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Comment by whitepaint | Hacker News Reader

I've read similar articles so many times but they all lack one thing - solutions. Seriously, what should we do about it?

Yeah, I agree that workers shouldn't be working so hard that they can't even go to the bathroom.

Would we have a better world if Amazon didn't exist? I personally doubt it. So, it's not Amazon per se, it is the system, isn't?

So, what are the solutions? How do we make it better? How do we minimize the suffering of these people? Or is it actually working pretty well and we should accept that some people will struggle badly no matter what the system is?

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Honestly, I think the only solution is, to make it easier to start a small business, and help and encourage people to start them, and then fix the tax policy, so companies as amazon would pay the same effective tax rates as a mom-and-pop bakery.

Amazon needs workers, workers need jobs. If you increase the number of jobs and decrease the number of unemployed, people can say "no" to shitty jobs. This is currently happening in parts of USA, due to people moving around, some illegals leaving and new standards, where shitty employers are forced to close down, because they cannot get workers, and competent workers moving "up". And getting workers is easy... just offer a better working enviroment for more money than their current workplace is offering, and you've got one.

I like your reply. I have a question though, how do we fix the tax policy and how do we make it easier to start a small business?

Tax policy, i have no idea... there was a newsstory here about a globally minimum 15% income tax here, that would probably solve many things. I'm not a tax lawyer, but "there surely has to be a way" (hopefully) to collect tax where the money is earned, and not where it's "moved".

I'm not sure about US laws, but here in slovenia, there are a bunch of bureaucratic requirements, things that need to be paid, taxes that have to be paid, even if you just started a business and literally earned zero money. Taxes, pension and health insurance are theoretically defined as percentages of earned money, but have hard minimum set in, so if you earn very little money the first few months, they can be higher than the money earned. Just to start a business, you have to register it's location, and if you live in an apartment building, you need permission from all your neighbours (even if you're a programmer, or even a construction worker (= don't work at home)), and one grumpy neighbour means you need to rent out a place. Permits for regulated businesses are also expensive.

There is also no "soft-start" for going to unemployment to a business owner... if you're unemployed, you get some money (social benefits). Want to start a business.. let's say translation (just need a laptop), you immediately lose all benefits, and have to pay ~400eur per month minimum for health and pension insurance, even if you earned zero money that month. Fail, and want to close the business? You might not even get unemployment/social benefits, because you didn't get fired but closed it yourself. Want to do a one-time job (eg. unemployed and someone wants to pay you to paint their house)... impossible to do here.

I've been watching louis rossman a lot, and he has more us-specifc complaints: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oDjSoic9Zk

Maybe zero corporate tax and ordinary income tax on dividends and capital gains. That would put mom and pop [on][near] the same footing as shareholders of public companies.

The solution is to go beyond a competition based society. No matter how good the people running these companies are or want to be, competition will force their hand to create things like this. If it's not them, it'll be someone else. I'm sure we could find a way to encourage innovation without this competitive system.

> I'm sure we could find a way to encourage innovation without this competitive system.

It sounds perfect. But how would we achieve it? Rewrite laws that prohibits private property and free enterprise?

Is ownership the thing that motivates people to innovate? I don't think so. People don't innovate because they may get to own a company, they innovate because they get an idea and implementing that idea successfully may get them a big reward. I don't think ownership or competition is necessary for this process. There's plenty of innovation without competition or ownership inside companies already. Workers innovate to get a reward in the form of a promotion and/or raise, not because they're expecting to own something or because they're competing against someone.

One idea could be to collectively pool money to give as rewards to anyone who improves society in a way that people think is worth rewarding. To prevent corruption this process should be transparent and democratic (preferably direct democracy).

Would Bill Gates try so hard with Microsoft if his biggest possible reward would have been what citizens decide to collectively reward him with?

Why not? He would have another idea and try to get another reward for that. If it's the biggest possible reward that you can get, and you have an idea, why wouldn't you try to implement it? The rewards for a successful business 50 years ago were much smaller than they are today, yet people still created businesses, because it was the best reward you could get. They didn't have an idea and abandon it because the biggest possible reward was 1 million instead of 100. Biggest possible rewards 50 years from now could be much bigger, so why do people innovate now?

> If it's the biggest possible reward that you can get, and you have an idea, why wouldn't you try to implement it?

Because it takes lots of work, risk, and sacrifice. If rewards are small (which, obviously, they would be in your scenario where people pool their money together to reward someone), then why take on such difficult task? I know I wouldn't be trying to do any business in your system. Many wouldn't.

The rewards don't have to be small if everyone in the country participates in the pool through taxes. Maybe not in the billions like in the current system, but plenty big enough to encourage people that have ideas.

The risk part is a problem, I agree. If the risk is larger than the potential reward, it isn't worth it. The risk should somehow be collectively handled as well.

> The solution is to go beyond a competition based society.

I'd frame the problem as follows:

"Capitalism is a powerful tool, but fails as the sole guiding principles of a society's values. Christianity, a former enabler of pro-social norms on a massive scale, is dead.

Wat do."

Are you suggesting that the problem lies in people losing faith in a god and in a church? Were people happier when they were more religious and when a church told them what's good and bad? And now we don't have that? And we should seek to replace it and the problems will lessen?

I don't feel qualified to answer that. All I know is that something will fill the god-shaped hole. Pray it won't be communism or Critical Race Theory.

but who should I pray to then?

Since we're on HN, the local wojak's ersatz-god is the computer.

"SCIENCE says we're all living in a simulation, and probability suggests it was created by a COMPUTER."

Do you have any examples of societies that have successfully abolishing competition (and continued being somewhat functional)?

It seems impossible to me but I would love to be surprised.

Smaller communes can successfully operate non-competitively. It seems the key is limiting membership to people seriously invested in the concept. With open societies that have large membership, competitive and power seeking forces from members uninterested in the vision seem to eventually dominate.

Didn't a lot of 'hippy' communities built like this end up falling apart from various squabbles like some people not pitching in enough etc?

Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirahã_people

> Seriously, what should we do about it?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

Perhaps one can replace the legal contracts involved in this with algorithms to achieve the necessary scale.

So, make it a law that if you hire a person they'd have a stake in a company automatically?

No one is stopping anyone to create worker cooperatives.

Indeed. Worker cooperatives don't often take off because they're a bad idea. A company going under can be devastating for your career. If you have a significant stake in your company, you'll be broke as well as unemployed. People should diversify whenever they can and forcing people to hold a stake in their companies is a terrible idea.

The growth-based system did quite well on average and it might be only the effects we have to address. One way to see it is that there is a mismatch between human capabilities and the systems requirements. We're already working on enhancing humans and creating better human replacements. Humans should be able to work on robots instead of working as robots. Until we made the transition, the system needs careful adjustment via i.e regulations and massive educational investments to minimize the pains for humans.

> So, what are the solutions? How do we make it better?

One of the interesting solutions I have heard: Board-level representation of workers. Currently all board members represent shareholders, and unsurprisingly the company is willing to sacrifice workers to satisfy shareholders. Make it so a third, or half the board has to be elected by workers.

How quickly we forget. This is not the first time workers have faced inhumane working conditions. Unions worked as a solution before - why wouldn't they work again?

Can't they already organize and associate with unions but choose not to?

Some of them do not want to know anything about unions, this is a common opinion among the American public.

Other would like, or even try. But Amazon management, an enormous American corporations, are determined to not allow to do so. Amazon warehouse workers are, generally, not a particularly wealthy or powerful segment of the society.

What is the solution? Make unions mandatory?

The solution is winning hearts and minds to convince workers to organize. In the past, corporate propaganda and improving living conditions convinced many that unions were a net negative. As conditions change, so too can those convictions.

But I don't think mandatory unions are a solution. Unions would have to be very popular for such legislation to pass. But if they were so popular, they would no longer need compulsory membership.

In general it is unions and organized labor that push legislation meant to help workers, so starting with legislation instead is putting the cart before the horse.

Here's my suggestion: change from an 8 hour work day into a 6 hour work day. Pretty simple really, I don't think we need to uproot society here...

So make it illegal to work for more than 6 hours? What if I actually want to work more and agree with a company to do so and get paid for it?

Whatever rules exist at the moment, just decrease the time by 25%. Not sure exactly how to make such a change though, probably hard, just suggesting a solution like was asked for

> Not sure exactly how to make such a change though, probably hard, just suggesting a solution like was asked for

Might I gently point out that the difficulty of the problem is all political. The easiest "solution" is of course to take all the wealth that exists in the world and fairly distribute it while keeping everyone working as effectively as they are now.

Now obviously that idea isn't anywhere near being a solution. Neither is your idea.

I don't understand what you're trying to say, the work day has already been successfully shortened to 8 hours, so why couldn't it be further shortened? Seems like a natural progression as technology improves, and this solution is extremely simple and also fair.

What you are suggesting I can't even understand because of how vague and impossible complex it is to even start to define what it would mean to fairly distribute all wealth the wealth in the world.

> How do we make it better?

You could, for example, offer these workers better jobs. Can you?

Who should? And why should they (what incentives they'd have to do it)?

simply, make the workers the owners of the company

If I have a company that hires software developers, we should abolish the signed contracts, and all of them should get an equal stake in the company? And we should make it a law so that happens for all companies?

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