An open-ended community for asking and answering various questions! Permissive of asks, AMAs, and OOTLs (out-of-the-loop) alike.
In the absence of flairs, questions requesting more thought-out answers can be marked by putting [SERIOUS] in the title.
Subcommunity of Chat
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Work isn't the only value to society - they can be a part of their community, do art, or anything else. Everyone wants to engage with the world to some extent, and thay is the value they add.
The question in my mind is how long can a universal income be put off as more gets automated? How many will fall through the cracks before something is done?
Unemployed are not a negative on society. They hold no money out of rotation, and the only resources they ask of us are the minimum necessary.
The negative drains on society are those who demand more than their share of resources, wealth that sits in coffers, held out of rotation, denying us their share of the tax pool, constantly begging for more and more, only to use it to squeeze more out of society.
Fool
Considering we have thousands of people who don't work at all, live off letting financiers manipulate their ancestors' assets, and go on Fox News to tell everyone that commoners' value is related to making their assets more valuable, I don't think that the work that most English speakers do helps anyone but the plutocrats or actually matters at all. No one is asking if they provide any value to society because our society is based on the propaganda they commissioned for their own profit. Your worth isn't in serving these actual parasites and neither is anyone else's. They're the only people we need to be talking about doing something with because they are the cause of all your problems, not disabled people whose circumstances aren't affecting you at all.
Why do you only use "him" to describe workers? Also, people are not just valuable for their labor. That is some corpo nonsense.
Based on that plus the various other mistakes, my guess is that OP's native language isn't English, but probably one of the many languages which uses masculine pronouns as gender-neutral, and they're just doing a literal translation from their native language.
That was my initial assumption as well, but I have also seen other posts from them that had fewer mistakes. I figured I just ask instead of assume malice
Dragging Hanlon into this?
lol, kinda, except ESL isn't really incompetence.
I tip my hat to you for compressing so much bigotry into such a small space.
This said, stop beeing an asshole on here. If you want to espouse othering ideals, this is not the space in which to do it.
Your level of ignorance of modern economic factors should win some sort of prize. I'm sure your response, as always, will be projection, but I feel your consistent efforts to espouse gestures broadly something is in bad faith. If you had a thesis for anything you've posted on this instance, we could engage in conversation.
But you don't.
This is a cavalcade of nonsense you get defensive about. Oh, you just learned about AI and are unaware that hundreds of billions have been thrown at it? Then shut the fuck up until you grasp the topic so you can craft a sensible question.
It's pathetically hilarious to me that you then -- on Beehaw -- opt for sexist language only to trump it with "you only count if you serve capital" bullshit, which is such a significant failure to read the room that I'll say nothing. This isn't your home instance, and I'm not aware of anyone who's enjoying your participation here, so take your ball and go home.
useful or at least neutral rather than being a negative on the society?
I would recommend reading about the Protestant work ethic
there is an assumption that is deeply embedded in our society, including in your question, that someone's worth as a human is linked to the job they perform, how much money they make at that job, etc.
it is so deeply ingrained that it's one of those "fish don't realize they're wet" things - you probably never had a class in school where the teacher explicitly said "today we're going to learn about why rich people are better than poor people, and employed people are better than unemployed people".
if you're looking for a concrete idea for what can be done, read about universal basic income.
but breaking out of that "not having a job means you're a drain on society" mindset needs to come first. if you skip that step, UBI will seem to you like a "handout" given to people who don't "deserve" it (I would also recommend reading about the concept of "deserving poor" vs "undeserving poor")
I reject your premise that "a job" is somehow a contribution to society, or that someone without one is a "negative".
If you're stuck with a capitalist mindset, go ahead and think of government as a corporation. The business model of USA, Inc (for example) is providing the infrastructure needs of businesses and consumers of the United States. Its various business units provide infrastructure essential to roads, rail, air, and sea transport. It provides last-resort arbitration in our courts; general security, both domestically and abroad; financial security to our banking and trading systems; and a whole host of services essential for business.
But here is the important part: We are shareholders of that corporation. The authority they have to provide those services is derived from our individual political power. Our governments are wielding the political power we invested in them to charge taxpayers for services rendered. Our governments owe each of us a return on that investment.
The unemployable person you are describing is a shareholder of their government, and is similarly owed a return. If he chooses to live off that return alone, that is his prerogative. But make no mistake: He is not "being a negative on society". He is owed his share of his government's "profits", just as you are.
Ideally or practically? Those are very different conversations.
Practically, there's not a lot that can be done. In the US, there's not a good way for someone like that to continue living.
I also will note that the phrasing of your last two sentences is kind of unpleasant. I'm not sure if that's your intent, but it creates this implication that your value as a worker is the major contributed to your value to society. I don't think that's the case- I think it's possible for someone to not work and contribute a lot to the happiness and well-being of a local community. Also, part of the thing that makes humans special is that even if someone doesn't contribute to the overall needs of society, we will still take care of them out of love. That we love other people is a sufficient foundation for their existence.
The goal of every society should be to free us from wage-labor to pursue other values beyond the bottom of Maslow's pyramid and generating even more wealth into pockets of 0.1%:ers. AI and automation should (in theory) free us to pursue research, art, improving life of others and other things that are actually valuable for the society and humankind.
Universal income is one of the solutions floated around this and it's been tested in some countries, but we're not quite there yet and in any case, most societies need to go through a transition periods where they switch from current free market capitalism to a system where only a minority has to do wage-labor.
In the meanwhile, most wealthy, civilized places have social security safetynets in place even today. These provide minimum income for those who can't participate in wage-labor for some reason (unemployment, disability etc). Minimum income through unemployment/social security benefits combined with free healthcare and education are essential building blocks, even in a society where majority or workforce is still trapped in menial wage-labor systems and this is really nothing new.
Of course the United States is one notable exception to all of this.