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Not really sure why this was originally flagged (or this is possibly a dupe of the original post which was flagged?), but even though the comments that I've see

Not really sure why this was originally flagged (or this is possibly a dupe of the original post which was flagged?), but even though the comments that I've seen so far are giving it a negative spin I think there are quite a few important points in the article about the way in which our (I'm generalizing about the broad HN demographic) quite privileged lifestyles do have a concomitant cost for somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants. This ranges from everything like online shopping (I bought a pair of trainers yesterday on a Sunday afternoon, and they were shipped from the warehouse 2 hours later), to the people who are used in low-wage countries to make those trainers at a price I feel is 'affordable'. I'm reminded of a newspaper interview with a bank director here in Sweden a few years ago. She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home. The obvious implication to me was that it was other people's children she was talking about not her's. On the contrary, they would obviously be sitting in the back of the cab, on their way to their well-paid career in banking, just like their mother.

adamsiem 5y ago
I’ve been thinking a lot lately how structured development programs, in the US workplace versus university, are not as popular as they should be. Pipelines like this are less common for young people in the post-4HWW world, where people strive for independence versus collective success. The latter to be had via hard work and building.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  I agree but I also think focusing on collective success allows us to all benefit from the increase in productivity and all stop working so many hours. In an age of abundance and ever increasing productivity, the work week should be getting shorter, not longer.
disruptthelaw 5y ago
> our quite privileged lifestyles do have a concomitant cost for somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants. But it stands to reasons that those who service our needs are doing so because it’s better for them than the alternative. If there is a systemic problem which results in lack of viable alternatives then attack those systemic causes, but it’s not obvious to me how those of us who who benefit from these services are the main cause of this issue. This seems tantamount to blaming Oscar Schindler for underpaying his Jewish factory workers rather than seeing the bigger picture in why those workers were happy to take low paying factory work. You almost make it sound like the people who service our needs are forced to do so. It’s not like they’re giving up life of comfort and leisure because they’re forced to do our laundry.
- disruptthelaw 5y ago
  To clarify the Schindler analogy, I’m obviously not suggesting that we deserve medals for providing low paid work, just that the work we provide is not causing harm, on the contrary it’s a slight improvement on the alternative options for those who take the work.
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    If that were the case, I would expect the number of hours that people work would be going down, the conditions would be getting better and the pay would increase. There has been a lot of improvement in some parts of the world, especially some of the (formerly) worst, but a lot of workers are experiencing the opposite even while profits and productivity skyrocket.
    - disruptthelaw 5y ago
      I don’t follow, how does my claim imply that number of working hours would decrease or that conditions would increase? Those seem to be factors that fall outside of the specific forces we are discussing?
marcus_holmes 5y ago
Isn't this the dream of automation, though? That all those shitty jobs are replaced by robots, and the humans are left with only the interesting, creative, ones? Those old pictures of banks, where there were huge rooms full of 100's of clerks, all busy doing double-entry book-keeping. Now that's all done by computers and the clerks are doing something else, almost certainly something more interesting. The problem, of course, is that the benefits of automation are accruing to the owners. If Amazon manages to replace all their warehouse staff with robots, then the benefits go to the Amazon shareholders. Which is OK, because the shareholders funded the creation of the robots. But as a society, we need to spread this more. We need UBI.
- thendrill 5y ago
  Jobs are automated only and only if: If it increases yield by magnitudes while also improving quality by magnitudes. Example from the Pickle factory: You have 4 people putting and screwing lids on pickle jars. 4 people. 2000 Lids a day. With around 40 faulty lids. Lets say you pay those 4 20k a year: total 80k. An automation solution would cost you at least 400-500k. So unless this automation can do 20 000 lids a day and with only 10 faulty lids per day. Then Maybe it will be worth it. But most of the time it would not be automated.
  - altvali 5y ago
    That's implying that automation costs that much every year, or that you must get an ROI of 100%. Almost in all cases, automation has a high setup cost but a low maintenance cost.
    - thendrill 5y ago
      No no. What I meant was that, the automation usually costs around 15x-20x annual salaries of the workers, one time cost maintenance comes after . So unless you get MORE THAN 20x - 30x yield per year, no one is gonna care about automating the process.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    This is one reason why "knowledge worker" jobs like accounting and legal were the first to be disrupted by automation and AI. It's a heck of a lot cheaper and easier to automate manipulating a spreadsheet than it is to automate manipulating a pickle jar.
adolph 5y ago
> somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants Someone chooses to provide a service. > people who are used in low-wage countries Where wages would be lower without manufacturing like shoe making. > well-paid career in banking Here's hoping software eats that part of the world earlier.
- thendrill 5y ago
  "I usually just choose to not pay artists for music, software developers for games and software libraries, made some millions from an mobile game, using some suckers open source libraries and free assets. Also movies, I chose not to pay for those, you can get em free anyway. Also I get to keep more cash if I just don't pay licensing fees. I just found out that I don't have to pay taxes since I am making so much money not paying for all the other stuff, I just call it non profit. I mean it is not hard. Made my first million before I was 20 with only 80k initial funding from my dads emerald mine."
gruez 5y ago
>I bought a pair of trainers yesterday on a Sunday afternoon, and they were shipped from the warehouse 2 hours later That might be surprising when you expect shipping to only work business days, but is it really weird considering that most stores/restaurants are open sundays?
bnralt 5y ago
> I think there are quite a few important points in the article about the way in which our (I'm generalizing about the broad HN demographic) quite privileged lifestyles do have a concomitant cost for somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants. That's true, and I've thought about it a lot. But it's odd that the author writes about this and yet can't see how they (and most people in developed countries) are part of the privileged consumer class as well. The author includes themselves as a member of the normal working masses that provide for 4 hour week workers: > Their authors are so far removed from the reality of normal people, they don’t even see us anymore. But the author isn't harvesting bananas or sewing clothes in a factory, they are a writer and editor. This isn't to say they don't suffer. Or, for that matter, that people who work 4 hours a week don't suffer. But if we're simply looking at who consumes more than they produce, then the net would be much wider than what they're casting and include many of the people they're advocating for (such as people in the west who work in restaurants or coffee shops).
- bjourne 5y ago
  Why does it matter if she is a part of the privileged consumer class or not? It doesn't affect the quality of her arguments, does it? I checked out her profile and one of her posts implies that she is a teacher: https://jessicalexicus.medium.com/nobody-will-ever-give-a-flying-f-ck-what-teachers-think-so-heres-some-photos-of-women-bathing-f1aaa4335b95 https://jessicalexicus.medium.com/nobody-will-ever-give-a-fl... I couldn't find much other information about her and Jessica Wildfire is obviously a pen name. I think you are quite incorrect in claiming that she is in the same class as people earning $70,000/month.
- akvadrako 5y ago
  It sounded to me like she was saying she's part of the privileged class.
CydeWeys 5y ago
> She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home. This just sounds so staggeringly inefficient. A person doing one full-time job well is gonna easily beat out many people doing that job part-time (and thus poorly). Plus, think of all the extra unnecessary commuting that comes with doing lots of little jobs spread throughout the day vs just the one job. I don't know how anyone can seriously advocate that this state of the world would be an improvement for anyone, except possibly the employers.
- whiddershins 5y ago
  What about boredom, and the advantages of being less beholden to a single source of income?
  - bluGill 5y ago
    It is called a mid-life crisis in popular culture. Many people do get bored and switch to a new job track once or twice in their life. They in general do worse overall monetarily (there are other factors that might be important) than someone who focuses, but it isn't unheard of to do this. If your single source of income is a good choice, the experience of doing it for years makes you much better at it than a jack-of-all-trades who can do anything but none of them well. You need to make the right choice for your situation. Don't knock someone else for making a different choice.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    What if they don't like the color of their uniforms? In this world, there are first-order effects, second-order effects, and a further deep hierarchy. Estimating which is which is a useful skill.
- bluGill 5y ago
  It will be worse for the employers than anyone else. McDonald's can train anyone to flip a burger, but if they are only getting 2 hours of work from someone they are net negative as the person training could do the job. With just a little experience though the new person can flip burgers on his own leaving the trainer to do some other station. The same for every other job - you are either hiring someone who already has the experience to do the job right, or you are hiring someone for long enough that the time spent teaching them to do the job is paid off by all the work they do after they learn how to do it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pjc50 5y ago
> somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants What I think this discussion often overlooks is the large class of people - a third of society and rising, in the West - who aren't working and instead have their needs and wants serviced by other people because they are retired. Now, obviously retirement isn't a hard cutoff, and retirement in general is getting later, but more and more work will be done in future for the retired rather than by themselves directly. A lot of this is currently done unpaid by their family members. The other distortion here is that retired people are more likely to be property owners.
Mordisquitos 5y ago
>She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home. The obvious implication to me was that it was other people's children she was talking about not her's. You make a very good point here. All this positive spin on "the gig economy" seems to completely gloss over on who on Earth are supposed to be "the gig customers" in this new paradigm, and where they will source their income. Is it gigs all the way down? While I am not particularly fond of capitalism as an ownership model (but I am generally in favour of free markets, I'm not anti-capitalist, just capitalism-sceptic), if there is one good thing about a clear dividing line between entrepreneurship and hired labour is a division of risks and rewards. Entrepreneurship is for betting on a big reward, while accepting big risks and taking responsibility for them. Labour on the other hand is for prioritising stability and taking less responsibility, while sacrificing the chance of a big reward. Somehow the gig economy is selling the worst of both worlds: take all the risk and responsibility, but with no chance to make it big.
baryphonic 5y ago
> I'm reminded of a newspaper interview with a bank director here in Sweden a few years ago. She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home. The obvious implication to me was that it was other people's children she was talking about not her's. On the contrary, they would obviously be sitting in the back of the cab, on their way to their well-paid career in banking, just like their mother. I sometimes question whether finance people (particularly those in intermediary institutions like banks) in general have the knowledge to understand how organizations actually operate. They seem to derive most beliefs about organizations from accounting statements, but don't seem to know much about "human resources," operations, organizational structure, management. Even areas like organizational strategy and legal compliance seem a bit out of reach. All of this is to say, from an accounting statement and naïve extrapolation point of view, maybe her prediction makes sense; when considering all of the other myriad factors that must be reckoned with across all organizations, I'm more skeptical.
jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
> our (I'm generalizing about the broad HN demographic) quite privileged lifestyles do have a concomitant cost for somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants. This has nothing to do with the 4HWW though. The average software engineer working full time and spending most of their paycheck has just as much dependence on the labor of others to satisfy their needs. I feel like normal people working normal jobs tend to not get called out for the simple fact that they are normal. It's a median bias.
erezsh 5y ago
Might be because it contains overt racism? Although I guess we've grown desensitized to that these days.

adamsiem 5y ago

I’ve been thinking a lot lately how structured development programs, in the US workplace versus university, are not as popular as they should be. Pipelines like this are less common for young people in the post-4HWW world, where people strive for independence versus collective success. The latter to be had via hard work and building.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
SyzygistSix 5y ago
I agree but I also think focusing on collective success allows us to all benefit from the increase in productivity and all stop working so many hours. In an age of abundance and ever increasing productivity, the work week should be getting shorter, not longer.

disruptthelaw 5y ago

> our quite privileged lifestyles do have a concomitant cost for somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants. But it stands to reasons that those who service our needs are doing so because it’s better for them than the alternative. If there is a systemic problem which results in lack of viable alternatives then attack those systemic causes, but it’s not obvious to me how those of us who who benefit from these services are the main cause of this issue. This seems tantamount to blaming Oscar Schindler for underpaying his Jewish factory workers rather than seeing the bigger picture in why those workers were happy to take low paying factory work. You almost make it sound like the people who service our needs are forced to do so. It’s not like they’re giving up life of comfort and leisure because they’re forced to do our laundry.

disruptthelaw 5y ago
To clarify the Schindler analogy, I’m obviously not suggesting that we deserve medals for providing low paid work, just that the work we provide is not causing harm, on the contrary it’s a slight improvement on the alternative options for those who take the work.
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  If that were the case, I would expect the number of hours that people work would be going down, the conditions would be getting better and the pay would increase. There has been a lot of improvement in some parts of the world, especially some of the (formerly) worst, but a lot of workers are experiencing the opposite even while profits and productivity skyrocket.
  - disruptthelaw 5y ago
    I don’t follow, how does my claim imply that number of working hours would decrease or that conditions would increase? Those seem to be factors that fall outside of the specific forces we are discussing?

marcus_holmes 5y ago

Isn't this the dream of automation, though? That all those shitty jobs are replaced by robots, and the humans are left with only the interesting, creative, ones? Those old pictures of banks, where there were huge rooms full of 100's of clerks, all busy doing double-entry book-keeping. Now that's all done by computers and the clerks are doing something else, almost certainly something more interesting. The problem, of course, is that the benefits of automation are accruing to the owners. If Amazon manages to replace all their warehouse staff with robots, then the benefits go to the Amazon shareholders. Which is OK, because the shareholders funded the creation of the robots. But as a society, we need to spread this more. We need UBI.

thendrill 5y ago
Jobs are automated only and only if: If it increases yield by magnitudes while also improving quality by magnitudes. Example from the Pickle factory: You have 4 people putting and screwing lids on pickle jars. 4 people. 2000 Lids a day. With around 40 faulty lids. Lets say you pay those 4 20k a year: total 80k. An automation solution would cost you at least 400-500k. So unless this automation can do 20 000 lids a day and with only 10 faulty lids per day. Then Maybe it will be worth it. But most of the time it would not be automated.
- altvali 5y ago
  That's implying that automation costs that much every year, or that you must get an ROI of 100%. Almost in all cases, automation has a high setup cost but a low maintenance cost.
  - thendrill 5y ago
    No no. What I meant was that, the automation usually costs around 15x-20x annual salaries of the workers, one time cost maintenance comes after . So unless you get MORE THAN 20x - 30x yield per year, no one is gonna care about automating the process.
- onion2k 5y ago
  This is one reason why "knowledge worker" jobs like accounting and legal were the first to be disrupted by automation and AI. It's a heck of a lot cheaper and easier to automate manipulating a spreadsheet than it is to automate manipulating a pickle jar.

adolph 5y ago

> somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants Someone chooses to provide a service. > people who are used in low-wage countries Where wages would be lower without manufacturing like shoe making. > well-paid career in banking Here's hoping software eats that part of the world earlier.

thendrill 5y ago
"I usually just choose to not pay artists for music, software developers for games and software libraries, made some millions from an mobile game, using some suckers open source libraries and free assets. Also movies, I chose not to pay for those, you can get em free anyway. Also I get to keep more cash if I just don't pay licensing fees. I just found out that I don't have to pay taxes since I am making so much money not paying for all the other stuff, I just call it non profit. I mean it is not hard. Made my first million before I was 20 with only 80k initial funding from my dads emerald mine."

gruez 5y ago

>I bought a pair of trainers yesterday on a Sunday afternoon, and they were shipped from the warehouse 2 hours later That might be surprising when you expect shipping to only work business days, but is it really weird considering that most stores/restaurants are open sundays?

bnralt 5y ago

> I think there are quite a few important points in the article about the way in which our (I'm generalizing about the broad HN demographic) quite privileged lifestyles do have a concomitant cost for somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants. That's true, and I've thought about it a lot. But it's odd that the author writes about this and yet can't see how they (and most people in developed countries) are part of the privileged consumer class as well. The author includes themselves as a member of the normal working masses that provide for 4 hour week workers: > Their authors are so far removed from the reality of normal people, they don’t even see us anymore. But the author isn't harvesting bananas or sewing clothes in a factory, they are a writer and editor. This isn't to say they don't suffer. Or, for that matter, that people who work 4 hours a week don't suffer. But if we're simply looking at who consumes more than they produce, then the net would be much wider than what they're casting and include many of the people they're advocating for (such as people in the west who work in restaurants or coffee shops).

bjourne 5y ago
Why does it matter if she is a part of the privileged consumer class or not? It doesn't affect the quality of her arguments, does it? I checked out her profile and one of her posts implies that she is a teacher: https://jessicalexicus.medium.com/nobody-will-ever-give-a-flying-f-ck-what-teachers-think-so-heres-some-photos-of-women-bathing-f1aaa4335b95 https://jessicalexicus.medium.com/nobody-will-ever-give-a-fl... I couldn't find much other information about her and Jessica Wildfire is obviously a pen name. I think you are quite incorrect in claiming that she is in the same class as people earning $70,000/month.
akvadrako 5y ago
It sounded to me like she was saying she's part of the privileged class.

CydeWeys 5y ago

whiddershins 5y ago
What about boredom, and the advantages of being less beholden to a single source of income?
- bluGill 5y ago
  It is called a mid-life crisis in popular culture. Many people do get bored and switch to a new job track once or twice in their life. They in general do worse overall monetarily (there are other factors that might be important) than someone who focuses, but it isn't unheard of to do this. If your single source of income is a good choice, the experience of doing it for years makes you much better at it than a jack-of-all-trades who can do anything but none of them well. You need to make the right choice for your situation. Don't knock someone else for making a different choice.
- mcguire 5y ago
  What if they don't like the color of their uniforms? In this world, there are first-order effects, second-order effects, and a further deep hierarchy. Estimating which is which is a useful skill.
bluGill 5y ago
It will be worse for the employers than anyone else. McDonald's can train anyone to flip a burger, but if they are only getting 2 hours of work from someone they are net negative as the person training could do the job. With just a little experience though the new person can flip burgers on his own leaving the trainer to do some other station. The same for every other job - you are either hiring someone who already has the experience to do the job right, or you are hiring someone for long enough that the time spent teaching them to do the job is paid off by all the work they do after they learn how to do it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pjc50 5y ago

> somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants What I think this discussion often overlooks is the large class of people - a third of society and rising, in the West - who aren't working and instead have their needs and wants serviced by other people because they are retired. Now, obviously retirement isn't a hard cutoff, and retirement in general is getting later, but more and more work will be done in future for the retired rather than by themselves directly. A lot of this is currently done unpaid by their family members. The other distortion here is that retired people are more likely to be property owners.

Mordisquitos 5y ago

>She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home. The obvious implication to me was that it was other people's children she was talking about not her's. You make a very good point here. All this positive spin on "the gig economy" seems to completely gloss over on who on Earth are supposed to be "the gig customers" in this new paradigm, and where they will source their income. Is it gigs all the way down? While I am not particularly fond of capitalism as an ownership model (but I am generally in favour of free markets, I'm not anti-capitalist, just capitalism-sceptic), if there is one good thing about a clear dividing line between entrepreneurship and hired labour is a division of risks and rewards. Entrepreneurship is for betting on a big reward, while accepting big risks and taking responsibility for them. Labour on the other hand is for prioritising stability and taking less responsibility, while sacrificing the chance of a big reward. Somehow the gig economy is selling the worst of both worlds: take all the risk and responsibility, but with no chance to make it big.

baryphonic 5y ago

> I'm reminded of a newspaper interview with a bank director here in Sweden a few years ago. She spoke at length about how we should accept that our children won't have regular jobs - they would have a few 'gig' employments: driving a cab a few days each week before stocking shelves in the evening and maybe working part-time at an old-people's home. The obvious implication to me was that it was other people's children she was talking about not her's. On the contrary, they would obviously be sitting in the back of the cab, on their way to their well-paid career in banking, just like their mother. I sometimes question whether finance people (particularly those in intermediary institutions like banks) in general have the knowledge to understand how organizations actually operate. They seem to derive most beliefs about organizations from accounting statements, but don't seem to know much about "human resources," operations, organizational structure, management. Even areas like organizational strategy and legal compliance seem a bit out of reach. All of this is to say, from an accounting statement and naïve extrapolation point of view, maybe her prediction makes sense; when considering all of the other myriad factors that must be reckoned with across all organizations, I'm more skeptical.

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago

> our (I'm generalizing about the broad HN demographic) quite privileged lifestyles do have a concomitant cost for somebody who needs to service our day-to-day needs and wants. This has nothing to do with the 4HWW though. The average software engineer working full time and spending most of their paycheck has just as much dependence on the labor of others to satisfy their needs. I feel like normal people working normal jobs tend to not get called out for the simple fact that they are normal. It's a median bias.

erezsh 5y ago

Might be because it contains overt racism? Although I guess we've grown desensitized to that these days.