Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[sluissa]

@Lordbucket again:

Okay, you're explaining yourself better this time, and within limits, I agree. Creating work just for the sake of creating a seat someone can sit in and get paid is not good and I'm all for creating robots to do all the work for us so we can sit aside and turn to more intellectual pursuits, but I do think you oversimplify things a bit.

There will always be things that people need to do to keep the system running. I know you mentioned a few but you're falling prey to this effect: http://xkcd.com/793/

I'm not going to say I can do any better, because I know I can't, but it's obvious there are holes in your plan you haven't considered.

[LordBucket]

it's obvious there are holes in your plan you haven't considered.

Some like to seek solutions to problems. Others like to find problems with solutions.

Both tend to find what they look for.

[Bauglir]

it's obvious there are holes in your plan you haven't considered.

Some like to seek solutions to problems. Others like to find problems with solutions.

Both tend to find what they look for.

And both are pretty important.

[Fenrir]

it's obvious there are holes in your plan you haven't considered.

Some like to seek solutions to problems. Others like to find problems with solutions.

Both tend to find what they look for.

Translated: “If you find problems with my solution, you obviously hate solutions.”

[LordBucket]

Translated: “If you find problems with my solution, you obviously hate solutions.”

So did you even read the dozen paragraph reply that I gave you, or are you just here to toss out one liners?

[Bauglir]

I'm not sure how many people actually perceive work as a good thing. I don't see any reason that "We need to create more jobs" rhetoric couldn't be born out of a mind that understands that work is a necessity in the world as it currently stands. Of course, you've also got people who think people don't deserve to have things they don't work for, but even they still think of work as the appropriate cost to be paid for something they actually want - not something that's desirable in itself.

EDIT: Well, except for people who like their jobs. I think we've established you're not talking about them, though.

[Virex]

@ LordBucket: Your example falls for a common but still very troublesome mistake; the assumption that the economy is static. It isn't. If resource acquisition or the conversion of resources to end products becomes easier, the manufacturing economy expands to take advantage of that. In your example, the only resource needed for production is presumably energy. The result of that is that the bottleneck for production is how much energy is produced, resulting in a drive to produce more, cheaper energy. As an effect of that, the majority of people would eventually come to work in the energy sector and that sector will expand as fast as it can, guzzling up all available labor in a short time.

[Vector]

I think people would be more prone to listen to you if you dropped the sanctimonious tone, Bucket.

I guess I'll also add that I very much want to work.  This is partially just because I like working, and partially because people like me only really gained the privilege to do so within the past 60, 70 years.  So yeah--I want to work, and I want to get a paycheck, and I want to have my own spending money and a measure of control over my life.  I want to see history peeling off in a different direction than it's been going through.  I want to be able to say something other than "I am a housewife" or "I'm Salmonella's mom."  I want to be able to talk to people and accrue respect because I worked hard and I made it, and for goodness' sake no one will be able to say women are lazy and stupid because of me.

That's what a job represents.  Being able to live without hocking myself off to marriage, and having enough security that I won't ever be tempted.

[Bauglir]

Oh, another thing, too. There are several jobs that the matter-creator can't obsolete for one reason or another. Anything where the product isn't something you'd expect to want, for instance. As just an arbitrary example, I've got a bit of amethyst here that I really, really like the look of. It cost me 35 cents. As far as grades of stones go, it's terrible. I doubt if anyone would ever have programmed a method for producing this particular piece, nor would I have thought to combine this particular shape with this particular color distribution or anything like that. Were it not for a shitty job (mining), it wouldn't exist. I do hope the people involved were paid well, but I'm still glad the work was done.

[RedKing]

Oh, another thing, too. There are several jobs that the matter-creator can't obsolete for one reason or another. Anything where the product isn't something you'd expect to want, for instance. As just an arbitrary example, I've got a bit of amethyst here that I really, really like the look of. It cost me 35 cents. As far as grades of stones go, it's terrible. I doubt if anyone would ever have programmed a method for producing this particular piece, nor would I have thought to combine this particular shape with this particular color distribution or anything like that. Were it not for a shitty job (mining), it wouldn't exist. I do hope the people involved were paid well, but I'm still glad the work was done.

In the workless future, you could thank the mining robots. Who would accept your thanks politely, hiding their contempt for you, you lazy flesh-bag.

[Bauglir]

In the workless future, you could thank the mining robots. Who would accept your thanks politely, hiding their contempt for you, you lazy flesh-bag.

The mining robots who would probably discard it as waste or designate it for use as an abrasive depending on their efficiency settings. It's the sort of thing I'd expect to find in an unsorted lot, which is basically how you (as a mine) can pass on the cost of sorting out the good stones from the mediocre ones to whoever you sell them to, at the risk of missing something spectacular that could fetch a very high price. It amounts to gambling, really, since I assume the expected return is higher for the mines this way, even if they occasionally miss something great. Mining robots could be easily adapted to do this sorting on-site, so there'd be no need for these sorts of shenanigans.

EDIT: It's important to note that I think I'm not enough to create a market here. If more people share my taste in mottled chips of crystal, that might be different, but ultimately what I'm trying to illustrate is that I have a taste for something that there's no reason to produce other than "Oh, it happened to be in the way of what we're actually going for."

ADDITIONAL EDIT: Oh, and it's something I didn't know I had a taste for in advance. That's more relevant. I couldn't have requested it of our hypothetical hypereconomy.

[Zrk2]

The reason people want jobs are so they can use their time to generate an income more efficiently. Money only has value because money is analogous with the time a human put in to produce goods of equal value to the money. Humans each only have so much time, and that is why money is desirable, because you can use it to commission others to use their time to provide goods or services to you more quickly than for you to do it yourself.

So people want a job is so they can get money more easily than if they tried to produce goods on their own time. It's more efficient to work for someone else than to make birdhouses or something because those birdhouses would earn them less money for the same time invested.

[Chunes]

Assuming a society based on eliminating as many jobs as it can, less and less workers actually work, which leads to less and less tax income which needs to be spent on more and more unemployed people. The state's wealth and capacity to do stuff goes down

Geez. It's not like we'd keep the same system we have now if our goal were to work fewer and fewer hours for a good standard of living. That'd be like wearing my fishing gear to a wrestling tournament. Unfortunately, it is clear that your goal is productivism.

[Agorp Stronden]

!!I thought we all!! knew.

[Calhoun]

Lordbucket seems to ignore the purpose of currency entirely. Or rather, the reason it exists.

Division of labor. If you want all of the amenities of the modern world than you can't do it all yourself. You work to provide an economic function, that you get payed for, so that you might, in turn, pay for other peoples services. Its as if you've never taken a basic economics course.

Your ideals are fine, but your methodology is entirely flawed.