Automation vs Today's Jobs
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@HardwareGeek said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Gąska said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
US unemployment is the lowest since the beginning of time.
TIL time began in 1970.
According to Unix, yes.
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@HardwareGeek said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Gąska said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
US unemployment is the lowest since the beginning of time.
TIL time began in 1970. I thought it began at nightfall preceding Sunday, October 3, 4004 B.C.
I knew someone would
on this, but you're the last person I would've suspected.
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@HardwareGeek I consider this a compliment.
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@Magus said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@LaoC said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Does anyone else find it utter lunacy to subsidize people doing work that's objectively unnecessary (or else legally mandate that such work cannot be automated) just to be able to stick to the idea that an entitlement to live can only come through something bearing the name of "work"?
No. People want to feel like they're doing something useful - it's a natural human drive. And there's no guarantee that they'll be able to forever.
People who don't feel like they're able to do anything productive, or that they're worthless, get up to all kinds of horrible things. It messes with their heads.
I largely agree -- but why the "no"? I don't know about you but my feeling of productivity wouldn't be the best if I knew the job I'm doing could easily be done by a dumb machine. Kind of the same symptom as for the guys with the Bullshit Jobs in the article I linked.
Of course people would tend to feel unproductive with a 4h work day if all they hear (and I keep reading that over and over here as well) is that "working hard" is the only thing that entitles you to any kind of material well-being. The hardship is obligatory, without it you're a worthless slacker. Typical protestant work ethics. And along the same lines they're told that the problem we have is people who precisely don't have that supposedly universal human drive to productivity. That's the worst kind, they have to be disciplined and forced to work by threat of death by starvation. And at the same time there's supposedly not enough work to go around.
Lunacy.
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@brie said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@LaoC said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Does anyone else find it utter lunacy to subsidize people doing work that's objectively unnecessary (or else legally mandate that such work cannot be automated) just to be able to stick to the idea that an entitlement to live can only come through something bearing the name of "work"?
Hm? You're free to go hew down some trees and build a cabin with your bare hands and plant or hunt your own food.
Really? Where?
Unfortunately that does kind of sound like "work", though. You'd probably rather just surf along on other people's accomplishments.
Me? No. Did you notice I said subsidizing people's unnecessary work is lunacy? That was the suggestion here.
It's socialism in action!
put to an honest day's work
Yeah, that sounds like the weird and unhealthy work ethic I was talking about.
Alternately, you can basically just enslave people who would rather work than die. It's kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't sort of situation, and I admit, I'm not sure what the answer to it is.
It could be what people like Keynes imagined like a century ago: for everybody to just work less.
I don't think the answer is just to block any sort of technological progress that might put people out of work, though.
Definitely not. Not that it would work anyway.
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@HardwareGeek said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@remi said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
there is little discussion of the effects and more importantly the remedies of the past.
Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
Not only do we not learn from the past, we don't learn the past.
That's kind of my point. The above saying (those who don't learn...) is well known (and only partly true of course), and yet when something happens, almost systematically the first response is that this is something new and why even bother looking at history? It's somewhat depressing to think how short our society's collective memory and attention span is...
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@izzion said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Rhywden
True. And given the international nature of IT consulting as it is, there's definitely the reality of location arbitrage -- even if you assume the automated checkouts are creating jobs on net, due to the developers maintaining & developing the code for them, the technicians repairing the systems when they break and otherwise generally administering the system, etc... most of those jobs can be anywhere, and only require a small number of "local hands" guys to go out and push the buttons or swing the hammer intermittently.It's definitely easy to be "comfortable" sitting here on my perch as an IT "superstar" troubleshooter, confident that I'm employable without even really needing to move if my current job dried up. But I've also met plenty of people working barista/clerk level jobs that are fully capable of doing Tier 1 / Tier 2 technical support or other entry level "automator" jobs, once they're driven to the necessity of learning how. Is it really better for them to "trap" them in their lower paying, lower producing job so they don't get the discomfort of retraining? Is it better for society? Can I add many more questions to the end of this post without getting it Jeffed to the questions thread?
Somehow I have a thought that some of those unemployed-because-replaced-by-computer people will buy a crypto-ransom kit(or other type that can get them money) from black market and milk money from it. Or for those who don't have skill to find one, will go the old way robbing people and shops.
It almost always don't need any qualification to commit crimes, and history told us that when farmers met drought or flooding weather so they can't make their life, they'll turn into robbers no matter how poor their equipments are.
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@cheong said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@izzion said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Rhywden
True. And given the international nature of IT consulting as it is, there's definitely the reality of location arbitrage -- even if you assume the automated checkouts are creating jobs on net, due to the developers maintaining & developing the code for them, the technicians repairing the systems when they break and otherwise generally administering the system, etc... most of those jobs can be anywhere, and only require a small number of "local hands" guys to go out and push the buttons or swing the hammer intermittently.It's definitely easy to be "comfortable" sitting here on my perch as an IT "superstar" troubleshooter, confident that I'm employable without even really needing to move if my current job dried up. But I've also met plenty of people working barista/clerk level jobs that are fully capable of doing Tier 1 / Tier 2 technical support or other entry level "automator" jobs, once they're driven to the necessity of learning how. Is it really better for them to "trap" them in their lower paying, lower producing job so they don't get the discomfort of retraining? Is it better for society? Can I add many more questions to the end of this post without getting it Jeffed to the questions thread?
Somehow I have a thought that some of those unemployed-because-replaced-by-computer people will buy a crypto-ransom kit(or other type that can get them money) from black market and milk money from it. Or for those who don't have skill to find one, will go the old way robbing people and shops.
It almost always don't need any qualification to commit crimes, and history told us that when farmers met drought or flooding weather so they can't make their life, they'll turn into robbers no matter how poor their equipments are.
Well hopefully they'll just rob each other. I look forward to the fully robotic farm and recent soft-structure robotics work is very encouraging.
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@LaoC said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Unfortunately that does kind of sound like "work", though. You'd probably rather just surf along on other people's accomplishments.
Me? No. Did you notice I said subsidizing people's unnecessary work is lunacy? That was the suggestion here.
So you'd rather subsidize people's not working. Which is even sillier, I think.
There's no simple answer, but giving people enough money to live comfortably without requiring them to work for it is socialism's answer, and socialism has been a huge failure each time it's been tried.
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@brie said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@LaoC said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Unfortunately that does kind of sound like "work", though. You'd probably rather just surf along on other people's accomplishments.
Me? No. Did you notice I said subsidizing people's unnecessary work is lunacy? That was the suggestion here.
So you'd rather subsidize people's not working. Which is even sillier, I think.
There's no simple answer, but giving people enough money to live comfortably without requiring them to work for it is socialism's answer, and socialism has been a huge failure each time it's been tried.
Subsidizing useless work is sillier than subsidizing non work.
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@Gribnit They're both pretty silly.
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@brie You can distinguish them by which hastens the heat-death of the universe more.
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@The_Quiet_One said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Think "Ready Player One" but hopefully less dystopian
Book or film version?
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@brie said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
socialism has been a huge failure each time it's been tried.
But it's never really been tried!
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@HardwareGeek what about true laissez-faire capitalism, huh?
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@Gribnit That would really suck. Capitalism would flop and fall without anti-trust regulations.
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@Magus said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
People who don't feel like they're able to do anything productive, or that they're worthless, get up to all kinds of horrible things. It messes with their heads.
Such people should take up a hobby.
I genuinely can’t understand the kind of person who, when they don’t have a job to go to, just sits around doing nothing all day. It’s apparently very common among retired people whose job was everything for them — and then they’re of retirement age and don’t know what to do with themselves. (Point one: why retire if you enjoy what you’re doing? Point two: if you’re made to retire against your will, why not find something else to do instead?)
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@The_Quiet_One said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Basically every culture ever so far has focused greatly on the importance of hard work because otherwise those cultures would have collapsed. I think people are innately driven to work hard to be both mentally and physically healthy.
How do you square this with hunter-gatherer societies?
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@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Point two: if you’re made to retire against your will, why not find something else to do instead?
You underestimated the difficulty in finding a similar job when you're above the retire age.
We're in recent debate for relevant topic in Hong Kong. The government proposed to increase the age for applying Comprehensive Social Security Assistance (CSSA) Scheme for elderly from 60 to 65, but without doing anything to make the working environment "elderly friendly" first. Most non-government jobs still have retirement age at 60, and most employment insurance scheme annual fee still sky-rackets once the employee is above 60.
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@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
I genuinely can’t understand the kind of person who, when they don’t have a job to go to, just sits around doing nothing all day.
Lots of people aren't very "strategic thinking". They don't work to make their own lives the way they want them, they just deal with stuff as it happens.
Like when people say "money can't buy happiness". That just means they just have no goals or motivations in life beyond getting a cool car.
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@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@The_Quiet_One said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Basically every culture ever so far has focused greatly on the importance of hard work because otherwise those cultures would have collapsed. I think people are innately driven to work hard to be both mentally and physically healthy.
How do you square this with hunter-gatherer societies?
The hard work comes in spurts (
) but it still has to happen.
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@pie_flavor Would it though, or was there regulatory capture even at the time such that the trusts managed to distort the legal system? H'mm?
(chants "Laissez-faire.")
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@brie said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@LaoC said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Unfortunately that does kind of sound like "work", though. You'd probably rather just surf along on other people's accomplishments.
Me? No. Did you notice I said subsidizing people's unnecessary work is lunacy? That was the suggestion here.
So you'd rather subsidize people's not working. Which is even sillier, I think.
There's no simple answer, but giving people enough money to live comfortably without requiring them to work for it is socialism's answer, and socialism has been a huge failure each time it's been tried.
Assuming everything is done by robots, how is “people don’t need to work”, aka “ohmergawd, mah socialism”, in any way worse than “there’s no useful work for them, so we have them dig holes on even days and fill them on odd days”?!
At least the people “not working” can be doing non-stupid things instead.
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@topspin said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@brie said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@LaoC said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Unfortunately that does kind of sound like "work", though. You'd probably rather just surf along on other people's accomplishments.
Me? No. Did you notice I said subsidizing people's unnecessary work is lunacy? That was the suggestion here.
So you'd rather subsidize people's not working. Which is even sillier, I think.
There's no simple answer, but giving people enough money to live comfortably without requiring them to work for it is socialism's answer, and socialism has been a huge failure each time it's been tried.
Assuming everything is done by robots, how is “people don’t need to work”, aka “ohmergawd, mah socialism”, in any way worse than “there’s no useful work for them, so we have them dig holes on even days and fill them on odd days”?!
At least the people “not working” can be doing non-stupid things instead.It's all
, we are filling in the necessary wasting of time with increased bureaucracy and foolishness as necessary, as we have ever done. As long as everyone wants to burn 8+ hours a day erking a dur their durs will expand to the erk time.
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@cheong said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Point two: if you’re made to retire against your will, why not find something else to do instead?
You underestimated the difficulty in finding a similar job when you're above the retire age.
I’m not talking about paid jobs, I’m talking about doing things in general. Work in the garden, volunteer at a local charity, go for walks, read books, take up painting — whatever. You’ll probably soon discover you like doing one or more of these things, and then you have a hobby to keep you occupied.
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@boomzilla said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
The hard work comes in spurts (
) but it still has to happen.True, but hunter-gatherers spend much less time and probably effort working hard than farmers and other more advanced civilisations do. The trade-off, of course, is that a farming society can support far more people, at the expense of those people having to work harder to survive as well as hunter-gatherers do. But in the eyes of farming societies and their descendants, hunter-gatherers don’t focus “greatly on the importance of hard work”, I think.
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@topspin said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@brie said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@LaoC said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Unfortunately that does kind of sound like "work", though. You'd probably rather just surf along on other people's accomplishments.
Me? No. Did you notice I said subsidizing people's unnecessary work is lunacy? That was the suggestion here.
So you'd rather subsidize people's not working. Which is even sillier, I think.
There's no simple answer, but giving people enough money to live comfortably without requiring them to work for it is socialism's answer, and socialism has been a huge failure each time it's been tried.
Assuming everything is done by robots, how is “people don’t need to work”, aka “ohmergawd, mah socialism”, in any way worse than “there’s no useful work for them, so we have them dig holes on even days and fill them on odd days”?!
At least the people “not working” can be doing non-stupid things instead.Ideally we, and by "we" I mean the free market, need to find something useful for them to do. But, they have to be able and willing to learn to do it.
The problem right now isn't that the market has shifted away from labor and toward automation and just doesn't have jobs for people. It's that it doesn't have people for jobs... people who are skilled and/or willing to learn. The unemployment rate is effectively zero right now; that means it should be relatively easy for people to find a job, if they're capable of working and willing to. Virtually all of them have found jobs.
If public assistance is ready to step in and give people an acceptable standard of living, without ever requiring them to actually go back to work, there's just not much point in them going back to work. The fact that their total income will actually decrease in some cases, if they start working, is also a huge fuck up. That needs to be fixed. Benefits should gradually decrease; earning more should always put more into your pocket, even while your benefits are dropping off. Unemployment is and should remain a temporary assistance that's given to people who need it while they're between jobs. Disability assistance also needs to still exist, although it's questionable how many of the people who are earning disability actually need it because they couldn't find work elsewhere, and how many of them are gaming the system. Being too
lazybipolar to get out of bed on mornings that you don't want to is not a disability, and if it gets someone fired for being late or missing too many days, that's nobody's fault but their own.
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@brie said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@topspin said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@brie said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@LaoC said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Unfortunately that does kind of sound like "work", though. You'd probably rather just surf along on other people's accomplishments.
Me? No. Did you notice I said subsidizing people's unnecessary work is lunacy? That was the suggestion here.
So you'd rather subsidize people's not working. Which is even sillier, I think.
There's no simple answer, but giving people enough money to live comfortably without requiring them to work for it is socialism's answer, and socialism has been a huge failure each time it's been tried.
Assuming everything is done by robots, how is “people don’t need to work”, aka “ohmergawd, mah socialism”, in any way worse than “there’s no useful work for them, so we have them dig holes on even days and fill them on odd days”?!
At least the people “not working” can be doing non-stupid things instead.Ideally we, and by "we" I mean the free market, need to find something useful for them to do. But, they have to be able and willing to learn to do it.
And the equivalent of a free market solution is “subsidizing not-work”, as people can and will decide on their own how time is best spent, whereas “subsidize useless work” is the equivalent of planned economy, where someone else decides that you should be doing the least useful thing instead.
Letting people work out themselves if they want to do painting or math or leisure instead of digging holes.
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@brie said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
The unemployment rate is effectively zero right now; that means it should be relatively easy for people to find a job, if they're capable of working and willing to. Virtually all of them have found jobs.
How many of those are in the BS gig economy? Y'know, Uber drivers driving their cars into the ground and all that jazz?
Also, fuck you for making being "bipolar" into a joke.
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@Rhywden said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Also, fuck you for making being "bipolar" into a joke.
So it's fine for people to doctor-shop until they get a diagnosis with bipolar/autism/BPD/whatever condition it is that excuses the fact that they can't drag themselves out of bed and to work on time and means that they should receive monthly handouts from the government instead.
But how dare I mention it, because pointing out the fakers means I'm the one who's turning a serious condition into a joke.
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There's an aspect of this issue that I haven't see brought up here: From the article:
[The drive towards automation is] messy, chaotic, and often painful on just about everyone besides management—imagine that.
Automation benefits the managers and executives primarily by lowering costs. That lowered cost is realized by firing now redundant workers. All of the burden of retraining or looking for new work or moving across the country is on the laborers being replaced. Managers and executives bear none of these burden and reap all of the benefits of automation. Granted, this is business as usual, but that doesn't make it right. It's not right that the ones making the decisions do not suffer any of the same consequences that they inflict on others. It's another example of privatized profits and socialized losses.
This is part of a trend I'm seeing in business where labor (defined as those whose efforts create the product from which the managerial types profit: those who turn the bolts, type the code, deliver packages, etc.) is judged to be without value, a necessary evil at best--only a cost to be minimized. There is no respect for experience or expertise, just the observation those things cost money and business would rather do without. As much as people love mentioning "buggy whips," they seem to forget that Gordon Gekko was the villain of the movie who profited not from starting new businesses or increasing their efficiency, but by liquidating their assets (including employees and their pension fund). The "greed is good" speech was a self-serving lie.
In my more conspiratorial moods, I might note that:
- Tech companies are always pivoting to the new shiny frameworks so they have an excuse to higher younger,
cheaperup-to-date programmers and get rid of older,more expensiveout-of-touch programmers. - The gig economy only exists so business owners don't have to hire employees (who would be getting health insurance, worker's comp, and retirement benefits).
- Companies like Lime and Bird have taken this even further by not only refusing to hire employees, but also seizing public space and dumping their wares on the sidewalk so they don't even have to pay for the real estate to set up shop.
To go full bat country, the ultimate result (if not purpose) of automation and the gig economy is to set worker against worker as they scramble for a piece of an ever-shrinking amount of work. To complete the paragraph where the first quote was taken from:
Of course, it’s the worst for those put out of work. Either way, we may be witnessing the rise of a truly broken system where coworkers are forced to struggle with whether or not to automate each other out of work, competing for a thinning pool of decent jobs as profits flow upstream, where the pool of investment for future automation projects grows.
The workers who create automation are pitted against the workers who currently perform the task. Every gig economy worker gets less and less pay for their work as more people start gigging since the supply of jobs is finite. All this is a distraction while someone else walks away unnoticed with all the money.
- Tech companies are always pivoting to the new shiny frameworks so they have an excuse to higher younger,
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@Rhywden said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Also, fuck you for making being "bipolar" into a joke.
No U.
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@brie said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@LaoC said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Unfortunately that does kind of sound like "work", though. You'd probably rather just surf along on other people's accomplishments.
Me? No. Did you notice I said subsidizing people's unnecessary work is lunacy? That was the suggestion here.
So you'd rather subsidize people's not working. Which is even sillier, I think.
You should have read on before taking your reflexes take over:
@LaoC said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:It could be what people like Keynes imagined like a century ago: for everybody to just work less.
There's no simple answer, but giving people enough money to live comfortably without requiring them to work for it is socialism's answer, and socialism has been a huge failure each time it's been tried.
What do you mean, "requiring"? Don't you agree with @Magus that it's a natural human drive found in most people to want to feel like you're doing something useful?
And regarding that "socialism's answer" you once again only read half of it, didn't you? The part before "to each according to their needs" says "from each according to their capability".Anyway, where is that place where I can go to hew down some trees and build a cabin with my bare hands and plant or hunt my own food? Not that I would want to go do that but I have a friend who's all into that self-suffiency stuff.
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@brie said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Ideally we, and by "we" I mean the free market, need to find something useful for them to do. But, they have to be able and willing to learn to do it.
Subsidizing non-work is how the free market can solve the problem. Retraining requires time, which you don't have if you are scrounging for bare subsistence or stuck in a redundant job that you have to be at to get your benefits.
If they had instead some basic room in social housing and food (like the ugly produce markets refuse to buy) they would have the time needed to make themselves useful.
Notice that this is not socialism, as the goal is not to make this a comfortable standard of living, or the same as someone that works. It's a safety net. And yes, some people would abuse it and think that's enough for them and just exist. But most would want to improve their situation (we have an innate desire to seek status, and this would be the lowest possible status). They would probably join the gig economy first, and specialize into more useful things as opportunity and talent allows.
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@brie said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Rhywden said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Also, fuck you for making being "bipolar" into a joke.
So it's fine for people to doctor-shop until they get a diagnosis with bipolar/autism/BPD/whatever condition it is that excuses the fact that they can't drag themselves out of bed and to work on time and means that they should receive monthly handouts from the government instead.
But how dare I mention it, because pointing out the fakers means I'm the one who's turning a serious condition into a joke.
Well, you're a moron of the highest order for actually believing that this is a serious problem.
With every scheme you'll always have freeloaders. But sure, let's ignore the thousands of people with problems like these because tens will abuse it.
Just look at your trustfund babies who just were lucky to be born rich.
But you're not crying about those, weirdly enough.
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@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@The_Quiet_One said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Basically every culture ever so far has focused greatly on the importance of hard work because otherwise those cultures would have collapsed. I think people are innately driven to work hard to be both mentally and physically healthy.
How do you square this with hunter-gatherer societies?
I find it hard to imagine a society in which almost constant hard work is more necessary. Hunting is not always successful, and the food supply is intermittent and at least somewhat unpredictable. Gathering may be fairly easy in summer when fruits and such are relatively abundant, but winter and spring, before the new year's crops are ripe, food may be rather scarce and require long travel, much searching, and/or settling for less desirable foods.
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@HardwareGeek said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
I find it hard to imagine a society in which almost constant hard work is more necessary.
That doesn’t go at all with:—
Hunting is not always successful, and the food supply is intermittent and at least somewhat unpredictable. Gathering may be fairly easy in summer when fruits and such are relatively abundant, but winter and spring, before the new year's crops are ripe, food may be rather scarce and require long travel, much searching, and/or settling for less desirable foods.
First you say that hunter-gatherers need to work constantly, then you say that at times they have it easy and at times there’s nothing for them to do.
In any case, people in hunter-gatherer societies spend a lot more time doing nothing much than those in farming or industrial societies. Whether this is by choice or by necessity isn’t really relevant, point is that they don’t need to do continual work. I once (a very long time ago) read an article about a study that looked at how much taxi drivers in some American city (probably New York) work. It turned out they more or less have an amount of money in mind for the day, and when they reached that, they went home. This meant that on bad days they would spend a lot more time driving around looking for fares, and going home late, than on days with plenty of customers, on which days they’d be going home much earlier.¹ Hunter-gathering is probably very similar to this.
OTOH, farmers pretty much have to work hard all the time, else the crops will fail or the livestock will die — which must be where the work ethic comes from.
¹ And, IIRC, the article noted that it would be much smarter to do it the other way around, but concluded that that’s probably not human nature.
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@MZH said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
As much as people love mentioning "buggy whips," they seem to forget that Gordon Gekko was the villain of the movie who profited not from starting new businesses or increasing their efficiency, but by liquidating their assets (including employees and their pension fund). The "greed is good" speech was a self-serving lie.
Movies are movies, but even that function is valuable, like a forest fire that clears out old and dead growth so new things can grow.
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@Rhywden said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
With every scheme you'll always have freeloaders. But sure, let's ignore the thousands of people with problems like these because tens will abuse it.
What are you talking about?
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@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@cheong said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Point two: if you’re made to retire against your will, why not find something else to do instead?
You underestimated the difficulty in finding a similar job when you're above the retire age.
I’m not talking about paid jobs, I’m talking about doing things in general. Work in the garden, volunteer at a local charity, go for walks, read books, take up painting — whatever. You’ll probably soon discover you like doing one or more of these things, and then you have a hobby to keep you occupied.
A hobby doesn't help much if you actually need a job still so you can put food on the table. (I'm getting quite sensitive to this as I age - and since I'm currently interviewing - though thankfully, my age is actually helping me right now - experience!)
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@boomzilla said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Rhywden said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
With every scheme you'll always have freeloaders. But sure, let's ignore the thousands of people with problems like these because tens will abuse it.
What are you talking about?
He's talking about joking about bipolar and people who abuse the system so they don't have to work. I don't know about his situation, but that can be a bit touchy to those of us who have friends in that situation. It took a 5150 before a friend of mine would even consider they had a problem. You want to talk about something that just rips your life (and the lives of all the people around) apart. Thankfully, they're stable now. Better living thru chemistry!
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@dcon said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@boomzilla said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Rhywden said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
With every scheme you'll always have freeloaders. But sure, let's ignore the thousands of people with problems like these because tens will abuse it.
What are you talking about?
He's talking about joking about bipolar and people who abuse the system so they don't have to work. I don't know about his situation, but that can be a bit touchy to those of us who have friends in that situation. It took a 5150 before a friend of mine would even consider they had a problem. You want to talk about something that just rips your life (and the lives of all the people around) apart. Thankfully, they're stable now. Better living thru chemistry!
No, I get all of that. But what he said, "let's [do]..." wasn't being done.
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@dcon said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@cheong said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Point two: if you’re made to retire against your will, why not find something else to do instead?
You underestimated the difficulty in finding a similar job when you're above the retire age.
I’m not talking about paid jobs, I’m talking about doing things in general. Work in the garden, volunteer at a local charity, go for walks, read books, take up painting — whatever. You’ll probably soon discover you like doing one or more of these things, and then you have a hobby to keep you occupied.
A hobby doesn't help much if you actually need a job still so you can put food on the table.
I hope you're aware you're switching to a different topic here? Because the people you're replying to were talking about retired people with pension big enough to cover all their needs, who can absolutely afford to sit on the couch whole day and do nothing, so they sit on the couch whole day and do nothing.
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@Gąska said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@dcon said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@cheong said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Point two: if you’re made to retire against your will, why not find something else to do instead?
You underestimated the difficulty in finding a similar job when you're above the retire age.
I’m not talking about paid jobs, I’m talking about doing things in general. Work in the garden, volunteer at a local charity, go for walks, read books, take up painting — whatever. You’ll probably soon discover you like doing one or more of these things, and then you have a hobby to keep you occupied.
A hobby doesn't help much if you actually need a job still so you can put food on the table.
I hope you're aware you're switching to a different topic here? Because the people you're replying to were talking about retired people with pension big enough to cover all their needs, who can absolutely afford to sit on the couch whole day and do nothing, so they sit on the couch whole day and do nothing.
(I'd forgotten the context. I'm only starting my 2nd cup of coffee, so processes are slowly winding back up.)
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@boomzilla said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@dcon said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@boomzilla said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Rhywden said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
With every scheme you'll always have freeloaders. But sure, let's ignore the thousands of people with problems like these because tens will abuse it.
What are you talking about?
He's talking about joking about bipolar and people who abuse the system so they don't have to work. I don't know about his situation, but that can be a bit touchy to those of us who have friends in that situation. It took a 5150 before a friend of mine would even consider they had a problem. You want to talk about something that just rips your life (and the lives of all the people around) apart. Thankfully, they're stable now. Better living thru chemistry!
No, I get all of that. But what he said, "let's [do]..." wasn't being done.
Yes, it was:
Disability assistance also needs to still exist, although it's questionable how many of the people who are earning disability actually need it because they couldn't find work elsewhere, and how many of them are gaming the system.
@brie explicitly questioned if there is a sizable amount of freeloaders compared to people with an actual disability. Sizable enough to even mention it, whereas @Rhywden's point is that it's irrelevant in size and @brie makes it sound like it's all fake (not "all" all, but enough to be relevant).
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@topspin said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@boomzilla said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@dcon said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@boomzilla said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Rhywden said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
With every scheme you'll always have freeloaders. But sure, let's ignore the thousands of people with problems like these because tens will abuse it.
What are you talking about?
He's talking about joking about bipolar and people who abuse the system so they don't have to work. I don't know about his situation, but that can be a bit touchy to those of us who have friends in that situation. It took a 5150 before a friend of mine would even consider they had a problem. You want to talk about something that just rips your life (and the lives of all the people around) apart. Thankfully, they're stable now. Better living thru chemistry!
No, I get all of that. But what he said, "let's [do]..." wasn't being done.
Yes, it was:
Disability assistance also needs to still exist, although it's questionable how many of the people who are earning disability actually need it because they couldn't find work elsewhere, and how many of them are gaming the system.
@brie explicitly questioned if there is a sizable amount of freeloaders compared to people with an actual disability. Sizable enough to even mention it, whereas @Rhywden's point is that it's irrelevant in size and @brie makes it sound like it's all fake (not "all" all, but enough to be relevant).
I get that they disagree. I don't get that anyone was saying to ignore people with real problems. Note that this was in response to a comment that explicitly said the opposite.
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@LaoC Because people will choose to believe in their usefulness if the alternative is insanity. Some won't, and may even get even more messed up by it, but the solution to that isn't, "Hey, it'd be worthless anyway to do anything, so just sit around!"
Honestly, I think that's part of why Star Trek works: Humanity has everything and can make anything at will, so sticking a bunch of overly-trained people in a giant lump of metal and having them fly around doing whatever keeps the more driven members of society doing something. But if they didn't bother, humanity would not really suffer for it.
In other words: there are things that can be accomplished that are not important overall, but can be made important. People will always want food cooked by humans, or vegetables and animals that have never touched a machine. Manufactured value is still value.
Even the most meaningless job imaginable, like having a building full of people work together to build an enormous virtual world or something could be enough to keep people sane. The 'utter lunacy' you're talking about is exactly that - because it's entirely a self-contradictory concept that exists only in your own head.
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@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
I genuinely can’t understand the kind of person who, when they don’t have a job to go to, just sits around doing nothing all day.
Many people do not want to spend their life doing something purely for amusement. They see even the challenge associated with such things as unproductive, and hate that idea. They've spent their life doing something that accomplished something, and now you want them to put that kind of effort in to have a higher meaningless number than someone else? Or make trinkets no one even wants to see?
The same thing doesn't work for everyone.
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@dcon said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
A hobby doesn't help much if you actually need a job still so you can put food on the table.
That isn’t what I was talking about: I was specifically referring to people who have gone into retirement, only to find themselves with time on their hands and genuinely don’t know what to do with it because they’ve up until then always had that time filled by a job. These people then often get in the way of others (usually wives) and/or of themselves (mentally, that is), which is why I suggested they need a hobby, any hobby.
