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Comment by canadiantim | Hacker News Reader

Easy fix. Simply increase immigration to a million+ people per year thereby driving down domestic wages and now voila we have cheap domestic labour.

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We already have cheap domestic labour, we fly in Mexicans and South Americans and squeeze them in share houses to do cheap and dangerous migrant labour work on a seasonal basis.

But you're suppose to keep that unsightliness away from cities / urban dwellers. People start to question when one bedrooms become unaffordable and basements are housing 8 students / food couriers whose bike just exploded in the subway and now no one can bring ebikes on transit. Cheap labour is suppose to make us feel richer and be invisible.

Except we are also complaining about a housing crisis. Homeless shelters that were already full of the homeless, are now joined with refugees, and apparently international students that also can't find a home to share with 24 other people.

https://www.blogto.com/city/2024/01/25-international-student...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/mayor-refugees-shelte...

It's simple: I want cheap houses, food, goods and child care built, picked, manufactured and done with expensive domestic labor, and I want home prices to be low but home values to increase without bound forever. I don't understand what's so hard about this. /s

A less easy fix, but one that's better for everyone is that we all just stop buying mountains and mountains of absolutely useless plastic and digital crap.

Sure we need lots of human labour to keep the world going round, but dealing with the obscenity of consumerism is where a better world begins.

These are the results [0], a kind of misery and 'poverty' (an 'affluenza') caused by unchecked material indulgence.

Surely we can address this culturally on the demand side?

[0] https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/techno-clutter-farnell...

Great read. I'm glad that the author stressed how systemic tech addiction is, and not a moral failure of the individual. It's only slightly ironic that he asked for readers to plug his article on social media, but the word needs getting out.

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