Hacker News Reader

Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Computers have an unprecedented ability to reproduce value for free. Programmers need a relatively fixed amount of resources to thrive. (The value of resources varies by location but we all need things like food, shelter, transportation, clothing, tools, etc etc)

If we can find a way to make sure every person has what they need to thrive regardless of their income, programmers can open source all of their software and we can enable the maximum value creation possible. Other engineers like those that design commodities like dishwashers and cars or important manufacturing or medical equipment can also open source their designs so that repair costs are low and innovative improvements are easy to apply. I genuinely believe this would result in a steeper and more rapid innovation curve as well as a better world for all, than a world where we try to monetize things which have zero marginal cost to reproduce.

View on HN

One problem is that most necessary projects aren’t fun, and most fun projects aren’t necessary. Does anyone design dishwashers as a hobby, as an easy example? How do you propose we motivate people to do work that isn’t fun? Currently the carrot of higher pay or ownership in a more valuable thing is doing that, so we would need something to replace it if that goes away.

There are potentially other carrots aside from material wealth that can motivate people to do unpleasant work. Currently it takes significant pay to get people to do certain important but thankless jobs. We could thank them. A legacy is important to many people. They may enjoy an immutable commemoration of their work, if they're secure in a material sense.

This is the exact same answer every leftist I've talked to says when I ask them who will run the garbage system, and who will clean the sewers.

C'mon, robots obviously! Cleaning sewers doesn't sound like any fun, but designing or remotely piloting a fatberg-blasting sewer shark bot? That sounds kickass!

But it the meantime while there exists no such robots, or while the prototypes get stuck downthere. Someone has to manually fetch them, and do the job. It's not very enticing and I don't think there will be many software engineers ready to suit up, to dig one out.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. You iterate, as with everything.

It took/is taking a long while to develop self-driving cars, despite the money and big players chasing it. How long will a fat-berg shark take-a-to-make-a?

Also, think of the people who might help you with this - sewer-diving experts! You are essentially collaborating with them to displace their own roles.

I used to work in retail stocking shelves. 1000% I would have happily collaborated on developing a shelf-stocking robot... if I got paid something for it.

I know it seems crazy on its face. And I'm sure those leftists you refer to didn't have a coherent concept of how such a system would actually work. There's no way we could just replace paychecks today with rations and social credits and have a functioning system. It'd be an extreme destabilizing change to a system we built incrementally over a long time to be self reinforcing. But I also have the view that people are very malleable and can conform to all sorts of social structures and belief systems.

>"But I also have the view that people are very malleable and can conform to all sorts of social structures and belief systems."

This is another view common to most (Marxist) communists, the belief in society's ability to cultivate the 'socialist man'.

Okay, so are you disputing what I said? Various disparate religions and ideologies have cultivated adherents with notable success across history -- not least among them is free-market capitalism.

It's less of a belief and more of an emergent property of liberty and maths

I like to think about how this works at smaller scales. When there is an office full of people all being paid about the same and (critically) where they all want and care about the same outcome, the shit jobs will get done. I have often called myself a "code janitor" since I clean up shit that was left behind. It's not because I didn't want to be working on fun greenfield projects but because it was shit that just needed to get done. So I did it. And so did others.

Another example to play around with is when you go camping with friends. There's some shit work that just needs to be done. People pitch in. The same with staying at a friends house or a vacation rental with friends. Or cleaning leaves off of the storm drains. We all do this sort of work because it makes our lives better. If literal shit was piling up in front of my house I would probably shovel it even if it took 8 hours.

Natural disasters are also examples where people do work for free without expectation of compensation. I think people are more like that than what happens in apocalyptic novels (even though I love reading them).

Seems like the key shared characteristic of these examples are small communities where people care about each other. As you say, it works at smaller scales. But free rider problems are a lot tougher in a community of millions or more.

I live in one of those communities (eco village in Australia) and all it takes is one old haggard lady to reduce the workforce to nothing, as no one wants to put up with her abuse.

I think one thing people keep forgetting is that all these problems have already been solved for hundreds and thousands of years. You will never reduce inequality, abuse, pain, suffering. It's much better to contribute and improve what we already have rather than to rip it out and try "yet another variation of the same utopia that we've all been thinking about".

Build towards it, not "start again "

You seem smart and it always amazes me how popular communist concepts are with smart people on HN.

Didn't you have some assigned group projects in school? Perhaps some people are easily satisfied by carrying the burden of other people who they don't know and who don't appreciate them, but I'd wager a ridiculously high majority of value producers would not be. Humans are social animals, but we're individuals first and foremost and self-interest will always be the best motivator.

Is there some future where humans are engineered to be satisfied with a predefined role and purpose, amongst other traits? Sure. But until we get to that point, commune-style living is an absolute dud.

By the way, I recommend you visit and try living in an actual commune. My girlfriend told me it was the most disgusting living situation she's ever seen.

I think people misunderstood where I was coming from a bit. To be clear, I wasn't commenting in support of communism, or against rewarding merit, or against rewarding merit with money. Status in life and legacy in death are still motivators that matter, though, and with the right set of shared values, they are powerful.

We still generally have a culture in the US of respecting our veterans and service members, for example. There is some social value in serving that's not material. If there wasn't, the material benefits would need to be more substantial.

Respect for military is probably well aligned with instinct though— I’m guessing most tribes have respect for their warriors. Can we repeat this for an arbitrary behavior that is not so aligned? Maybe, maybe not?

Even this is not a fair comparison IMO because even people who don’t mind carrying the majority of the work eventually often get tired and frustrated with this and in my experience this tends to happen at a similar rate to when they enter their most productive years.

There's lots of kibbutz (communes) in Israel. Apparently most aren't too bad. The one I visited seemed decent. But Jewish culture has a pretty strong community ethic which is key.

I also visited a couple of Greek Orthodox monasteries and they were not just nice but beautiful. So for small scale communities with a strong cultural binding "communes" can totally work. It doesn't scale though.

For some issues around this, also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz_crisis and the "Decline and restructuring" section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz

How often do you talk to people this far to the left? I live in a family full of liberals and none of them even remotely think the world should operate this way. I think you could take every person in the US with ideology this far out to the left and put them in a single medium size stadium.

Presumably they mean "every leftist that holds this opinion, I've talked to", not "every leftist I've ever talked to".

That's a charitable reading given they literally wrote the latter, not the former.

A charitable reading requires fair consideration.

First, they didn't literally write the latter:

A: every leftist I've talked to

B: every leftist I've ever talked to

Second, if true, would imply that every leftist they've ever talked to will always get asked "who will run the garbage system, and who will clean the sewer" which wouldn't make sense outside the context of having given a specific opinion on a specific topic first.

Hence the topic of conversation is implied as context.

Running the garbage system is a desk job largely I would expect. It might not be the most stimulating subject matter to you, but I think it's within the realm of possibility that you'd find people who found it an interesting system to manage.

Cleaning the sewers sounds objectionable. I think you shouldn't discount the idea that in a societal structure that's different from ours you'd remove some of the social stigma that comes from such a job. But at the same time, if you observed that very very few people wanted to clean sewers for whatever reason, and there wasn't enough supply to meet demand, then you invest more in technology that reduces the shortfall. As others suggested, automation.

"But at the same time, if you observed that very very few people wanted to clean sewers for whatever reason"

The reason might be, most people do not like to be in the literal shit of others? It comes with actual health hazards btw.

"and there wasn't enough supply to meet demand, then you invest more in technology that reduces the shortfall. As others suggested, automation"

But we ain't there yet at all. What do we do, till then?

The sewage needs to run 24 h and not only if someone feels like taking a look eventually.

And as for ordinary garbage: mostly it is not a desk job, but physical labour to touch and move hundreds of different dirty garbage bins every day.

Dealing with that shit, should always come with good compensation. (whether money or social credits or whatever currency is in use)

> What do you do until then?

Sure, but you iterate. We decided as a society that Polio was awful enough that we wanted to eradicate it. If we freed up enough effort that is currently wasted on chasing profits, we could eventually get to solving problems like "shit stinks and it sucks having to clean it".

Absent corruption, profits must by definition come from money paid by people who determined that, according to themselves, the work being paid for has value. This is why capitalism works. It is a mass, distributed, value computation engine.

Considering this, I don’t see how effort is wasted on profit, since the effort produced something that someone considered valuable. Do we have another way of computing value at scale? To date, I haven’t seen any realistic proposals.

> I think you shouldn't discount the idea that in a societal structure that's different from ours you'd remove some of the social stigma that comes from such a job.

I can see you haven't done any of jobs like that ever in your life. "Social stigma", lmao, that shit smells

> But at the same time, if you observed that very very few people wanted to clean sewers for whatever reason, and there wasn't enough supply to meet demand, then you invest more in technology that reduces the shortfall.

It's delusional to think every job that's undesirable but necessary could be automated and that it would be cheaper than ye olde good material compensation for doing something hard/unpleasant.

I mean, I'm all for it, but that won't happen to the level that would eliminate unpleasant jobs

> I can see you haven't done any of jobs like that ever in your life. "Social stigma", lmao, that shit smells

I haven't, but I didn't say that shit didn't smell. My point was that one component of why some jobs are worse than others is social stigma. Working at a fish monger or in a butchers shop stinks, and you probably get way less PPE than a sewer cleaner would. But butchers and fishmongers have less social stigma.

> It's delusional to think every job that's undesirable but necessary could be automated and that it would be cheaper than ye olde good material compensation for doing something hard/unpleasant.

The fallacy here is that it _needs_ to be cheaper. Sewer cleaning is valuable. If it requires more investment to automate so that we have enough supply to meet the demand, so be it. The only reason we haven't already automated this smelly job is because it's easier to turn a profit if you just pay people peanuts. If profit is no longer motivating, you can make vastly different decisions.

Why would you be so bothered to just let them? Would you feel embarrassed that "leftists" are nicer? That can be a motivation too! I know some people just show up so they can have someone to talk to for a few hours on a Saturday.

I think if you can't find volunteers, you can have a lottery.

> you can have a lottery

what happens if the lottery "winners" refuse?

Many western countries use a lottery to choose juries.

If the winners refuse, they'll have a chance to explain themselves, and then they'll be judged by those who didn't refuse. Exactly what happens next depends.

Jury duty is one off, and often compensated. It also isn't clearly undesirable - it's a lottery for different reasons.

What would you do in the scenario described for people who refuse any undesirable work?

Possible difference is that we may need far smaller number of programmers interested in dishwashers than we need for this jobs.

Let me analyze your sewage and garbage and sell your consumption habits to the highest bidder, and I might bite. Think of it as a "sump scription" :D

The obvious answer is "pay people more".

If we had UBI, for instance, and people did not have to work in order to have basic needs (food and shelter) met, then the willingness to do unpleasant jobs like sewer cleaning will go down, and it'll be necessary to pay people more to do that work.

And the need to pay people more will then drive technological innovation that may today not be worthwhile because "just hire someone" is less expensive. And in a world with UBI, automating away unpleasant jobs becomes more of an unmitigated win.

(In case it isn't clear: I think "UBI plus a free market" is a much better system than "don't pay people but magically hope all the work gets done anyway".)

> UBI plus a free market

If there's a ubi, then there's price floor that is higher than a non ubi price floor, meaning that the median prices of goods go up, less taxes to find the ubi, and the ubi must then increase to meet the increased costs for a basic standard of living.

Well done you invented inflation.

Maybe, maybe not. It does depend on how efficient we could make basic necessity items, and those are only a tiny portion of the modern economy, I suppose. Though I don’t trust the government to not simultaneously screw with the incentives for producing those items, whether by accident or not, which would make a situation like the one you describe more likely. Also it’s not at all clear how housing would work— I’m guessing people would complain about the sort of housing you could get for a workable UBI amount (i.e. one that is actually in equilibrium with the rest of the economy, as in being a tiny rider-on). This would realistically politically cause the amount to keep going up (and thus cause inflation).

> basic necessity items, and those are only a tiny portion of the modern economy

If housing/shelter is a necessity, it might not be cheap. I think housing projects aimed to do exactly this. You'll eventually find 'poverty' redefined to those receiving UBI only, stuck in undesirable locations, who don't consider it true that "work is optional".

Another issue is policing, which is also increasingly expensive, and has all sorts of issues in the US. People like to just shout "fix the police", but have no answer as to how you can recruit for such a job.

This aspect of UBI is functionally equivalent to the generous unemployment + other benefits that exist in many developed countries. The accelerating inflation hypothesis is easily empirically disproven there.

(There's of course normal inflation in these places, like everywhere else, it's a by-design feature of most monetary systems)

The UBI argument seems fundamentally flawed - things like food-stamps or free social housing make more sense.

Let me give you an example: If the government offers anyone buying a house an incentive of $10K, every house asking price will go up by $10K and wipe out the discount. The relative/competitive nature of the market opposes many en-mass pay-outs.

Umm running the garbage system sounds rad?? I currently design open source farming robots but I would absolutely love designing open source garbage robots. Of course what’s better is community level management of waste production so we don’t even have a lot of garbage to deal with! Reusable washable containers for food, etc.

Sure, ask someone to shovel shit for 8h/day 5 days a week and see where your thanks will get you.

You might find one sucker, but not nearly enough

Clearly this isn't going to work in a world where people use the word "sucker" to refer to people who do work to help others. Honestly, do we call volunteers at soup kitchens suckers?

The problem clearly involves an unequal distribution of work.

If everyone is else being paid and you are trying to convince a single person to literally shovel shit for 8 hours then yes, that won't work. They will feel like they are being taken advantage of. I think this is a common feeling amongst all workers. If your boss asks you to work late you are much less likely to be pissed off if the boss stays late and helps out too.

We only have structures like this due to the class system, where some people never shovel shit and some people do it all week long. A great suggestion for this incidentally brought up by Noam Chomsky in 1976 is to rotate people through these jobs, so everyone spends maybe two days a month on the task. People appreciate a little bit of difficult labor, it just sucks when you have to do it every day for survival. I linked directly to the few minutes of this talk where he talks about it here, but if you have more time check out the whole thing: https://youtu.be/h_x0Y3FqkEI?t=1744

Without any intention of snark or confrontation whatsoever, can I ask you

1) Have you personally tried to put this idea to practice? If yes, for how long? Would you be willing to share some details? If no, why not? It doesn't take changing the entire society, you can do something like that literally now. Be creative, travel to a different random town twice a month and offer to clean toilets in a couple of buildings? Again, I don't mean to be snarky with this example, I just think working on 3D printers doesn't cut it as a type of difficult labor. Think more along the lines of going down into a mine, shoveling literal shit for 8 hours, etc.

2) Imagine, the society has actually changed such that everyone is supposed to do a couple days of difficult labor. What happens if someone refuses? A punishment? If there is no punishment, what happens if almost everyone refuses and there's not enough people to sustain this undesirable but critical jobs?

I believe this concept was tried out in communist states. They sent intellectuals out to farms in china so they could get some hard manual labour.

The USSR honored their hardest and most productive workers with huge billboards and monuments to their eternal glory and legacy. Could you name one?

Yuri Gagarin Also I was born in 1984 in the USA so I don't have a lot of experience with billboards in Soviet Russia...

The USSR is the only example I can think of where they ever tried for a long time to elevate workers in this way instead if paying them better, like the parent commenter asked for.

Well they were not that huge, but most of organizations had "board of honor" with photos and names of best workers displayed for everyone to see. It was mocked ("look at those idiots that work for free, lol") even before USSR died.

And monuments are only for the very, very few.

> immutable commemoration

Are you saying that we can make communism work with… NFTs?

I'm 200% convinced there are plenty of people out there who could easily be nerdsniped into building an open source dishwasher! Hackers get up to all kinds of stuff that doesn't seem traditionally fun!

Does QAing Dishwasher firmware sound fun to you ?

Even if you imagine software development to be generally fun, even the mundane, the rest of the workflow can be God awful boring. While Communism is a cool idea , it never works since you need incentives to motivate people.

Funny you say that because the most popular 3D printer firmwares are open source. Does QA’ing 3D printer firmware sound fun to you? No? Great well you don’t have to do that someone else is literally doing that right now because they thought it was fun.

By the way this is a decent job for an apprentice under supervision. It’s a good way to learn with minimal risk and young people are often willing to do this kind of thing. Then the veteran comes in and makes a few improvements to the QA system and hopefully it’s good for a while.

printers can’t flood your kitchen

They can totally set it on fire and poison you with toxic fumes though.

don't forget about shocks and pinch/crush hazards, hooray

right they just burn people's house down

Concrete printers can?

Nobody is QAing 3D printer firmware because they thought it would be fun. They are doing it because their printer crashed and now they can no longer print.

presumably hackers use dishwashers too

But we're talking here about thermal runaway protection. Not "my prints are ugly let me fix this".

In the same way you want your 3D printer to not burn your house down you want your dishwasher to not flood your house.

Sounds very similar to me.

Working on a Word Processor, especially one that is mature and stable, sounds like the most boring, awful thing I could work on.

However, here are the list of release notes for LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/release-notes/

You can see man bugs were fixed in the latest release.

What may sound dreadful to you might be interesting for someone else.

While capitalism sounds nice in practice, it results in the destruction of the planet because the profit motive eats everything alive and leaves nothing behind for future generations.

The majority of those bug fixes are from people who probably were paid by companies to work on them.

A couple of people with a bunch of fixes attributed to them seem to work for Red Hat, and several contributors have Collabora email addresses. A fair bunch of fixes would seem to be from members of a LibreOffice team at some company (based on bugzilla comments and email addresses). One contributor seems to be from a company that does consulting related to LibreOffice.

A few fixes are from people registered with what look like private email addresses or with email addresses associated with the LibreOffice or other open source projects themselves. But they seem to be a minority.

That doesn't mean it can't be interesting to those people, or to many people, but it also doesn't mean most of the fixes were motivated by that alone.

(Also, fixing bugs is different than QA.)

> While capitalism sounds nice in practice, it results in the destruction of the planet because the profit motive eats everything alive and leaves nothing behind for future generations.

As always, that doesn't mean communism (or some other supposed polar opposite) would work. Or that those are the two possible binary options.

Doing something as a hobby as very different from doing what someone tells you to do, how and when they tell you to do it.

This is true but what does this have to do with this idea? Who says we need bosses and overseers to get stuff done? See: https://vorondesign.com/

"The original goal of the VORON project, back in 2015, was to create a no-compromise 3D printer that was fun to assemble and a joy to use. It had to be quiet, clean, pretty, and continue to operate 24 hours a day without requiring constant fiddling. In short a true home micro-manufacturing machine without a hefty price tag. It took over a year in development, with every part being redesigned, stress tested and optimized. Shortly after the release a vibrant community formed around the project and continues to grow today. This community is part of what makes VORON such a special experience.

What was once a one-person operation has grown into a small tight-knit group of engineers united under a common design ethos. We're dedicated to creating production-quality printers you can assemble in your kitchen. It's this passion and dedication that drive us to push the boundaries just a little further. We build space shuttles with gardening tools so anyone can have a space shuttle of their own. Welcome to VORON Design"

Respectfully, 3d printers are a special case.

People aren’t building a washing machine at home. That takes industrial machinery.

If I could pay rent and feed myself regardless, I would design this out of spite.

Design is the easy bit. It's getting engineers to do the boring stuff like making sure it doesn't burn your house down in the middle of the night.

Yes and to make my vision a reality we need community ownership of the means of production, which would 100% mean access to these tools. With appropriate access to tools, bored engineers under such a system can get a LOT of shit done.

> bored engineers under such a system can get a LOT of shit done

Or they can go spend time with their families which is a much better use of their time.

> community ownership of the means of production, which would 100% mean access to these tools

I’ll bite. Who builds the tools?

> Who says we need bosses and overseers to get stuff done?

I prefer being told what to do so that I can use my mental capacity on things I care about.

I do not care about making a dishwasher or a 3d printer. I would rather pay someone else to do it, and I would rather that person has a team of people under them who can help me with trivial issues if I come across it.

I desperately do not want to waste my time with a dishwasher or anything else in the kitchen.

Yeah easily me.

If a group of nerds builds an open-source dishwasher as a hobby, the final product will be something too esoteric and difficult to use for regular people.

"if you don't like it, you're welcome to fix it and create a pull request."

Yeah, for sure. The only issue would be that I wouldn't be as interested in building an open source dishwasher for every possible (or even the most common) users/use cases, but for myself.

I figure someone is going to come along who's excited about adapting the dishwasher for their own use cases, since they also don't want to do dishes. Maybe they'll even have it support their social circle's use cases so they never have to help doing their friends' dishes after being over for dinner again.

It's bound to happen at some point, right? There's a lot of people doing dishes.

> It's bound to happen at some point, right?

No. As a hardware hacker myself, the benefit and draw is the fun of it, I don't want to have to hack my own dishwasher and make it work to my requirements, not maintain it.

Hackers usually write very bad code, in case you weren't aware

That's exactly why Torvols wrote the first linux kernel. He wanted it for himself, and decided to give the source away so people would contribute.

I don't think this is limited to just digital items like software.

I would absolutely use an open source dishwasher if I could ship my custom design to a manufacturer to build.

Luck us, templatable CAD exists. Tailor the dishwashers to the end-users.

I get the point that some jobs are boring and need actual materialistic motivation to be done but...

I'm absolutely sure someone would design one out of sheer annoyance with existing solution (if existing solution would be bad).

It would be interesting if system with very short copyright (say 3-5 years) would work. You'd still have leader's advantage for investing in development, but overall winner would be companies that can both innovate and fill the market and not just throw some ideas, patent them and live off people actually trying to implement them...

There would be a perfect design for that one person, and everyone else would either do it themselves (not many could) or suffer

Actually I think the way this works is you have a series of forks. You will have a variety of weirdos who spend a lot of time on their fork of a design which is close but needs some tweaks. Regular people then can choose from a bunch of different forks with different pros and cons. This is similar to design and production in a capitalist system only it takes way less effort to design a similar but slightly different fork. Most vacuum cleaners are pretty similar but each company has to design their first machine from scratch and there’s a high barrier to entry for that. With forks, it’s easy. And we see with 3D printed objects that when someone is in demand you will have a popular option that a lot of people have downloaded, and then someone comes along and makes their own fork, and someone sees that and improves upon it too, and now you’ve got three options but only one person had to design it from scratch.

I don’t think this is an argument to remove markets.

It looks to me more like a suggestion to give people a some kind of guaranteed minimum income, and abolish all IP laws.

to remove property laws is to remove markets by definition. You cannot sell anything you have no ownership over or rights to, given that everyone can just take it.

Hence why open source maintainers are barely paid, and companies in the space rely on selling services, not software. If you want, as the title of the article suggests, a world where people pay for software, strengthen IP laws instead of weakening them.

Even libertarians argue that intellectual property is not real property and is incompatible with capitalism. Removing government-mandated IP restrictions is not "removing property laws", it is freeing innovators to copy what they hold in their hands without government intervention. They own the property they purchase or produce but they don't own the intangible ideas behind the thing.

Mises Institute "How Intellectual Property Hampers Capitalism | Stephan Kinsella"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWShFz4d2RY

I’m talking about intellectual property, the legal fiction invented to let people own ideas. I’m not sure why you’d bring up actual property rights.

I don’t see any suggestions to remove property rights. This was the bit of confusion I was pointing out.

All property rights are legal fiction, there's no "actual property rights". Owning ideas is perfectly reasonable because that's where the entire value is, and having rights to your own ideas guarantees that you are compensated for the invention and value they provide to others. Property rights, intellectual and non-intellectual, correctly allocate resources to value creators.

What if an idea has value independent from an inventor e.g. someone invents it independently. Novel-ty of invention is hard to prove. There is a strong incentive towards rent-seeking beyond the collaborative value invention is supposed to provide.

There are "actual property rights" because an actual property is an actual property - owning one house doesn't mean you own them all. An idea is an abstract "property" that isn't like real estate at all, and most of the concerns highly subjective interpretation of scope and value.

there's strong incentive towards rent-seeking in all property schemes. The oldest form of rent seeking literally does concern physical property, land and real estate. Rent seeking is bad and common but eliminating property rights is worse, some have tried. And you generally can't own abstract ideas, you can't own the number '5', or 'wizard stories', only a particular logo design or Harry Potter. IP is only concerned with specific artifacts. They're intangible but not abstract, they're instantiations of ideas.

If you produce intellectual work there are really only three ways to do that. Give it away for free and beg and provide services, accept some sort of feudal patronage (now reinvented on the internet) or have rights to what you make. The last one is the only thing that gives creators independence and compensates them directly, even if yes you have to settle subjective differences sometimes.

Anyone who wants to abolish IP needs to tell me how a novelist earns a living without being reduced to some sort of begging.

Beyond that, the issue is risk. To make a new, better company is a very risky endeavor. It takes sticking through hard times. Very few people and willing to do that without a chance of major remuneration.

I don't see why people can't gather and pay someone to design a good dishwasher, even if a lot of other things were available for free.

There is a lot of open-source software, and still software development contractors exist and do well, all the while they may use 90%-100% open-source stacks to solve a client's problem.

I guess nonposix shells are not fun since there are so few of them. Or maybe it's just me that posix shell has poor ergonomics?

> Does anyone design dishwashers as a hobby, as an easy example?

I'm pretty sure Alec from Technology Connections would if he had the resources.

We should guarantee minimum income, and abolish intellectual property. Build an economy around actually doing things rather than calling dibs on solutions. Let the market sort out the doing of things, just make sure everyone can participate.

Building a modest economy where everyone can participate is the way to go but to be honest, this world isn't fair, there are some who have more power over others

> Build an economy around actually doing things rather than calling dibs on solutions.

If I design something, how do I get compensated for the work if anyone can clone the work? Why is manufacturing counted as "compensated actually-doing-something" while design/R&D isn't?

Abolish IP? Why should you have errant and free access to modify my book and publish it under your name as if you wrote it, without me having 0 say in it?

Do you think there would be very many programmers in such a world?

Personally, I think that a lot of people who right now go into programming "because it's a good career", would instead do things that are equally creative but also capture other things high on the Maslow hierarchy — e.g. fame.

Personally, despite enthusiastically enjoying my programming career and puzzle-oriented problem-solving more generally, I'm still intending to retire early and become a novelist. If I could "thrive regardless of income", I'd do that right now.

Same amount as novelists ;) I enjoy both, in moderation

It is hard to guess what people would work on without needing to worry about money.

You might try your novel, and one of two things could happen:

You find out you love it, you write a really good novel, and society wins.

You try it, find out that the actual experience of writing a novel is a drag. No harm no foul, you move on and keep trying things until you find something you are really passionate about and good at, and society wins.

Maybe it is programming but you just need a more interesting program.

You can also find out that you love it despite the novels (or software or paintings or poems or whatever) not being interesting for almost anyone else or even being available to anyone, but as you don't need the money you can keep doing that (and only that) and society simply loses out on whatever you're doing currently.

The key part of what people would work on without needing to worry about money is that there is literally zero reason to assume that the thing worked on would be useful to society in any way whatsoever, it can be useless or even detrimental to it - the current mechanism of monetary compensation is the thing aligning the work to interests of others, remove it and you can't expect that alignment to persist.

Unconditional income is a solution to the problem when we don't need people's labor anymore - it makes all sense when people can just go off and do whatever without worrying if it benefits others enough to justify the basic goods and services they need, and the society is okay with that. But while we still do need the labor of most people, there needs to be motivation to guide that labor to the specific things society needs.

I think there's a huge difference between everyone having unlimited material goods Star Trek style and UBI being a floor for everyone. I think of UBI as a floor that I can go below no matter how bad I screw up. If I start a company and max out my credit cards to fund it and it goes belly up then no matter how much I still owe to Chase I will still get my $1000/month to pay the rent and put food in my belly.

But I will still want luxury goods and I'm willing to work for them most of the time. I want a phone upgrade every few years which might be a luxury I couldn't afford under UBI. I like flying airplanes and certainly would need to work to pay for that hobby. But if I get burnt out and want to read books for a year then I could do that too!

> there is literally zero reason to assume that the thing worked on would be useful to society in any way whatsoever, it can be useless or even detrimental to it - the current mechanism of monetary compensation is the thing aligning the work to interests of others, remove it and you can't expect that alignment to persist.

I think a strong argument can be made that the current system does not necessarily align the work being done with the interests of others in a broad or universal sense. Think about a corporation with a very useful drug whose patent is about to expire. Allowing the drug to go generic would be in the best interests of many poor sick people all over the world (patent harmonization means even poor countries must follow US patent law or get locked out of global systems). However companies often find legal tricks they can use to effectively renew the patents for their drugs. This aligns with the interests of some people - the shareholders for example, but is detrimental to the interests of sick poor people all over the world.

And this isn’t a hypothetical, this just happened again two weeks ago with Johnson and Johnson and only a coordinated pressure campaign from some high profile YouTubers was able to get the company to relax their plans: https://youtu.be/tMhgw5SW0h4

However when there is no profit motive, people often work on problems that they personally need to solve, and there is often good alignment with the work they are doing and the needs of others.

More broadly, we can say that the current system does not necessarily align the work being done with the needs of most people, and that alternative ways of aligning that work must be possible.

My (honestly non-snarky) answer is: who cares?

Do we really need all of the programmers that are currently being employed? Will society collapse if there aren't 100,000 working on the next photo sharing app?

The important stuff will get done. Anything that is a luxury will get done only if someone wants to do it for themselves or if someone can convince another person to do it. Money doesn't need to disappear under a world of UBI, it's just not something that every single person on earth needs to participate in under thread of starvation and death.

> My (honestly non-snarky) answer

> 100,000 working on the next photo sharing app?

hmm..

There are plenty of programmers that don't work for FB et al companies. A lot of modern infrastructure depends of custom software.

We probably don't need Twitter (although the cultural impact of SMN might be important e.g. #meetoo, arab-spring etc).

> The important stuff will get done.

Yes, it will. You know how? Because the importance will inspire more money to be offered.

> Yes, it will. You know how? Because the importance will inspire more money to be offered.

Actually I am the lead engineer and maintainer on an open source farming robot project. I do get paid enough to cover my bills, but the pay is less than 50% what I could earn at any of the companies which repeatedly pester me on linkedin. But the work I am doing is more important to me than all that. I am doing the work for less money specifically because it is important.

In a world where we have community control of the means of production, what does it mean for work to be important? It means our community members need us to solve problems so they can grow food, make clothes, and build shelter. Caring for one another is in our DNA, literally! There is no specific monetary incentive required, the care for community members is already enough incentive. The only reason we need to pay people huge sums of money for some SAAS app is that the work is nearly meaningless to us. The money is the only thing that makes it worthwhile. But if we don't need money, we can work on what really matters. And when we open source the results of the work we needed, many others will find that it solves their problems too, perhaps with modest changes, so they don't need to reinvent the wheel over and over again. This means the work goes farther for the same effort.

I’ve been writing ship software, for my entire career. Most times, I’ve been quite involved in the entire process; from napkin sketch to shrinkwrap.

For me, it is quite gratifying to ship, but for many people, the 50% (or more) of shipping software that is non-coding work, isn’t fun, and is usually deprecated, during the planning process.

Examples are things like end-user documentation (not just maintenance docs), training, error handling, accessibility, localization (a huge task), continuing customer support, legal checklists, patent searches, copyright searches, branding strategies, glossaries, distribution channels, evangelists, usage feedback support, synchronization between all of the above, and the Web site, etc.

Big fat, not-fun pain, but needs to be done. A lot of this stuff really needs to be considered before the first line of code is written, and the journey can take years.

The app I’m working on has been in development for over two years (but to be fair, I did “wipe the slate,” and restart, after about a year). The basic “business logic” is in one SDK that I wrote in about a month and a half. All the rest of the work has been chrome.

see https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html

That's a great read!

Humans have tried all kinds of value transfer systems for thousands of years. Giving someone "tokens" (ie. currency) to convert that into whatever they want, or need has been the most flexible version of whatever has come before it. What one person needs to thrive is not the same another person needs to thrive, so who gets to set what that level is?

I'd be skeptical of any system where there's no opportunity to get ahead as people will either find ways to take advantage of the system and screw others over, or the system becomes unsustainable as populations shift in size.

Generally the broad concept I work with is “community ownership of the means of production”. What this means is that you are part owner in a cooperative of cooperatives that owns the machinery you depend upon for your well being. Of course your community trades with others and you and everyone have free choice to vote how you please and contribute as you desire. There is no “enforcement” that prevents you from accumulating more wealth but most of what you rely on is borrowed from a “things library” where you are permitted to use it indefinitely but not sell or destroy it, and in times of need the community may request that you return some items you are not using.

More broadly I would say that many people believe the current system actually does not serve people well. We have a very small portion of the society that owns the means of production and 99 percent of the population have to deal with the dictums of those owners with very little say in how production is allocated. This leads to a world where the output is heavily slanted towards the ownership class while everyone else is fighting for scraps. A world with community ownership of the means of production would mean MUCH more wealth for the average person, so concerns over resource allocation would be less of a concern.

The point anyway is that in the current system I certainly don’t get to decide what my “level” is beyond trying to work hard, but in a community ownership model I would have much more say.

As you have said we have been trying different value systems for thousands of years. No reason to believe attempts to improve the system should not continue.

> A world with community ownership of the means of production

You seem to be trying really hard to avoid the word "communism". Is it a banned word in HN?

It’s not an officially banned word but I live in the USA and folks turn off their brain if you advocate for communism. Also it’s not very specific to advocate for communism because doing so leaves things quite open to interpretation. Would that mean I want Soviet style communism? Chinese style communism? Advocating for “community ownership of the means of production” is precise without being overly proscriptive. I’m not talking about a government at all - we can achieve this ownership a variety of ways. Way better to discuss specifics than use a term that will cause a million comments like “we tried that and it failed”. This openness allows people to decide on their own how the goal might be achieved instead of believing I am going to come in like Lenin or Mao and push a specific plan. I don’t want to do that!

I understand "common ownership of means of production" is just plain communism in the way Marx intended when it refers to "post-capitalistic economic organisation".

Unfortunately that is not how human nature works. Value itself depends on the necessity or desire of people for a product and is distributed via the money printing debt system.

In other words: Necessary value can only exist, if other humans have a problem and depend on somebody/something to solve it (temporarily).

Explaining valuation from individual desire is hard, but group desire depends on techniques to control the masses and in between are many layers of uncertainty.

the necessity of debt to measure and trade is dubious at best, selfish and evil at worst

people advocating for this are on the receiving end of a very extractive and destructive system

> the necessity of debt to measure and trade is dubious at best, selfish and evil at worst

This is not what I wrote or meant, but I do agree that it could be understand like that. It would be of course better to measure necessity with something else, but so far approaches to replace it have failed for various reasons.

These are the sorts of efficiency improvements that would go a long way towards tackling global warming and environmental destruction, particularly the open design to reduce waste. The question is, how can we get from where we are in terms of an economic and political system to one that supports a healthy commons and maximizes value, like you describe?

I mean, I’ve seen worse arguments for socialism, but you seem to be painting an overly rosy picture. Yes, computers can reproduce software at zero marginal cost, but there’s still a considerable investment in the initial creation and ongoing maintenance. While I’m all for a world where programmers and engineers are able to fully devote themselves to open source projects, it’s not as simple as just making sure everyone has their basic needs met.

The incentive structures are complex, and money still serves as a potent motivator for many to push boundaries and innovate. Remember, open-source doesn’t always equate to high-quality or innovative, and proprietary doesn’t always mean restrictive or uncreative. A balanced ecosystem where both proprietary and open-source software can coexist might be a more realistic and productive approach. I’m afraid that balance isn’t too dissimilar from the one we have now, so I’m sort of forced to go with Occam’s razor here.

I certainly think open source under capitalism (work at the margins, engineers spread thin) will always be worse than open source under socialism (abundant workforce, lower stress, more time available).

As far as initial investment in the creation of the software - yeah, that’s programmer time. The point of my scheme is to lower the cost of programmer time because their needs are already met, thus lowering the cost of initial investment.

Hardware is a separate concern but I have a whole thing about how open source hardware tends to bring the hardware costs down to the lowest physically possible cost. Just look at 3D printers under patent ($25k) versus ten years after the patents expired and open source took over the low end ($250).

I’m not sure how Occam’s razor would suggest that the status quo is close to the ideal situation here. Those seem unrelated.

From each according to his ability. So far we haven't worked out how to square that with human nature, and it keeps failing utterly.

And yet 100 years ago Peter Kropotkin asked, "Are we good enough?" (to handle capitalism?) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-are-w...

A single paragraph excerpt: "Men are not good enough for Communism, but are they good enough for Capitalism? If all men were good-hearted, kind, and just, they would never exploit one another, although possessing the means of doing so. With such men the private ownership of capital would be no danger. The capitalist would hasten to share his profits with the workers, and the best-remunerated workers with those suffering from occasional causes. If men were provident they would not produce velvet and articles of luxury while food is wanted in cottages: they would not build palaces as long as there are slums. "

Capitalism at least tries to use human selfishness to achieve a better outcome, even if imperfect.

Could it be better? Obviously. I’m not convinced communism is the answer.

> Capitalism at least tries to use human selfishness to achieve a better outcome

Maybe you're not aware, but it was the socialists who coined the term "capitalism", and their definition has no relation with the one you gave.

The definition is simply: the system where private property of means of production allow the accumulation of capital.

I find it really hilarious that you're literally going "that's not real capitalism" yet you probably hate the same "excuse" from the other side of the ideological spectrum.

Quite a lot big open source projects are backed by big cooperations.

Actually all open source projects are big cooperations. :)

Sounds like an excellent idea that will work really well because it's incredibly well aligned with how humans actually function. I really wonder why no one else has thought of communism before.

</sarcasm>, obviously. A couple remarks:

Just because someone is proposing something for a small slice of society, doesn’t mean they intend to propose something similar for all of society. For instance, insisting on free schools, free (rail) roads, free health care, free water, and nationalised energy plants doesn’t mean they want to make everything free, or that they want to nationalise everything, or that they are nostalgic for communist Russia or whatever. That’s just the Red Scare talking. The fact is, different systems for different slices of society can and do coexist.

Human nature is not limited to the environment we’re currently living in. Genetically we’re barely different from the people of a couple hundred years ago. And yet our ancestors lived under many kinds of societies. It would be a little presumptuous to assume the one we’re currently living in is the best. Especially considering how it came to be: remember that as Thatcher was saying capitalism/neoliberalism was natural, she did "nudge" things along by having the army pay a visit to workers on strike.

Even communism isn’t a monolith. It took various forms, which failed for various reasons. Sometimes it was direct outside interference, like how the Paris Commune was basically crushed by the national army.

> Just because someone is proposing something for a small slice of society, doesn’t mean they intend to propose something similar for all of society

Yup, a "small slice of society" that's just proverbially eating the world.

> remember that as Thatcher was saying capitalism/neoliberalism was natural, she did "nudge" things along by having the army pay a visit to workers on strike.

Unfortunately things never happening at times gets in the way of me remembering them.

> Even communism isn’t a monolith. It took various forms, which failed for various reasons [...such as] direct outside interference

Similarly to how perpetual motion machines took various forms and failed for various reasons, including direct outside interference.

> Yup, a "small slice of society" that's just proverbially eating the world.

Software may be everywhere, but last time I checked very few of us actually write it. Something similar can be said about food: everyone has to eat, but relatively few people actually grow crops. And even if we were to implement UBI for everyone, it’s an idea that was around for quite some time, with weaker versions of it implemented for decades now. It didn’t kill capitalism, let alone spread communism (whatever that means) all over the world — or any single major Western country.

> Unfortunately things never happening at times gets in the way of me remembering them.

Sorry, my facts weren’t quite right: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jan/03/margaret-th...

Thatcher only planned to use the army and declare a state of emergency. Actual repression only used regular police forces… resulting in quite a few injuries, as well as trumped up charges (that turned out to have been fabricated by the police if my link is to be believed): https://www.history.com/news/margaret-thatcher-miners-strike... Also remember what a strike is: people stopping to work because they don’t want something. Something they reject so badly they’re willing to sacrifice their income to prevent it.

So my main point remains: what Thatcher did was far from natural, not to mention contrary to of the will of her people. You could deny that if you want, but to be honest it would be more an expression of your allegiances than your actual beliefs. (Then again, people have an uncanny ability to tailor their beliefs to suit their allegiances…)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com