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Nearly 20 years ago we used to install monitoring software to tell if a user's mouse or keyboard hadn't been used in a while. More and more places use traffic i

Nearly 20 years ago we used to install monitoring software to tell if a user's mouse or keyboard hadn't been used in a while. More and more places use traffic inspection "for security". Desks now use sensors to tell when warm bodies are near. Doesn't matter whether you're working from office or in the home, surveillance is here to stay. Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished. Bad businesses will continue to use draconian methods to try to squeeze productivity rather than foster it. Quit the bad ones, join the good ones.

gchamonlive 3y ago
> Quit the bad ones, join the good ones. This is why universal income is extremely important, so that people can pursue better jobs without risking being vulnerable.
- 2devnull 3y ago
  Some people don’t want to work. They’ve told me so. I think UBI would destroy these people, like easy wealth does to the newly rich. A better solution is to focus on worker’s rights and labor regulations. Of course that opens the internationalism question, but so too would ubi.
  - oneplane 3y ago
    What leads you to believe that people who do not want to work are desirable to have in the workplace? UBI also doesn't give you wealth, it gives you basics, and overal that's much cheaper than dragging down an entire team or department. At the same time, we currently have plenty of people who do not want to work and do indeed not work, that will not change regardless of what you implement. I also think that happy and healthy non-working people are worth more to humanity than unhappy or unhealthy working people.
    - mantas 3y ago
      They ain't desirable. But who wants to pay them do nothing? Many people ain't happy to cover existing welfare. Increase welfare and even more people would feel it's unfair.
      - wizofaus 3y ago
        You can accuse UBI of many things but unfair it is clearly not, hence the "universal". Everyone gets the same amount - but the assumption is most will then choose to work and earn extra income on top of that.
        vihren 3y ago
        How is it fair? You do give the same amount to everyone, but you do not take the same from everyone - you have to take more from those who chose to work. Hence the unfair part.
        wizofaus 3y ago
        Taxation is quite separate though - we all have the same access to government provided services and infrastructure regardless of how much income tax we pay, I don't see anybody arguing that's unfair.
        eropple 3y ago
        Those with the most to lose benefit the most from having a just and civil society, but that realization never seems to percolate through.
        tomcam 3y ago
        A just and civil society being one where the harder I work, the more taxes I pay? Where stores are closing right and left because theft isn’t prosecuted but I have to pay $7,000 to get a bathroom permitted while an RV on the street outside my house is considered a home and gets to dump shit on the street with no repercussions?
    - swader999 3y ago
      It's hard to infer someone's particular motivations. I'd rather work with code that was carefully crafted than something that was nervously hammered away at while looking over their shoulder just to catch a breath.
    - josefx 3y ago
      > What leads you to believe that people who do not want to work are desirable to have in the workplace? Many of them are still better than having nobody and if they have to work to get money they are also somewhat incentivized to at least do the bare minimum. Counterpoint: Some management handbooks consider both unmotivated and motivated workers problematic. Would you rather deal with a highly motivated moron or a substantially less motivated Einstein?
  - photonbucket 3y ago
    Giving people what they desire in terms of like quality is destroying them? Pushing them to keep doing what they don't want to do is helping them?
  - lannisterstark 3y ago
    >Some people don’t want to work. They’ve told me so ...and? That's fine. there will always be some people who do not want to work. a UBI guarantees somewhat basic level of living conditions at least.
    - CoastalCoder 3y ago
      [deleted] I failed to consider the audience.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - cornercasechase 3y ago
        > Perhaps we could make paying for such people voluntary? I’d like to opt out of paying for war but sadly I can’t. My tax dollars going to help people instead of kill and oppress them seems like a huge upgrade.
      - bombolo 3y ago
        What is your actual contribution to society? I'm going to assume you work at some useless startup (like most of us) that will be gone in a few years, having left nothing useful to society. Is your work really helping society?
        itsboring 3y ago
        What, you’re not “Making the World a Better Place through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols”? In seriousness, I wish there was more self-awareness like this in our field.
        bombolo 3y ago
        Remember when every startup was claiming to make the world a better place?
  - tigrezno 3y ago
    So if you have the opportunity to stop working and keep being paid, wouldn't you take it? I'm sure the mayority of people don't want to work. It's not a natural thing to do.
    - charlie0 3y ago
      I'm sure those people don't want to give up their iPhones and AC either (which also are not "natural").
      - eropple 3y ago
        And so they would...continue...to work...for things that cost more than food and shelter do?
        cornercasechase 3y ago
        Very often, yes. But if their boss harassed them (or say tried to force RTO), they could quit and not worry about ending up on the street.
        eropple 3y ago
        That was what I was getting at, yeah. ;)
        itsboring 3y ago
        This is the real reason I like the idea of UBI. It’s not because I want to do nothing all day, it’s because I want to shift the power dynamic. For example, imagine a worker living paycheck-to-paycheck who needs their employer-provided health insurance, with an asshole boss who refuses to let them take a day off to attend a family member’s funeral: the UBI improves their ability to tell that boss to get fucked without ending up broke and homeless. Basically I’m for any system that allows people to tell bad bosses to get fucked. Also a good argument for universal health care.
        ElFitz 3y ago
  - Randomizer42 3y ago
    Easy wealth? I am not sure how to respond to this.
  - callmeal 3y ago
    >Some people don’t want to work. Good. It's preferable that people who don't want to work stay home and do other things, rather than coming into the office and not working.
  - guy98238710 3y ago
    Huh, UBI has its own moral panic. Never thought I would see that, but it seems obvious in retrospect. Both capitalism and communism worship work like some insane religion. If you work, you are a good person. If you don't, you are scum.
    - flir 3y ago
      Protestant work ethic, innit. Both Capitalism and Communism are economic systems born of Northern Europe.
    - Shaanie 3y ago
      People who don't work are usually economic parasites for those who do, so it makes sense to encourage working regardless of which economic system is used.
      - EatingWithForks 3y ago
        Wow, I never thought to consider my mother an economic parasite.
      - guy98238710 3y ago
        Once you have certain degree of automation, the hard-working people just drag everyone into pointless rat race.
  - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
    The "basic" in basic income isn't there for decoration: just taking UBI and not working would probably be about as comfortable as living on something like Universal Credit in the UK, minus the adversarial means-testing, which is to say, "not very". Certainly I wouldn't characterise it as "easy wealth", more like "easy bare minimum so you don't have to worry about starvation". Besides, if it was that much gloriously easy wealth, you'd get it too!
    - tomcam 3y ago
      How is means testing adversarial?
      - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
        Adversarial as well as means-tested, I should have said. The Universal Credit system is famously cruel in how it is designed. Not least it is paid in arrears and is designed to take 6 weeks to get the first (backdated) payment, by which time anyone who actually needs it is already likely to be overdrawn to the tune of a month's rent and utilities. https://www.newstatesman.com/quickfire/2022/10/universal-credit-cruel-inefficient-counterproductive https://www.newstatesman.com/quickfire/2022/10/universal-cre... https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/universal-credit-chaos-fear-and-preventable-deaths/ https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/universal-credit-chaos... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/universal-credit-system-whistleblower-benefits-poverty-suffering-vulnerable-claimants-hunger-chaos-theresa-may-a7998731.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/universal-cr... https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/government-benefit-sanctions-mp-report_uk_5be069b9e4b09d43e3215b7a https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/government-benefit-sa...
      - jclulow 3y ago
        The purest idealistic version of means testing may well be fine in theory, but in practice means testing is universally co-opted by conservative governments to make it difficult or impossible for the people with the least resources (and thus most in need of the benefits) to actually get them. The Australian Centrelink programme is a pretty good example of what happens: one government introduces a system of unemployment benefits and then later a different conservative government (whose members and voting base don't like poor people) are able to pervert the system through means testing provisions and other bureaucratic hurdles to effectively prevent a large subset of eligible persons from actually collecting the benefits to which they are entitled, but without having to deal with the political fallout of actually ending or reducing benefits on paper.
  - whitemary 3y ago
    >Some people don’t want to work All we can be certain of is that they don't want to spend most of their lives under a dictatorship, and that's fair imo.
  - II2II 3y ago
    I used to be employed in a community where the vast majority of people collected welfare and did not work. Except that most of the people who did not work actually did work. They would hunt for food, chop fire wood, haul their garbage to the dump, cook their own food, raise their own children, and do the many other things that are necessary to live. I'm not saying that they type of person you describe does not exist. They do. Some of them lived in the very community I described. I am saying that because we tend to have a very specific, and peculiar, idea of what work means. We almost universally mean working for another. It doesn't much matter whether we are an employer or an employee, the product of that work is typically meant for someone outside of our family, social circles, and community. At the same time we dismiss any form of labour that isn't based upon some sort of transaction, the type of labour that is central to the health of both families and communities. Our culture has these notions so entrenched that the lack of a "proper job" does destroy people, psychologically. Not only is one's sense of value lost, but the value of other types of relationships is greatly diminished. I don't really see worker rights or labour regulations as a complete solution since we are dealing with a problem that is stitched into the fabric of our society. Likewise, UBI is not a complete solution. If we were to dive into UBI today, which is about providing for people's basic needs from our surpluses (it is not about providing easy wealth), some people would be destroyed because we have never put much thought into what it means to live without there being some sort of transaction. We have never put much thought into what a non-authoritarian workplace would look like. We have never put much thought into what we need and our relationship with society as a whole. The question that I have trouble answering is how can we build the foundation of a society where we aren't simply asking whether we work to live or live to work? A society where people's needs are met without coercion. A world where people want to contribute to a more egalitarian society.
    - godelski 3y ago
      This is a very important part of the equation and I think many miss. "Work" is not well defined. I often ask what people would do if money wasn't an issue and they didn't have to have a job[0]. Most people end up answering that they'd pursue passions like art, volunteering, doing research, or other things that many call "work" but might not pay (after they say they'd travel and do other things like that, of course (follow-up is always required)). A lot of work is not quantified by traditional economic transactions (i.e. pay for work). People don't want to sit around and do nothing their entire lives. The other thing is people also seem to forget that this is exactly the situation those from generational wealth are in, and that the vast majority of them do some form of work. Yes, there are those that don't (especially while younger) but the majority do. I have a very hard time buying the narrative that were people to not work to make a living that they'd be a net drain on society. I see little evidence. I also see this as claiming that a post-scarce society is impossible. This is also critical as we live in a time where the potential for a post-scarce world exists (robotic workers liberate humanity from labor). It is even critical if we live in a semi or limited post scarce world, which is the transitional period to a post scarcity society (we're possibly in this). [0] I say I'd like to read math books, research, and publish openly. Not far from what I do now (academia). People counter me saying that that's work.
  - codegeek 3y ago
    Free money is never going to solve anything. I don't mind helping people in need but just handing out money to people especially the ones that are already lazy wouldn't solve a thing. Instead, we should focus on getting people to work. Whatever that takes. We should reward those who want to work and penalize those who don't. If you can't work due to a real disability, you should be helped.
    - bombolo 3y ago
      > Whatever that takes. Ah, the old whip, yes… -_-'
    - machinawhite 3y ago
      I used to think HN is full of brilliant people but then there's emotionaly stunted priviliged yuppies like you spewing the most retarded shit I've ever seen. Please fuck off and work yourself to death so there's less of you. Fuck you.
    - Jochim 3y ago
      I'd rather require employers to make themselves a place someone would freely choose to work. If a person's basic needs are taken care of and they don't want to work for you, that's your problem. Even with our current systems, we have a situation where people live in such precarity that employers are able to treat them abusively/illegally. An egregious example would be "companies hiring children to clean slaughterhouses on a nightshift". More generally, we shouldn't put people in a position where they have to accept abuse because the alternative is massive upheaval at best, homelessness at worst.
  - 93po 3y ago
    There are millions of stay-at-home parents or childless spouses that don't work traditional jobs and their lives are not destroyed.
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    UBI is a solution to the problem of structural unemployment when due to advances in automation we don't have enough reasonable jobs for people who are capable of working, when we don't really want everyone to work as much. If we need everyone who can work to actually work, if we want to force people to work with a threat that if they don't contribute to society then they'll be (for example) homeless - well, then we don't (yet) need UBI and should not implement UBI until(if) we get the problem which UBI would fix.
  - pierat 3y ago
    Work and labor are 2 different things. And I would never 'work' either, if it weren't for hanging starvation and destitution over my head. Labor - I build a fence for my home, or fix plumbing, or make miniatures, or do cool stuff. I and those around me benefit from my labor. I may help a friend move. Or help to do light construction, or networking. Again, we benefit. Work is labor where someone else takes the lion's share of the labor and keeps the surplus, where you nearly never see the result and keep scraps of your worth. You'll never see your 'worth', and all attempts will be made to hide it. The 'who' whom gets this massive surplus is the company you work for. Lots of hand-wavey reasons will be made why your share is low. I have no problem with labor. I and those around me benefit. Work is exploitative and serves to make someone else richer at my, my family's, and my friends expense.
  - abwizz 3y ago
    > Some people don’t want to work. They’ve told me so. I think UBI would destroy these people most ppl dont want to work some unrelateable, bullshit under time constraints for richer ppl they dont even know or like. so mostly we chug along and put in the required performances. imo this is unesessary and counterproductive since we have gained access to automation of most physical and a lot of office work.
- trw_phy 3y ago
  You'd think people would learn after the covid money printer that giving people paper with funny pictures doesn't actually do anything. UBI, like Roko's basilisk, is the magical thinking of our age. We need a working government to meet people's needs because the market sure as hell can't. That's a lot harder than just brrrr.
  - lannisterstark 3y ago
    UBI isn't covid money printer though. You're misrepresenting it either intentionally or by mistake to discredit it. UBI would, and should, replace current welfare schemes. We already have those in place.
    - qwytw 3y ago
      > UBI would, and should, replace current welfare schemes. We already have those in place. But that would still require a huge amount of additional money if you want UBI to be above subsistence levels. Otherwise the amount received by current welfare recipients would have to be cut several times. Also what about disabled people and others who can't work? Would they get the same amount as everyone?
      - gchamonlive 3y ago
        I don't really understand the subject too deeply, just enough to have me convinced UBI should be implemented in some form, but I think the fundamental assumption is that everything that the government has to provide, it is going to do so, by no fault of the government itself, in a very inefficient way. So by the mere act of UBI replacing many systems and centralising in a single program many forms of wealth redistribution, it would do so with less waste, even if UBI would be by itself inefficient.
        michaelmrose 3y ago
        It is incredibly easy to automate giving every citizen an unconditional electronic deposit. The inefficiency and overhead of social programs comes from individual assessments to figure out who to exclude.
- mantas 3y ago
  Universal income covering the very basic would still keep people making beyond minimum wage vulnerable. Paying meaningful money would be too expensive at scale. Then few jobs could pay meaningfully more than the universal income. Why work if you get +/- not working?
  - jupp0r 3y ago
    Your understanding of universal income is broken. Everybody receives a monthly income, regardless of them working or not. The incentive to earn more by working is always there.
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      Not if employers are taxed so much to fund UBI that they hire fewer workers. The ability to work and earn more is contingent upon enough jobs existing. What would really happen is they would raise their prices to earn the amount of profit they deem necessary to be worth the trouble of being in business. Everything gets more expensive, and the UBI payments won't be enough to live on.
    - mantas 3y ago
      People would still pay taxes ;) UBI is essentially a negative tax. If you make nothing - you get some money. If you make some - there's a breaking point somewhere where you pay more taxes than is UBI. If UBI was a cushy amount covering more than the bare basics, low-tier jobs would pay a very small premium over pure UBI.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    Why work now at minimum wage if it won't get you out of poverty?
    - clnq 3y ago
      UBI will just cause inflation so that you have to work to afford things again. No company will forgo an opportunity to raise prices when they can. Fiduciary responsibility to corporate boards has always been more important than morals or ethics. And easier to get sued over. So boards will demand growth, as they do, and that will include raising prices where people can afford it. Poverty will still be there, it will just cost more (nominally) to get out of it. The question you pose will remain with UBI, as will poverty. It might just get more extreme for anyone who gets disqualified from UBI for some reason (undocumented, etc). This problem has not been solved for UBI nor seen in small-scale trials. But there isn't a single rich country or region in the world where the retail prices have not adjusted to consumers' spending power.
Silhouette 3y ago
Meanwhile in 2023 a favourite argument of management who want everyone back in the office is that it's essential to have those casual interactions around the watercooler. When of course your keyboard and mouse won't be used at all.
- transpute 3y ago
  If an employer can snoop keyboard and mouse, there's a non-zero chance that unauthorized remote attackers can do the same. Watercooler surveillance requires physical access for cameras and lip-reading, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36188381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36188381
  - reustle 3y ago
    All of the mainstream tools that I've seen for this just monitor activity, not the specific keystrokes / mouse pointer coordinates.
geek_at 3y ago
> surveillance is here to stay in the United States. Europe has very strict rules about surveiling employees. Example: In Austria we are not allowed to use some of the functions that Azure-AD joined computers would be capable of because employers _might_ push remote control software the user hasn't agreed to
- oneplane 3y ago
  Same here. Employers can't even look inside user's mailboxes because there is no guarantee that it doesn't contain anything personal. Even if the company has a rule that you're not allowed to use it for personal things, the law supersedes that and you still can't do it willy nilly.
  - josefx 3y ago
    > Even if the company has a rule that you're not allowed to use it for personal things, the law supersedes that and you still can't do it willy nilly. Companies are not homogeneous blocks of matter and there is always information some people at the company may need to know that others have no business dealing with. Tax, banking and health related information are some of the things that I can think of that would be shared on a need to know basis with people at work and have no business to be seen by people outside of the intended audience.
    - krageon 3y ago
      Health related information may absolutely not be shared, and doesn't need to be.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        Employer don't even get diagnosis behind sick leave. Not sure how work accidents are treated in that regard so.
      - josefx 3y ago
        Honestly I wasn't sure how much that point applied. However with people that suffer chronic illnesses or disabilities that require special consideration I would be surprised if it was always possible to adequately communicate those needs without also mentioning information that the employee might not want to share publicly.
hmmSceptical 3y ago
> Bad businesses will continue to use draconian methods to try to squeeze productivity rather than foster it What about jobs that aren't creative like coding or graphic design? Some jobs are simply "sit in your chair and do work". The productivity metrics aren't speculative - they are measurable. You may argue "these are jobs for AI" - but realistically alot of jobs are a way off from this. Why shouldn't the "productivity" of these staff be measured? Because you don't like it? If you work at "big shipping co" and "box" 1 item a day and your colleagues do 100, should you not be fired?
- gedy 3y ago
  > If you work at "big shipping co" and "box" 1 item a day and your colleagues do 100, should you not be fired? Those are results, and not measured by "is their ass in this chair for 8 hours?", same as monitoring keyboard and mouse usage.
- wmf 3y ago
  The productivity metrics aren't speculative - they are measurable. So measure the output, not the mouse, not the keyboard, not the chair, etc.
  - hmmSceptical 3y ago
    "output" only matters if your company is paid by "results" and isn't based on billable hours, otherwise ... "output" doesn't matter. Law firms would love every case to be solved in 2 hours if they still got the same $ value from a case that dragged on for 6 months.
    - wmf 3y ago
      Keep moving those goalposts.
      - hmmSceptical 3y ago
        > Goalposts You literally said "output" the most speculative / vague definition of "work" available. I appreciate programmers / "creatives" "output" is much harder to measure, but there are alot of jobs where "mouse moving", "words per second" is a very reliable indicator of "output".
bboygravity 3y ago
Only in America (and third world countries).
- reaperducer 3y ago
  Only in America (and third world countries). Today I learned that Canada, Australia, South Korea, and Japan are third-world countries. Thanks for the lesson in geopolitics, bboygravity!
suddenclarity 3y ago
> Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished. This always comes across as people wanting to have the cake and eat it. Employers should only care that the work is getting done, but if the work isn't done, then the employee should still be able to go home after 8 hours and get full salary?
- cornercasechase 3y ago
  If the work is not getting done, spying on people isn’t going to improve things. If you want people to work, you have to properly motivate them. That means fair wages and non-toxic management.
  - codegeek 3y ago
    So you are assuming that if someone is not doing a good job, it is because they are paid unfairly and/or in a toxic env ? Thats a lot of assumption. How about the deadbeats ? Do they exist or not ?
    - brewdad 3y ago
      If you can't tell your deadbeat employees without logging every minute of their workday, you are a terrible manager and should be fired.
- lliamander 3y ago
  > but if the work isn't done, then the employee should still be able to go home after 8 hours and get full salary? Of course not. If the work isn't getting done, then the employee should be fired. And that's the case even with the surveillance.
  - mysterydip 3y ago
    That being said, there's also a difference between progress and meeting goals. Employees can put in 100% for a full 8 hours and still miss a deadline (poor scheduling, issues/roadblocks that arise, or maybe they're not good at the job). I think a lot of the tension between management and workers is because much modern work isn't assembly-line-deterministic x widgets-per-hour.
pcurve 3y ago
lol oh the good old days. The funniest part is, it would take screenshots of desktop periodically, but I would know when it's happening due to micro lag in mouse movement as it happened. It was so hilarious. I didn't give a crap because I worked hard anyway. Ended up staying at the place for 17 years.
whitemary 3y ago
>Quit the bad ones, join the good ones. It's literally a recession. IT just experienced historically massive layoffs over the last 6 months. Could you be any more out of touch?
osigurdson 3y ago
Gross, why didn't you just quit instead?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
godelski 3y ago
> Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished. Goodhart's Law (HN might be annoyed at how often I reference this) Goodhart's Law isn't just about that setting a metric as a target leads to that metric being exploited, but is more about how difficult things are to measure and evaluate. The lesson to be learned here is that measurements should only ever be considered as indicators at best, and usually as weak signals. Proper evaluation requires significant nuance, exceptions to the rules, and care. It requires being human: messy, a bit chaotic, and inconsistent. There's good reason for our desire for good metrics. It can help make things fair, consistent, reduce bias, and help control for bad actors. There is that appeal to act mechanically, as machines are often highly interpretable and controllable. But over-reliance on metrics end up with the exact same results. Humans will always exploit a metric. Humans aren't machines. Hell, AI always exploits metrics (which creates a big irony that there's so much benchmarkism in the field). For this reason meritocracy can never exist, as unbiased metrics and evaluations can never exist. Doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for it, but rather that we need to think slow and with care. Unfortunately, our brain is lazy and wants to think fast and on autopilot. An irony with how often HN references Kahneman's book. The most human thing we can do is actually override our autopilot, as that's what differentiates us from the other animals and machines. Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished. That's hard to measure. But one needs to recognize this rather than chase mechanistic one-size-fits-all metrics. You need to embrace the chaos to navigate it. Set guidelines, not rules. Managers and business owners, take heed. > surveillance is here to stay I'm unconvinced. This happens because there is little to no pushback because people are convinced that the hierarchical structures are too powerful. But as I said above to embrace the chaos, this too is how you can attack these structures. I talked about this longer in another thread, but remember that you're <6 steps from any person. Ideas spread like viruses (memes), and the control only exists when we stop talking and communicating. If we self censor (e.g. are afraid to tell others our salaries because we think they'll be mad at us instead of the person that controls the pay) then the hierarchy has too much power. Hierarchies are good, but power gets abused. It isn't good for your business to have that power abused. But it also requires care: to not chase short term gains but think long term and remain fluid (environments change. Adapt or die).

gchamonlive 3y ago

> Quit the bad ones, join the good ones. This is why universal income is extremely important, so that people can pursue better jobs without risking being vulnerable.

2devnull 3y ago
Some people don’t want to work. They’ve told me so. I think UBI would destroy these people, like easy wealth does to the newly rich. A better solution is to focus on worker’s rights and labor regulations. Of course that opens the internationalism question, but so too would ubi.
- oneplane 3y ago
  What leads you to believe that people who do not want to work are desirable to have in the workplace? UBI also doesn't give you wealth, it gives you basics, and overal that's much cheaper than dragging down an entire team or department. At the same time, we currently have plenty of people who do not want to work and do indeed not work, that will not change regardless of what you implement. I also think that happy and healthy non-working people are worth more to humanity than unhappy or unhealthy working people.
  - mantas 3y ago
    They ain't desirable. But who wants to pay them do nothing? Many people ain't happy to cover existing welfare. Increase welfare and even more people would feel it's unfair.
    - wizofaus 3y ago
      You can accuse UBI of many things but unfair it is clearly not, hence the "universal". Everyone gets the same amount - but the assumption is most will then choose to work and earn extra income on top of that.
      - vihren 3y ago
        How is it fair? You do give the same amount to everyone, but you do not take the same from everyone - you have to take more from those who chose to work. Hence the unfair part.
        wizofaus 3y ago
        Taxation is quite separate though - we all have the same access to government provided services and infrastructure regardless of how much income tax we pay, I don't see anybody arguing that's unfair.
        eropple 3y ago
        Those with the most to lose benefit the most from having a just and civil society, but that realization never seems to percolate through.
        tomcam 3y ago
        A just and civil society being one where the harder I work, the more taxes I pay? Where stores are closing right and left because theft isn’t prosecuted but I have to pay $7,000 to get a bathroom permitted while an RV on the street outside my house is considered a home and gets to dump shit on the street with no repercussions?
  - swader999 3y ago
    It's hard to infer someone's particular motivations. I'd rather work with code that was carefully crafted than something that was nervously hammered away at while looking over their shoulder just to catch a breath.
  - josefx 3y ago
    > What leads you to believe that people who do not want to work are desirable to have in the workplace? Many of them are still better than having nobody and if they have to work to get money they are also somewhat incentivized to at least do the bare minimum. Counterpoint: Some management handbooks consider both unmotivated and motivated workers problematic. Would you rather deal with a highly motivated moron or a substantially less motivated Einstein?
- photonbucket 3y ago
  Giving people what they desire in terms of like quality is destroying them? Pushing them to keep doing what they don't want to do is helping them?
- lannisterstark 3y ago
  >Some people don’t want to work. They’ve told me so ...and? That's fine. there will always be some people who do not want to work. a UBI guarantees somewhat basic level of living conditions at least.
  - CoastalCoder 3y ago
    [deleted] I failed to consider the audience.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - cornercasechase 3y ago
      > Perhaps we could make paying for such people voluntary? I’d like to opt out of paying for war but sadly I can’t. My tax dollars going to help people instead of kill and oppress them seems like a huge upgrade.
    - bombolo 3y ago
      What is your actual contribution to society? I'm going to assume you work at some useless startup (like most of us) that will be gone in a few years, having left nothing useful to society. Is your work really helping society?
      - itsboring 3y ago
        What, you’re not “Making the World a Better Place through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols”? In seriousness, I wish there was more self-awareness like this in our field.
        bombolo 3y ago
        Remember when every startup was claiming to make the world a better place?
- tigrezno 3y ago
  So if you have the opportunity to stop working and keep being paid, wouldn't you take it? I'm sure the mayority of people don't want to work. It's not a natural thing to do.
  - charlie0 3y ago
    I'm sure those people don't want to give up their iPhones and AC either (which also are not "natural").
    - eropple 3y ago
      And so they would...continue...to work...for things that cost more than food and shelter do?
      - cornercasechase 3y ago
        Very often, yes. But if their boss harassed them (or say tried to force RTO), they could quit and not worry about ending up on the street.
        eropple 3y ago
        That was what I was getting at, yeah. ;)
        itsboring 3y ago
        This is the real reason I like the idea of UBI. It’s not because I want to do nothing all day, it’s because I want to shift the power dynamic. For example, imagine a worker living paycheck-to-paycheck who needs their employer-provided health insurance, with an asshole boss who refuses to let them take a day off to attend a family member’s funeral: the UBI improves their ability to tell that boss to get fucked without ending up broke and homeless. Basically I’m for any system that allows people to tell bad bosses to get fucked. Also a good argument for universal health care.
      - ElFitz 3y ago
- Randomizer42 3y ago
  Easy wealth? I am not sure how to respond to this.
- callmeal 3y ago
  >Some people don’t want to work. Good. It's preferable that people who don't want to work stay home and do other things, rather than coming into the office and not working.
- guy98238710 3y ago
  Huh, UBI has its own moral panic. Never thought I would see that, but it seems obvious in retrospect. Both capitalism and communism worship work like some insane religion. If you work, you are a good person. If you don't, you are scum.
  - flir 3y ago
    Protestant work ethic, innit. Both Capitalism and Communism are economic systems born of Northern Europe.
  - Shaanie 3y ago
    People who don't work are usually economic parasites for those who do, so it makes sense to encourage working regardless of which economic system is used.
    - EatingWithForks 3y ago
      Wow, I never thought to consider my mother an economic parasite.
    - guy98238710 3y ago
      Once you have certain degree of automation, the hard-working people just drag everyone into pointless rat race.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  The "basic" in basic income isn't there for decoration: just taking UBI and not working would probably be about as comfortable as living on something like Universal Credit in the UK, minus the adversarial means-testing, which is to say, "not very". Certainly I wouldn't characterise it as "easy wealth", more like "easy bare minimum so you don't have to worry about starvation". Besides, if it was that much gloriously easy wealth, you'd get it too!
  - tomcam 3y ago
    How is means testing adversarial?
    - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
      Adversarial as well as means-tested, I should have said. The Universal Credit system is famously cruel in how it is designed. Not least it is paid in arrears and is designed to take 6 weeks to get the first (backdated) payment, by which time anyone who actually needs it is already likely to be overdrawn to the tune of a month's rent and utilities. https://www.newstatesman.com/quickfire/2022/10/universal-credit-cruel-inefficient-counterproductive https://www.newstatesman.com/quickfire/2022/10/universal-cre... https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/universal-credit-chaos-fear-and-preventable-deaths/ https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/universal-credit-chaos... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/universal-credit-system-whistleblower-benefits-poverty-suffering-vulnerable-claimants-hunger-chaos-theresa-may-a7998731.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/universal-cr... https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/government-benefit-sanctions-mp-report_uk_5be069b9e4b09d43e3215b7a https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/government-benefit-sa...
    - jclulow 3y ago
      The purest idealistic version of means testing may well be fine in theory, but in practice means testing is universally co-opted by conservative governments to make it difficult or impossible for the people with the least resources (and thus most in need of the benefits) to actually get them. The Australian Centrelink programme is a pretty good example of what happens: one government introduces a system of unemployment benefits and then later a different conservative government (whose members and voting base don't like poor people) are able to pervert the system through means testing provisions and other bureaucratic hurdles to effectively prevent a large subset of eligible persons from actually collecting the benefits to which they are entitled, but without having to deal with the political fallout of actually ending or reducing benefits on paper.
- whitemary 3y ago
  >Some people don’t want to work All we can be certain of is that they don't want to spend most of their lives under a dictatorship, and that's fair imo.
- II2II 3y ago
  I used to be employed in a community where the vast majority of people collected welfare and did not work. Except that most of the people who did not work actually did work. They would hunt for food, chop fire wood, haul their garbage to the dump, cook their own food, raise their own children, and do the many other things that are necessary to live. I'm not saying that they type of person you describe does not exist. They do. Some of them lived in the very community I described. I am saying that because we tend to have a very specific, and peculiar, idea of what work means. We almost universally mean working for another. It doesn't much matter whether we are an employer or an employee, the product of that work is typically meant for someone outside of our family, social circles, and community. At the same time we dismiss any form of labour that isn't based upon some sort of transaction, the type of labour that is central to the health of both families and communities. Our culture has these notions so entrenched that the lack of a "proper job" does destroy people, psychologically. Not only is one's sense of value lost, but the value of other types of relationships is greatly diminished. I don't really see worker rights or labour regulations as a complete solution since we are dealing with a problem that is stitched into the fabric of our society. Likewise, UBI is not a complete solution. If we were to dive into UBI today, which is about providing for people's basic needs from our surpluses (it is not about providing easy wealth), some people would be destroyed because we have never put much thought into what it means to live without there being some sort of transaction. We have never put much thought into what a non-authoritarian workplace would look like. We have never put much thought into what we need and our relationship with society as a whole. The question that I have trouble answering is how can we build the foundation of a society where we aren't simply asking whether we work to live or live to work? A society where people's needs are met without coercion. A world where people want to contribute to a more egalitarian society.
  - godelski 3y ago
    This is a very important part of the equation and I think many miss. "Work" is not well defined. I often ask what people would do if money wasn't an issue and they didn't have to have a job[0]. Most people end up answering that they'd pursue passions like art, volunteering, doing research, or other things that many call "work" but might not pay (after they say they'd travel and do other things like that, of course (follow-up is always required)). A lot of work is not quantified by traditional economic transactions (i.e. pay for work). People don't want to sit around and do nothing their entire lives. The other thing is people also seem to forget that this is exactly the situation those from generational wealth are in, and that the vast majority of them do some form of work. Yes, there are those that don't (especially while younger) but the majority do. I have a very hard time buying the narrative that were people to not work to make a living that they'd be a net drain on society. I see little evidence. I also see this as claiming that a post-scarce society is impossible. This is also critical as we live in a time where the potential for a post-scarce world exists (robotic workers liberate humanity from labor). It is even critical if we live in a semi or limited post scarce world, which is the transitional period to a post scarcity society (we're possibly in this). [0] I say I'd like to read math books, research, and publish openly. Not far from what I do now (academia). People counter me saying that that's work.
- codegeek 3y ago
  Free money is never going to solve anything. I don't mind helping people in need but just handing out money to people especially the ones that are already lazy wouldn't solve a thing. Instead, we should focus on getting people to work. Whatever that takes. We should reward those who want to work and penalize those who don't. If you can't work due to a real disability, you should be helped.
  - bombolo 3y ago
    > Whatever that takes. Ah, the old whip, yes… -_-'
  - machinawhite 3y ago
    I used to think HN is full of brilliant people but then there's emotionaly stunted priviliged yuppies like you spewing the most retarded shit I've ever seen. Please fuck off and work yourself to death so there's less of you. Fuck you.
  - Jochim 3y ago
    I'd rather require employers to make themselves a place someone would freely choose to work. If a person's basic needs are taken care of and they don't want to work for you, that's your problem. Even with our current systems, we have a situation where people live in such precarity that employers are able to treat them abusively/illegally. An egregious example would be "companies hiring children to clean slaughterhouses on a nightshift". More generally, we shouldn't put people in a position where they have to accept abuse because the alternative is massive upheaval at best, homelessness at worst.
- 93po 3y ago
  There are millions of stay-at-home parents or childless spouses that don't work traditional jobs and their lives are not destroyed.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  UBI is a solution to the problem of structural unemployment when due to advances in automation we don't have enough reasonable jobs for people who are capable of working, when we don't really want everyone to work as much. If we need everyone who can work to actually work, if we want to force people to work with a threat that if they don't contribute to society then they'll be (for example) homeless - well, then we don't (yet) need UBI and should not implement UBI until(if) we get the problem which UBI would fix.
- pierat 3y ago
  Work and labor are 2 different things. And I would never 'work' either, if it weren't for hanging starvation and destitution over my head. Labor - I build a fence for my home, or fix plumbing, or make miniatures, or do cool stuff. I and those around me benefit from my labor. I may help a friend move. Or help to do light construction, or networking. Again, we benefit. Work is labor where someone else takes the lion's share of the labor and keeps the surplus, where you nearly never see the result and keep scraps of your worth. You'll never see your 'worth', and all attempts will be made to hide it. The 'who' whom gets this massive surplus is the company you work for. Lots of hand-wavey reasons will be made why your share is low. I have no problem with labor. I and those around me benefit. Work is exploitative and serves to make someone else richer at my, my family's, and my friends expense.
- abwizz 3y ago
  > Some people don’t want to work. They’ve told me so. I think UBI would destroy these people most ppl dont want to work some unrelateable, bullshit under time constraints for richer ppl they dont even know or like. so mostly we chug along and put in the required performances. imo this is unesessary and counterproductive since we have gained access to automation of most physical and a lot of office work.
trw_phy 3y ago
You'd think people would learn after the covid money printer that giving people paper with funny pictures doesn't actually do anything. UBI, like Roko's basilisk, is the magical thinking of our age. We need a working government to meet people's needs because the market sure as hell can't. That's a lot harder than just brrrr.
- lannisterstark 3y ago
  UBI isn't covid money printer though. You're misrepresenting it either intentionally or by mistake to discredit it. UBI would, and should, replace current welfare schemes. We already have those in place.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    > UBI would, and should, replace current welfare schemes. We already have those in place. But that would still require a huge amount of additional money if you want UBI to be above subsistence levels. Otherwise the amount received by current welfare recipients would have to be cut several times. Also what about disabled people and others who can't work? Would they get the same amount as everyone?
    - gchamonlive 3y ago
      I don't really understand the subject too deeply, just enough to have me convinced UBI should be implemented in some form, but I think the fundamental assumption is that everything that the government has to provide, it is going to do so, by no fault of the government itself, in a very inefficient way. So by the mere act of UBI replacing many systems and centralising in a single program many forms of wealth redistribution, it would do so with less waste, even if UBI would be by itself inefficient.
      - michaelmrose 3y ago
        It is incredibly easy to automate giving every citizen an unconditional electronic deposit. The inefficiency and overhead of social programs comes from individual assessments to figure out who to exclude.
mantas 3y ago
Universal income covering the very basic would still keep people making beyond minimum wage vulnerable. Paying meaningful money would be too expensive at scale. Then few jobs could pay meaningfully more than the universal income. Why work if you get +/- not working?
- jupp0r 3y ago
  Your understanding of universal income is broken. Everybody receives a monthly income, regardless of them working or not. The incentive to earn more by working is always there.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    Not if employers are taxed so much to fund UBI that they hire fewer workers. The ability to work and earn more is contingent upon enough jobs existing. What would really happen is they would raise their prices to earn the amount of profit they deem necessary to be worth the trouble of being in business. Everything gets more expensive, and the UBI payments won't be enough to live on.
  - mantas 3y ago
    People would still pay taxes ;) UBI is essentially a negative tax. If you make nothing - you get some money. If you make some - there's a breaking point somewhere where you pay more taxes than is UBI. If UBI was a cushy amount covering more than the bare basics, low-tier jobs would pay a very small premium over pure UBI.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  Why work now at minimum wage if it won't get you out of poverty?
  - clnq 3y ago
    UBI will just cause inflation so that you have to work to afford things again. No company will forgo an opportunity to raise prices when they can. Fiduciary responsibility to corporate boards has always been more important than morals or ethics. And easier to get sued over. So boards will demand growth, as they do, and that will include raising prices where people can afford it. Poverty will still be there, it will just cost more (nominally) to get out of it. The question you pose will remain with UBI, as will poverty. It might just get more extreme for anyone who gets disqualified from UBI for some reason (undocumented, etc). This problem has not been solved for UBI nor seen in small-scale trials. But there isn't a single rich country or region in the world where the retail prices have not adjusted to consumers' spending power.

Silhouette 3y ago

Meanwhile in 2023 a favourite argument of management who want everyone back in the office is that it's essential to have those casual interactions around the watercooler. When of course your keyboard and mouse won't be used at all.

transpute 3y ago
If an employer can snoop keyboard and mouse, there's a non-zero chance that unauthorized remote attackers can do the same. Watercooler surveillance requires physical access for cameras and lip-reading, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36188381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36188381
- reustle 3y ago
  All of the mainstream tools that I've seen for this just monitor activity, not the specific keystrokes / mouse pointer coordinates.

geek_at 3y ago

> surveillance is here to stay in the United States. Europe has very strict rules about surveiling employees. Example: In Austria we are not allowed to use some of the functions that Azure-AD joined computers would be capable of because employers _might_ push remote control software the user hasn't agreed to

oneplane 3y ago
Same here. Employers can't even look inside user's mailboxes because there is no guarantee that it doesn't contain anything personal. Even if the company has a rule that you're not allowed to use it for personal things, the law supersedes that and you still can't do it willy nilly.
- josefx 3y ago
  > Even if the company has a rule that you're not allowed to use it for personal things, the law supersedes that and you still can't do it willy nilly. Companies are not homogeneous blocks of matter and there is always information some people at the company may need to know that others have no business dealing with. Tax, banking and health related information are some of the things that I can think of that would be shared on a need to know basis with people at work and have no business to be seen by people outside of the intended audience.
  - krageon 3y ago
    Health related information may absolutely not be shared, and doesn't need to be.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      Employer don't even get diagnosis behind sick leave. Not sure how work accidents are treated in that regard so.
    - josefx 3y ago
      Honestly I wasn't sure how much that point applied. However with people that suffer chronic illnesses or disabilities that require special consideration I would be surprised if it was always possible to adequately communicate those needs without also mentioning information that the employee might not want to share publicly.

hmmSceptical 3y ago

> Bad businesses will continue to use draconian methods to try to squeeze productivity rather than foster it What about jobs that aren't creative like coding or graphic design? Some jobs are simply "sit in your chair and do work". The productivity metrics aren't speculative - they are measurable. You may argue "these are jobs for AI" - but realistically alot of jobs are a way off from this. Why shouldn't the "productivity" of these staff be measured? Because you don't like it? If you work at "big shipping co" and "box" 1 item a day and your colleagues do 100, should you not be fired?

gedy 3y ago
> If you work at "big shipping co" and "box" 1 item a day and your colleagues do 100, should you not be fired? Those are results, and not measured by "is their ass in this chair for 8 hours?", same as monitoring keyboard and mouse usage.
wmf 3y ago
The productivity metrics aren't speculative - they are measurable. So measure the output, not the mouse, not the keyboard, not the chair, etc.
- hmmSceptical 3y ago
  "output" only matters if your company is paid by "results" and isn't based on billable hours, otherwise ... "output" doesn't matter. Law firms would love every case to be solved in 2 hours if they still got the same $ value from a case that dragged on for 6 months.
  - wmf 3y ago
    Keep moving those goalposts.
    - hmmSceptical 3y ago
      > Goalposts You literally said "output" the most speculative / vague definition of "work" available. I appreciate programmers / "creatives" "output" is much harder to measure, but there are alot of jobs where "mouse moving", "words per second" is a very reliable indicator of "output".

bboygravity 3y ago

Only in America (and third world countries).

reaperducer 3y ago
Only in America (and third world countries). Today I learned that Canada, Australia, South Korea, and Japan are third-world countries. Thanks for the lesson in geopolitics, bboygravity!

suddenclarity 3y ago

> Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished. This always comes across as people wanting to have the cake and eat it. Employers should only care that the work is getting done, but if the work isn't done, then the employee should still be able to go home after 8 hours and get full salary?

cornercasechase 3y ago
If the work is not getting done, spying on people isn’t going to improve things. If you want people to work, you have to properly motivate them. That means fair wages and non-toxic management.
- codegeek 3y ago
  So you are assuming that if someone is not doing a good job, it is because they are paid unfairly and/or in a toxic env ? Thats a lot of assumption. How about the deadbeats ? Do they exist or not ?
  - brewdad 3y ago
    If you can't tell your deadbeat employees without logging every minute of their workday, you are a terrible manager and should be fired.
lliamander 3y ago
> but if the work isn't done, then the employee should still be able to go home after 8 hours and get full salary? Of course not. If the work isn't getting done, then the employee should be fired. And that's the case even with the surveillance.
- mysterydip 3y ago
  That being said, there's also a difference between progress and meeting goals. Employees can put in 100% for a full 8 hours and still miss a deadline (poor scheduling, issues/roadblocks that arise, or maybe they're not good at the job). I think a lot of the tension between management and workers is because much modern work isn't assembly-line-deterministic x widgets-per-hour.

pcurve 3y ago

lol oh the good old days. The funniest part is, it would take screenshots of desktop periodically, but I would know when it's happening due to micro lag in mouse movement as it happened. It was so hilarious. I didn't give a crap because I worked hard anyway. Ended up staying at the place for 17 years.

whitemary 3y ago

>Quit the bad ones, join the good ones. It's literally a recession. IT just experienced historically massive layoffs over the last 6 months. Could you be any more out of touch?

osigurdson 3y ago

Gross, why didn't you just quit instead?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

godelski 3y ago

> Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished. Goodhart's Law (HN might be annoyed at how often I reference this) Goodhart's Law isn't just about that setting a metric as a target leads to that metric being exploited, but is more about how difficult things are to measure and evaluate. The lesson to be learned here is that measurements should only ever be considered as indicators at best, and usually as weak signals. Proper evaluation requires significant nuance, exceptions to the rules, and care. It requires being human: messy, a bit chaotic, and inconsistent. There's good reason for our desire for good metrics. It can help make things fair, consistent, reduce bias, and help control for bad actors. There is that appeal to act mechanically, as machines are often highly interpretable and controllable. But over-reliance on metrics end up with the exact same results. Humans will always exploit a metric. Humans aren't machines. Hell, AI always exploits metrics (which creates a big irony that there's so much benchmarkism in the field). For this reason meritocracy can never exist, as unbiased metrics and evaluations can never exist. Doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for it, but rather that we need to think slow and with care. Unfortunately, our brain is lazy and wants to think fast and on autopilot. An irony with how often HN references Kahneman's book. The most human thing we can do is actually override our autopilot, as that's what differentiates us from the other animals and machines. Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished. That's hard to measure. But one needs to recognize this rather than chase mechanistic one-size-fits-all metrics. You need to embrace the chaos to navigate it. Set guidelines, not rules. Managers and business owners, take heed. > surveillance is here to stay I'm unconvinced. This happens because there is little to no pushback because people are convinced that the hierarchical structures are too powerful. But as I said above to embrace the chaos, this too is how you can attack these structures. I talked about this longer in another thread, but remember that you're <6 steps from any person. Ideas spread like viruses (memes), and the control only exists when we stop talking and communicating. If we self censor (e.g. are afraid to tell others our salaries because we think they'll be mad at us instead of the person that controls the pay) then the hierarchy has too much power. Hierarchies are good, but power gets abused. It isn't good for your business to have that power abused. But it also requires care: to not chase short term gains but think long term and remain fluid (environments change. Adapt or die).