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Comment by Lucasoato | Hacker News Reader

It's not about owning an house, having kids, or a luxury car. Most people just want to work with dignity, a mean to reach their workplace wether by car or a decent public transport, affording to live in a place you can call your home, in which maybe one day you could raise a family if you find a person that shares your view of life. This is not granted at all, for most people this is just not the reality and actually it's getting worse year by year.

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The thing is that someone has to clean the toilets, sweep the floors, maintain that public transportation, or have the skills to fix up your car, etc. Dignity means a lot of things to different people. If you live in a society that enables you to work with dignity, it's because there is a lot of undignified labor sustaining it. The things we wish for don't just magically happen. It takes a lot of undignified human labor to get there. Now let's say you automated all undignified labor. Now your competition increased a hundred fold, greatly lowering your odds if finding dignified labor.

And the world churns.

I don't see that a contradictory. A job cleaning toilets or repairing cars can be dignified if you get paid a living wage, have reasonable working conditions, and aren't mistreated by your company.

Ask recent grads what they would think about a janitor position for $55,000 a year (average U.S. living wage). My guess is the percent who would be happy with that? < 1%.

Not everybody goes to University, what example is that one? A lot of people would be happy to take a janitor position if it allowed to live decently, without living in fear for your future.

Um 60% of americans go to college. We cant all have cushy office jobs with 3 hours of real work a day.

Someone has to be the janitor, the checkout clerk, the garbage collector, the factory worker, etc. etc. etc.

I don't have a degree. I'd love a cleaning job I can actually live on. The last one I had worked the shit out of me and paid peanuts. See: the problem.

This is so defeatist. You may need these roles filled, but you can pay much better for them and give them more respect socially. If you automate them, you can implement massive redistributionary schemes to ensure that benefits people. It’s a lack of political will, not possibility.

> but you can pay much better

Yes

> for them and give them more respect socially

How? You can't dictate social behavior.

You can't dictate it, but you can influence it.

Imagine if we teach from primary school student to clean their own classroom and bathroom so that everyone must do at least once every x days/week, it think it would help reconsider how we view this jobs. This is just an example, but I think there are plenty of ways for a government to incentivize desirable behavior (even social).

You're going to get parents with torches and pitchforks if you ask primary students to clean the school bathrooms....

I think any solution to this whole constellation of problems with the economy will have to be extralegal first anyways. Social movements and the like.

It's not much to do with the money. It is just work most people will be unwilling to do.

The number of college graduates who will willingly work in housekeeping or dusty construction sites even for 100K USD a year will be next to zero.

People will not downgrade their quality of life compared to what they grew up with. And you're lying to yourself if you think a construction site is as comfy as the Meta HQ.

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