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> I don’t know what you understand about the caste system, but it is entirely unnecessary to bring it up here. There is no ‘caste system’ in the 21st century.
by Melting_Harps 5y ago
> I don’t know what you understand about the caste system, but it is entirely unnecessary to bring it up here. There is no ‘caste system’ in the 21st century. There may be human beings who are also bigots, but we can’t keep beckoning the colonial construct of ‘caste’ which was derived from the Portuguese word ‘casta’.
I'm saying we're creating a wealth divide that resembles an archaic developing nations assumption that title and surname matter more than capability, intellect or ambition. Things the US lauded in the 19th-20th Century that made my ancestors migrate here and help emerge to what it has become but has since degraded in the 21st century due to perpetual crony-capitalist wealth extractors who do nothing more than lobby and pay off who ever they have to ensure they can keep things 'business as usual.'
> I can’t support menial jobs in any form. They need to be made extinct. Not coddled and protected. If you believed what you wrote, you’d still be a biodynamic farmer and not into AI/ML.
To be clear, my methods are not clear to you; I believe in immersive learning to be the most effective way at solving a problem (my degrees are seldom utilized beyond just getting an interview); mine had to do with being a trained but unsatisfied cellular and molecular biologist in an Industry captured by big pharma. I excelled in microbiology and sought to play a role in the advancement of carbon sequestration and soil fertility via crop rotation of certain (then illegal prior to 2012) cash crops (hemp) and maybe alleviate the endemic opioid crisis happening in the US with more sustainable and holistic forms of pain management--introducing an Industry making products from various cannabis based products made the most sense to support small organic/biodynamic farms beyond anything that I have seen.
As of 2018 with the Farm Bill hemp is legal in all 50 US states and regulated by the US department of Ag via their local state branches licensure system we pioneered in Colorado. My goals were accomplished, there was no point in staying there any longer.
I think your viewpoint comes from an almost inescapable notion that work and identity are tied to one another, where for most people they simple see it as a means to an end: especially when family and responsibilities are included in the equation. Limited options coupled with the stress of high demands and responsibilities are probably responsible for more misery in the World than delivering doordash.
Just so it's clear, this methods is also used at the SBB in Switzerland: my friend, who let me run her farm as a manger when I was an apprentice, was a high ranking manager at her local station in the Capital. And it's typical to have to do this once a month, she often collected tickets, cleaned the trains, etc...
I'd argue Switzerland is a fr cry from your notion you are describing.
Also worth noting, and this was my experience in my time in fintech and affirmed during the COVID lockdowns, the most remarkable consistent way to reach millionaire status isn't being a a hardworking entrepreneur unshackling himself from the menial labor force: it's being a broker or money manager of a successful hedge fund that has deep ties to banks that lobby the State.
Your over romanticizing something that clearly has a more clear trajectory from outright slavery and indebted servitude than you're willing to admit, here is fun homework task if you want it: find how much prison labor is used by major corps around the World? And how many of these corps lobby the government on behalf of for profit prisons in the US for these contracts to use prison labor and help shape conviction rates to that end.
I'm going to end with this: as a person with a background in logistics and supply chain management in the auto industry (my day job when I was a bootstrapping co-founder in fintech) I decided to look at Doordash's emergence as the top delivery app and successful IPO and continued Softbank VC funidng etc... when the pandemic happened and locked downs were imposed I looked at the r/doordash for several weeks and even signed up and did a few deliveries to get under the hood,
In the end, (May 2020) what I found was the typical SV 'grow fast and break things' charade coupled with the VC inflated IPO exit strategy and left thinking that space was not worth investing my time in and went back to focusing on what I knew: International supply chain and logistics of freight. The amount of money loss due to basic things was staggering and sobering to say the least.
I wrote about this experience in my application process where I was accepted on performance based admission which opened the doors to meeting other CS students and now collaborating with graduate level data scientists in discussing and exploring how to address some fundamental needs in this space.
So you see, it's not all bad.
- jelliclesfarm 5y ago1. No. I don’t think ‘we’ are creating a wealth divide. There is a skills divide. Wealth accrues from the value of skills in demand. There will always be a wealth divide. Technology compresses more value into IT and AI related jobs. So they will always be paid more. What you pay for an IT/AI specialist is for the years of education and experience, skill and intelligence. It’s like why a doctor gets paid more than a nurse. Or why you’d pay for an artist who has many years of education and practice honing a skill vs your scribbling with crayons. What is rewarded with money is skill. Gigs are unskilled labour. If that is the main source of income, then there will be wealth gap. As it should be. 2. I can’t discuss caste system with you as I think it’s a distraction and entirely useless to this discussion. Ditto about your ancestors. It is irrelevant and I am not interested. 3. Thanks for making it clear that ‘your methods are not clear to me’. That is your deficit in explaining and again irrelevant to this discussion. As are your degrees or your immersive learning. I am skipping all that. 4. No. My viewpoint isn’t ‘work and identify are tied to one another’. My viewpoint is that a SWE didn’t sign up for a job to do a delivery job for performance score. Skipped the rest of the paragraph as it’s irrelevant. 5. Again…skipping the part on SBB in Switzerland. Irrelevant to discussion at hand. 6. Skipping the part about your opinion about my ‘over romaticisation’ and your incomprehensible analysis about me. Irrelevant. Again. 7. Prison Labour. Skipped. Pass. Ok. I guess that’s that then.
- qwytw 5y agoWhat you pay is mainly determined by supply and demand if everyone has the same disdain at menial labour and would do basically anything to avoid it, including getting 'useless' degrees with no good job prospects or even become 'IT/AI specialists' I would expect the compensation for menial workers etc. to increase significantly (of course there is likely a ceiling to how much people would pay for food delivery instead of just going to pick it manually).
- jelliclesfarm 5y agoWon’t happen. Not in the food sector. That’s why food and Ag sector needs to be automated. Delivery is a service, but it can never cost more than the cost of food itself. It won’t make sense to most customers. Which brings us to: why should food always be cheap and/or subsidized? Because everyone needs to be fed. It’s the duty of any govt to keep food prices stable. There is no way cost of food will be stable or not increase when an economy is doing well. If cost of food has to be affordable to all but labour has to be fairly compensated, this labour MUST be automated. At some point, the cost of labour will exceed the cost of automation. This might happen when momentum /scale kicks in..but that will take time. We shouldn’t stop working towards automating entire sectors. We are already a decade or two late. By 2050, population will peak at 10-11 billion and then it will start declining. There won’t be enough people to do these kinds of jobs. So we can’t develop systems and structures and processes that doesn’t take into account the eventual generational population decline. We must redesign legacy infrastructure processes and systems. Like ..the paradigm shift..we should have started yesterday or a decade ago. Some jobs simply have to disappear. What happened to horse carriage drivers and stable boys and farriers when automobiles replaced horse drawn transport? We can’t claim any advancement unless we aim to get rid of all menial jobs. This has to be a stated goal. So much human talent is wasted and especially horrible because to keep food costs low, an entire demographic is being paid barely liveable minimum wages, exploited and work under hazardous conditions. Agtech will not bring down real cost of food but it will make food accessible and affordable to all as wages/income go up as menial job workers move up to higher wage paying jobs. This is how society should make leaps and bounds. If one wants human beings to do menial job, it means one is ok with inequalities. One can’t engage in virtue signaling and harping against inequalities while still encouraging exploitative sectors to thrive and creating startups that rely on said low wage menial jobs. Door dash and it’s ilk..fooling no one. Not me anyways. I am just sick and tired of the startup community’s virtuous song and dance. The truth is that Door Dash can never..I want to repeat: never…justify its valuation. And hence all this pipsqueak drama of Shakespearean proportions.