12 ms·

If I could make the kind of money I make in software doing some kind of hands on manual labor I'd be all over it, honestly. Or maybe I'm just romanticizing.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
It's been 100 degrees here for a month. I wouldn't want any kind of an outdoor job here right now, not for any amount of money.
- quacked 5y ago
  But you still think that someone should do outdoor jobs where you live. Why them and not you? Their jobs are open to you, but your job is not open to them. How do you reconcile expecting the rewards of other people's labor if you wouldn't be willing to do the same labor yourself?
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    How am I "expecting the rewards of their labor"? And, reversing your logic: If my job is not open to them (presumably because they don't have the skills), and I do their job, who's going to do mine? They aren't. And they aren't going to do their job, either, because I took it. How does that make anything better?
    - quacked 5y ago
      Outdoor jobs: growing food, infrastructure repair, dock loading, police work, etc. If there's a big crash on the highway and it's 100 degrees out, someone's still got to go direct traffic, clean up the glass, etc. If you expect the cleanup to happen, you expect someone to do the cleanup, therefore you are expecting the rewards of the labor of people who do outdoor jobs. My apologies for not explaining my own thoughts clearly, but when you and I say "job", we're talking about two different concepts. You are talking about a 261-day/year 8-hour/day commitment to a set group of tasks, and I am talking about "the collection of tasks that end up providing a quantity of goods or service" without any of the expectations that it's full-time or year-round attached to it. This may seem like an asinine distinction, but I'm not proposing a vision of society where you leave your current profession and work full-time at some mundane outdoor job, but rather a vision of society where you are capable of rendering some assistance in order to offset the bulk of labor required to produce the goods and services that unpleasant "non-brainy" jobs currently produce. I don't want you to give up your current amount of free time, or your medical care, or your access to entertainment and food, but neither do I want you to remain satisfied that other non-smart people labor for you while you do smart-guy stuff that you enjoy. If you could learn the tasks that they perform, you theoretically could offset the amount of time they have to spend outside by occasionally performing those tasks. It likely wouldn't take away from your ability to perform the tasks at your current "job", whatever that may be. I am not a socialist or a communist, and as I've said in another comment I don't really have a full-stack solution built out in my head that would make all of this magically work out, but it seems very wrong to me that the electronic-gentry portion of society is comprised of people sitting in air-conditioned offices thinking "god, I'd never work outside", but still tweeting angrily when the power goes out during a heat wave and the city employees don't fix it fast enough.
      - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        So there's a crash on the freeway, and someone needs to direct traffic. Yeah, I could probably do that, if I needed to. I even would, if I thought it needed doing, until actual authorities showed up. But, to use your other example, the power goes out. You don't really want amateur me trying to restore the power. You want a professional doing that, because it's much more likely to work, and much less likely to have negative consequences. So having me "render assistance" is not likely to be either welcome or useful. In the same way, you don't want me wandering around a construction site looking to be helpful. I'd be more likely to get killed than to do much good. So... Yes, I'm willing to pitch in, outside, if needed. No, for many jobs you don't actually want me doing that, no matter how much sympathy we have for the people having to work out in the heat. And none of that takes anything away from my initial point, which is that no, I don't wish that I did manual labor outside instead of my nice air-conditioned job. Right now I'm really grateful for my nice indoor cubical farm. If you want to go anywhere with this, maybe the direction is that we ought to pay people better who have to work outside, rather than paying them less than indoor people.
        quacked 5y ago
        But your conception of "amateur you" is fed by your (again, I'm assuming) 16 years in school, when you could have spent 200 of those hours learning how to clean up freeway crashes. You don't have to be an amateur, unless you accept that as your station in life. You're correct that I don't want <you as you exist in the present> to repair power lines, but I have full faith that if you set your mind to it and had the right access to training you could learn how to repair power lines, or at least provide entry-level assistance to a power-line-repair master. Just as you went from unskilled in your domain to skilled in your domain, so could you theoretically go from unskilled in construction to skilled in construction. I know you don't want to become an expert in construction, but how much of that want is based in the fact that in the current build of society, the only way to become a construction expert is to accept years of low pay in terrible conditions with awful coworkers in 100-degree-heat? Don't you think that somehow, using the combined man- and brain-power of the billions of people alive, we could form some kind of society where you might be able to learn and perform some construction without needing to accept the complete sacrifice of your quality of life to do it? The problem with "paying people better to work outside" is that the entire concept of paying people to do anything, ie rewarding people with money, require that the most unpleasant jobs be done by people who must choose between the job and starvation/exposure or violence (serfs or slaves). That's why the easiest, most brutal jobs are always done by the lowest-IQ immigrants. If you were to pay them more, per your suggestion, the price of the reward of their labor goes up (berries go from $6/carton to $38/carton), the demand for the reward of their labor goes down, and they get laid off and are back to having no way to secure food, shelter, and medical care. (There are some exceptions to this rule; construction workers in the US are usually decently-compensated, but the US is an anomaly because we subsist based on the efforts of serfs and slaves in Asia, who mine and refine our rare earth minerals, assemble our tech, etc.)
  - brippalcharrid 5y ago
    They probably aren't willing to do outdoor work in the cicumstances, seeing as they have previously delayed a lot of gratification by spending time and money developing skills that now enable them to do work in an air-conditioned office in a field that they find intellectually stimulating, with good remuneration. If they hadn't made good use of the opportunities that life had presented them with, if they were dealt a bad hand in life, or if the developed world was plunged into a new dark age, then I'm sure they would be more than happy to till the earth, tend to livestock or perform tree surgery if that was what it took to avert starvation or penury.
  - jimbokun 5y ago
    Why is his/her job not open to "them"?
    - quacked 5y ago
      IQ, education experience, the oppression of society, take your pick. Take an average programmer and an average backhoe operator. Give them both 120 hours to train at each other's jobs, monitored by an expert. Who will be a more suitable replacement for the other? As a writer I like said- "you get upset when a toll booth operator takes a long time to count your change, but if they could count change, they'd be an engineer like you are."
      - jimbokun 5y ago
        Well, yes, software engineer takes a lot more than 120 hours of training to do that job. But that's not to say if you gave the backhoe operator the same number of years experience learning programming as the software engineer, they wouldn't be just as good at software development.
        s1artibartfast 5y ago
        Do you honestly believe that? They could be as good, but I would wager that they wouldn't on average. There is fair amount self sorting based on aptitudes.
        anonfornoreason 5y ago
        Having known a large number of manual labor professionals my whole life, there is no difference between the good-at-heavy-equipment and the good-at-writing-a-crud-app crowd. You do get a wider variety of intellectual capacity on the blue collar side depending on the trade, but electricians, plumbers, heavy equipment operators, etc are all just as good at problem solving on average as any group of developers I know. "Blue collar", "the trades" are just so broad in scope it's an unfair comparison. It becomes much easier when you look at specific manual labor professions and specific developer professions.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    >How do you reconcile expecting the rewards of other people's labor if you wouldn't be willing to do the same labor yourself? I pay them directly for their labor, as simple as that. I guess I'm not sure what the confusion is. Everyone wants the best job they can get given their skills and luck. Nobody is going to be shoveling asphalt in the sun for fun if their part time astrophysicist gig covers their expenses.
    - quacked 5y ago
      Everyone has been tricked into believing that the best use of their time is to "get the best job", and the "job" is working at a hyper-specialized set of tasks, day-in, day-out. They claw at each other like crabs, dismayed when they lose a position, elated when they eke out a few more dollars or gain an extra few days of free time as they shuffle jobs. On HN, there's an archetypal hero's ascendency crawl where you finally find that $300k product manager job and retire at 45 with crazy stock options. It's a slave mentality. Do you believe that we, the people in society, set up the component parts of society and thus have the right to rebuild those component parts as it suits us, or do you believe that concepts like "jobs" and "laws" are naturally occurring phenomena that we are owned by? I am immune to the siren call of endless improvements in the amount of money I receive. I have reached a high enough standard of living that I don't need any more goods or services than I already can get, and I'm not particularly rich as far as Americans go (about 65th percentile according to a recent income distribution calculator). My goal is to convince as many people as I can to start thinking about what quality of life they would be satisfied with, figure out what labor and materials are required of them and their community to provide that quality of life, and then cut everything else out of the picture. We don't need the rat race, we don't need our elders worrying about how they'll afford the doctor, we don't need people working 80 hour weeks at minimum wage so they can afford a crappy apartment. We just need the materials and the labor. The more people buy into "I've got to get the best job" mentality, the more impossible realizing any sort of overall improvement in our labor-time-to-reward ratio is. (I know I sound like a communist, but I don't believe in the labor theory of value, and most self-described communists I talk to call me a right-wing extremist.)
      - 5y ago
quacked 5y ago
Do you mean "make the kind of money", or "live the kind of lifestyle"? In order to provide you with the lifestyle you take for granted, several million actions must be undertaken by people around the globe (drill for oil, watch hospital patients, build N95 masks, etc). My question is- how many of those actions could be undertaken by people who consider themselves "brainy", the completion of which would guarantee a similar lifestyle to those same brainy people? I know this is a little utopian- I don't have a full stack solution made up- but when your street gets a pothole, some man comes out and fixes it in the hot sun. Why don't you fix it? Well, you don't have the tools, or the expertise, or the legal right to do it. Furthermore, you don't have the time to do it, because you work 40-60 hours per week yourself at a white collar job (I'm assuming, given you're on HN during the workday). Many people think that someone's full-time "job" should be fixing potholes, and so people think "well I'd never fix potholes, I don't want that as my career". But wouldn't you learn how to fix potholes if you only had to fix potholes when they showed up near you, instead of for 40-60 hours per week every week?
- nradov 5y ago
  Fixing potholes properly so that they stay fixed requires some specialized equipment. It's not the kind of stuff that everyone can keep in the corner of their garage. I certainly don't want random neighbors doing it because they'll end up making the situation worse for everyone.
  - quacked 5y ago
    Jesus Christ, this is like trying to convince the blind men that the elephant exists. What, do you think it takes a lifetime of practice to operate specialized equipment? They send a crew of high school dropouts and semi-fluent immigrants to do the potholes in my street and the potholes are fixed just fine. You can walk on to a pothole crew and be considered a functional crew member inside a single season. Sure, I don't want you fixing my potholes because you don't know how to do it, but if I happened to live next to those pothole guys, I'd be happy with my neighbors fixing my potholes. Now, let's assess the difference between them and you: they have at least a few hundred hours of pothole repair practice, and you don't. It's too bad that you're incapable of learning how to do that. I bet you think that good grades are important, don't you? Without grades, you never know what kind of unqualified whack job might start Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Whole Foods, Uber, Dell, Dropbox... that's why we need those pothole guys to only ever work on potholes- you never know what kind of whack job might start jackhammering your street and "making the situation worse for everyone else".
dragonwriter 5y ago
I've done manual labor. If I could work in software despite only by not making any more than I would in manual labor, I’d still work in software. And that's even before considering the way management and coworker selfishness and ineptitude becomes a physical safety threat rather than an irritation.
jimbokun 5y ago
In high school, I had a job driving a tractor and planting grass seed for a summer. I was working with a couple gentlemen near retirement age. I made a comment one day about how this wasn't so bad, getting physical activity, breathing fresh air. They told me to get a job in a nice air conditioned office. I wouldn't want to still be doing this when I was their age.
- quacked 5y ago
  I've said it in a few other comments- everyone has a very, very standard rat-race vision of what a "job" is. You, other commenters that are downvoting me, and the gentlemen you worked with all have the conception that a "job" must be a 40-hour/week, 261 day/year commitment to a set of tasks. (I'm not sure that you agree with them or not, based on what you said.) I do not agree that society must be set up in this manner. Each job produces a good or a service. In order to produce that good or service, a certain amount of raw materials and a certain number of skilled labor hours must be expended to produce it. It is more efficient, from a scaling perspective, to hyper-specialize and make the same people do the same drudgery day-in-day-out, which is why those gentlemen were stuck in that job. The market makers demanded efficiency, and things fell into place such that those gentlemen were pigeonholed into being grass-planters. The point that I am making is that there isn't any particular reason (besides an incessant demand for shareholder value in dollars) that the raw materials and skilled labor hours must be allocated in the caste-method that we currently use in modern society. Those guys have to plant grass all day every day because if they don't, they can't buy food, afford shelter, have a doctor look at them, or receive medical supplies. I am certain that we must find a way to look past this system to achieve any of the high-minded goals that people like to argue over, like the 4-hour workweek, or equitable education, or mass literacy, or an end to hunger, or...
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Specialization and increased efficiency is exactly what leads to the high minded goals you mention. >4-hour workweek, or equitable education, or mass literacy, or an end to hunger. It also allows the guy shoveling asphalt in the sun to live in an air conditioned house with fancy electronics and medical care.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

It's been 100 degrees here for a month. I wouldn't want any kind of an outdoor job here right now, not for any amount of money.

quacked 5y ago
But you still think that someone should do outdoor jobs where you live. Why them and not you? Their jobs are open to you, but your job is not open to them. How do you reconcile expecting the rewards of other people's labor if you wouldn't be willing to do the same labor yourself?
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  How am I "expecting the rewards of their labor"? And, reversing your logic: If my job is not open to them (presumably because they don't have the skills), and I do their job, who's going to do mine? They aren't. And they aren't going to do their job, either, because I took it. How does that make anything better?
  - quacked 5y ago
    Outdoor jobs: growing food, infrastructure repair, dock loading, police work, etc. If there's a big crash on the highway and it's 100 degrees out, someone's still got to go direct traffic, clean up the glass, etc. If you expect the cleanup to happen, you expect someone to do the cleanup, therefore you are expecting the rewards of the labor of people who do outdoor jobs. My apologies for not explaining my own thoughts clearly, but when you and I say "job", we're talking about two different concepts. You are talking about a 261-day/year 8-hour/day commitment to a set group of tasks, and I am talking about "the collection of tasks that end up providing a quantity of goods or service" without any of the expectations that it's full-time or year-round attached to it. This may seem like an asinine distinction, but I'm not proposing a vision of society where you leave your current profession and work full-time at some mundane outdoor job, but rather a vision of society where you are capable of rendering some assistance in order to offset the bulk of labor required to produce the goods and services that unpleasant "non-brainy" jobs currently produce. I don't want you to give up your current amount of free time, or your medical care, or your access to entertainment and food, but neither do I want you to remain satisfied that other non-smart people labor for you while you do smart-guy stuff that you enjoy. If you could learn the tasks that they perform, you theoretically could offset the amount of time they have to spend outside by occasionally performing those tasks. It likely wouldn't take away from your ability to perform the tasks at your current "job", whatever that may be. I am not a socialist or a communist, and as I've said in another comment I don't really have a full-stack solution built out in my head that would make all of this magically work out, but it seems very wrong to me that the electronic-gentry portion of society is comprised of people sitting in air-conditioned offices thinking "god, I'd never work outside", but still tweeting angrily when the power goes out during a heat wave and the city employees don't fix it fast enough.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      So there's a crash on the freeway, and someone needs to direct traffic. Yeah, I could probably do that, if I needed to. I even would, if I thought it needed doing, until actual authorities showed up. But, to use your other example, the power goes out. You don't really want amateur me trying to restore the power. You want a professional doing that, because it's much more likely to work, and much less likely to have negative consequences. So having me "render assistance" is not likely to be either welcome or useful. In the same way, you don't want me wandering around a construction site looking to be helpful. I'd be more likely to get killed than to do much good. So... Yes, I'm willing to pitch in, outside, if needed. No, for many jobs you don't actually want me doing that, no matter how much sympathy we have for the people having to work out in the heat. And none of that takes anything away from my initial point, which is that no, I don't wish that I did manual labor outside instead of my nice air-conditioned job. Right now I'm really grateful for my nice indoor cubical farm. If you want to go anywhere with this, maybe the direction is that we ought to pay people better who have to work outside, rather than paying them less than indoor people.
      - quacked 5y ago
        But your conception of "amateur you" is fed by your (again, I'm assuming) 16 years in school, when you could have spent 200 of those hours learning how to clean up freeway crashes. You don't have to be an amateur, unless you accept that as your station in life. You're correct that I don't want <you as you exist in the present> to repair power lines, but I have full faith that if you set your mind to it and had the right access to training you could learn how to repair power lines, or at least provide entry-level assistance to a power-line-repair master. Just as you went from unskilled in your domain to skilled in your domain, so could you theoretically go from unskilled in construction to skilled in construction. I know you don't want to become an expert in construction, but how much of that want is based in the fact that in the current build of society, the only way to become a construction expert is to accept years of low pay in terrible conditions with awful coworkers in 100-degree-heat? Don't you think that somehow, using the combined man- and brain-power of the billions of people alive, we could form some kind of society where you might be able to learn and perform some construction without needing to accept the complete sacrifice of your quality of life to do it? The problem with "paying people better to work outside" is that the entire concept of paying people to do anything, ie rewarding people with money, require that the most unpleasant jobs be done by people who must choose between the job and starvation/exposure or violence (serfs or slaves). That's why the easiest, most brutal jobs are always done by the lowest-IQ immigrants. If you were to pay them more, per your suggestion, the price of the reward of their labor goes up (berries go from $6/carton to $38/carton), the demand for the reward of their labor goes down, and they get laid off and are back to having no way to secure food, shelter, and medical care. (There are some exceptions to this rule; construction workers in the US are usually decently-compensated, but the US is an anomaly because we subsist based on the efforts of serfs and slaves in Asia, who mine and refine our rare earth minerals, assemble our tech, etc.)
- brippalcharrid 5y ago
  They probably aren't willing to do outdoor work in the cicumstances, seeing as they have previously delayed a lot of gratification by spending time and money developing skills that now enable them to do work in an air-conditioned office in a field that they find intellectually stimulating, with good remuneration. If they hadn't made good use of the opportunities that life had presented them with, if they were dealt a bad hand in life, or if the developed world was plunged into a new dark age, then I'm sure they would be more than happy to till the earth, tend to livestock or perform tree surgery if that was what it took to avert starvation or penury.
- jimbokun 5y ago
  Why is his/her job not open to "them"?
  - quacked 5y ago
    IQ, education experience, the oppression of society, take your pick. Take an average programmer and an average backhoe operator. Give them both 120 hours to train at each other's jobs, monitored by an expert. Who will be a more suitable replacement for the other? As a writer I like said- "you get upset when a toll booth operator takes a long time to count your change, but if they could count change, they'd be an engineer like you are."
    - jimbokun 5y ago
      Well, yes, software engineer takes a lot more than 120 hours of training to do that job. But that's not to say if you gave the backhoe operator the same number of years experience learning programming as the software engineer, they wouldn't be just as good at software development.
      - s1artibartfast 5y ago
        Do you honestly believe that? They could be as good, but I would wager that they wouldn't on average. There is fair amount self sorting based on aptitudes.
        anonfornoreason 5y ago
        Having known a large number of manual labor professionals my whole life, there is no difference between the good-at-heavy-equipment and the good-at-writing-a-crud-app crowd. You do get a wider variety of intellectual capacity on the blue collar side depending on the trade, but electricians, plumbers, heavy equipment operators, etc are all just as good at problem solving on average as any group of developers I know. "Blue collar", "the trades" are just so broad in scope it's an unfair comparison. It becomes much easier when you look at specific manual labor professions and specific developer professions.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  >How do you reconcile expecting the rewards of other people's labor if you wouldn't be willing to do the same labor yourself? I pay them directly for their labor, as simple as that. I guess I'm not sure what the confusion is. Everyone wants the best job they can get given their skills and luck. Nobody is going to be shoveling asphalt in the sun for fun if their part time astrophysicist gig covers their expenses.
  - quacked 5y ago
    Everyone has been tricked into believing that the best use of their time is to "get the best job", and the "job" is working at a hyper-specialized set of tasks, day-in, day-out. They claw at each other like crabs, dismayed when they lose a position, elated when they eke out a few more dollars or gain an extra few days of free time as they shuffle jobs. On HN, there's an archetypal hero's ascendency crawl where you finally find that $300k product manager job and retire at 45 with crazy stock options. It's a slave mentality. Do you believe that we, the people in society, set up the component parts of society and thus have the right to rebuild those component parts as it suits us, or do you believe that concepts like "jobs" and "laws" are naturally occurring phenomena that we are owned by? I am immune to the siren call of endless improvements in the amount of money I receive. I have reached a high enough standard of living that I don't need any more goods or services than I already can get, and I'm not particularly rich as far as Americans go (about 65th percentile according to a recent income distribution calculator). My goal is to convince as many people as I can to start thinking about what quality of life they would be satisfied with, figure out what labor and materials are required of them and their community to provide that quality of life, and then cut everything else out of the picture. We don't need the rat race, we don't need our elders worrying about how they'll afford the doctor, we don't need people working 80 hour weeks at minimum wage so they can afford a crappy apartment. We just need the materials and the labor. The more people buy into "I've got to get the best job" mentality, the more impossible realizing any sort of overall improvement in our labor-time-to-reward ratio is. (I know I sound like a communist, but I don't believe in the labor theory of value, and most self-described communists I talk to call me a right-wing extremist.)
    - 5y ago

quacked 5y ago

Do you mean "make the kind of money", or "live the kind of lifestyle"? In order to provide you with the lifestyle you take for granted, several million actions must be undertaken by people around the globe (drill for oil, watch hospital patients, build N95 masks, etc). My question is- how many of those actions could be undertaken by people who consider themselves "brainy", the completion of which would guarantee a similar lifestyle to those same brainy people? I know this is a little utopian- I don't have a full stack solution made up- but when your street gets a pothole, some man comes out and fixes it in the hot sun. Why don't you fix it? Well, you don't have the tools, or the expertise, or the legal right to do it. Furthermore, you don't have the time to do it, because you work 40-60 hours per week yourself at a white collar job (I'm assuming, given you're on HN during the workday). Many people think that someone's full-time "job" should be fixing potholes, and so people think "well I'd never fix potholes, I don't want that as my career". But wouldn't you learn how to fix potholes if you only had to fix potholes when they showed up near you, instead of for 40-60 hours per week every week?

nradov 5y ago
Fixing potholes properly so that they stay fixed requires some specialized equipment. It's not the kind of stuff that everyone can keep in the corner of their garage. I certainly don't want random neighbors doing it because they'll end up making the situation worse for everyone.
- quacked 5y ago
  Jesus Christ, this is like trying to convince the blind men that the elephant exists. What, do you think it takes a lifetime of practice to operate specialized equipment? They send a crew of high school dropouts and semi-fluent immigrants to do the potholes in my street and the potholes are fixed just fine. You can walk on to a pothole crew and be considered a functional crew member inside a single season. Sure, I don't want you fixing my potholes because you don't know how to do it, but if I happened to live next to those pothole guys, I'd be happy with my neighbors fixing my potholes. Now, let's assess the difference between them and you: they have at least a few hundred hours of pothole repair practice, and you don't. It's too bad that you're incapable of learning how to do that. I bet you think that good grades are important, don't you? Without grades, you never know what kind of unqualified whack job might start Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Whole Foods, Uber, Dell, Dropbox... that's why we need those pothole guys to only ever work on potholes- you never know what kind of whack job might start jackhammering your street and "making the situation worse for everyone else".

dragonwriter 5y ago

I've done manual labor. If I could work in software despite only by not making any more than I would in manual labor, I’d still work in software. And that's even before considering the way management and coworker selfishness and ineptitude becomes a physical safety threat rather than an irritation.

jimbokun 5y ago

In high school, I had a job driving a tractor and planting grass seed for a summer. I was working with a couple gentlemen near retirement age. I made a comment one day about how this wasn't so bad, getting physical activity, breathing fresh air. They told me to get a job in a nice air conditioned office. I wouldn't want to still be doing this when I was their age.

quacked 5y ago
I've said it in a few other comments- everyone has a very, very standard rat-race vision of what a "job" is. You, other commenters that are downvoting me, and the gentlemen you worked with all have the conception that a "job" must be a 40-hour/week, 261 day/year commitment to a set of tasks. (I'm not sure that you agree with them or not, based on what you said.) I do not agree that society must be set up in this manner. Each job produces a good or a service. In order to produce that good or service, a certain amount of raw materials and a certain number of skilled labor hours must be expended to produce it. It is more efficient, from a scaling perspective, to hyper-specialize and make the same people do the same drudgery day-in-day-out, which is why those gentlemen were stuck in that job. The market makers demanded efficiency, and things fell into place such that those gentlemen were pigeonholed into being grass-planters. The point that I am making is that there isn't any particular reason (besides an incessant demand for shareholder value in dollars) that the raw materials and skilled labor hours must be allocated in the caste-method that we currently use in modern society. Those guys have to plant grass all day every day because if they don't, they can't buy food, afford shelter, have a doctor look at them, or receive medical supplies. I am certain that we must find a way to look past this system to achieve any of the high-minded goals that people like to argue over, like the 4-hour workweek, or equitable education, or mass literacy, or an end to hunger, or...
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Specialization and increased efficiency is exactly what leads to the high minded goals you mention. >4-hour workweek, or equitable education, or mass literacy, or an end to hunger. It also allows the guy shoveling asphalt in the sun to live in an air conditioned house with fancy electronics and medical care.