Such a fake comment. You were never excited for AVs.
-As AVs scale, there cost will go below that of personal car ownership
-AVs maintain the same flexibility as personal cars, something public transit cannot resolve.
-As Personal cars ownership declines, real progress in emissions, land and safety will be made.
Your suggestions just add more regulation and fees that always end up impacting low income people more.
> Such a fake comment. You were never excited for AVs.
I was excited for AVs for most of my life, just like everybody, because it's cool sci-fi tech. But if you start thinking about the whole picture of transportation / urban design... they mostly don't make sense. Just like flying cars.
> As AVs scale, there cost will go below that of personal car ownership
Why?
> AVs maintain the same flexibility as personal cars, something public transit cannot resolve.
Sure. Why are we testing/using them in SF, a city that can resolve its transportation needs with public transit and light electric vehicles?
> As Personal cars ownership declines, real progress in emissions, land and safety will be made.
My whole point is we can make these progresses today.
Self driving cars and other innovations cribbed from sci-fi, are a distraction that prevent us from addressing our real issues in real ways.
> Your suggestions just add more regulation and fees that always end up impacting low income people more.
Actually, none of my suggestions would impact low-income people more.
You don't think giving 24/7 control of all personal vehicles to a handful of companies is going to hurt lower-income people?
People in the industry and those who support it are excited because of the positives impacts it can make. Not because its scifi tech.
At scale the cost per mile of an AV will be below that of an equivalent personal car because of all these factors
- High utilization means you are not paying for a car that spends 80% of its life parked and removes the costs associated with that
- Insurance, maintenance, and parking costs are reduced because of efficiency gains in a fleet configuration vs personally handling all those things
- Fixed upfront cost that goes down considerably as number of vehicles increases
Testing is happening in SF probably because the data shows that SF residents are high utilization users of vehicles and don't use public transit as much as you think. Ex Uber and lyft to 200k trips in SF alone everyday. SF is a difficult city to drive in so it shows real capability and a lot of the people working on this tech happen to live in and around SF.
Autonomous cars are here today. The things you are suggesting will require all car companies to align on new standards and develop tools for the government to interface with there new standard equipment and than deploy that infrastructure. That will require years more of work. AVs use the infrastructure that is there already.
New equipment is not free. It will add costs to vehicles and someone will pay for it. More fees (ex for speeding) are always a bigger burden on the poor.
There is a strong monetary incentive to make sure every car has a high utilization time. The cars driving around empty are there so they can collect data to prove the safety.
No one is targeting transit. Autonomous cars will also have a place in transit. Its highly likely one day you will be relying on an autonomous car to get you somewhere for cheaper than transit does today. AVs have real potential to get people to forgo personal car ownership which actually will reduce traffic, emissions and restore millions of sqft in parking spaces to be reclaimed for parks and housing.
We make special lanes for cars with multiple passengers b/c we think driving alone contributes to congestion, emissions etc. Driving with 0 passengers might be best for the companies, but for the same reasons, is not in the public interest. I think it's entirely appropriate for the public to place stringent restrictions on rides which do not move people or goods usefully. If you need high utilization, figure out deliveries and freight. Do _something _ useful.
It might be cool if someone developed a human-like robot that walked and talked independently ... But not cool if that robot walks in crowded places, doing nothing in particular, and stopping inexplicably. I would expect it to be shoved down a stairwell on day one. It just turns out cars are a little more challenging to shove.
There are only a couple hundred AV cars on the road. They are not causing the level of congestion you are trying to suggest.
Remember that these companies cannot earn money from rides right now because the CPUC has not given them the permit to do so. Once that permit is granted, the monetary incentive will be very strong. There is cost to the company for also operating an empty vehicle that they will not want to pay either. I think the incentives are aligned on both sides.
I think it varies a lot by neighborhood though. In some areas you see them a lot. Perhaps there are specific routes or locations that are considered high value as test cases? The density is high enough that as a pedestrian and casual observer it's easy to see them do stupid stuff a human would know not to do with some regularity.
Sure it makes sense that density per neighborhood would vary for testing and in the future will vary by demand.
Any new technology is going to have challenges as it scales. I think the expectation that the system is only used in public once its perfect is extremely ideal. The systems are doing really well at being safe (there are no human deaths linked to AVs nor any severe accidents despite over 1 million + miles driven).
Do you think people living in the places that are disproportionately impacted, who are being used as a test course, and who don't receive benefit in exchange for inconveniences imposed have a reason to be upset?
I think a small, non-destructive direct action, social media push and telling people they can make a public comment on official proceedings is reasonable and appropriate.
> There is a strong monetary incentive to make sure every car has a high utilization time
Not based on real utilization of cars today (5% utilization, 95% parked)
There is a stronger monetary incentive to sell at least one car to every single person :)
> Restore millions of sqft in parking spaces to be reclaimed for parks and housing.
That was also my hope. I don't think it'll happen. People will use autonomous cars like they use uber/lyft/taxis but they will still have their personal cars... Those will need the same amount of parking, or more given electrification and long charge times.
High utilization time is irrelevant; autonomous vehicles further encourage low-occupancy vehicle use (both additional trips and trips that are converted from walking/bicycling/mass transit), and should not have 'a place in transit' except in limited cases like, for example, rural transportation for senior citizens. They have no place in urban environs; there's no need for them beyond profit.
Ride-share vehicles crippled the world's cities by causing a massive increase in low-occupancy vehicle trips, increasing vehicle ownership, etc.
> No one is targeting transit.
Uh, there's been a concerted effort since the 1940's by the automotive industry to kill public transit, but ok.
Whether they intend to or not is irrelevant; these self-driving-car companies are clogging up our roads because apparently it's acceptable to "fail fast"
You won't be satisfied until you accept that the public has demonstrated that they want low occupancy vehicles by using there dollars.
People enjoy the privacy, flexibility, convenience, and safety of having a vehicle space to themselves vs public transport. Even in economies which have heavily incentivized public transport (Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong), people still pay large costs to get access to the incentives I mentioned above. AVs are much better than personal car ownership and will play a big role in improving transportation.
I get throwing conjecture out there makes it seem like you found a real problem, but you have no solution. Even if you increased public transit with more rail lines and busses, you can't solve the privacy, convenience and safety factor with something that is public. There a reason we have locks on our doors and don't share our homes, even though most of our home is empty and we can only occupy one room at a time.
We need real solutions (which AVs are a part of) and not people swooning over idealisms.
> AVs are much better than personal car ownership and will play a big role in improving transportation.
But again what makes you think that AVs won't be personal cars with the same ownership model? GM is suddenly going to be cool with selling 1/10000th of the cars they sell today?
There is more money longer term in a complete AV system then in personal car ownership. You can see it in GM market capitalization today. They are worth ~30 billion while Cruise is estimated to also be worth 30 billion. Making money off each mile is way more lucrative then selling a vehicles most people don't update for 3-7 years at a time. And it will be better for the consumer because it means more miles per vehicles which = less total vehicles.
> You won't be satisfied until you accept that the public has demonstrated that they want low occupancy vehicles by using there dollar
What the public wants is irrelevant; the public wants to eat its cake and have it as well, all the while riding a magical flying unicorn. Low occupancy vehicle use in urban areas is not sustainable, and never has been. There simply isn't enough road space. In the space of 2-3 cars which likely only contain 2-3 people, a bus can carry fifty or more people: https://danielbowen.com/2012/09/19/road-space-photo/
Climate emissions goals aren't achievable without a significant curtailing in low occupancy vehicle use, as well. The most efficient production EV, a Model 3, gets about 4 miles per kWHr. An e-bike...even a cargo e-bike...will get around 60 miles per kWHr.
Further: we can't afford it. At least in the US, a huge amount of infrastructure hasn't received the maintenance funding it needs, and we vastly overbuilt our road network - paving to everyone's driveway and building more and more roads as traffic increased - without thinking whether the long-term expenses were sustainable. In the near future, bridges are going to start collapsing because nobody wanted to pay for the upkeep they needed and now we can't pay for it.
> We need real solutions (which AVs are a part of) and not people swooning over idealisms.
Aside from the fact that our current road network is based on not just idealism but outright sticking one's head in the sand and not paying the maintenance costs...
There are "real solutions" working just fine in most of Europe and especially the Netherlands and Denmark.
> AVs are much better than personal car ownership and will play a big role in improving transportation.
The only thing AVs "improve" is eliminating labor costs and a potential increase in safety. They address none of the congestion and energy efficiency problems of low occupancy vehicle use, and by reducing the cost, the technology either increases profits or lowers the cost, both of which will lead to their greater use.
Safety isn't relevant in this discussion because people fear crime and rubbing elbows with smelly people who don't look like them. The reality is that public transit is orders of magnitude safer than low occupancy vehicle travel because collisions are far more common than crime, and public transit drivers are involved in collisions with pedestrians and cyclists far less than other drivers.
Death on the streets via drugs, assaults and homelessness but because locals want more "empathetic leaders", that are hard on big business, so the leaders focus on that. Recent SF politicians are not proactive. They are reactive and in the worst way. They use bureaucracy to clog the system and strongly believe the status quo is good enough. Mean while, the urban area continues to decay, albeit slowly thanks to the regions weather and views being sought after. Very similar to national level politics where filibusters and repeals are trying to maintain the status quo or go backwards for the sake of the "better times". All these people are not leaders. They are just people who know how to get theres while they make you think you are getting yours. They don't care for the future at all.
Even though there has been a body positivity movement and large brands (Target, Victoria's Secret) have changed marketing material to present there designs with people of all body types, the fact remains that humans are a visual species that are driven by aesthetic attributes of what is considered "beautiful" and "popular". Today that happens to be fit and athletic (or whatever the Kardashians are doing these days) and social media clearly presents these folks to the youth while simultaneously pushing the idea of medical procedures to attain these looks.
Body positivity will go down as one of the most destructive marketing campaigns of all time. It helped lock in big food and big pharma revenues and avoid scrutiny at the expense of people's health and amplified healthcare costs for everyone.
It's not body positivity that is driving the obesity epidemic. It started long before that movement existed. Body positivity is just a coping mechanism because we don't have anything better.
I get bullied about having a Pixel as a 30 year old by all my close friends. No one wants the green bubble. At 12, fitting in is a big thing. Sometimes some things are worth adjusting for.
To be fair, this isn't an Android problem as much as it is a carrier problem.
There's technically no reason they can't pass through the raw media sent by MMS, but as a result of lack of engineering talent, cutting corners and technical debt, it is mangled and recompressed to potato quality before being delivered.
This problem would also affect iPhones that don't use iMessage.
> Automation, which had already come a long way in Lafargue's time, could easily reduce working hours to three or four hours a day. This would leave a large part of the day for the things we really want to do, such as to spend time with friends, relax, enjoy life, and be lazy. Lafargue argues the machine is the saviour of humanity but only if the working time it frees up becomes leisure time. The time that is freed up is usually converted into more hours of work, which he compares to more hours of toil and drudgery. Working too many hours a day is often degrading, while working very few hours can be very refreshing and enriching, leading to general advancement, health, joy, and satisfaction.
Doesn't seem like a privileged argument. If the needs of a society can be met with 3-4 hours of work a day and automation for the rest, fighting to work only 8 hours a day does seem to miss the mark. Whether 3-4 hours of work a day is actually enough is a separate discussion worth having. There is good evidence supporting the idea that with more free time employees could get done in 30 hours a week what they are currently doing in 40. But he's been demonstrated to be absolutely right with regards to where the spoils of increased productivity go. It rarely if ever materializes as less work or better pay for the masses and always seem to be funneled to the moneyed class instead. I hardly think it's privileged to believe that the progress and advancements made in a society should benefit everyone instead of a handful of already extremely wealthy people.
> If the needs of a society can be met with 3-4 hours of work a day
That's a very subjective question. Suppose we could have maintained a 19th century standard of living for everyone with reduced work, but without the scientific and technological advancements that we got by using that time to do even more work. Would you prefer a society where everyone works 15 hr weeks but the internet was never invented?
Innovation doesn't require 40 hour work weeks or labor relations that divorce workers from the fruit of their own labor and the democratic decision making that's afforded to owners, but not workers. It's not a dichotomy.
Okay how about modern medicine then? If you got a cancer that only became treatable in the last ten years, would you trade your life away so that everyone in the last century could work 15 hour weeks and most likely never discover the treatment which was the cumulative result of a century of people working 40 hour weeks?
This argument is too broad. Why set the number at 40? Maybe if we all worked 80 hour weeks devising new algorithms to target people with ads and bussing tables in fast food chains, we'd all be immortal by now! Time spent in labor does not linearly correlate with production, especially in high cognitive demand fields like research. Not only that, labor unions and the like had to fight to get work weeks reduced to just 40 hours. Why not ask if we don't need it to be so high? The number is arbitrary, after all.
I would be dead if i was born 20 years before.
Also, working gives hobby a meaning. I don’t know a translation for this:
El ocio es la madre/padre de todos los vicios.
Too many free time would kill us. We are a specie which evolve through work. But it shouldnt mean: bad job = ugly death
I really don’t like this, because it is a moral view with no real justification (someone gets to decide what a vice is, which is historically a tool of oppression). For example, not that long ago lower-class people having outrageous hobbies such as reading or participating in politics was considered morally unacceptable.
However, there is a kernel of truth in that we need to have some meaning in our lives otherwise we just wither psychologically and then physically. Sometimes being forced to do something (“work”) helps us getting some of that. But the amount of stuff we need to do to live somewhat happy lives varies from person to person. Ultimately, this should be the absolute criterion: the right amount of activity is that which makes us live satisfying lives. Some people need a lot, some do not.
I just learned that this quote is attributed to Jostein Gaarder, author of Sophie's world.
I think "ocio"/being idle is some older quotes has a meaning of doing absolutely nothing with oneself (not working, not studying, not having any interests). Interpreted in this light it makes more sense, to me at least.
You also wouldn't get anything else that has been invented or understood since then. I'm pretty sure you can have the equivalent quality (and length) of life of the average 19th century person with very few hours of work in a week. In Germany, it requires zero hours, welfare here will make you live like a king compared to the 19th century -- it's only relative to today's standards that you wouldn't be rich.
Ah, yes who doesn't know about the famous German welfare recipients living in lavish palaces with their 10 comely mattresses and their stable full of fast horses, which will pull their gold-encrusted carriage to the hunting lodge a few times per month, and a small group of life guards to keep them safe.
It is highly misleading to compare lifestyles between different centuries like that.
And their 21st century health care, their high life expectancy, their unlimited access to information etc etc. Would you prefer to live in the 19th century with the average life expectancy at 35 and your 10 shitty mattresses (there's a reason they had 10) instead of living today and get to live 75 years and sleep on your one modern mattress that's of higher quality than those 10 19th century mattresses combined? Palaces 150 years ago sucked in comparison to modern apartments with isolation so good you barely have to heat, modern plumbing, hot water on demand, showers and electric toothbrushes.
> It is highly misleading to compare lifestyles between different centuries like that.
Not really, there are measurable facts. What it seems you are doing is comparing relative wealth. A king is richer than a peasant, therefore his life is better than a welfare-recipient 150 years later, because there are kings in 2022 richer than the welfare-recipient.
Because of course, 5 > 1, and 50 > 10, therefore 5 > 10. It's all relative etc etc. People quickly forget how much worse everything was even decades ago, much less centuries.
That should have read maitresses (autocorrect can be a bitch), and the average life expectancy for a 19th century king was more like 70.
> Palaces 150 years ago sucked in comparison to modern apartments with isolation so good you barely have to heat, modern plumbing, hot water on demand, showers and electric toothbrushes.
I'd much rather live in Versailles or Neuschwanstein in their then-valid state than in an 1960s-era social-built flat, thank you very much.
It is consistent with the meaning of bourgeoisie then, which transposed to modern systems means more like "the owner class" than the contemporary social connotation of well-compensated professionals. Owners benefit from more/harder work, both their own and that of others, and so it (reasonably) becomes a class value for them.
A non-owner worker doesn't benefit in the same way, but many still value work in the same way the bourgeoisie do. Workers don't benefit like owners do and so they shouldn't want to work like owners do. That's the point being made.
so you're saying he's bourgeoisie. Yeah that's the irony. The irony is that he's rich enough to have that lifestyle and still have food, while poor people would not.
Nope, according to the wikipedia linked, the only time Lafargue came close to being an owner (i.e. petit bourgeois) was when he tried running that photolithography workshop.
You are trying very hard not to think out of your box.
First Lafargue was by no means rich nor a capitalist.
Then this is not about promoting a "lifestyle", it is basically a proposal to have everyone work less by sharing the workload. Think of it what you will but do not misrepresent it.
I suggest you actually read the book.
>It is consistent with the meaning of bourgeoisie then, which transposed to modern systems means more like "the owner class" than the contemporary social connotation of well-compensated professionals.
That's still the definition used in Marxist circles today.
I know but HN is pretty far from a marxist circle in my experience. And it does also have, at least in american english, a connotation very similar to that of yuppie eg more about social class than relationship to the means of production.
HN skews pretty neo liberal. A lot of holy-than-thou proselytizing of Western exceptionalism, as if Western culture actually earned it's place as the dominant culture on Earth through the virtue of simply being better than everyone else, who I guess just didn't want it bad enough, rather than a combination of luck, ruthless exploitation, and general disregard for the well-being of their fellow man.
Lafargue totally reminds me of the arch-contrarian Oscar Wilde —- who was not bourgeois in any sense of the word, but also a (“lifestyle”) anarcho-socialist
Think it may be helpful to point out how the term evolved over time.
Before Marx, the bourgeoisie only meant the middle, or upper-middle, class as opposed to the proletariat on the one side (which, despite its contemporary Marxist connotations, dates from Ancient Rome's proletarii) and the nobility on the other.
After the rapid industrialization and social displacement of the 19th century that saw the middle class' rise, it was Marx who coopted the term to mean the owner class.
Outside of Marxist circles today, I think the original upwardly mobile meaning is still more common, as in bougie.
This is a fallacious position. The modern attitude of “you’re not one of us, therefore you cannot possibly have a valid opinion” is wrong on many levels.
It is not logically consistent (a variation of ad hominem arguments).
It is counter productive because having a range of opinions helps avoiding echo chambers and have a broader outlook and understanding, and ultimately find better solutions and strategies.
It opens the door to no true Scotsman sterile arguments that are very easy to use in bad faith against people you disagree with.
It creates counter-productive dissent when people who actually agree on an idea or policy don’t work together for ideological reasons.
I cannot voluntarily not work, and I don’t get to choose who gets the benefits of my work. And I am in a privileged situation because I could lose my work and still pay rent for long enough to find another one, but this is not the case for a vast class of people in western countries. These people are effectively bound to their employer because losing their job means losing their home and means of subsistence.
The world is not black and white, and the fact that a situation is not as absolutely terrible as a sex slave in Mauritania should not shut down any discussion. There are shades of involuntary work.
> These people are effectively bound to their employer because losing their job means losing their home and means of subsistence.
Even in this case it is still significantly better than being enslaved.
Even with the worst wage labour people still have option to leave it. Slave owner can force slaves into mine and never let them out and force them to work in horrific conditions until they die. Happened in many places across history, likely still happens somewhere.
With enough stuff like company scrip, company stores, ensuring that laws outlaw being homeless and deliberate breaking of relationship allowing people to escape you can get situation undistinguishable from slavery.
But just "if I will be fired then I am instantly homeless" is still markedly better than "my owner can force me to work to death in a mine".
> The world is not black and white, and the fact that a situation is not as absolutely terrible as a sex slave in Mauritania should not shut down any discussion. There are shades of involuntary work.
Definitely! I am not claiming that oppression does not exist but "wage labour is tantamount to slavery" is an absurd claim.
You work for somewhere between 6 and 14 hours per day, and the rest of the time you can choose to spend anywhere you're able to go, and tie relationships with whomever you're able to attract, and your owner can't decide these things for you. That's a categorical difference, not one of degree.
Mandatory on-call duty exists, as do drug tests, background checks, security clearances, etc. Employers can certainly decide how "free time" is spent and with whom you associate.
For employees under such rules, it certainly is a notch closer to slavery. I would guess the vast majority of people on this site are not under such rules.
There are plenty of people on this site whose free time is constricted by their employers because of things like non-compete agreements and anti-moonlighting clauses.
The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass had this to say on the subject of wage labor[1]:
> [E]xperience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other
From Wikipedia[1]:
> Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market: "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper"
That's an interesting quote from Douglass. If you follow the reference, it continues
> It gives the shopkeeper a customer who can trade with no other storekeeper,
and thus leaves the latter no motive for fair dealing except
his own moral sense, which is never too strong. While the
laborer holding the orders is tempted by their worthlessness,
as a circulating medium, to get rid of them at any sacrifice,
and hence is led into extravagance and consequent destitution.
> The merchant puts him off with his poorest commodities
at highest prices, and can say to him take these or nothing.
Worse still. By this means the laborer is brought into debt,
and hence is kept always in the power of the land-owner.
When this system is not pursued and land is rented to the
freedman, he is charged more for the use of an acre of land
for a single year than the land would bring in the market if
offered for sale. On such a system of fraud and wrong one
might well invoke a bolt from heaven red with uncommon
wrath.
> It is said if the colored people do not like the conditions
upon which their labor is demanded and secured, let them
leave and go elsewhere. A more heartless suggestion never
emanated from an oppressor. Having for years paid them in
shop orders, utterly worthless outside the shop to which they
are directed, without a dollar in their pockets, brought by
this crafty process into bondage to the land-owners, who can
and would arrest them if they should attempt to leave when
they are told to go.
I can think of modern power relations this reminds me of, but an ordinary job in the U.S. is not one of them.
Slavery means lots of things. Chattel slavery, yes, but also forced labor like in us prisons. Indentured labor, child soldiers, forced marriage, etc etc.
The concept of "wage slavery" is basically, "you are not free to not earn a wage because you will starve". It's also easy to draw parallels between the commodification of ones labor and slavery.
It's a term that is not new, is widely used, and debated plenty. The incorrect response is to say, "that's a useless way to think". Show some intellectual curiosity - why do people believe that, what values do they hold, what are their reasons, which arguments do I disagree with, etc.
I'm a socialist, I don't think capitalists have a "useless way to think about the world", I have fundamental critiques of specific policies and different values on certain social behaviors.
Struggle slavery; you're not free not to struggle on the face of the Earth, otherwise you will not survive. Man, how dare the universe spring forth creatures, yet foist that on them.
Wage labor is an imposition on people by people with power, wage labor is not a natural law or state of being. It is not unlike feudalism in that respect.
People engage in wage labor because they find it preferable to alternatives like hunting and gathering berries.
However meager is their lifestyle, it's better than what it would be under the alternatives. That's what people are slaves of: consumption. People engage in wage labor because it sustains a certain level of consumption that alternative activities wouldn't.
It isn't a dichotomy between wage labor and living in the woods picking berries. You can have extremely similar production and economies that we have now, but without wage labor. One other option is worker ownership, as owning the fruits of one's own labor is not the same thing as wage labor. There are plenty of examples of historical and contemporary worker ownership, and none of them involve living in the woods.
Worker cooperatives are legal and there are some around today. There's nothing stopping workers from owning the fruits of their own labor. Yet most workers choose not to join or start cooperatives, and instead prefer wage labor. Why is that?
It seems that most workers prioritize a steady wage without the risk of being an owner. And it's difficult for worker cooperatives in capital-intensive industries to attract outside investors; investors who put in significant amounts of money quite rationally want some control over the enterprise rather than leaving the decisions up to workers.
One of the most prominent examples of employee ownership was with United Airlines. Employees gained majority ownership in 1994. That kind of worked for a while but ultimately failed, ironically partly due to labor union disputes. It seems the workers had trouble deciding how to share the fruits of their labor.
A good elaboration of this point is Greg Dow's "Governing the Firm" and "The Labor-Managed Firm".
In short, worker-owned businesses are rare because individual workers are poor (relative to the capital that's needed) and they can't get external funding because the investors want control in return, which labor management can't provide.
That's why most large-scale worker-owned businesses are part of a federation supported by a bank - e.g. Mondragon's Caja Laboral. Institutional design indeed does matter.
Funding is a huge part, for sure, but also getting incorporated. Talk to a lawyer and your state about founding an LLC or sole proprietorship. Ezpz. Done in an hour.
Talk about founding a workers co-op that's democratically run? With shares issued to each worker? There's just no template for it. It's days of work to get it over the line.
This really is the same as the YouTuber "how I bought a house within a week of watching this video"
"Ownership is so easy, imagine if you not only have to work, but also have to deal with ownership problems such as maintenance, insurance, business and real-estate, logistics, marketing, depreciation, and management. - and, best of all, you don't own any of it if you stop working!"
In order to own the fruits of your labor, you have to pay for all the tools and materials you need, and the space where you apply the tools to the materials.
The material suppliers and toolsmiths also own the fruits of their labor, and don't owe them to you.
Capitalism exists because individual worker ownership doesn't scale beyond simple trades. If a worker gets enough wherewithal to scale his or her operation to just a small shop, there are going to be workers there, who are either wage labor, or else customers who pay to use the shop.
I'd encourage you to read The Conquest of Bread for some high level thoughts on other ways we could arrange things that a) aren't primitive and b) aren't capitalism.
> People engage in wage labor because they find it preferable to alternatives like hunting and gathering berries.
They don't exactly choose.
If a person wants to live by hunting and gathering, or by subsistence agriculture, he first has to acquire fertile land. And all that land is taken. In the United States, you don't even have the Right to Roam. Nor, on the public rights-of-way, do you have any right to so much as a sidewalk.
The ability to live an "indigenous" lifestyle no longer exists. The whole place has been terraformed.
You are trapped by the actions of everyone else. Mathematically, it's some kind of game theoretic equilibrium. But what it feels like is a prison.
Now you're just making excuses. In the USA at least, there are still small parcels of fertile land available very cheaply in isolated rural areas where no one else wants to live. Look for places in Alaska or Appalachia. If someone wants to live the 18th Century subsistence farmer lifestyle then it's totally possible. Get off the Internet and go live your dream.
This is very short sighted. 10 billions people cannot live off the land like that, and the land won’t stay cheap or undefended for long if millions of people suddenly spread out of the cities to do what you say.
We’d just end up with tribes defending their land because isolated people are vulnerable. It won’t solve the issue of involuntary labour, if anything it would make it worse for quite a lot of people as it is easier for leaders of smaller groups to exercise absolute control. We’ve been there before and there is a reason why we ended up in our current situation. The life of the average urban dweller is still better than that of a medieval serf.
I never claimed that billions of people can live that way. I was merely responding to @FooBarBizBazz's comment above, pointing out that they can live that way if they really want to. There are others living that lifestyle voluntarily right now. Personally I think it would be miserable, but the option exists for those who really want it.
In developed countries at least, most labor is voluntary. There are certainly cases where people have been trafficked and essentially held as slaves, and we should do everything possible to stop those, but such cases are rare.
There are quite a few Amish communities that pretty much live like that. We are lucky in the US- we still have quite a bit of wilderness, plenty to lose yourself in, and live a hunter gatherer lifestyle. I think it would be significantly harder to get away with farming without buying the land, at least in the contiguous states.
I think a typical Amish family farm is nowadays worth $1-2M, maybe more. And I believe their children have been moving to new places in recent years, in search of more affordable land.
> farming without buying the land
Illegal cannabis farms apparently operate in national forests. There are surreptitious irrigation systems, and there's a whole cat-and-mouse game to find and destroy them.
> We are lucky in the US- we still have quite a bit of wilderness, plenty to lose yourself in, and live a hunter gatherer lifestyle.
You're right though. Particularly, I would bet, up in Alaska.
Maybe I was confusing amish with Quaker? I think it was a quaker village near where I grew up, they still use horses to plow fields and stuff like that.
Either way, they're obviously not all living like that, but whichever one it is, they have communities here and there where they live old school
> Illegal cannabis farms apparently operate in national forests
This is a million times easier to do than grow crops. Of course it's possible people could get away with growing crops in national forests, but the risk/reward just isn't there like it is(was?) for weed.
Worker ownership is not the same thing as wage labor. Wage labor bifurcates people into an asset owning class and laborers who don't own the assets they're forced to depend on to eat. Wage labor divorces workers from owning the fruit of their labor in place of wages, whereas worker ownership doesn't.
Wage labor was imposed upon people hundreds of years ago with the enclosure and privatization of common lands that people had relied on for centuries to provide for themselves. It was imposed because people voluntarily chose not to become wage laborers, as they preferred their lifestyles as is. To rectify this, a landless class of people was created, that could only rely on selling their labor to survive, through the enclosure of the land they had relied on in the past. People did not freely accept becoming factory workers, for example, they were forced into situations where it was the only option, and in many places, those that chose not to work were arrested and forced to work anyway.
Worker ownership is at least a respectable alternative. But it has a problem with capital-intensive industries. The workers typically don't have the resources to pool their funds and build a semiconductor fab.
They "freely accepted" it as an alternative to starvation when they were forced off of the land they were previously farming so that it could become a large private farm.
A lot of the land that was enclosed wasn't even productive after privatization. Some of it just stood (and still stands) idle, despite previously providing sustenance prior to enclosure. Big estates with an abundance of non-productive land was a popular thing at one point.
There lies the problem: in todays society, I’m not free to choose how I live outside of a pre-approved selection of careers due to a small portion of people deciding they wanted this specific setup.
There are an incredible variety of careers to choose from and there are countless unconventional jobs out there that people have never heard of. There is no small portion of people creating a pre-approved selection of roles that we have no choice but to follow. Even if there were, it definitely begs the question of 'who are these people' and 'how do they have this power'?
Nope. Customers choose what kinds of pursuits receive monetary compensation.
You have something you want to do (and get paid for) that investors won't pay you to do? Can you get customers to pay for it? Then just go do it. Nobody's stopping you.
> The concept of "wage slavery" is basically, "you are not free to not earn a wage because you will starve".
This is the baseline for basically pretty much all life on earth. You will die unless you perform labor to interrupt death. Your body itself must perform labor in order to generate the energy and to allocate the resources you provide it to survive as well. If you expand the definition of slavery to encompass labor, then all living things are inherently enslaved until they die. Philosophically that might be interesting in its own right but it's not actually a very cogent critique of labor nor does it justify the use of the word, "slavery."
Wage labor isn't a natural baseline, though. It's an arbitrary system that benefits certain people at the expense of others, and is just as natural as feudalism, monarchism, etc.
If you want to make an argument from history and nature, you can't ignore that early human societies didn't have wage labor, nor were there asset owning classes that didn't work and depended on the labor of others. Those kind of relations eventually erupted with the advent of agriculture that allowed people to settle and accumulate assets.
> It's an arbitrary system that benefits certain people at the expense of others, and is just as natural as feudalism, monarchism, etc.
Yeah, but for a person coming into it, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just earn a wage and buy existing goods, rather than be self-sufficient and grow your own crops, plant your own trees to harvest lumber and mine your own ore to make steel.
Nor is the shift back to hunting/gathering even possible at this point. The population of the planet is such that we would consume all animal and plant matter within months, if it were not replenished in highly structured ways on farms.
> Wage labor isn't a natural baseline, though. It's an arbitrary system that benefits certain people at the expense of others, and is just as natural as feudalism, monarchism, etc.
Labor having value is in fact wholly arbitrary, which is why its value fluctuates depending on various market conditions. Fundamentally, it depends on people valuing living, which is why what I'm saying is not unnatural.
"Wage labor" is just "labor."
> If you want to make an argument from history and nature, you can't ignore that early human societies didn't have wage labor, nor were there asset owning classes that didn't work and depended on the labor of others.
Asset owning people do work, though. This notion falls apart under minute scrutiny. There's of course people that inherit wealth that only ever exchange it for consumption of goods or services, but those people are still inheriting labor from people that chose to give them it.
Yes, but with the invention of private property, people are no longer allowed to labor directly for their own survival as subsistence farmers without first working for wages and then purchasing land.
It seems strange now that wage labor is so normalized, but at the start of the industrial revolution, many subsistence farmers were forced off of the land they had farmed for generations as it was turned into large private farms and instead had to seek wage labor.
It might help to read more about Marxism to avoid a reductio ad absurdum.
The general argument as laid out in Capital vol 1 is highlighted in the working day[1]. This section introduces the contradiction between laborer and capitalist, namely, that a laborer is paid for his or her time, while the capitalist in turn receives the product of creation.
The point is that this is a rather strange exchange. Instead of the laborer's product of creation being bought as a commodity, the capitalist pays the laborer for their time. The capitalist makes a profit (in their subsequent transactions[2]) because the the money gained by reselling what the laborer produces nets a profit[3]. Were that this was a fair trade, there would be no profit to make.[4]
Extending this to all labor is evidently disingenuous as the argument is contingent on the exchange of money and I hope at this point, given the above, you can see why. All life on earth doesn't participate in economy of labor and earn wages. If you agree, and I hope you do, that such a proposition is absurd, then I kindly refer back to the first sentence of this comment as we're now on the same page.
1. Vol 1 Chapter 10. Section 1
2. The C-M in the M-C-M circuit.
3. Yes, even when accounting for raw materials and the investment in the instruments of production.
4. If you're yelling at the screen, "But that's the point!" then yes, we're also in agreement. This maybe one of those "so so so close" moments.
> The point is that this is a rather strange exchange. Instead of the laborer's product of creation being bought as a commodity, the capitalist pays the laborer for their time. The capitalist makes a profit (in their subsequent transactions[2]) because the the money gained by reselling what the laborer produces nets a profit[3]. Were that this was a fair trade, there would be no profit to make.[4]
> 3. Yes, even when accounting for raw materials and the investment in the instruments of production.
Even if you just presume this to be true, which is ridiculous, it fails to acknowledge that 1) resources are a finite and scarce, 2) supply and demand are variable, and as such, so is the value of labor and goods (money is a representation of labor), and 3) that the "capitalists" in this situation are performing labor by performing transactions (but also probably many other things as well).
Your argument basically hinges on the notion that the value of goods is static and that certain types of labor have zero value.
I regret to inform you that this argument is not mine; it's Marx's. You're more than welcome to direct your complaints to him, but he may take a while to respond.
Be assured though, if you take the time to read Capital, your criticisms are addressed. I'd encourage you to read it. It's a much better way to understand the argument than a HN comment section. Good luck!
If it were simply about Marx's argument, then you wouldn't suggest that we (you and I, not Marx) could be in agreement, which you mentioned in your previous comment.
This is like me telling you to go read a textbook on economics. Obviously it's a better way to learn about economics than from me, but that's not really the point, is it?
You made a clear rebuttal to my original comment, supported by what Marx wrote. I'd ask that you take ownership of your own argument rather than shifting it over to Marx. Your assertion was this:
> Extending this to all labor is evidently disingenuous as the argument is contingent on the exchange of money and I hope at this point, given the above, you can see why.
In order for me to agree with your assertion, I'd have to agree with the basis for it, which was Marx's writing. I made a point as to why I think it's wrong because I think Marx is fundamentally wrong. Asking me to read Das Kapital or talk to Marx is non sequitur.
Take a step back for a moment. The point your making is that wage slavery shouldn't exist as an interesting or separate category because all organisms have to work to live. This is like saying that sex trafficking isn't conceptually important because species must reproduce to survive. It's so wildly beyond the pale that it's difficult to categorize it as a particular breech of logic other than simply and fundamentally confused.
> Take a step back for a moment. The point your making is that wage slavery shouldn't exist as an interesting or separate category because all organisms have to work to live.
I am saying that extending the definition of slavery to simply include any process that is being thrust upon a living being is idiotic. All living beings are required to perform labor to live. Performing labor for wages is an extension of that that fits within a human framework. Rather than individually performing all the requirements to live by creating your own shelter, making sure that you stay warm, hunting other animals or gathering edible berries, nuts, and the like, we've figured out a way to more efficiently divide the labor and abstracted away the notion of labor into something called money (or wages). It enables human beings to use their time more efficiently and is why we are such a successful species.
No, you're not enslaved because you feel like you have to work for a wage. Unless you are being coerced by another person into performing labor for them (with or without compensation), you are not being enslaved. External natural forces like going hungry or going cold are not acts of coercion. That is simply life.
> This is like saying that sex trafficking isn't conceptually important because species must reproduce to survive.
I'm not sure how you extrapolated this, either. To quote you, "It's so wildly beyond the pale that it's difficult to categorize it as a particular breech of logic other than simply and fundamentally confused."
2) in a way that instead of simply rebutting, attempts get more curious instead.
The response simply isn't very hacker newsy and it's coming across that you simply don't like Marxism so I must be wrong. Please take the emotional reaction out of it. Thanks.
I don't like Marxism but it shouldn't come across as me simply disliking Marxism. I've provided plenty of ideas supporting why I disagree with both Marx and you that you are more than welcome to respond to (so far, you've chosen not to).
Your original comment was worthwhile responding to, but the rest have largely been performative rhetoric. If you don't have any actual refutations to my ideas, then please refrain from responding at all.
Likewise, but please refute things you're actually familiar with. You've been arguing against what you think Marx has said rather than what he actually said. I think you could make some really compelling arguments against Marxism, but it would require you to read something you disagree with. You come across as a rational and intelligent person. I think you're fully capable of reading something you dislike in order to craft better arguments against it.
I think you'd have better luck by explaining your ideas further, rather than simply trying to associate ideas with emotionally charged words like 'slavery' or 'sex trafficking' by writing them next to things you dislike.
This analogy got me thinking, but only for a little bit.
Similarity: people are forced to do things which they would not choose to do. (Different form would be preferable or for some none).
Difference: level of freedom. Wage slave can choose a lot (whom to slave, what to do with the wage, if to change occupation or if to invest).
Sex trafficked person has far fewer options.
> The concept of "wage slavery" is basically, "you are not free to not earn a wage because you will starve".
Slavery usually includes ownership and force. I believe "wage slavery" is mostly used today because of the connotations of slavery that the user wants to hang their idea on to, but also clearly knows that it's not really it. Like "chicken holocaust" isn't really a holocaust, even though some chicken farms are terrible places, but it's really not the same.
You wouldn't talk of nutritional slavery even though you're not free not to get nutrition, because you'll die. "Wage slavery" very much falls in the same corner, I think. Take away everything else, and imagine an individual being alone on earth. There's fruits to eat and wood around to build a shelter. If the individual doesn't reach for those fruits, and doesn't use the wood, they'll be hungry and cold, and eventually they'll starve. Are they a slave?
Ownership applies very specifically to chattel slavery, and does not apply to the vast majority of extant slavery today.
> I believe "wage slavery" is mostly used today because of the connotations of slavery that the user wants to hang their idea on to, but also clearly knows that it's not really it.
No, it’s a much more sincere concept than that, from an analysis that workers are forced to do labor which enriches others—in an involuntary exchange for a disproportionately small fraction of the fruits of that labor—rather than doing either the direct labor which would satisfy their own needs or the collective labor whose fruits would be shared by all.
The force is rooted in private property; importantly: private in this usage is jargon, meant as ownership of productive means, not as individual personal ownership of arbitrary stuff. To the extent productive property ownership is concentrated and pervasive, which is a nearly total extent in most of the world, this force is practically unavoidable for the vast majority of workers.
Your likening, along with several others, of waged labor to basic labors like nutrition or shelter is not wrong but misses the point. For “wage slaves” (quoted not to dismiss its validity but to indicate I’m still engaged with clarifying the term), the only options available to acquire food and shelter are:
- work to enrich others in exchange for a fraction of their productive output
- become an owner of productive private property and an employer of other “wage slaves”
- become an owner of some productive private property and voluntarily share it with others (to the extent that’s achievable, practical and sustainable)
- reject productive private property claims (which itself may be punishable by more explicitly forced labor! but in any case is a high risk to other aspects of one’s autonomy however limited)
If there truly are fruits to eat and woods around from which to build a shelter, from which anyone could freely choose that lifestyle rather than wage labor, then the term “wage slavery” would definitely be as sensational as you suggest. But for, well, nearly everyone who works for wages, that isn’t true. The options above are the only ones available, and acquiring private productive property is an exceedingly limited pursuit regardless of how one wants to use or share it. For the nearly everyone else remaining, they must toil so others profit or they must do crimes.
> No, it’s a much more sincere concept than that, from an analysis that workers are forced to do labor which enriches others—in an involuntary exchange for a disproportionately small fraction of the fruits of that labor—rather than doing either the direct labor which would satisfy their own needs or the collective labor whose fruits would be shared by all.
You say that, but that's not at all how it worked when that very thing has been tried by groups like the Khmer Rouge. Who, incidentally, took people from their homes at gunpoint in Phenom Penh, forced them to work for nothing, and even stole their kids from them. You can claim that's an implementation detail, but when you point out that workers collectives have trouble working on a very small scale, that's an indictment of the idea that this idea could work on a national scale, because organizational problems only get harder the bigger you are.
And despite the Khmer Rouge ostensibly doing that for the "collective good", being marched out of your home to farm rice at gunpoint seems to me to be a lot closer to what most people think of as "slavery" than choosing an employer, choosing what type of work to do, being able to obtain free education online for nearly anything, being able to start a business of one's own (including worker collectives, if you wish), and being able to get loans to start that business. All of which are regular activities for us "wage slaves" here.
It seems I haven't made my point very clearly: I wasn't suggesting that there's ample self-maintaining land for everyone, that's clearly not the case. But if there was, would its inhabitants be slaves? And who's slaves would they be? Nature's? God's? Their own?
Is a self-employed black smith who owns everything downstream a slave? He'll mine the ore, smelt the iron, produce his own coal for his fire etc etc. Still, he'll have to sell his product at a fraction of what it's worth it to his customers. Like your "wage slaves", it'll be a very large fraction of it, but it's a fraction, they wouldn't buy it if it cost more than it's worth to them. Is the black smith a slave?
I've seen that as a meme and/or talking point, here on HN, far too many times.
Your alternatives are to be independently wealthy, own your own business, to be a subsistence farmer, to work in a co-op, to be on welfare, or to work for wages. Those who trot out this line never specify which option they think is better. Either they haven't thought that far, or they're thinking we're all going to work in co-ops, or they're thinking the rest of us should support them. But that just turns into more slavery for everyone else...
(I will give the more thoughtful ones the credit that they seem to want co-ops, or full-on communism, which could be considered co-ops on a larger scale.)
It's meant in the sense of "coerced into working." Eg if you don't have a viable alternative to working, did you choose work freely? Everyone using this comparison from that time period knows it's an extreme metaphor and is using it at least partially for the shock value of the comparison, to jar people into seeing the everyday pressures in a different way.
They aren't comparing the conditions of slavery to the conditions of wage labor, just that the force that compels a proletarian worker to work is on the same continuum with the force that compels a slave to work.
Adding to this, there are employers who do what they can to ramp up the coercive aspect. This happens mainly in low-wage jobs where there is lots of usually low-quality labor. The usual dynamic is to seek out job hunters with family or other commitments to employ, and then constantly threaten them with all the people who apply. Make them feel trapped and precarious by threatening their ability to feed kids, and that can go a long way.
Obviously, the legal system no longer supports outright slavery outside of prison, and the tactics and conditions are consequently less severe than historic chattel slavery in the US.
But the opposite conclusion - that all labor is voluntary - has to use a specific sense of the word 'voluntary', more similar to the IRS definition than the picking-from-a-menu sense.
> It's meant in the sense of "coerced into working."
In case of slavery one is forced to work (and that is basically the best case).
With enough stuff like company scrip, company stores, ensuring that laws outlaw being homeless and deliberate breaking of relationship allowing people to escape you can get situation undistinguishable from slavery.
But just "if I will be fired then I am instantly homeless" is still markedly better than "my owner can force me to work to death in a mine".
And forces even horrible employees to be better option than begging friends/family/strangers for help. Slave owners have no need even for such bare minimum. To say nothing about less pathological cases where employees at least sort-of compete for workers.
I suspect calling it slavery is more shocking today than it would have been at the time when slavery was still an acceptable practice in major countries. Certainly people have a more visceral reaction to the term in general today than at that time.
The headline makes it sound like the robot can make this decision but in reality this is just a RC car with a weapon attached to it that is still controlled by a human
But I wonder if the decision requires the "robot" to have a human controller or can the police unilaterally expand the kind of devices they use to include more autonomous ones?
In the USA, if I understand it correctly, it seems there is a lot of case law establishing criminal or civil liability for autonomous mechanical devices that kill or injure someone - Typically traps like tripwired guns, so it would be interesting to see how it applies to autonomous robots having some degree of "perception" and "judgement"
Do those cases apply to the police though? Qualified immunity is basically a separate, non-overlapping set of case law for police liability that also coincidentally almost always rules that they have none.
Honestly I'm waiting for most of these SPACs to face the implications of fraud. Even when this one launched it was clearly obvious what they were presenting is not fully representative of the reality. Having 15-20 trucks that basically operate similar to hands free cruise control with lane changing is not the set-up for a billion dollar company. It may be the foundation but that doesn't remove the fact that there is a high possibility that the founders were able to cash out millions on the backs of naive investors and most likely will never deliver the final product.
-As AVs scale, there cost will go below that of personal car ownership -AVs maintain the same flexibility as personal cars, something public transit cannot resolve. -As Personal cars ownership declines, real progress in emissions, land and safety will be made.
Your suggestions just add more regulation and fees that always end up impacting low income people more.