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> Most jobs are bullshit jobs. This has been true for hundreds of years though. It's been shown time and time again that some kind of automation breakthrough e

by MSM 8y ago

> Most jobs are bullshit jobs. This has been true for hundreds of years though. It's been shown time and time again that some kind of automation breakthrough eliminates jobs but people need work so new jobs are created. Engines were created to eliminate tons of manual labor jobs, we had looms, mills, automated mining, printing changes, etc. and here we are still working. Five years ago we started to automate the food service industry. Now instead of driving to McDonald's to get a burger made by a human we can call up Uber Eats to have a human go get us a burger that was made by a robot. Is it a bullshit task? Maybe, but I can't see how one day we'll wake up and all of a sudden there will be no jobs.

dv_dt 8y ago
It's been true for hundreds of years, but we live in a civilization with higher expectations of stability now. People struggled but living conditions - and stability improved over those hundreds of years. But if you look at the overall stats, we are going in reverse on stability. More and more people are falling out of a middle class existence - will there be more jobs yes. Will there be as many, allowing a higher than subsistence living? That is very unclear even now before even more automation comes.
- harryh 8y ago
  More and more people are falling out of a middle class existence Um, no. This is wrong. Living standards around the world are improving like they never have in human history.
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    I think what we are seeing is world wide there is improvement, but our economic system has a non-uniform performance depending on the state of the region. In a relatively undeveloped area, expansion into basically non-serviced markets is efficient and an improvement. In a relatively developed area (e.g. the US and many first world nations), it is failing. In the US for example, life expectancy has dropped three years running. More and more people fall to a median income that doesn't even let them have kids and send them to college, and seems to be falling to where they can't even pay for minor emergencies. That's not improvement.
    - harryh 8y ago
      Yes, the opiate addiction is a temporary setback, but improvement is almost never monatomic in every population subset. Worldwide life expectancy continues to rise at a pretty good pace.
      - dv_dt 8y ago
        I don't think you can blame opiate addiction alone. (Sorry I was adding to the text while you were replying).
        harryh 8y ago
        'eh sure. It's just the most obvious culprit when there are surely many causes. Regardless, I stick by my overall point. It's a temporary setback in an otherwise very strongly positive trend. I'd bet money that US life expectancy in 2023 is hither than it was in 2018.
    - dpark 8y ago
      > In the US for example, life expectancy has dropped three years running. Largely due to obesity and related diseases. People are dying from overabundance. The percentage of people at "subsistence" levels is quite low. > More and more people fall to a median income that doesn't even let them have kids and send them to college, and seems to be falling to where they can't even pay for minor emergencies. That's not improvement. Is this at all true? Paying for your kids' college simply wasn't something most people did even 30 years ago, because most kids didn't go to college.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > Largely due to obesity and related diseases No, the decline is due primarily to drug overdoses, and that mainly from the opioid epidemic. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/28/us-life-expectancy-drops-as-opioid-deaths-and-suicide-rates-rise.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/28/us-life-expectancy-drops-as-...
  - vkou 8y ago
    The three guys that are sleeping rough in a two-block radius around my apartment - they give zero shits that living standards in Kenya, or Shenzhen have improved 300% over the past 20 years. Or that you can store 64 GB of data on a card the size of a bottle cap. What they care about is that rent in this city has gone up ~50% in the last six years, their incomes haven't, and they went from having a home, to wrapping themselves in dirty blankets, and sleeping by the garbage bins in the back alley.
    - harryh 8y ago
      Yes, restrictive building codes that prevent construction of sufficient housing in major cities are a real problem (some days I think literally the biggest problem) in the US. We should really fix that.
      - NorthOf33rd 8y ago
        Do you mean code or zoning? Code is about safety, zoning is about... well, historically many things, some good, many bad.
        harryh 8y ago
        Er ya, zoning. My bad. Thanks for the correction.
      - vkou 8y ago
        My city is going through an unprecedented amount of construction. 'Restrictive building codes' aren't the problem. Vacancy rates are higher then they've been since the recession... Yet rents are climbing 5-15% yoy.
        harryh 8y ago
        What city? Restrictive zoning is definitely a huge problem when it comes to affordable housing in a great many American cities. I guess I can't say it's universal though.
  - zjaffee 8y ago
    Middle class by definition means that people are able to save and build up assets such that by the end of their career they can comfortably retire and pass down some wealth to their children. i.e. they make money from both capital and labor. Just because peoples standards of living are rising, it's happening in a way that is keeping them a part of the working class who is entirely sustained their whole life by making money from labor and never capital.
lotsofpulp 8y ago
However, I can see one day where there are sufficiently few jobs such that I won’t be able to negotiate paid time off or enough income for healthcare or a predictable work schedule unless I am born to the right parents and receive the right education. That time is now.
leesec 8y ago
Technology is exploding at a pace we've never seen before. Sure there will be a lot of new jobs, but we're on the verge of being able to wipe out entire industries. It will be like the industrial revolution except much much faster and even greater impact.
- harryh 8y ago
  I hope so! The industrial revolution was responsible for a greater increase in human wealth than almost any other even in human history. We are all tremendously better off getting to live after it instead of before it.
  - zwkrt 8y ago
    It's living during it that is the tumultuous part. There was an article posted here recently arguing that luddites were not irrational, they were out of a job with no recourse. It might be that every few hundred years we need to totally shit on a generation to make the future a better place, but being that generation is rather bad luck.
- ashelmire 8y ago
  We’ve been working on eliminating retail workers entirely. We’ve run into snags though; machines are poorly designed, difficult to modify, etc, which keeps humans working. One day it might seem like it happened overnight but we’ve been working on this for decades. We’ve been working on self driving cars and drones for decades too. Maybe we’ll actually finish self driving cars. Maybe we won’t. If we do, that’s a lot of jobs lost.
coliveira 8y ago
One of the reasons is that we live is a class-based society. Americans, for example, think it is Ok for Mexicans to cook their food for close to nothing, and having African Americans clean for them for minimum wage. Of course, there is no reason why these people should make close to nothing while other people throughout the economy have bullshit jobs that pay really well. If we removed artificial classes in society, everybody should at this point been working very little (2 to 3 hours a day) and making good salaries to maintain a consumption-based economy.
- njarboe 8y ago
  I don't think most people who pay for someone to do something for them are that concerned on the race of the person doing it for them. And wouldn't that be a race-based society, not class based?
- pathseeker 8y ago
  >Americans, for example, think it is Ok for Mexicans to cook their food for close to nothing, and having African Americans clean for them for minimum wage. Where do you come up with this racist crap? As someone who grew up in a poor white area in the North of the US I can assure you that race has absolutely nothing to do with lack of low-paying jobs concern. >Of course, there is no reason why these people should make close to nothing while other people throughout the economy have bullshit jobs that pay really well. Supply and demand. It's economics 101. It's like claiming that there is no reason people should be paying over a thousand dollars for an ounce of gold when copper is only a couple of dollars a pound. If the people with low paying jobs were qualified to do the higher paying job, the employer would happily hire them for a lower price to save money.
  - zjaffee 8y ago
    Organizing the price of labor around supply and demand is a choice that our society has made that comes with tons of perverse incentives such as organizing to make it more difficult for people to enter an industry. This is especially true because if you don't work, you'll almost certainly be homeless, hungry, ect so the entire premise of there being a fair market for labor is false.
hoaw 8y ago
I really can't agree though. There are a lot of people not having a particularity good time working low wage jobs without a future. Whether you want to say that this is the same, or even better than, before or not it certainly isn't a good situation. Any sort of economic downturn, even in prosperous countries, are going to be brutal. Just because jobs don't disappear doesn't mean they don't get worse. But it isn't in absolutes. It might mean that instead of being in poverty once in your life now it is three times.

by MSM 8y ago

dv_dt 8y ago

It's been true for hundreds of years, but we live in a civilization with higher expectations of stability now. People struggled but living conditions - and stability improved over those hundreds of years. But if you look at the overall stats, we are going in reverse on stability. More and more people are falling out of a middle class existence - will there be more jobs yes. Will there be as many, allowing a higher than subsistence living? That is very unclear even now before even more automation comes.

harryh 8y ago
More and more people are falling out of a middle class existence Um, no. This is wrong. Living standards around the world are improving like they never have in human history.
- dv_dt 8y ago
  I think what we are seeing is world wide there is improvement, but our economic system has a non-uniform performance depending on the state of the region. In a relatively undeveloped area, expansion into basically non-serviced markets is efficient and an improvement. In a relatively developed area (e.g. the US and many first world nations), it is failing. In the US for example, life expectancy has dropped three years running. More and more people fall to a median income that doesn't even let them have kids and send them to college, and seems to be falling to where they can't even pay for minor emergencies. That's not improvement.
  - harryh 8y ago
    Yes, the opiate addiction is a temporary setback, but improvement is almost never monatomic in every population subset. Worldwide life expectancy continues to rise at a pretty good pace.
    - dv_dt 8y ago
      I don't think you can blame opiate addiction alone. (Sorry I was adding to the text while you were replying).
      - harryh 8y ago
        'eh sure. It's just the most obvious culprit when there are surely many causes. Regardless, I stick by my overall point. It's a temporary setback in an otherwise very strongly positive trend. I'd bet money that US life expectancy in 2023 is hither than it was in 2018.
  - dpark 8y ago
    > In the US for example, life expectancy has dropped three years running. Largely due to obesity and related diseases. People are dying from overabundance. The percentage of people at "subsistence" levels is quite low. > More and more people fall to a median income that doesn't even let them have kids and send them to college, and seems to be falling to where they can't even pay for minor emergencies. That's not improvement. Is this at all true? Paying for your kids' college simply wasn't something most people did even 30 years ago, because most kids didn't go to college.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Largely due to obesity and related diseases No, the decline is due primarily to drug overdoses, and that mainly from the opioid epidemic. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/28/us-life-expectancy-drops-as-opioid-deaths-and-suicide-rates-rise.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/28/us-life-expectancy-drops-as-...
- vkou 8y ago
  The three guys that are sleeping rough in a two-block radius around my apartment - they give zero shits that living standards in Kenya, or Shenzhen have improved 300% over the past 20 years. Or that you can store 64 GB of data on a card the size of a bottle cap. What they care about is that rent in this city has gone up ~50% in the last six years, their incomes haven't, and they went from having a home, to wrapping themselves in dirty blankets, and sleeping by the garbage bins in the back alley.
  - harryh 8y ago
    Yes, restrictive building codes that prevent construction of sufficient housing in major cities are a real problem (some days I think literally the biggest problem) in the US. We should really fix that.
    - NorthOf33rd 8y ago
      Do you mean code or zoning? Code is about safety, zoning is about... well, historically many things, some good, many bad.
      - harryh 8y ago
        Er ya, zoning. My bad. Thanks for the correction.
    - vkou 8y ago
      My city is going through an unprecedented amount of construction. 'Restrictive building codes' aren't the problem. Vacancy rates are higher then they've been since the recession... Yet rents are climbing 5-15% yoy.
      - harryh 8y ago
        What city? Restrictive zoning is definitely a huge problem when it comes to affordable housing in a great many American cities. I guess I can't say it's universal though.
- zjaffee 8y ago
  Middle class by definition means that people are able to save and build up assets such that by the end of their career they can comfortably retire and pass down some wealth to their children. i.e. they make money from both capital and labor. Just because peoples standards of living are rising, it's happening in a way that is keeping them a part of the working class who is entirely sustained their whole life by making money from labor and never capital.

lotsofpulp 8y ago

However, I can see one day where there are sufficiently few jobs such that I won’t be able to negotiate paid time off or enough income for healthcare or a predictable work schedule unless I am born to the right parents and receive the right education. That time is now.

leesec 8y ago

Technology is exploding at a pace we've never seen before. Sure there will be a lot of new jobs, but we're on the verge of being able to wipe out entire industries. It will be like the industrial revolution except much much faster and even greater impact.

harryh 8y ago
I hope so! The industrial revolution was responsible for a greater increase in human wealth than almost any other even in human history. We are all tremendously better off getting to live after it instead of before it.
- zwkrt 8y ago
  It's living during it that is the tumultuous part. There was an article posted here recently arguing that luddites were not irrational, they were out of a job with no recourse. It might be that every few hundred years we need to totally shit on a generation to make the future a better place, but being that generation is rather bad luck.
ashelmire 8y ago
We’ve been working on eliminating retail workers entirely. We’ve run into snags though; machines are poorly designed, difficult to modify, etc, which keeps humans working. One day it might seem like it happened overnight but we’ve been working on this for decades. We’ve been working on self driving cars and drones for decades too. Maybe we’ll actually finish self driving cars. Maybe we won’t. If we do, that’s a lot of jobs lost.

coliveira 8y ago

One of the reasons is that we live is a class-based society. Americans, for example, think it is Ok for Mexicans to cook their food for close to nothing, and having African Americans clean for them for minimum wage. Of course, there is no reason why these people should make close to nothing while other people throughout the economy have bullshit jobs that pay really well. If we removed artificial classes in society, everybody should at this point been working very little (2 to 3 hours a day) and making good salaries to maintain a consumption-based economy.

njarboe 8y ago
I don't think most people who pay for someone to do something for them are that concerned on the race of the person doing it for them. And wouldn't that be a race-based society, not class based?
pathseeker 8y ago
>Americans, for example, think it is Ok for Mexicans to cook their food for close to nothing, and having African Americans clean for them for minimum wage. Where do you come up with this racist crap? As someone who grew up in a poor white area in the North of the US I can assure you that race has absolutely nothing to do with lack of low-paying jobs concern. >Of course, there is no reason why these people should make close to nothing while other people throughout the economy have bullshit jobs that pay really well. Supply and demand. It's economics 101. It's like claiming that there is no reason people should be paying over a thousand dollars for an ounce of gold when copper is only a couple of dollars a pound. If the people with low paying jobs were qualified to do the higher paying job, the employer would happily hire them for a lower price to save money.
- zjaffee 8y ago
  Organizing the price of labor around supply and demand is a choice that our society has made that comes with tons of perverse incentives such as organizing to make it more difficult for people to enter an industry. This is especially true because if you don't work, you'll almost certainly be homeless, hungry, ect so the entire premise of there being a fair market for labor is false.

hoaw 8y ago

I really can't agree though. There are a lot of people not having a particularity good time working low wage jobs without a future. Whether you want to say that this is the same, or even better than, before or not it certainly isn't a good situation. Any sort of economic downturn, even in prosperous countries, are going to be brutal. Just because jobs don't disappear doesn't mean they don't get worse. But it isn't in absolutes. It might mean that instead of being in poverty once in your life now it is three times.