I've worked a variety of manufacturing jobs; from medical manufacturing of catheters the size of fishing lines with three inner diamters, running 5 story oven stack extrusion lines, laser etching tooth insert threading, and suface coating PTFE into sheet material for military radar and industrial applications, to grunt work factory assembly lines making the rubber gun butts for Ruger.
They all carried serious risks of bodily injury, and some far more so than others - but this is what's crazy to consider: the difference in wages we are talking is no more than $3 per hour. Meaning, that grunt work where you could lose your hand to a steel injection mold was $9, the teflon coating job where someone working third shift on the machine I ran was struck in the skull with the peg-end of a steel 72+ inch roller pin holding a full 300 yard roll of coated fabric, nearly (millimeters from), resulting in her having a steel plate surgically placed - that position paid a whopping $12 in 2014.
I've worked as a line cook, over 5 years, and as a driver, 6 years. None of these paid well, and all are inherent of risks. It's always seemed silly to me when you zoom out of this picture and see it like this; the more your job pays the less it exposes you to physical harm.
>It's always seemed silly to me when you zoom out of this picture and see it like this; the more your job pays the less it exposes you to physical harm.
I've worked physical labor too, though never in a factory. More like lugging baggage and cleaning toilets. Still, people got hurt doing it, especially over a lifetime of labor.
It comes down to rarity of skill. Not to be to crass about it, but when your primary value is that you're willing to put yourself in physical harm, the market for your offering has a lot more supply than demand.
For example, I spend a lot of time in hotels when I was young. Just finding people who were reliable and trustworthy and legal enough to drive the airport van without wrecking it were like 1 in 10 of the people who were potentially eligible to do it. If you were able to do rudimentary math and not steal from the till, you were one of the "lucky" few who got to work at the front desk. If you showed up regularly, well, the world was your oyster.
Being the one driving the important people, I can tell you from my experience, is one of the most eye opening of my eclectic history up til now, in that context. After doing it for 6 years, I can't imagine really voluntarily accepting that large pill to swallow of "lacking the skill."
Good points, I figure it's interesting from both sides hearing the others' perspective.
Not totally sure I understand your comment, but I wouldn't say the issue with drivers was lacking driving skill...it was more about dependability and reliability.
Finding employees who were legal to drive, insurable, at least somewhat able to avoid accidents, and reliable enough to show up to work was a constant hassle.
I think you misinterpreted, I only meant the discrepancies between social/working classes becomes more obvious as you are exposed to clientele representing higher-ups and large spend limits. "Important people" I mean as what the industry itself terms them; VIP's. the clients who contribute towards a sizeable chunk of the owners business.
Not a coincidence they are also known as the clients with the longest driveways.
When you consider the commute to work as part of the work day itself, most people are nowhere near compensated for (A) the time and money spent to and from workplace, (B) their inherent risk exposure to non-work related damage / injury etc., it just becomes clear, in my opinion.
The long driveway folks have mitigated these risks to the point companies will pay cover the time cost, not to mention travel costs and meals, overnight stays, and add to that the willingness to pay for professional limousine service to take them to and from the airports.
I say all this as observations, not even trying to bring bias into this. Would I like to see some balancing of the scales? sure, but it probably needs to start with constructive discussion around the topic. I don't see it talked about nearly enough.
> Still, people got hurt doing it, especially over a lifetime of labor.
The number of programmers I know with back issues like herniated discs is larger than those without. It's a different risk, no doubt, but it's real nevertheless.
Most if not all programmers certainly would have the time to do stretching, gymnastic, sport - develop and maintain the right muscles and take brakes when needed. Most are just too lazy.
A guy breaking his back on a construction site does not have this choice - if the job requires him to lift heavier things than he safely can carry - then his only real choice is to quit.
Of for fucks sake, this comment is so backwards, it reminds me of an ex of mine who refused to brush his teeth because doing so caused his gums to bleed.
But you usually won't get Sciatica if you exercise.
And I luckily had not had so many company office jobs, but in those I had, I absolutely could stand up and walk around and do some stretching if I needed it. And even in the worst coding monkey enslavement camps, you can probably have toilet breaks.
You seem to have this weird thing where a work related injury which makes it difficult to exercise is clearly only solved by - exercising. Which they can’t effectively do while injured.
Sure, if everyone did yoga before getting injured maybe they’d never get injured.
But if they’re injured, what exactly do you think their options are here?
You seem to be projecting a unrelated problem your ex had onto everyone. This isn’t bloody gums.
And notably, you could 90% tell the computer workers at the climbing gym by the anterior pelvic tilt - and yoga only did so much.
"You seem to be projecting a unrelated problem your ex had onto everyone. This isn’t bloody gums."
I have never said anything about my ex. And you seem not interested in the original argument - exercise before your body is messed up due to physical inactivity is usually possible.
If it is too late, it is too late.
> guy breaking his back on a construction site does not have this choice - if the job requires him to lift heavier things than he safely can carry - then his only real choice is to quit.
Or to build muscle to avoid the issues. I know it first hand, herniated disks and no working out while people who do work out turn out ok. Gene and other variance to be taken into account.
Heavy physical labor with no place for rest and stretches in between is however much better at messing you up, than a work when you can pause every 15 min and do 60s of stretching. + Do 5 min of yoga before and after work. + A standing desk to stand 15min per hour. + A HÅG Capisco style chair that forces you to change position every 10 minutes (it's somewhat uncomfortable), but due to its build, allows like 4-5 different positions out of the box.
I'd like you to show up on site and let everyone with shoulder and back issues (which is everyone) that you've cracked the case wide open and it's their own fault.
It's wild sometimes the level of man child bubble the average HN poster lives in.
In order to do everything needed so that no one calls you lazy, the day would need 80hous.
Otherwise said, if you called a hard working guy who also cooks and spends time with kids lazy, because they also did not do yet another optional activity on the regular, maybe you should not.
Hey, mentioned it above, assuming your making $80k, it's a one time cost of non expensive standing desk and ergonomic chair, plus 5 minutes of workout before and after work. And stretching brakes during.
Those 15 min is actually quite a lot if you don't have the habit yet. But you're in a better situation than someone working at a slaughter line, with no time to scratch your nose for 2h15min in between brakes not long enough to eat, use bathroom and sharpen your knives for the next 2h15min run.
I still feel sorry for your herniated disk, I don't think it's just your laziness, but more ignorance and equally lazy ignorant surroundings normalizing unhealthy lifestyle.
But you can't say someone that can get up and stretch for 30s every 15 min has it as bad as people running to the toilet and eating by swallowing big bites just to make it in time before the next animal comes to their position in line.
I did not call you lazy, or a hard working guy with kids and no time, but specifically those IT guys who I know, who definitely have a unhealthy lifestyle and do not care about their health as much as they could (or rather not at all, until it is too late).
So I could have probably made it more clear that my judgement was not absolute, but anecdotally. But I have seen many IT guys.
Of course it does. It alone does not make you a body builder, but compare the average person who does regular cooking with those who do not but eat fast food.
Neither does the police stop murders from happening, but if your employer demands you haul around 50 kg of bricks around by hand, you have legal recourse.
No, especially with stress, even carrying relative light things can cause lasting damage with one moment of not paying attention. Nevermind all the other dangerous things. Also I thought laws were tough for safety in germany, but they restaurated a big railway bridge right next to where I lived (years ling project) - and they worked even in icy, windy conditions with fog. You know those fog, that combined with freezing conditions will cover everything with a slipery wet ice layer. And this with heavy wind. No wonder people literally died there in accidents. (And officially this was not mentioned ever, DB rather celebrated themself for this project often. It was mostly east europeans working there).
Injuries happen most often because the rules or best practices weren’t followed (ignored safety to meet unrealistic quota, cut corners to leave work early, and why not, sometimes just being lazy, etc.) and less often because of some really unexpected condition (invisible defect in the safety equipment).
The difference between office and construction workers is that the former probably have more control over the situation but the damage is so slow they only realize too late, while the latter have too little control most times even if they are acutely aware of the immediate risk. They are the people who can’t afford to protest, lose the job, go to court, etc. and usually the informal requirements are shaped in such a way that in the end it looks like their own decision to forego safety concerns.
But an office worker can be under similar pressure to deliver day after day, and ruin their muscles, spine, eyes, joints, psyche in the process. Just less abruptly.
Indeed, but about the exact case I talked about - I doubt the construction workers were fine with going to work in those conditions but they were pushed into it (they were behind schedule). I am a climber - and icy windy foggy conditions are not when it is safe to be in heights.
And that was my point, a office worker can get stressed a lot - but when they make a misstake they have to compile again(and maybe consider quitting), not go to the graveyard, because they fell to death.
Otherwise sure, heart attacks can happen as well. And burn out is real, too. But the work itself is not physically dangerous.
I was the Health and Safety Representative at a previous job site, with a lot of different nationalities. Of course I can't generalise all of them, but I noticed that eastern europeans usually had way more disregard for job safety than Danes. There was one guy from Hungary especially who I had to reprimand at least weekly for doing stupid acrobatic shit on ladders. And we usually weren't even under time pressure, he just had barely any regard for his own safety. It was maddening. I would have fired him if I had authority to do so.
Maybe so, but at this site they did not even stopped working for the day, after a deadly accident happened. I assumed they do and do a proper investigation how it could happen, but nope. Body was removed and work proceeded.
In the US if you aren't union (which most people aren't) you will be fired and blacklisted by anybody and everybody if they find out you called OSHA. And if you are union they will probably be pissed you didn't contact the union first. It also likely won't result in any real changes, just some paltry fine and pissed off lead men. The exploted worker themselves will likely take a lot of the financial hit. (wages theft in the US dwarves all other theft combined)
Atleast half of trade jobs in the US expect you to break OSHA and labor laws regularly as part of the job. If you don't there are enough other desperate people to replace you.
Lazy is not a very nice way of putting it, but I would urge anyone without a simple stretching routine to develop one.
Five to ten minutes a few times a week, and I've not had a back problem in years.
It's a simple and easy way to keep a healthy baseline. Good for all sorts of physical and mental issues. I feel like shit if I've not done them for a while.
> Five to ten minutes a few times a week, and I've not had a back problem in years.
It helps, no doubt.
But it's not bullet proof either. A buddy of mine, very active guy, runner, cyclist, rower, tennis, swimmer, works out 10x a week, hikes 2 weeks in the rockies every summer. If anybody knows about warmup and stretching and all that, it's him. Has been a programmer for 20 years. Herniated disc took him out a year ago, still recovering.
When I had no exercise routine, my back acted up. I think distilling it into laziness is, well, a lazy take on it. It’s very hard to make proactive actions and work off delayed gratification. Especially when you are in pain. Pain is often all encompassing and you can’t perform long term thinking, and when you are out of pain (laying in bed) then you are just so happy to be relieved. It’s hard
You do have some choice on a construction site. Physical activity depletes nutrients. You can choose to replenish them. Strength and obesity is also a choice.
I once had a coworker 24 years old but he barely ate and barely slept. In a few years he has injuries everywhere that didn't go away.
One guy I know fell down 10 meters onto his back then got up and went back to work. He looks exactly like someone like that.
I've met a surprising number of manual laborers who seemed to believe you can build or repair something without materials.
Much like office workers who think ergonomics is something that comes after ruining your body.
There is no comparison between a programmer who chooses not to concern himself with ergonomics and a labourer who must put his health on the line daily or be fired.
Then there are quite a few essentially workplace injured programmers who are dismissively called "burnt out". Unable to work, unable to claim workers comp.
It seems that both blue and white collar jobs have their share of workplaces where in a do-the-task-or-maybe-get-fired situation, it's up to the employee to enforce their own boundaries and decide when saying no is a safer choice for their long term physical/mental safety. (Of course, sometimes you only realise this when it's too late.)
In trades, those projects have obvious beginnings, ends, and results. The driveway is poured. You’re often not expected to maintain that driveway either.
A lot of tech is basically a treadmill. You’re never finished. It is no wonder people burn out mentally.
Something like cybersecurity? Great, we made it through today, tomorrow will be worse. Repeat until something bad happens.
Classifying burnout as a dismissive term is a problem in and of itself. It's a real thing, but I also understand that people who have never experienced it can have a hard time taking it seriously and would be tempted to dismiss it. To be honest, I was one of them, until it happened to me a few years ago. It took me 5 months to recover and be able to go back to work. Since then, everybody in those shoes gets my support.
This reminds of the scene in The Office where Micheal Scott tries really hard to show how office work was just as dangerous as working in the warehouse with heavy machinery.
The comments here are confusing risk with health consequences. Whereas working in construction or with heavy machinery poses much higher risks than sitting at a desk for 30 years the results may be just as bad in both cases.
Just like a construction worker should observe H&S to minimize accidents, the office worker should get up regularly and exercise but, again in both cases, ignorance, carelessness or a heavy handed boss are rampant.
Yes, I did this, but I could still work as a programmer. My dad on the other hand was a painter and decorator, he fell off a ladder, hair line fracture in his back. Couldn't work to provide for his family. Fortunately he had critical illness cover. He never did painting and decorating again, but did start a building firm.
> when your primary value is that you're willing to put yourself in physical harm, the market for your offering has a lot more supply than demand
I don't think anyone here is unaware of this, it's more that maybe, purely relying on supply and demand leads to unfair outcomes...
>relying on supply and demand leads to unfair outcomes
And I don't think anyone here is unaware of this either. Peoples abilities (actual or potential) will forever be variable and fall on some sort of standard distribution.
This is not about abilities at all though, compensation shouldn't be tied to just "ability" either. My point is that it should to some extent depend on the risk a person takes on as well.
No matter how many people are are able and willing to do some "low-skill high-risk" work, their salary should reflect the fact they are taking on a risk. Taking that risk should be valued and rewarded by society.
This is not about equal outcomes, it's about fair compensation. If someone risks their life and damages their body in a mine every day, it's absurd and insulting that I make more than them sitting in an air-conditioned desk typing on a keyboard.
What’s the point of this? Talking about fairness or how things should be doesn’t do anything. How do you actually accomplish it? Without some notion of what could be done, it’s akin to complaining about the weather.
Well recognizing the problem is the first step, no? If you scroll up you'll see that this is what this was about. There are plenty of people who haven't even gotten that far and think supply and demand is the perfectly fine and the only option.
But sure, if you want, there are plenty of ways. Mandatory bonuses for higher-risk or generally physical labour would be one easy start, although it likely wouldn't be as effective in practice as one would like it to be. Restructuring the way people are paid as a whole is a more effective solution, which could cover other aspects too, although it would obviously be less popular with The Shareholders™ and therefore more difficult to pass. It's all a matter of legislation - every sane country has a law that says what the salary may or may not be based on, various limits (e.g. minimum wage), bonuses and modifiers... Maybe take inspiration from some countries' public sectors and make salaries fully standardized with a big lookup table and a bunch of modifiers based on objective or at least measurable parameters?
I don’t see anyone not acknowledging the problem. Some don’t see a good solution.
You propose a legal requirement to pay these people more. That will indeed solve the problem of unfairly low pay for these jobs. It will also create a problem of reduced hiring for those jobs and reduced output, possibly substantially reduced depending on how much more they have to be paid.
In short, you can mandate that lumber mill workers must be paid more, but you have to accept that less lumber gets produced and fewer people get paid to work there.
Less lumber gets produced, luber prices get higher or lumber productions profits get smaller, yes. Ideally it's a mix of the three.
But this isn't nearly as bad as you're making it sound. Lots of things used to be done by extremely low-wage workers or even slaves, and haven't gone away now that workers have to be paid better (or at all). Obviously many of those people are still paid very poorly and there's lots of work left to do there, but we improved things to a noticable extent and we didn't really suffer any bad effects. We can go further.
A lot of that was automation rather than legislation. You could use this as an automation push. That could work well. My main point is that this should be something like “legislation should mandate higher wages for riskier jobs and push for automation to control costs and reduce risk” rather than “it’s unfair.”
You're mixing up two parts of the discussion. This is unfair, THEREFORE we should ____. You need to agree on what the problem is, why it's a problem and what the outcome should be, then you can get to the methods.
And no, not that much. Automation is of course a factor, but it came at different times for different things and don't forget that it often made things worse for workers, at least where or when they didn't have institutional support.
Having institutional support for workers (unions and a pro-labour government) is what ultimately matters. Even if some prices go up and some jobs are lost, such institutions help smooth out the transition and put pressure on businesses which would otherwise jump at the opportunity to also increase their margins.
Equality in outcome doesn't need to be the goal. I much prefer the idea that someone who puts in (40|30|20) [0] hours a week of actual work gets some sense of dignity and purpose from that work along with a reasonable standard of living, no matter what the work involves.
[0] actual number would vary by culture, nation and technological time period
No?? I'm sorry but that's an insane comparison. We live in countries that have laws. Those laws are what applies the "law" of supply and demand to wages. We could alternatively have laws that say all human labor is paid equally per hour worked, or have a master table of types of work to monetary amounts, or some complex formula that takes various measurable factors into account.
I'm not saying any of those specific examples would be better than the current, but they're definitely options that exist and they're just words on a page passed by parliament, just like the current system is.
Hell, some of those things already exist in the public sector [0]. My base salary is calculated based on my job title and level of education, automatically adjusted with cost-of-living inflation, with modifiers for years of experience, job performance, being on-call, mentoring, working non-standard hours or weekends, dangerous conditions...
[0] I'm only familiar with some EU countries, not sure how this is done in the US or wherever else
I read a book called "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea" by Barbara Demick, about North Koreans in the 1990s that escaped into China and told their story. One of the interesting parts of it is about the planned economy, and all the control the government exerts over the economy in NK.
There was a massive famine I didn't know about in the mid-to-late 1990s in NK, and millions died. During this period, an underground capitalism took over, where people were producing food in various ways, often grown in their own gardens, and then buying and selling from each other, with barter rates / prices determined by availability.
While I agree with you that countries can make rules that fix prices (or do whatever they want), there is an underlying set of mechanisms to supply and demand that are not derived from law, but logic. If I have 5 cupcakes, and there are 100 people that want them, unless someone points a gun at me and says "Sell them each for 5 cents" (while the 100 people all fight over who gets to pay), the natural incentive structure would essentially be an auction to figure out who is willing to pay the most, and then sell it to them. That's not some legal theory or set of laws, but rather the human condition.
Of course, it doesn't play out this way in reality. In reality, it all comes down to power, and those with power take whatever they want, but my point here is that supply and demand exist outside of a legal structure, and if there's only one electrician, and there's enough work for 10 electricians, that one electrician can server the richest 1/10 of those in need (and charge accordingly to select that 1/10), and it is rational to do so independent of any laws made. So much so, in fact, that laws are advisory, but the fundamental incentives are inherent.
This is why I like incentives more than rules: they're less brittle.
There are many inherent incentives that we correct for with laws. The incentive for people to shoplift is high, but we counter it with the threat of fines or jail. Similarly, the incentive is to raise prices / undercut wages / do arbitrage... and we can counter that with similar punishments.
I'm not saying I have the magic formula for how to codify such crimes and what punishment would be appropriate, but it took us hundreds of years to figure out how to effectively deal with even very basic crimes (and some countries still struggle with those).
Why does a kid in kindergarten that hoards all the crayons for himself get told off, but buying all the masks during a pandemic to sell at an insane profit was considered valid economic activity? We have arbitrarily decided that various tiers of "being an asshole" are somewhere between ssocially unacceptable and criminal, but if you're making money, being an asshole is fine. We can change that.
This whole discussion is about the fact that it isn't paid well but it should be paid well.
But yeah, if "as far as you're concerned", what defines value is only the price under an unconstrained suppy-demand system, then this discussion won't go anywhere.
If by "supply and demand" you mean all supplies have positive and reasonably sized elasticity, and all demands have negative and reasonably sized elasticity, through all reasonable price ranges...
Some niche cases include any kind of labor, anything that comes out of a factory with economies of scale, and anything that involves land or extraction of natural resources.
One of the common defenses of capitalism is that the capital owner is risking capital so should get to enjoy a disproportionate amount of their profits. The standard rejoinder is: "what exactly are they risking? If the capital owner is wiped out, they simply become a worker like everyone else".
I remember reading about the life expectancy of people who have worked construction all their working lives. The life expectancy in this same was (IIRC) 59. The life expectancy of the guy who owns the construction company was over 80.
So who exactly is taking a risk here?
To your point, you can look at an awful lot of incredibly dirty and dangerous jobs in undesirable locations and they pay surprisingly bad. As an example, underwater welding on North Sea oil rigs pays $100-160k. That is an incredibly dangerous job that wrecks your health. Even if there isn't a risk of acute injury or death, often it wrecks your body. And this fact also gets lost every time the idea is resurrected of raising the retirement age. How exactly is a construction worker or an airport baggage handler meant to work until 68 instead of 65 exactly?
On top of all that, the people who are getting paid very little in a possibly dangerous job can often cost a fortune if they screw up. International shipping tends to use fairly low paid sailors from countries like The Phillipines. The cost of a screw up can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day when they might be earning as little as $30.
I'm not arguing either perspective but being 59 and out of money looks very different than being 80 and out of money. If you have built up capital and that's how you make your living, you become very dependent on that capital.
I've known people who believed they would never live past 20. I've also known people who want to live to 200. The difference in mentality between the two as well as the different approach to life is large. IMHO, the difference is directly comparable to working for what you need for the day/week vs saving for when you are 80.
Frankly, if you had just enough money to simply retire, would you risk it on employing folks who drink themselves to death, wreck expensive equipment, take responsibility for as little as possible and generally don't care about your bottom line? ... or would you retire?
Most "capital" used to be workers who risked everything they've worked for because they thought they could do a better job than their boss. People mortgage their homes to get their businesses through hard times.
It's easy to frame the owners of capital as the bad guy when you act like they are the Monopoly man but most businesses are small businesses and sole proprietorships.
Most businesses aren't a problem because they are many and small.
Contrary wise, most Capital is a problem for many because most of the capital (literal trillions) is tied up in the hands of a very few individuals and boards who are exerting an undue influence on hundreds of millions.
That is not true tho. They did not risked "everything". That is super exaggerated framing. They risked not succeeding and being slightly worst off then other guys at most.
And big capital people risked "becomming a middle class" at worst.
It is. That is the whole thing where American setup is supposed to be better then European - you can fail, fail again and then again with little punishnent or consequence. And it is not like European consequences were grave, you are just less likely yo get another investment once you failed.
Frankly, too many people like to talk about risk taking in fairly low risk situations.
When you look at capital and risk, the risk are not that large. And economic policy favorwed capital over labor literally for decades on top of it.
> One of the common defenses of capitalism is that the capital owner is risking capital so should get to enjoy a disproportionate amount of their profits. The standard rejoinder is: "what exactly are they risking? If the capital owner is wiped out, they simply become a worker like everyone else".
That standard rejoinder is completely dismissive of how the capital owner came to be in the position of owning capital in the first place. That capital owner - or his ancestor - either worked exceptionally hard or took exceptional risks to get into that position.
But nobody answers the question of why that would allow them to treat others like basically slaves.
The standard answer is: but the others could do the same thing. Well, if everybody tried to become a capitalist at all costs then we'd be in a pretty bad place.
Not trying to argue on the downsides of capitalism, but what comes to mind is the Endicott Johnson Corporation. They paid decent wages to their workers during 1950s, but got overcompeted by Nike partly because they were unwilling to lower their wages to stay in business
> That capital owner - or his ancestor - either worked exceptionally hard or took exceptional risks to get into that position.
That’s nuts. The industrial barons of 19th century America neither worked hard nor took amazing risks. They were lawyers and bankers who manipulated stocks and broke unions.
When you suddenly limit a discussion to a very specific time and place, sure, you could discount any point ever made.
I live in neither the 19th century nor in America. The wealthy people I know all earned everything over the past three generations - three generations ago my people were completely devastated and many started off with no more than the single torn shirt they fled with.
"Or his ancestor"? What are we, an aristocracy? Personally I don't think there should be any inherited wealth beyond a few million dollars but that's another story. Luckily, this hasn't been a big problem yet. The heirs tend to be very bad at maintaining or building their inherited wealth. Cornelius Vanderbilt II is an obvious exception.
But in the middle we do have an increasing problem of trust fund kids dominating industry. Hollywood is an obvious example. But even in the startup world, your education matters an awful lot. And you going to Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Yale has a lot to do with elite private schooling and all of it has a ton to do with the luck of birth not merit.
I'm actually curious who you think risked their fortune? Is it anyone in particular or is it just some romanticized idea? Bill Gates came from a privileged background. Jeff Bezos's parents had a quarter million in retirement savings to lend him in the 1990s and he was playing with investor money after that.
Now wealth creation seems to be taking other people's money and buying up industries with inelastic demand to extract wealth from ordinary people. Housing, medical care, vets, utilities, that sort of thing.
And then there's slavery and its aftermath. How much generational wealth was created from slavery? Even a century after Emancipation, we had the government creating wealth for white people with the GI Bill post-WW2. Free college and cheap mortgages. Who was taking a risk there?
You get sufficiently wealthy and you aren't allowed to fail. The government will bail you out.
I feel like James Cameron has never tried anything safe. He was a truck driver early on. Some dentists took a risk and financed a truck driver to make a movie.
That’s the thing about pension schemes like American social security: they were originally set with a retirement age that matched mean mortality, so half of potential recipients would die before drawing on them. In other words, half of workers were not meant to retire, and the half that did would be protected by the contributions of all. Modern medicine completely changed those expectations, keeping the elderly alive twenty years longer and making twenty years of unproductive, publicly funded retirement an expectation and entitlement for everyone. It’s political suicide to discuss whether something should change about that.
> the capital owner is risking capital so should get to enjoy a disproportionate amount of their profits
Anyone who advanced that ‘defense’ has a poor understanding of economics.
Risk is not an essential element of capitalism. Some investments are effectively risk free. ‘Disproportionate’ return seems to be something you’ve just made up. There’s no mention of the proportionality of returns in any economic treatise I’ve ever read.
Lastly, there’s nothing to defend. There’s simply the observation that if there is no return on capital then there’s no reason at all to provide capital. Nobody has ever come up with a working alternative.
In that case most capitalists and owners don't understand capitalism, because there are only two standard arguments - one is the one about risk, and the other is that everyone should be grateful when a capitalist creates jobs at all.
As for defences - capital is just political power by other means. If the capitalist is wasting money on yachts while workers can't afford food and housing, the return is morally disproportionate, and the usual outcome is socially catastrophic, in various possible ways.
Capitalism reduces every transaction to personal opportunism, with no concept of broader consequences. That's a shockingly stupid way to run anything - as we're all about to find out.
> Capitalism reduces every transaction to personal opportunism, with no concept of broader consequences
It is people who ALWAYS reduce everything to personal opportunism (no matter capitalism or not). Capitalism is the smartest way to run anything exactly because it is build on concepts of broader consequences of that fact.
> if there is no return on capital then there’s no reason at all to provide capital.
Untrue. Capital accumulates. People have desires for their world/society/community beyond their own wealth. They want to see certain things happen, and owning capital puts a person in a position to influence whether it does (or does not).
The problem is that "the owner can simply become a worker" doesn't really work like that because they likely sacrificed career advancements, education, time, saved up money, etc.
If someone starts running a company at 20 years old and goes bankrupt at 40, they can't simply go back to working a regular job. They don't have a resume, they sacrificed 20 years of career progress. They'll be working at Walmart while their peers who got the same education and have the same intelligence are becoming partners at law firms or investment banks.
Precisely the same objections can be made about someone who takes one particular job instead of another. There's an opportunity cost to deciding to go and work for company/person X instead of company/person Y (or maybe to not work at all, and instead study, or raise young children etc. etc.)
Yeah completely unlike the regular worker whose factory gets shut down or gets injured on the job or any of a million things that breaks the fragile little house of cards that gives them any kind of basic human dignity at all.
The capital class doesn't need you to defend them. You're embarrassing yourself.
I'm failing to see your point. A $9 /hr job that risks serious bodily harm vs a $12/hr job where the level of risk is say 5-10x greater? Where's this safe job you speak of?
My mom insisted I got a job the summer after my freshman year in high school and I didn't want to. We lived in a small town and there was a small new French restaurant about to open just down the street so she walked me down there and talked the owner-chef, Franc into giving me a job. I ended up working there all throughout high school (washing dishes and eventually cooking) and the education was arguably as valuable as what I learned in college. I was studying French so Franc and I only spoke in French. It was incredibly helpful but I also learned a lot of words and phrases that weren't useful on the AP French test. Working in the kitchen I got exposure to people and lifestyles that I didn't know existed and it was eye opening in the best possible way. One time when I was home from college I got a frantic call from Franc to see if I could fill in because his sous chef had been busted with a kilo of coke.
I worked at a deli from age 16 to 18. Working alongside people 2 and 3x my age who had been doing that their whole working lives taught me more about life than almost anything since.
I think it’s just that the dangerous jobs are avoided y those who can avoid them. So they are left to those who have little choice, which depresses wages. This is rather immoral, but Covid made quite clear that the essential jobs weren’t the high-status or high-paying ones.
I find this worrying because the entire economy is built on the idea of cheap physical snd cheap unskilled labor. So if we do a good job educating, we’ll need to fill these jobs by paying more rather than preying on the desperate. And I don’t see the current world being willing to pay more.
Was this all in the US? If so, that's broken. I've been permanently employed since 1998 in Australia and I've never earnt less than about $27 per hour, and even that was only in the very early / junior days. The exchange rate (US$ to $AU$) has always been approximately $0.60 to $0.80 US to $1 AU for almost all of that time, so I wonder why the US pays so little when you also don't get the benefits of affordable healthcare etc?
I’m pretty sure today entry level (non-union) factory work is around $15-$20 USD ($21.62-$28.82 AUD at current exchange rate) in most parts of the US. I wouldn't be surprised if it’s lower though in very rural, low income parts of the country like West Virginia.
Federal minimum wage is still $7.25/hr, hasn't changed in years but very few jobs today pay less than about 2x that, as people simply won't work for less. Even fast food pays about $15 in most places.
its ok.....i got a diploma from a prestigious music school at the age of 18 and still spent the large chunk of my 20s working my way from busboy to assistant kitchen manager at a variety of classy restaurants, culminating in about $12/hr.
During the restaurant years I was also going to college for computer science and ultimately dropped out halfway through to do remote R&D work for a silicon valley gig making a whopping 500 bucks a week (living in FL)...Than covid hit and the boss went back to Korea.
Now I make 12.50 an hour repairing and designing boutique tube amps in KS
I've been a welder, a machinist of exotic metal orifice plates holding ten thousandths of an inch, a lowest level carpenter, got a college degree in horticultural science (pretty useless degree IMHO), became an entrepreneur,a licensed sprinkler pro, a landscaper, an executive running a mail order company, and the most successful of all: An installer - servicer of underwater pumps on the area lakes for the wealthiest waterfront property owners. It was dangerous, indeed. Working with 230 V electricity at all times (been shocked multiple times), diving alone in almost constant zero visibility water at depth, up and down hillsides where a mis-step could cripple you and end your career (or worse), driving 100 miles or more RT 3 to 4 times a week for 15 years+.
Luckily, I survived it all without serious injury. What I discovered affected me the most was business OVERHEAD, the cost of doing business. I had 8+ employees in the mail order business plus a lease space, numerous expenses, huge overhead. With the lake pump business I had day labor guy I paid only on days I needed him. I was quite able to be the chief salesman, website creator and manager, head diver, head electrician and plumber, etc. Lowest overhead of anything I ever got involved with, consequently the most successful. Huge savings for retirement, mortgage paid off, no debt, got a Rivian on order. Rec diving in Asia and the Caribbean with my son, kiteboarding in Costa Rica. Blue collar made me successful.
On the other hand, my son is a degreed comp. sci grad who got hired just before machine learning became a thing, his company gave him the title of "senior engineer" recently instead of a raise, in fact, his salary raises have stopped, luckily he still has a job.
> the more your job pays the less it exposes you to physical harm.
the high-paying jobs are for reliance under obscurity: part of a very big deal, and if you screw up you ruin everything, and it's hard to know if you screwed up. That's everything from CEO's to investors and researchers, teachers, and yes, some tradesmen.
If you want to reduce wages, increase transparency.
Not always the case. You can make almost as much money as I did as a programmer, working the most dangerous and life-risking jobs. For example being out on an oil rig, or construction, power line repair, etc. in hostile locales. (Extremely cold weather, out on cliffs, etc.).
When I lived in Portland there was a bloke in my building who did this—cutting trees over the edges of cliffs to make way for construction of some sort—and got paid a grip for it. Then he'd come back and for two weeks blow his wad on weed, alcohol, and women—only to go out and do it all over again on the next job.
sans_souse · · focus · HN ↗
They all carried serious risks of bodily injury, and some far more so than others - but this is what's crazy to consider: the difference in wages we are talking is no more than $3 per hour. Meaning, that grunt work where you could lose your hand to a steel injection mold was $9, the teflon coating job where someone working third shift on the machine I ran was struck in the skull with the peg-end of a steel 72+ inch roller pin holding a full 300 yard roll of coated fabric, nearly (millimeters from), resulting in her having a steel plate surgically placed - that position paid a whopping $12 in 2014.
I've worked as a line cook, over 5 years, and as a driver, 6 years. None of these paid well, and all are inherent of risks. It's always seemed silly to me when you zoom out of this picture and see it like this; the more your job pays the less it exposes you to physical harm.
timr · · focus · HN ↗
I've worked physical labor too, though never in a factory. More like lugging baggage and cleaning toilets. Still, people got hurt doing it, especially over a lifetime of labor.
It comes down to rarity of skill. Not to be to crass about it, but when your primary value is that you're willing to put yourself in physical harm, the market for your offering has a lot more supply than demand.
For example, I spend a lot of time in hotels when I was young. Just finding people who were reliable and trustworthy and legal enough to drive the airport van without wrecking it were like 1 in 10 of the people who were potentially eligible to do it. If you were able to do rudimentary math and not steal from the till, you were one of the "lucky" few who got to work at the front desk. If you showed up regularly, well, the world was your oyster.
sans_souse · · focus · HN ↗
Good points, I figure it's interesting from both sides hearing the others' perspective.
timr · · focus · HN ↗
Finding employees who were legal to drive, insurable, at least somewhat able to avoid accidents, and reliable enough to show up to work was a constant hassle.
sans_souse · · focus · HN ↗
Not a coincidence they are also known as the clients with the longest driveways.
handzhiev · · focus · HN ↗
sans_souse · · focus · HN ↗
The long driveway folks have mitigated these risks to the point companies will pay cover the time cost, not to mention travel costs and meals, overnight stays, and add to that the willingness to pay for professional limousine service to take them to and from the airports.
I say all this as observations, not even trying to bring bias into this. Would I like to see some balancing of the scales? sure, but it probably needs to start with constructive discussion around the topic. I don't see it talked about nearly enough.
hanibrel · · focus · HN ↗
The number of programmers I know with back issues like herniated discs is larger than those without. It's a different risk, no doubt, but it's real nevertheless.
lukan · · focus · HN ↗
Most if not all programmers certainly would have the time to do stretching, gymnastic, sport - develop and maintain the right muscles and take brakes when needed. Most are just too lazy.
A guy breaking his back on a construction site does not have this choice - if the job requires him to lift heavier things than he safely can carry - then his only real choice is to quit.
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
Most programming folks I know sit so long, it screws up their back and ability to exercise. Rinse, repeat.
It’s a common issue for drivers too.
astura · · focus · HN ↗
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
ubercow13 · · focus · HN ↗
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
Part of why I left the industry.
Same with truck drivers.
If your job is cool with it, good for you.
ubercow13 · · focus · HN ↗
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
Sciatica screws up your ability to exercise.
lukan · · focus · HN ↗
And I luckily had not had so many company office jobs, but in those I had, I absolutely could stand up and walk around and do some stretching if I needed it. And even in the worst coding monkey enslavement camps, you can probably have toilet breaks.
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
Sure, if everyone did yoga before getting injured maybe they’d never get injured.
But if they’re injured, what exactly do you think their options are here?
You seem to be projecting a unrelated problem your ex had onto everyone. This isn’t bloody gums.
And notably, you could 90% tell the computer workers at the climbing gym by the anterior pelvic tilt - and yoga only did so much.
lukan · · focus · HN ↗
I have never said anything about my ex. And you seem not interested in the original argument - exercise before your body is messed up due to physical inactivity is usually possible. If it is too late, it is too late.
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
my point is, once someone is messed up, especially in the current job market, it’s too late to tell them that eh?
wafflemaker · · focus · HN ↗
Or to build muscle to avoid the issues. I know it first hand, herniated disks and no working out while people who do work out turn out ok. Gene and other variance to be taken into account.
Heavy physical labor with no place for rest and stretches in between is however much better at messing you up, than a work when you can pause every 15 min and do 60s of stretching. + Do 5 min of yoga before and after work. + A standing desk to stand 15min per hour. + A HÅG Capisco style chair that forces you to change position every 10 minutes (it's somewhat uncomfortable), but due to its build, allows like 4-5 different positions out of the box.
R in RSI is for repetitive.
idiotsecant · · focus · HN ↗
It's wild sometimes the level of man child bubble the average HN poster lives in.
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
In order to do everything needed so that no one calls you lazy, the day would need 80hous.
Otherwise said, if you called a hard working guy who also cooks and spends time with kids lazy, because they also did not do yet another optional activity on the regular, maybe you should not.
wafflemaker · · focus · HN ↗
Those 15 min is actually quite a lot if you don't have the habit yet. But you're in a better situation than someone working at a slaughter line, with no time to scratch your nose for 2h15min in between brakes not long enough to eat, use bathroom and sharpen your knives for the next 2h15min run.
I still feel sorry for your herniated disk, I don't think it's just your laziness, but more ignorance and equally lazy ignorant surroundings normalizing unhealthy lifestyle.
But you can't say someone that can get up and stretch for 30s every 15 min has it as bad as people running to the toilet and eating by swallowing big bites just to make it in time before the next animal comes to their position in line.
lukan · · focus · HN ↗
So I could have probably made it more clear that my judgement was not absolute, but anecdotally. But I have seen many IT guys.
Viliam1234 · · focus · HN ↗
lukan · · focus · HN ↗
hanibrel · · focus · HN ↗
And I also know plenty of ripped folks who hardly ever cook. Granted, they don't only eat fast food, but quite a lot of it.
encom · · focus · HN ↗
Civilised countries have laws prohibiting this. Here in Denmark it's arbejdsmiljøstyrelsen (bless you), and OSHA in USA.
Geezus_42 · · focus · HN ↗
encom · · focus · HN ↗
lukan · · focus · HN ↗
close04 · · focus · HN ↗
The difference between office and construction workers is that the former probably have more control over the situation but the damage is so slow they only realize too late, while the latter have too little control most times even if they are acutely aware of the immediate risk. They are the people who can’t afford to protest, lose the job, go to court, etc. and usually the informal requirements are shaped in such a way that in the end it looks like their own decision to forego safety concerns.
But an office worker can be under similar pressure to deliver day after day, and ruin their muscles, spine, eyes, joints, psyche in the process. Just less abruptly.
lukan · · focus · HN ↗
And that was my point, a office worker can get stressed a lot - but when they make a misstake they have to compile again(and maybe consider quitting), not go to the graveyard, because they fell to death.
Otherwise sure, heart attacks can happen as well. And burn out is real, too. But the work itself is not physically dangerous.
encom · · focus · HN ↗
I was the Health and Safety Representative at a previous job site, with a lot of different nationalities. Of course I can't generalise all of them, but I noticed that eastern europeans usually had way more disregard for job safety than Danes. There was one guy from Hungary especially who I had to reprimand at least weekly for doing stupid acrobatic shit on ladders. And we usually weren't even under time pressure, he just had barely any regard for his own safety. It was maddening. I would have fired him if I had authority to do so.
lukan · · focus · HN ↗
idiotsecant · · focus · HN ↗
Worker in the US do not have substantial protection. It's limited to penalizing employers and even that almost never happens.
AngryData · · focus · HN ↗
Atleast half of trade jobs in the US expect you to break OSHA and labor laws regularly as part of the job. If you don't there are enough other desperate people to replace you.
specproc · · focus · HN ↗
Five to ten minutes a few times a week, and I've not had a back problem in years.
It's a simple and easy way to keep a healthy baseline. Good for all sorts of physical and mental issues. I feel like shit if I've not done them for a while.
hanibrel · · focus · HN ↗
It helps, no doubt.
But it's not bullet proof either. A buddy of mine, very active guy, runner, cyclist, rower, tennis, swimmer, works out 10x a week, hikes 2 weeks in the rockies every summer. If anybody knows about warmup and stretching and all that, it's him. Has been a programmer for 20 years. Herniated disc took him out a year ago, still recovering.
specproc · · focus · HN ↗
What I'm saying is that stretching is going to give you a very good defence against back problems. Been totally life-changing for me.
stevepotter · · focus · HN ↗
econ · · focus · HN ↗
I once had a coworker 24 years old but he barely ate and barely slept. In a few years he has injuries everywhere that didn't go away.
One guy I know fell down 10 meters onto his back then got up and went back to work. He looks exactly like someone like that.
I've met a surprising number of manual laborers who seemed to believe you can build or repair something without materials.
Much like office workers who think ergonomics is something that comes after ruining your body.
This doesn't even look real
<a href="https://youtu.be/7bXNCrGc0Ro?is=zCL-1ARUzygbdSqS" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/7bXNCrGc0Ro?is=zCL-1ARUzygbdSqS
zemvpferreira · · focus · HN ↗
jojobas · · focus · HN ↗
zdc1 · · focus · HN ↗
doubled112 · · focus · HN ↗
A lot of tech is basically a treadmill. You’re never finished. It is no wonder people burn out mentally.
Something like cybersecurity? Great, we made it through today, tomorrow will be worse. Repeat until something bad happens.
My knees and back might last longer though.
hanibrel · · focus · HN ↗
altmanaltman · · focus · HN ↗
cfn · · focus · HN ↗
Just like a construction worker should observe H&S to minimize accidents, the office worker should get up regularly and exercise but, again in both cases, ignorance, carelessness or a heavy handed boss are rampant.
pipes · · focus · HN ↗
franga2000 · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think anyone here is unaware of this, it's more that maybe, purely relying on supply and demand leads to unfair outcomes...
wallst07 · · focus · HN ↗
And I don't think anyone here is unaware of this either. Peoples abilities (actual or potential) will forever be variable and fall on some sort of standard distribution.
There will never be equality in outcomes.
franga2000 · · focus · HN ↗
No matter how many people are are able and willing to do some "low-skill high-risk" work, their salary should reflect the fact they are taking on a risk. Taking that risk should be valued and rewarded by society.
This is not about equal outcomes, it's about fair compensation. If someone risks their life and damages their body in a mine every day, it's absurd and insulting that I make more than them sitting in an air-conditioned desk typing on a keyboard.
wat10000 · · focus · HN ↗
What’s the point of this? Talking about fairness or how things should be doesn’t do anything. How do you actually accomplish it? Without some notion of what could be done, it’s akin to complaining about the weather.
franga2000 · · focus · HN ↗
But sure, if you want, there are plenty of ways. Mandatory bonuses for higher-risk or generally physical labour would be one easy start, although it likely wouldn't be as effective in practice as one would like it to be. Restructuring the way people are paid as a whole is a more effective solution, which could cover other aspects too, although it would obviously be less popular with The Shareholders™ and therefore more difficult to pass. It's all a matter of legislation - every sane country has a law that says what the salary may or may not be based on, various limits (e.g. minimum wage), bonuses and modifiers... Maybe take inspiration from some countries' public sectors and make salaries fully standardized with a big lookup table and a bunch of modifiers based on objective or at least measurable parameters?
wat10000 · · focus · HN ↗
You propose a legal requirement to pay these people more. That will indeed solve the problem of unfairly low pay for these jobs. It will also create a problem of reduced hiring for those jobs and reduced output, possibly substantially reduced depending on how much more they have to be paid.
In short, you can mandate that lumber mill workers must be paid more, but you have to accept that less lumber gets produced and fewer people get paid to work there.
franga2000 · · focus · HN ↗
But this isn't nearly as bad as you're making it sound. Lots of things used to be done by extremely low-wage workers or even slaves, and haven't gone away now that workers have to be paid better (or at all). Obviously many of those people are still paid very poorly and there's lots of work left to do there, but we improved things to a noticable extent and we didn't really suffer any bad effects. We can go further.
wat10000 · · focus · HN ↗
franga2000 · · focus · HN ↗
And no, not that much. Automation is of course a factor, but it came at different times for different things and don't forget that it often made things worse for workers, at least where or when they didn't have institutional support.
Having institutional support for workers (unions and a pro-labour government) is what ultimately matters. Even if some prices go up and some jobs are lost, such institutions help smooth out the transition and put pressure on businesses which would otherwise jump at the opportunity to also increase their margins.
PaulDavisThe1st · · focus · HN ↗
[0] actual number would vary by culture, nation and technological time period
wanderlust123 · · focus · HN ↗
It would be akin to saying its unfair humans can’t fly due to gravity
franga2000 · · focus · HN ↗
I'm not saying any of those specific examples would be better than the current, but they're definitely options that exist and they're just words on a page passed by parliament, just like the current system is.
Hell, some of those things already exist in the public sector [0]. My base salary is calculated based on my job title and level of education, automatically adjusted with cost-of-living inflation, with modifiers for years of experience, job performance, being on-call, mentoring, working non-standard hours or weekends, dangerous conditions...
[0] I'm only familiar with some EU countries, not sure how this is done in the US or wherever else
rpdillon · · focus · HN ↗
There was a massive famine I didn't know about in the mid-to-late 1990s in NK, and millions died. During this period, an underground capitalism took over, where people were producing food in various ways, often grown in their own gardens, and then buying and selling from each other, with barter rates / prices determined by availability.
While I agree with you that countries can make rules that fix prices (or do whatever they want), there is an underlying set of mechanisms to supply and demand that are not derived from law, but logic. If I have 5 cupcakes, and there are 100 people that want them, unless someone points a gun at me and says "Sell them each for 5 cents" (while the 100 people all fight over who gets to pay), the natural incentive structure would essentially be an auction to figure out who is willing to pay the most, and then sell it to them. That's not some legal theory or set of laws, but rather the human condition.
Of course, it doesn't play out this way in reality. In reality, it all comes down to power, and those with power take whatever they want, but my point here is that supply and demand exist outside of a legal structure, and if there's only one electrician, and there's enough work for 10 electricians, that one electrician can server the richest 1/10 of those in need (and charge accordingly to select that 1/10), and it is rational to do so independent of any laws made. So much so, in fact, that laws are advisory, but the fundamental incentives are inherent.
This is why I like incentives more than rules: they're less brittle.
franga2000 · · focus · HN ↗
I'm not saying I have the magic formula for how to codify such crimes and what punishment would be appropriate, but it took us hundreds of years to figure out how to effectively deal with even very basic crimes (and some countries still struggle with those).
Why does a kid in kindergarten that hoards all the crayons for himself get told off, but buying all the masks during a pandemic to sell at an insane profit was considered valid economic activity? We have arbitrarily decided that various tiers of "being an asshole" are somewhere between ssocially unacceptable and criminal, but if you're making money, being an asshole is fine. We can change that.
wanderlust123 · · focus · HN ↗
As far as I am concerned unskilled labour always has a lower value than skilled labour due to supply and demand.
Layering on laws and regulations does not change that.
franga2000 · · focus · HN ↗
But yeah, if "as far as you're concerned", what defines value is only the price under an unconstrained suppy-demand system, then this discussion won't go anywhere.
marcosdumay · · focus · HN ↗
If by "supply and demand" you mean all supplies have positive and reasonably sized elasticity, and all demands have negative and reasonably sized elasticity, through all reasonable price ranges...
Some niche cases include any kind of labor, anything that comes out of a factory with economies of scale, and anything that involves land or extraction of natural resources.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
alexpotato · · focus · HN ↗
There was a great tweet recently:
"There is a reason the babysitter that shows up 100% of time makes more than double the babysitter who only shows up 80% of time"
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
jmyeet · · focus · HN ↗
I remember reading about the life expectancy of people who have worked construction all their working lives. The life expectancy in this same was (IIRC) 59. The life expectancy of the guy who owns the construction company was over 80.
So who exactly is taking a risk here?
To your point, you can look at an awful lot of incredibly dirty and dangerous jobs in undesirable locations and they pay surprisingly bad. As an example, underwater welding on North Sea oil rigs pays $100-160k. That is an incredibly dangerous job that wrecks your health. Even if there isn't a risk of acute injury or death, often it wrecks your body. And this fact also gets lost every time the idea is resurrected of raising the retirement age. How exactly is a construction worker or an airport baggage handler meant to work until 68 instead of 65 exactly?
On top of all that, the people who are getting paid very little in a possibly dangerous job can often cost a fortune if they screw up. International shipping tends to use fairly low paid sailors from countries like The Phillipines. The cost of a screw up can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day when they might be earning as little as $30.
hanibrel · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
imoverclocked · · focus · HN ↗
I've known people who believed they would never live past 20. I've also known people who want to live to 200. The difference in mentality between the two as well as the different approach to life is large. IMHO, the difference is directly comparable to working for what you need for the day/week vs saving for when you are 80.
Frankly, if you had just enough money to simply retire, would you risk it on employing folks who drink themselves to death, wreck expensive equipment, take responsibility for as little as possible and generally don't care about your bottom line? ... or would you retire?
parineum · · focus · HN ↗
It's easy to frame the owners of capital as the bad guy when you act like they are the Monopoly man but most businesses are small businesses and sole proprietorships.
defrost · · focus · HN ↗
Contrary wise, most Capital is a problem for many because most of the capital (literal trillions) is tied up in the hands of a very few individuals and boards who are exerting an undue influence on hundreds of millions.
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
And big capital people risked "becomming a middle class" at worst.
nomorewords · · focus · HN ↗
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
Frankly, too many people like to talk about risk taking in fairly low risk situations.
When you look at capital and risk, the risk are not that large. And economic policy favorwed capital over labor literally for decades on top of it.
folkrav · · focus · HN ↗
dotancohen · · focus · HN ↗
cowboy_henk · · focus · HN ↗
amelius · · focus · HN ↗
The standard answer is: but the others could do the same thing. Well, if everybody tried to become a capitalist at all costs then we'd be in a pretty bad place.
ahalay-mahalay · · focus · HN ↗
dotancohen · · focus · HN ↗
enoint · · focus · HN ↗
That’s nuts. The industrial barons of 19th century America neither worked hard nor took amazing risks. They were lawyers and bankers who manipulated stocks and broke unions.
dotancohen · · focus · HN ↗
I live in neither the 19th century nor in America. The wealthy people I know all earned everything over the past three generations - three generations ago my people were completely devastated and many started off with no more than the single torn shirt they fled with.
nkrisc · · focus · HN ↗
The capital owner risks his status, the laborer risks his life.
jmyeet · · focus · HN ↗
But in the middle we do have an increasing problem of trust fund kids dominating industry. Hollywood is an obvious example. But even in the startup world, your education matters an awful lot. And you going to Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Yale has a lot to do with elite private schooling and all of it has a ton to do with the luck of birth not merit.
I'm actually curious who you think risked their fortune? Is it anyone in particular or is it just some romanticized idea? Bill Gates came from a privileged background. Jeff Bezos's parents had a quarter million in retirement savings to lend him in the 1990s and he was playing with investor money after that.
Now wealth creation seems to be taking other people's money and buying up industries with inelastic demand to extract wealth from ordinary people. Housing, medical care, vets, utilities, that sort of thing.
And then there's slavery and its aftermath. How much generational wealth was created from slavery? Even a century after Emancipation, we had the government creating wealth for white people with the GI Bill post-WW2. Free college and cheap mortgages. Who was taking a risk there?
You get sufficiently wealthy and you aren't allowed to fail. The government will bail you out.
enoint · · focus · HN ↗
Telemakhos · · focus · HN ↗
That’s the thing about pension schemes like American social security: they were originally set with a retirement age that matched mean mortality, so half of potential recipients would die before drawing on them. In other words, half of workers were not meant to retire, and the half that did would be protected by the contributions of all. Modern medicine completely changed those expectations, keeping the elderly alive twenty years longer and making twenty years of unproductive, publicly funded retirement an expectation and entitlement for everyone. It’s political suicide to discuss whether something should change about that.
sarchertech · · focus · HN ↗
The number of men who make it to 65 after having made it to 21 is about 20% higher than it was in 1940.
And the average remaining lifespan for men reaching 65 is about 3 years higher than in 1940.
These factors certainly change the calculations, but the size of the baby boomers is a much larger factor.
mr_toad · · focus · HN ↗
Anyone who advanced that ‘defense’ has a poor understanding of economics.
Risk is not an essential element of capitalism. Some investments are effectively risk free. ‘Disproportionate’ return seems to be something you’ve just made up. There’s no mention of the proportionality of returns in any economic treatise I’ve ever read.
Lastly, there’s nothing to defend. There’s simply the observation that if there is no return on capital then there’s no reason at all to provide capital. Nobody has ever come up with a working alternative.
TheOtherHobbes · · focus · HN ↗
As for defences - capital is just political power by other means. If the capitalist is wasting money on yachts while workers can't afford food and housing, the return is morally disproportionate, and the usual outcome is socially catastrophic, in various possible ways.
Capitalism reduces every transaction to personal opportunism, with no concept of broader consequences. That's a shockingly stupid way to run anything - as we're all about to find out.
MentalM · · focus · HN ↗
It is people who ALWAYS reduce everything to personal opportunism (no matter capitalism or not). Capitalism is the smartest way to run anything exactly because it is build on concepts of broader consequences of that fact.
PaulDavisThe1st · · focus · HN ↗
Untrue. Capital accumulates. People have desires for their world/society/community beyond their own wealth. They want to see certain things happen, and owning capital puts a person in a position to influence whether it does (or does not).
djaro · · focus · HN ↗
If someone starts running a company at 20 years old and goes bankrupt at 40, they can't simply go back to working a regular job. They don't have a resume, they sacrificed 20 years of career progress. They'll be working at Walmart while their peers who got the same education and have the same intelligence are becoming partners at law firms or investment banks.
PaulDavisThe1st · · focus · HN ↗
Capital has no special position here.
idiotsecant · · focus · HN ↗
The capital class doesn't need you to defend them. You're embarrassing yourself.
tgv · · focus · HN ↗
That's power for ya. It comes with all kinds of perks.
tome · · focus · HN ↗
What's crazy about it? Do you mean it's crazy that people chose to work a dangerous job when a safe job was available for not much less?
sans_souse · · focus · HN ↗
kyleblarson · · focus · HN ↗
hydrogen7800 · · focus · HN ↗
rocqua · · focus · HN ↗
I find this worrying because the entire economy is built on the idea of cheap physical snd cheap unskilled labor. So if we do a good job educating, we’ll need to fill these jobs by paying more rather than preying on the desperate. And I don’t see the current world being willing to pay more.
Intermernet · · focus · HN ↗
sarchertech · · focus · HN ↗
sgerenser · · focus · HN ↗
SoftTalker · · focus · HN ↗
AngryData · · focus · HN ↗
jzemeocala · · focus · HN ↗
During the restaurant years I was also going to college for computer science and ultimately dropped out halfway through to do remote R&D work for a silicon valley gig making a whopping 500 bucks a week (living in FL)...Than covid hit and the boss went back to Korea.
Now I make 12.50 an hour repairing and designing boutique tube amps in KS
mmooss · · focus · HN ↗
DivingForGold · · focus · HN ↗
Luckily, I survived it all without serious injury. What I discovered affected me the most was business OVERHEAD, the cost of doing business. I had 8+ employees in the mail order business plus a lease space, numerous expenses, huge overhead. With the lake pump business I had day labor guy I paid only on days I needed him. I was quite able to be the chief salesman, website creator and manager, head diver, head electrician and plumber, etc. Lowest overhead of anything I ever got involved with, consequently the most successful. Huge savings for retirement, mortgage paid off, no debt, got a Rivian on order. Rec diving in Asia and the Caribbean with my son, kiteboarding in Costa Rica. Blue collar made me successful.
On the other hand, my son is a degreed comp. sci grad who got hired just before machine learning became a thing, his company gave him the title of "senior engineer" recently instead of a raise, in fact, his salary raises have stopped, luckily he still has a job.
sarchertech · · focus · HN ↗
This is a big part of the reason you see so many successful immigrant owned businesses. The owners (and family) work nonstop.
w10-1 · · focus · HN ↗
the high-paying jobs are for reliance under obscurity: part of a very big deal, and if you screw up you ruin everything, and it's hard to know if you screwed up. That's everything from CEO's to investors and researchers, teachers, and yes, some tradesmen.
If you want to reduce wages, increase transparency.
bitwize · · focus · HN ↗
When I lived in Portland there was a bloke in my building who did this—cutting trees over the edges of cliffs to make way for construction of some sort—and got paid a grip for it. Then he'd come back and for two weeks blow his wad on weed, alcohol, and women—only to go out and do it all over again on the next job.