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Comment by RC_ITR | Hacker News Reader

This is a very HN comment, because it ignores that a lot of people are paid for being physically present somewhere (not for their output).

I love the idea of a 20 hour workweek, but I also understand that the harsh reality is that it would make things like construction, building security, janitorial services, etc. 2x more expensive.

I personally think that would be a boon for society, but given how much everyone is worried about (largely transitory) inflation today, IDK how willing they would be to accept that inflationary pressure.

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> a lot of people are paid for being physically present somewhere (not for their output).

Right. A FireFighter or an on-call IT Tech are excellent examples of how we can have 40 hours of presence while only requiring 20 hours of work. Making it acceptable for people to read a book if working 40 hours makes things better.

> love the idea of a 20 hour workweek, but I also understand that the harsh reality is that it would make things like construction, building security, janitorial services, etc. 2x more expensive

I'm not sure that's true. As I understand it, a lot of construction time is spent dealing with looking busy because of blocking tasks. But if we transition those jobs from hourly to piece-rate it solves a lot of problems.

Even building security only doing rounds/checking tapes 1/2 the time seems sufficient.

Funny that you mention it - piece rate in construction means 60+ hours a week. The more you do, the more you get paid and there's always work available. Not in all cases, but definitely a lot of them. As a contractor, you finish on one site/job, you have six others lined up.

I want to make sure people can live comfortably on the money they can earn in 20 hr/week. If want to work 60 hr/week for 15 years and then retire early good for them. I just want to make 20 hr/week the norm.

It doesn't work like that... many of life's biggest expenses are priced based on market rates (e.g. housing). If more work is available and some people choose to work more hours, they will be able to outbid tier who don't and drive up the cost of living.

Nurses, firefighters, and military already work unusually bad hours but they don’t seem to be especially well-paid.

In the US, nurses (at least RNs) and firefighters are well paid, but military are not. I imagine the well-paid jobs vary quite a lot per nation.

As a member of the military:

I'm compensated fairly, and my pension makes it actually quite well compensated. The career does suck and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but for someone needing mobility from generational poverty it can work.

The career opportunities upon retirement are nothing to be trivialized either. Compensation there may not be SWE level, but it's WELL above median.

The military seems to pay pretty well considering the requirements.

That's because one of the requirements is willingness to get shot at.

It's more like the requirement to do the job without being able to quit for at least a few years (and then they can call you back anytime for another few).

A lower chance of getting to use the pension means better benefits. Actuarial math.

For me, at least theoretically, getting shot at is not as bad as having to kill others.

Military isn't paid too badly once you factor in pensions and benefits. The amount of salary that you'd have to save to construct something similar out of 401ks is... high.

I don’t think many people understand just HOW high.

Aside from monetary compensation (which can range widely, and typically is made up of 25-50% tax sheltered disability pay) there is health insurance at a maximum out of pocket of $3600/year for a family ($600 premium plus $3000 catastrophic cap), tax free shopping, discounted fuel, free flights, remarkably cheap lodging all over the US and in allied countries, and the list goes on.

The last calculation I saw for an average Senior Enlisted retiree was that you would need a lump sum of in excess of $3 million to hope to compare, invested at a decent return. Albeit that’s not completely accurate, but it’s as close as we can get given such different financial vehicles.

The downside is that you have to serve in the military.

Serving ain't the bad part. Dying would have sucked.

A lot of firefighters are volunteers

Yeah, but if you decided to pay nurses/firefighters the same salary for putting in half the hours, you'd have to hire twice as many to cover the same shifts. Net result is your labor costs would double.

Probably more due to people overhead.

One thing that the pandemic lockdowns have revealed in glowing detail is that the vast majority of the most critical and important jobs in society are among the lowest-paid: retail and foodservice.

> the most critical and important jobs in society are among the lowest-paid: retail and foodservice

Pay has nothing to do with how critical or important a job is. Nothing.

Pay is determined — like everything else — by supply and demand.

Nails are the most ‘critical and important’ component of a house. They are also the cheapest. Because the supply is endless. The chandelier in the entryway, on the other hand, is neither critical nor important, yet it costs a great deal more than a nail.

Nah, it's status. We have a teacher and nurse shortage in the US, they're critical professions, and they're super underpaid. Supply and demand doesn't explain the low wages.

You just described supply and demand.

If the wages are too low, you’ll have a shortage.

To remediate the shortage, wages must increase.

Yeah but step 2 of that is "wage increase" (then step 3 of that is "either school A increases wages or school B increases wages and gets all the teachers, etc.) You can't arbitrarily pick a point at which you stop making an appeal to authority to Econ 101; it's all or nothing.

The point here is, the situation should make us ask ourselves "huh, I wonder why wages aren't increasing." But I can save you some time and tell you the answer is mostly we don't think those jobs are high status enough.

Comparing people to nails is a new one! I'm not sure I find it apt, though.

>Pay has nothing to do with how critical or important a job is

Well yeah, that's the observation I was describing. The difference is that I think that's a bad thing.

>supply and demand

We aren't describing free markets, so you're going to have to fill that out a little bit to meet reality.

>This is a very HN comment, because it ignores that a lot of people are paid for being physically present somewhere (not for their output).

Are you saying you think most people on HN do piecework? Because I sort of took for granted they were salaried.

At any rate, different companies within an industry area can be quite different.

I have had jobs involving programming that were:

  - salaried
  - hourly, with overtime
  - required time entry of billable/nonbillable projects worked on in 15 or 6 minute increments
  - required using a time clock (but not intraday time entry)
  - union
  - non-union

Only the time clock one (salaried, non-union) was primarily focused on "butts in seats". They also had something in the orientation about sleeping at your desk not being allowed.

A friend of mine was about to interview at a company when he found out from Glassdoor they required salaried engineers to swipe in and out (among other micromanagement). Cancelled the interview and the recruiter was really miffed and acted like punching a clock is normal for software devs.

Some people did dislike it enough to leave online reviews about it.

But everywhere I'd previously worked, I had to account for every minute of the day so clocking in at the beginning of the day and out at the end was a million times less micro-manager-y from my viewpoint.

Exactly. Like fire fighters. They spend most of there time doing nothing.

Or secretaries. Or HR.

I was a part-time, paid firefighter in Woodinville, WA for seven years. That was about twenty-five years ago now.

I worked twelve hour overnight shifts about ten times a month, supplementing the full-time crews (24 hour shifts.) I was a signed off as a firefighter, driver-operator, EMT Basic, and acting lieutenant.

Maybe it's different elsewhere, but in our city no one spent their time doing nothing. There was always training and drilling, classes to attend, physical training, station, rig and equipment maintenance, and usually, a few calls to run.

Most people were friendly most of the time.

We did usually watch a couple of hours of television or a movie most nights before we racked out.

Secretaries aren't an obvious case in my experience. A good number of them appear to me to work as hard as the boss they assist. And in some cases they appear pretty much as capable (but they never carry anything like the same responsibility).

I think it came with an implied /sarc tag

A Big Mac doesn't cost any more in Denmark than in the US, but the workers make twice as much.

Really? I was under the impression from a Danish person that fast food and other leisure type activities were quite expensive like they are in Norway.

Per https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index, in December 2020, “A Big Mac costs DKr30.00 in Denmark and US$5.66 in the United States.” Using the listed exchange rate of DKr 6.12/US$, that’s $4.90 in Denmark, so in fact somewhat less. Which implies that the DKr is undervalued vs. the US$, at least for this particular one-item basket of goods.

On one hand, sure but if your take home pay after taxes is also less, than it's affordability (cost/income after taxes) may be lower.

After reading your comment I want searching around the nets - and discovered this: https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index . Hilarious yet insightful.

This is not true. Not only is the Big Mac in Denmark nominally more expensive, but so is almost everything else. Actual purchasing power after taxes is not necessarily higher, but it also varies with the city.

For example: Seattle vs Copenhagen

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

What??

All the Scandinavian countries have high cost of living. Go to one of their supermarkets, you will be shocked. I think on balance they are better off though.

I was really surprised how expensive basic food is in New York compared to UK[0]. Things like fruit, veg, cheese, cereal were more than twice the price. The only things that were cheaper were hotdogs and hotdogs buns. Eating out is very expensive in scandinavia but I don’t think supermarket food is expensive compared to the US.

[0] Prices at the large supermarkets don’t vary much if at all between shops across the UK

I had the opposite experience. I suspect people spending time abroad temporarily, but long enough to go grocery shopping, tend to arrive at the most expensive grocery stores during their temporary stay.

I'm not talking about Wholefoods, that's overpriced here as well. I'm talking about a slightly grubby supermarket in an unfashionable part of Brooklyn about 5 years ago. Maybe food prices vary a lot across the US, they don't really in the UK as the big 4 supermarkets all advertise their offers nationally. Smaller supermarkets can be more expensive, but an extra 20% not 300%.

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