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Comment by roschdal | Hacker News Reader

What can people do instead of technology jobs, to make real productive work in the labour market?

Sometimes I think about this. Things humans need: food, shelter, healthcare, energy, water. Working in one of these industries or improving access/efficiency of these things could be useful. But there are a lot of tech startups, i.e vertical farming that end up wasting capital because the economics don't make sense.

Individually, most startups fail, so most of them are "wasting capital". As wtih any experimentation, they only make sense in the aggregate, where the total value for society delivered by successful experiments makes up for the cost of the failed ones.

> where the total value for society delivered by successful experiments makes up for the cost of the failed ones.

I disagree. The successful experiments are negative to society just a few years after some startup wins in a niche. The world would be better off without Google, Facebook, Airbnb or Uber now that they already "changed" the market. Every tech dominance becomes society-negative over time.

Nursing seems to have a shortage basically everywhere. Especially when you factor in the difference in physical strength between men and women.

I personally wouldn't want any job where I didn't feel like I was personally helping push out the Pareto frontier of civilization, though. Everything else feels somehow short-sighted to me.

On the contrary, not having people working on the structure needed to support this kind of effort seems to be more short-sighted.

Now that just doesn't ring true. Uncountable millennia passed where virtually everyone had to work on "the structure" and we didn't get anywhere interesting. The nurses of today would have been the shamanic healers of yesteraeon, but the vast difference in their abilities to actually deliver cure come entirely from the work of countless researchers and technologists.

The work of those researchers and technologists would have been impossible without the work of countless others who understood there were many ways to contribute.

None of which would be possible without mothers giving birth.

Anything related to taking care of old and/or disabled people.

Yes yes I’m a plowing ox, put a collar on me and let me pull the heavy heavy weights for my masters.

Carpenter, plumber, electrician.

Skilled manual labor like welding, for example

Not sure if that would work out.

farm

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