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comment by am_Unition
am_Unition  ·  3254 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Happy Basic Income Day

If you've got a lot of time to kill, long discussion here.





wasoxygen  ·  3254 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thanks, I remember that post, but missed most of the discussion.

I am not convinced that so-called bullshit jobs are so bad; I have argued that workplace conditions have gotten a good bit better than they were in the days when actual bull shit was a feature of many laborers' workplace. And I think it requires some energetic handwaving to say that an office job is useless when, by definition, it involves labor that someone is willing to pay for.

I don't think I am unusual in that I began my career with few valuable skills and started by doing unpleasant and low-paid work that very gradually led to a comparatively comfortable cubicle. It will take some fine tuning to work out how you give a young person more money than they can earn without compromising their motivation to start getting experience.

In short, the "average" (median, or whatever) worker in a given place has a far better deal than at any time in the past, and this despite centuries of fear of automation bringing ruin to workers.