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You can tell who was born with a silver spoon in their mouth by their response to this. The "why can't we just make all jobs great forever" responses crack me u

You can tell who was born with a silver spoon in their mouth by their response to this. The "why can't we just make all jobs great forever" responses crack me up. It's classic virtue signalling by liberal elites: demand that life be a perfect fantasy land for everyone, then put forward zero realistic proposals to achieve it. Doesn't matter that it will never happen because you've already gained your social capital with your circle of people who think and act just like you. It seems to me like it used to be a lot more common for people to take up a "shitty" (e.g., low paying, menial, and hard) job when they were young, to help pay their way through school, for some extra pocket money, etc. You would do this during the summers, or part-time, or both. This was just considered an ordinary part of life and a character building experience. It seems like this experience is a lot less common now. In part because we're coddling our children and our young adults (hard work increasingly seems to be a dirty word and something no one should ever have to do), in part because we're handing off all the worst jobs to illegal immigrant labor. I'm sure this will prompt some "ok boomer" type responses (I'm not that old btw) but that's just how it was when and where I grew up. I was expected to work and make money as soon as I was able, because my family wasn't rich. They were also super clear with me that there was no free rent after I turned 18, and that if I wanted to go to college I needed to pay for it myself. So this fantasy land "we'll have only perfect jobs for everyone and work will always be a fulfilling endeavor" crap does not connect with me and I suspect does not connect with 90% of Americans. It is popular with techno-fantasists who went to Stanford and work in SV and drink the kool-aid from their employer about how they are changing the world by optimizing the profitability of some billionaire's advertising inventory. (None of this is to suggest that Cierra Brown's situation is fine and we don't need to change anything about the system btw! Biggest practical issues I saw in that article were that she doesn't have healthcare and she walks away from 2 weeks of work with only $215, something is very wrong there.)

Spooky23 7y ago
It is funny that the dog whistle for conservatism these days are the immigrants whom are supposedly taking peoples jobs. When the Reagan administration changed the regulations around meatpacking to break the unions and ship the industry back to 1910 standards to rural places, none of the principled conservatives were complaining about cheap meat packing and illegal workers who didn’t collect workers compensation or have pesky demands for health insurance. Likewise, none of the large apple growers around me were too concerned about guest worker visas when they were able to hire on Jamaicans for a few months, house them in onsite dormitories and pay below market rates. They love to bitch about Mexican construction guys though. When I worked in the mall in the 90s, the struggle of unskilled workers was obvious and sad. At that time, most workers made $4.25, and the barrier to moving up for folks not in college was a car. Getting a $12/hr job as a line cook at Pizza Uno or $15/hr job cleaning offices meant freedom for those people. If labor standards didn’t allow the abysmal working conditions that only desperate Latin American or other immigrants are willing to take, the market would take care of that problem. Instead of shipping in Apple pickers from 4,000 miles away, you could hire folks 10 miles away and bus them in.
- apatters 7y ago
  > It is funny that the dog whistle for conservatism these days are the immigrants whom are supposedly taking peoples jobs. You have this backwards. My point wasn't that immigrants are taking American jobs, it was that Americans are giving them these jobs because Americans are being lazy, soft and cheap. The immigrant is not at fault. It seems like you're responding to Fox News talking points, not to me. I would suggest doing that on foxnews.com. At no point did I suggest that better labor standards are a bad idea, but I did observe that anyone who thinks society will eliminate all the jobs Hacker News perceives as shitty is drinking a lot of kool-aid.
  - distances 7y ago
    > You have this backwards. My point wasn't that immigrants are taking American jobs, it was that Americans are giving them these jobs because Americans are being lazy, soft and cheap. Don't blame the American who doesn't want to do back-breaking work for pennies. It's the same everywhere: for example, Finland imports seasonal berry pickers from Thailand. No sane local wants to work on the rates the market is willing to pay; mechanised agriculture has pushed the prices low enough to make manual agricultural work simply unsustainable. To make local work profitable we'd need to radically raise the product prices or provide subsidies.
    - apatters 7y ago
      To the extent that America is still a representative democracy, Americans are responsible for importing workers who have limited rights and no representation (they can't vote, they can't contact law enforcement for help, etc). These problems can be solved in other ways. A real world solution probably involves some workers getting paid less than they would like, and some businesses paying higher wages than they want to. The least moral solution is to develop an illegal underclass and deny them human and political rights. This sort of thing is cancerous for a democracy and bears an unsettling resemblance to one of America's original sins, one which I'm sure I don't need to name directly, but which we knew was wrong from day one, and which we spent a lot of blood and treasure to abolish.
cixter 7y ago
I'm suspecting that you're picking up the wrong attitude here. We're not saying that all jobs should be chill and easy and "great forever". We're saying that they should be compensated properly. As a CS engineer, I'm fine with my salary being close to that of a less educated person, if his job is really hard and physically taxing.

Spooky23 7y ago

It is funny that the dog whistle for conservatism these days are the immigrants whom are supposedly taking peoples jobs. When the Reagan administration changed the regulations around meatpacking to break the unions and ship the industry back to 1910 standards to rural places, none of the principled conservatives were complaining about cheap meat packing and illegal workers who didn’t collect workers compensation or have pesky demands for health insurance. Likewise, none of the large apple growers around me were too concerned about guest worker visas when they were able to hire on Jamaicans for a few months, house them in onsite dormitories and pay below market rates. They love to bitch about Mexican construction guys though. When I worked in the mall in the 90s, the struggle of unskilled workers was obvious and sad. At that time, most workers made $4.25, and the barrier to moving up for folks not in college was a car. Getting a $12/hr job as a line cook at Pizza Uno or $15/hr job cleaning offices meant freedom for those people. If labor standards didn’t allow the abysmal working conditions that only desperate Latin American or other immigrants are willing to take, the market would take care of that problem. Instead of shipping in Apple pickers from 4,000 miles away, you could hire folks 10 miles away and bus them in.

apatters 7y ago
> It is funny that the dog whistle for conservatism these days are the immigrants whom are supposedly taking peoples jobs. You have this backwards. My point wasn't that immigrants are taking American jobs, it was that Americans are giving them these jobs because Americans are being lazy, soft and cheap. The immigrant is not at fault. It seems like you're responding to Fox News talking points, not to me. I would suggest doing that on foxnews.com. At no point did I suggest that better labor standards are a bad idea, but I did observe that anyone who thinks society will eliminate all the jobs Hacker News perceives as shitty is drinking a lot of kool-aid.
- distances 7y ago
  > You have this backwards. My point wasn't that immigrants are taking American jobs, it was that Americans are giving them these jobs because Americans are being lazy, soft and cheap. Don't blame the American who doesn't want to do back-breaking work for pennies. It's the same everywhere: for example, Finland imports seasonal berry pickers from Thailand. No sane local wants to work on the rates the market is willing to pay; mechanised agriculture has pushed the prices low enough to make manual agricultural work simply unsustainable. To make local work profitable we'd need to radically raise the product prices or provide subsidies.
  - apatters 7y ago
    To the extent that America is still a representative democracy, Americans are responsible for importing workers who have limited rights and no representation (they can't vote, they can't contact law enforcement for help, etc). These problems can be solved in other ways. A real world solution probably involves some workers getting paid less than they would like, and some businesses paying higher wages than they want to. The least moral solution is to develop an illegal underclass and deny them human and political rights. This sort of thing is cancerous for a democracy and bears an unsettling resemblance to one of America's original sins, one which I'm sure I don't need to name directly, but which we knew was wrong from day one, and which we spent a lot of blood and treasure to abolish.

cixter 7y ago

I'm suspecting that you're picking up the wrong attitude here. We're not saying that all jobs should be chill and easy and "great forever". We're saying that they should be compensated properly. As a CS engineer, I'm fine with my salary being close to that of a less educated person, if his job is really hard and physically taxing.