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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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"
People aren’t building a washing machine at home. That takes industrial machinery.
Or they can go spend time with their families which is a much better use of their time.
I’ll bite. Who builds the tools?
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.
It's bound to happen at some point, right? There's a lot of people doing dishes.
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
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.
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...
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.
This is another view common to most (Marxist) communists, the belief in society's ability to cultivate the 'socialist man'.
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).
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 "
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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".
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 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 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.
I think if you can't find volunteers, you can have a lottery.
what happens if the lottery "winners" refuse?
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.
What would you do in the scenario described for people who refuse any undesirable work?
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".)
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.
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.
(There's of course normal inflation in these places, like everywhere else, it's a by-design feature of most monetary systems)
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.
You might find one sucker, but not nearly enough
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.
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?
And monuments are only for the very, very few.
Are you saying that we can make communism work with… NFTs?
It looks to me more like a suggestion to give people a some kind of guaranteed minimum income, and abolish all IP laws.
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.
Mises Institute "How Intellectual Property Hampers Capitalism | Stephan Kinsella"
I don’t see any suggestions to remove property rights. This was the bit of confusion I was pointing out.
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.
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.
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'm pretty sure Alec from Technology Connections would if he had the resources.