In the beginning of the 1970s, when women did join the labor force in greater numbers, admittedly the macroeconomic conditions were bad (oil crisis), so it is hard to filter that out.

But still, mostly we have more workers, which lowers wages and leads to the creation of more bullshit jobs. To be clear, also men create and perform bullshit jobs!

Now it takes two salaries to finance a house and a family. Great progress.

At the supermarket, I boycott automated self-checkouts even if the lines are long so the nice cashiers keep their jobs.

Yes! I have been thinking this. So as an economic consequence of both parents being able to work, now the choice to stay home and care for the kids is an even harder one. The birth rate falls. Kids are raised by childcare workers, not their parents.

Turns out, for the market, having a choice is a form of wealth. It will make you pay to acquire it, it will treat you as that much more wealthy if you have it, and it will encourage you to sell it.

Ultimately capitalism is built so that improved productivity, more working hours, higher salaries never benefit the worker long-term. If people start earning more, the owning class will simply raise prices to match this new level of income. The US is the wealthiest and strongest country in the world, and yet young people there struggle to buy houses just as much (or even more) than their peers in much poorer countries.

All sexually reproducing organisms on the Earth have families without any social pressure and we evolved from primates who work like this.

By far the stronger pressure is biological. I doubt social pressure even comes close to moving the needle.

The peak reproductive years are the late teens to late twenties (give or take). However and in modern society, having children in the first two-thirds of the peak years is a recipe for failure or lifelong hardships.

We need to stop asking 10+ workdays a week from each couple. Once we only demand 7 workdays a week, people are allowed to raise their own kids again!

Is this bad?

The thing you're missing is that, you go to a starbucks, which promises to sell you posh coffee, but it may be good, or it may be crap, and it's all down to luck whether the barista gives a crap about your "posh" coffee. Whereas if you go to a small business owner whose business is posh coffee, you can probably expect a great coffee (or if they don't, then you expect the place to soon go out of business)

hardly requires a bustling industry to solve this 'problem' or provide this 'value'.

starbucks is a monument to the lazyness and exploitation of this lazyness in homo sapiens.

The only 'skills' you need is the ability to transfer powders and liquids from one container to another.

I have no idea why people idealize coffee making so much. I have been doing pour over coffee my whole life and it feels as basic a skill as washing a dish.

Is the solution really to replace even more workers by capital, or do we have an issue with how we measure value that we should fix first?

I have more faith in our ability to solve world peace and AGI than I do in us getting to a more objective way to measure value that everyone can agree and adhere to.

The problem with the wealth-weighted-value that gets optimized by capitalism is that the gini coefficient tips the optimization process from being about doing what other people want to being about doing what rich people want. Rich people mostly want to get paid for being rich, of course, so they pump assets to increase their wealth. Their weight goes up, the objective function pumps assets harder, their weight goes up, the objective function pump assets harder... and gini heads to 1 and you return to a palace economy.

A note of optimism: we've been here before, shortly after the industrial revolution. We've fixed this before, even though Marx predicted that we couldn't. We should all be trying to figure out how to make sure that next time the USA gets neo-Roosevelt, not neo-Hitler or neo-Lenin.

On the wealth weighting, I’m a fan of a 100% inheritance tax tbh. I’m in the “top 1%” and I don’t plan on giving my kids more than a great upbringing and education. I’m not giving them any additional cash injection. I think that solves a lot of the wealth weighting problem by shortening the lifecycle of capital holds, but I don’t know if I’ll ever live to see it (or some form of it like inheritance caps).

Is it fixed if it falls apart in a couple generations? Maybe flex tape over the problem isn't going to cut it.

In other words: we're screwed.

And yet countries that value more than efficiency and productivity are repeatedly ranked as the happiest in the world [0].

"Just push for progress in natural way, and for politicians to adjust to an already happend changes"

How much damage has unfettered tech done to society at large? Maybe we'll never know the full answer, but we can definitely agree it hasn't all been positive (advertising, social media etc..). We're now retrospectively regulating, but a lot of it feels too little, too late, for some elements of society (privacy being a notable example).

0: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2020/the-nordic-exceptional...

We do?

This is just not true. If people feel worse it's because they want more things from life, not because they are able to afford less things.

(I'm talking about the last ~50 years. The last 20 years may be a different point, but it doesn't have to do with female participation in the marketplace)

I have a "hobbyist conjecture" that I'd love feedback on from people familiar with economics. Simply put, the idea is this: if you were to give every human around the world a million dollars (imagine this is easy and feasible), prices would inevitably rise. The poorest might experience some improvement in their standard of living, but not as much as one might expect. This effect seems to go beyond inflation alone. My intuition is that prices ultimately adjust based on social structures and expectations.

Similarly, we see a unique economic advantage in many dual-income gay couples who, statistically, achieve higher standards of living. Often, this is partly because fewer have children, which shifts financial priorities and spending capacities.

So, if you give everyone in a given population (I'd go for the country instead of the world to see the effect much faster) a million dollars a month, the average discretionary income would, obviously, rise by one million dollars. That would cause prices to raise, but also all kinds of new products and services to become available. Some of those would evolve from luxuries to necessities over time - like e.g. having a car, or a mobile phone. Housing would likely eat a chunk of the surplus.

In the end, it would all stabilize, at exactly the "life is more expensive by a million dollars, on average" point. We'd still have socioeconomic classes - poor with < 0 surplus, rich with > 0 surplus, and the middle with ~0 surplus. Some people would've moved to different places on the ladder, but the ladder would still be there, simply because of variability in individual incomes.

I guess put another way, you could say, the market is a DC filter - as wealth distribution in a population changes, the market always adjusts to cancel out the constant component ("DC offset").

Changing policies frequently increase the risk for future arbitrary decisions.

Other currencies 1M base notes is not a lot (e.g. 1M dinar). You can just add/remove zeros but prices have adjusted, those people can't live like "millionaires" with 1M dinar.

There was a time goods like meat cost pennies, now it's $10 per pound. In those times $10,000 would be a life-altering amount of money, today most people have $10,000 in assets. The price of goods is related to money supply, they get more expensive if people have more money.

Money has no intrinsic value, it is balanced by whatever goods and services can be bought by it. If you add money but no goods and services, money is worth less (see COVID policy, increase money and decrease goods and services).

More generally, gifting every person worldwide the same amount of money seems roughly equivalent to taxing every above-average wealth person a fixed percentage of their surplus and giving every below-average-wealth person a fixed percentage of their deficit...

On a more realistic note, gifting every human 1M would probably completely break the financial system and cause a global recession...

But if you also buy clothes only made from hand-spun yarn, I mean, it was a problem for the yarn-spinsters back then, and by all means help them. But paying someone to do something that no longer needs doing is how you create bullshit jobs. No problem with spinning yarn for recreation, but if they have to do some complete nonsense to earn a roof and a meal... there are kinder ways to help.

Alternative take wrt. self-service checkouts: the store is making you do unpaid labor for it. And with how it's implemented in practice, it's not only offloading work of a specialist to you, it's also costing you time and frustration, since a cashier doing checkout 8h/day on a checkout desk optimized for throughput is doing a much faster job at it than you doing it ad-hoc, in constrained space, on a machine that throws an error if you look at it funny.

I'm very much for automating bullshit jobs away, but store checkout ain't it yet, and the results are universally worse.

More importantly, it's a common pattern that's been inflicted on people (and ourselves) by our industry particularly often: "automating away" specialist jobs with software. The workload doesn't actually go away - it gets redistributed to everyone. It only looks like a win, because specialist salaries are legible to the business, while generalized productivity loss isn't.

Think of it next time when a two day coding problem takes you a week, because you also need to attend several useless meetings, make some powerpoint slides, update your calendar, timesheet, and fill in expense reports from a business trip.

From my perspective self checkout is a latency optimization. The person in front of you in line may have 3 items and still take an unreasonably long time finishing the transaction, but replace one line with 4 machines and the line keeps moving.

Sure I’ll take a full cart to an actual cashier, but by removing people with only a few items from those lines they become more predictable.

It doesn't look this way from customer perspective, so I propose alternative interpretation: it contributes to hiding inflation, because instead of seeing the prices rapidly rise, we see them rise slower (further slowed down by "shrinkflation" and related shenanigans), but the quality of service goes down too. So what we get is ever worse shopping experience and lower inflation rates reported by economists.

(Not to mention, shopping taking more time because of this "optimization" is effectively even more hidden inflation.)

> From my perspective self checkout is a latency optimization. The person in front of you in line may have 3 items and still take an unreasonably long time finishing the transaction, but replace one line with 4 machines and the line keeps moving.

It's a good reason to have both. Because in practice, 2 out of 4 machines are, at any given moment, locked and waiting for a supervisor - and many stores "optimize" further, by eschewing a dedicated role and just tacking responsibilities on to existing work roster. Meaning, the supervisor you're waiting for is likely staffing a checkout point or unloading boxes in the back of the store at the same time, so you better get ready to wait.

Ideally, the store would have both automated and staffed checkout, and direct those with few discrete items to the former, where a dedicated supervisor would ensure problems get resolved quickly. That would indeed optimize latency/maximize throughput.

I’ve never been to a store that only had self checkout, I think the equilibrium is one bank of self checkout + a bunch of normal registers.

> 2 out of 4 machines are, at any given moment, locked and waiting for a supervisor > where a dedicated supervisor would ensure problems get resolved quickly

Sounds like an implementation issue.

The grocery store I typically use has one bank of 6 self checkout machines with a dedicated attendant who seems to be able to resolve any issues. It’s common for 1 or 2 of the machines be down though. They also have 4 to 14 normal checkout lines open depending on how busy the store is.

I rarely use self check but it seems like a good tradeoff vs a 5th line being open when things aren’t that busy.

Note: The European guest worker model of the 1950s and 1960s doesn’t work for the United States, due to the birthright citizenship status.

Doesn’t matter whether a person chooses self check out or cashier check out.

What matters is the training.

When self checkout becomes nearly as accurate as cashiers the cashiers lose their jobs.

Which lane we choose has little to do with the replacement. Thousands of holdouts won’t affect the millions of shoppers training the replacements.

Not sure how that shows up in the stats

I’m not sure this is Owning the Bots the way you think it is.