don’t follow, how does my claim imply that number of working hours would decrease or that conditions would increase? Those seem to be factors that fall outside of the specific forces we are discussing?

> our (I'm generalizing about the broad HN demographic) quite privileged lifestyles do have a concomitant cost for somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants.

This has nothing to do with the 4HWW though. The average software engineer working full time and spending most of their paycheck has just as much dependence on the labor of others to satisfy their needs.

I feel like normal people working normal jobs tend to not get called out for the simple fact that they are normal. It's a median bias.

Might be because it contains overt racism? Although I guess we've grown desensitized to that these days.

>I bought a pair of trainers yesterday on a Sunday afternoon, and they were shipped from the warehouse 2 hours later

That might be surprising when you expect shipping to only work business days, but is it really weird considering that most stores/restaurants are open sundays?

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