The analogy is just that, an analogy. The Airbnb case can be tragic for some cities but for specific reasons that aren't going to affect cafés. I for one haven't seen anyone staying overnight and sleeping in a café.
The project could be catastrophic for cafes for unforeseen reasons, but those are surely not going to be the same as for Airbnb. You'd have to come up with a plausible threat scenario, otherwise your extrapolation of the analogy has no substance.
Great then, if people are unhappy with having great coffee and WiFi for virtually the same price as a cowork, I think they can always default to just going to a coworking space and leave his place empty for an actual paying customer in the café.
In my opinion it's already quite unfriendly to have an unpaying customer wasting limited time in your café.
This solution by itself would function like this, but you are leaving out a crucial point that it also doubles as a hub to advertise your café as a place that will welcome you as long as you pay.
The client can know beforehand which cafés are ok with you using it as a cowork space, and cafés make sure they don't have dead space, which in many parts of the world is very expensive.
Those who disagree with the system can always default to just paying for an actual coworking space.
He has a ton of regulars that hang out there all the time, myself included. I spend a lot there, so do they. Often times they are having their real estate sales meetings there, startup discussions, etc (you know, doing business).
They all, including me, known the owner well, we are friends.
Something like this would completely ruin that dynamic. It would push away the customers like me and the others I described that regularly spend a lot there in favor of getting $5 from the "randos".
I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and competitive, it's just capitalism. If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently. Because what you see in small, specially poor communities is that trust in each other is strong.
You could argue that the church tried it and we had the inquisition, but I think it's different. We have way more benefit of hindsight and the population is way more educated than it was in the middle ages.
Not advocating for a renaissance of the Christian kingdom, but for embedding care and charity as first class moral values in economics.
It's not what I see. I go out and I see people helping each other, people having fun and taking care of the environment, social justice being discussed at the government level. I'm Brazilian though so I might be biased, but I think I prefer to be an idealist than a defeatist.
If the world is like what you say it is, shouldn't you just drop dead? Thinking like this is like committing philosophical suicide anyways, if you can't imagine a better world that's worth fighting for, even if it's just in a thought experiment.
This learned helplessness is by design, not by nature, so you don't question the status quo and keep working to make the elites richer without realising it's killing the world.
I think one of the core failures of our current economic religion is that we can rely solely on anonymous transactions. But many transactions fail when everything is black boxes. We can't easily evaluate (1) if the thing we got is of good quality and (2) there wasn't any harmful side effects.
Transactions need more trivially verifiable metadata. That could solve one of many issues.
> I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and competitive, it's just capitalism
This is why when we look at animals in nature, which don’t have capitalism, they’re all getting along, right? Never competing for anything, fighting each other, or battling for mates?
Being competitive is human nature. People will always compete for things, even if you try to artificially remove or forbid financial incentives. There are always more incentives. There will always be social standing to pursue, a coveted position, or the recognition of having accomplished something.
> If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently.
Alternate economic systems that forbid capitalism rely on heavy government enforcement to prevent people from doing capitalistic things: Running unapproved businesses, being entrepreneurial, selling goods and services at market rate.
This belief that we just need to come up with an alternate economic system that makes everybody stop trying to do trade and then suddenly everyone’s behaviors will change is also a fantasy. Even within a system where everyone is hypothetically taken care of, you would still see competition over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted positions (even if they paid the same).
We should be able to tell which behaviors are not properly included in the concept of "humanity".
And when we find these behaviors within ourselves, recognize those as a vestige of inhuman nature.
We should be constantly striving not to confuse the unsuitable animalistic stuff as "human nature", otherwise that's the lamest excuse of all and has leveraged more stupidity than probably anything else in history.
I'm with you on competitiveness though, to a degree it's all not purely animalistic, especially not financially ;)
OTOH, the cutthroat stuff can be so inhuman there's not any question, or it wouldn't be called that.
animals do frequently get along and cooperate, ironically what youre doing is a reflection of capitalism, youre projecting the current economic system onto the animal planet. Think of that famously wrong study from the 70s about alpha wolves, its been disproven but people still of it as true because it molds to the economic system they understand.
But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live under an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly: will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?
Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses. Market economies, command economies, mercantile economies, and any other economic system must deal with these scarcities somehow. Even in the animal kingdom this must be contended with, albeit at a much lower level of abstraction. We deal with scarcity in a number of different ways, e.g. higher prices, waiting lines, by need, or some other metric or any combination thereof. Animals tend to deal with resource (food) scarcity through violence, abandonment, and a few other processes because not eating means death. That isn't to say cooperation doesn't happen, it absolutely does, but it is still constrained by resource scarcity.
> But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live under an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly
All economic systems are a set of trade-offs and capitalism in general tends to outperform all other economic systems we know of. That isn't to say it's a perfect system, it isn't, but I've noticed people who profess your opinion implicitly assume the alternative is a utopia that which simply does not exist. We may find a better system in the future but it will still be constrained by the law of supply and demand, resource scarcity, and human nature and hence will have trade-offs.
And humans do, too. So what’s your point? I’m drawing parallels between animals and humans and you are too! You seem to be supporting my point, not refuting it.
Humans get along and cooperate at scales far beyond anything the animal kingdom can do. Capitalism has driven the advancements that enable it.
> will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?
The classic vacuous anti-capitalism rhetoric: Capitalism will destroy the world, but unspecified alternative which doesn’t exist and isn’t described is better. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the non-existent superior non-capitalistic that solves everyone is the bad person, right?
> Capitalism will destroy the world, but unspecified alternative which doesn’t exist and isn’t described is better. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the non-existent superior non-capitalistic that solves everyone is the bad person, right?
And this is the classic positivist rethoric that prevents self assertion and self criticism. Every doctrine that can't take criticism and take care of it's flaws while maintaining it's benefits is doomed to fail.
Nobody is saying that you are bad in essence, that is the whole idea. There is no essence. You create the meaning you see in the world.
You've nailed it: this is exactly why Soviet socialism failed in the past, and also paradoxically the reason why neoliberal capitalism is failing today.
Although I am a Marxist, I reject the idea that Communism is going to be the "final" form of human society. We may be able to get there someday, but only constant care and effort towards maintaining the system will be able to sustain it, and there is no "deterministic" answer to what the ultimate form of human society is.
>an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly: will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?
Not my downvote, but . . .
More like so there will be massive corporations to work for instead of the appropriate number of small businesses and farms that could substitute. For instance if things wouldn't have pivoted long ago, including major milestones like the formation of the Federal Reserve system.
Nothing like how it could have been if things would have been allowed to continue as they were progressing, the working citizens would have continued to gain wealth at a faster rate than the government, even more so than many established Wall Street capitalists. Especially the ones who have no talent for creating wealth and instead resort to just moving money around, and they were as powerful as any.
All pressure has been put on to reverse independent prosperity, whatever it takes, whenever the threat to centralized control appears on the horizon.
Those who prefer to centralize their power over you are not the ones wanting you to have an opportunity to start a small business someday. They just haven't completely eliminated that possibility. Yet.
> This is why when we look at animals in nature, which don’t have capitalism, they’re all getting along, right? Never competing for anything, fighting each other, or battling for mates?
Even if this was true, humans aren't subjective to their base instincts and can adapt and reinvent themselves.
> Being competitive is human nature.
I'm not and I'm human.
> People will always compete for things
Sometimes you want something, but you let others have it when they need it more than you. Otherwise if you always compete for things you are just a little kid.
> This belief that we just need to come up with an alternate economic system that makes everybody stop trying to do trade and then suddenly everyone’s behaviors will change is also a fantasy. Even within a system where everyone is hypothetically taken care of, you would still see competition over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted positions (even if they paid the same).
This is a misunderstanding of what I said. If you read back I never said competition should be tossed out of the window, it's just that caring for the other as it is right now it's not a core value of the economic system. It's just best effort, if we can say that to the eventually charitable billionaire.
This is a weird quirk of history. I feel like open source, and especially free software, was at least left-adjacent when I was coming up in the 90s. The bad guys were the megacorps. Open source was the counter-culture. I guess it changed around the dotcom boom.
Netscape feels like a big part of the story - a company staffed with hackers coming out of a public-funded research institute who rewrote a closed-source version of their browser that quickly killed off the predecessor and helped the company to a massive IPO. Then, only when threatened by a more established player, they finally open-sourced it. From the outside that came across more as a Hail Mary than an authentic expression of principles. Around then we also had the Red Hat IPO, the Slashdot/Andover/VA Linux thing etc. It was clear by then that open source had become another gimmick that capitalists could leverage to compound their wealth, rather than a fundamental belief that users of a piece of software should have the right to modify and reconstruct it as they see fit.
Nowadays capitalists love open source because their startups and big tech investments are the users - open source provides free labor whose products these companies can repackage and sell as a platform. Meanwhile a lot of that "free" labor is no longer done by hobbyists or researchers, but by workers at other for-profit companies looking to boost their personal brand or the company's profile, so the whole motivation to contribute has changed too.
In a free market system people can transact as they wish, including giving away something for free if they want.
There is nothing at odds at all. If you don’t see it, you might have a rather cartoonish, villainy view of a capitalism that gets promulgated by people who refuse to allow anything good or nice to be ascribed to capitalism.
If you can’t understand why capitalists can also like open source, have you considered that maybe it’s your understanding of the system that is flawed, not theirs?
I understand that capitalism is the doctrine that is based on economic growth and profit. This is invariably going to be at odds with the core tenets of open source, because given enough time ownership will have to give way to profit, hence the embrace, extend, extinguish and the various changes in licensing in major opensource projects.
However that's not even the case because op wasn't criticizing capitalism as whole, just how absurd the ethos in HN is where we seem to defend contradictory values.
one of the core tenets of capitalism is the profit motive, its a central piece of it: the idea that people innovate and create and labor for the expected reward of a pile of money, but so much of tech actually bucks this idea between open source projects and public funded initiatives (maybe not as relevant for app based coding, but the space race was pretty important for technology overall.)
>capitalism is the doctrine that is based on economic growth and profit.
These are not actually essential.
I'm not going to put down a better definition of capitalism, but if you're not handling Other Peoples' Money, and they're not handling yours, you are definitely not a capitalist.
No matter how financially successful you are as an entrepreneur with your own money, even when you out-compete capitalists in a pro-capitalist market.
Sure if AI could make small communities autonomous and provide everyone with everything they would ever need, there would be no need for money.
But we are far away from this utopia, this utopia will require a ton of energy to be produced just to run the AI supervision layer, so hopefully by then we'd have fusion energy or something else figures out, and to achieve this utopia there will be a transition period.
I am actually worried about the transition period in your fictional world. Some people will be replaced long before the deprecation of money. It's a lot of people that is going to suffer from extreme poverty if we don't think this right, which I believe is what the OP comment was about.
> and provide everyone with everything they would ever need
It doesn't need to provide for everyone. Imagine a single Jeff Bezos type who conquers the world with the magical AI with no need for anyone else to do anything for him. With no need for someone else to do something for him, there is no need for him to sell to anyone else. This is where the "they forget people also need money to buy their goods" falls apart. There is no such need.
You just forget that the transaction part of consuming is just a portion of it. AI could provide bezos with everything material he'd need, just not the power and status. That's where your argument falls apart. We are social beings, and for those in power they won't be satisfied with the illusion of power. Consumption is the driving force that maintains power in capitalism. You could replace the system, but never the need for power humans have.
Because "But if I don't need anything from you — because, say, magical AIs are already giving me everything I could ever hope and dream of — I have no reason to become indebted to you" and "With no need for someone else to do something for him, there is no need for him to sell to anyone else" implies that consumption is purely transactional which I argued against.
In other words, AI can't ever give you everything you need and hope for.
Seriously though, I don't know what you are thinking when you say "Are you aimlessly reading comments in strict isolation?". I don't know what's unclear and what I should expand. If you treat everyone this way there is no way people will talk to you or take you seriously.
It, like every other followup response I have written, was a question. Do you mean that you would ask the same thing?
> If you treat everyone this way there is no way people will talk to you or take you seriously.
If asking questions means people will not talk to me or take me seriously, that's fine. What purpose would continually asserting random statements serve?
Not all questions are born the same. All questions you posed so far had this arrogant air to them like I'm missing something so obvious it doesn't have to be stated. If you can't bother to express yourself better why should I make this effort of guessing what you mean? You'd be surprised how far a bit of benefit of the doubt can take you.
> All questions you posed so far had this arrogant air to them
Arrogance has nothing to do with anything, so this seems logically flawed, no? However, in the interest of trying to better understand your take, how would you have alternatively phrased them to not have that "air to them"?
> If you can't bother to express yourself better why should I make this effort of guessing what you mean?
Why make a foolish guess when you can simply ask more about what was intended to be meant? Now that I have introduced you to the concept of asking a question, you've sensibly started doing exactly that, but if we look back at earlier comments...
I'm sorry. I lack the patience and the interest in continuing this conversation, but I deemed impolite to just ghost you. I won't be responding anymore.
Then I have to wholeheartedly disagree, because that's elitist. The 10% of the population will never have problems with information access. Only the poor is affected if you go after information access.
O.k., misled information access...now let me do this for you...
My kinese television-set says: "People are digitally often misled by disinformation."
Have you ever "searchengined" a look for a "lesbian sunset"? The search-engine i used had more than 29,000 search-hits for "lesbian sunset", and i clicked on nearly all of them...but there was none "lesbian sunset" no one, no a single one, none. It showed (for example)...
Lesbian Sunset - Check out our selection of lesbian sunsets to find the most amazing unique or custom-made handmade lesbian sunsets from our stores.
Lesbian sunset: what's going on?
Classic lesbian sunset... Regular special offers and discounts up to 70%
Lesbians on the Beach: Stock video
...and they dance! Sunset as a stage of belonging.
High-quality lesbian sunset-themed items from all over the world. Get out the cylinder and monocle, now it's time
Sunset for Sale
Reel with a feminist touch and sunset golf course.
Lesbian sunset for adults Colorful ...
Lively, inspired by the sunset, expressing identity in style.
Manifesto of the „Lesbian Sunset“
Sunset in red and purple - not just beautiful.
Lesbian sunset in Munich and after-party
A different scene...
I mean, that's a myth.
There is no lesbian sunset for me!
But typed in a search line... over 29,000 hits for "lesbian sunset" (counts)
They don't exist!
You don't even remotely know, even one
not even a single lesbian sunset...
At this point you may ask: "What he/she/it/div was thinking about?" (using an 'AI' to translate and for some 'chars' i forgot the asci-code for - too often...)
A battle-painting is probably the most accurate, i was thinking about 12 x 4 meters, where you've been able to zoom in, if you are at a computerscreen...
I even looked for fresco painters, nothing...!
Not a single lesbian sunset... not one...
(feeling rude about...)
That is what i call a Myth...
...talked too dumb, free!
(explanation: How to set a one topic record for been too relevant OT but still related hahaha?)^^
Everybody is quick to jump the gun and blame the victim, while all this can be easily explained by the insane lifestyle we are forced to subscribe in order to survive in this crazy cut-throat productivist job market.
I wouldn't be so quick to divide the world so neatly into victims and perpetrators. Every FAANG engineer I know, for example, could easily retire by mid-40s by keeping consumption in check. Instead, nearly every single one chose instead to "improve their lifestyles." Not blaming them, either, because it's cultural programming -- but until we all learn to slow down a bit and reflect, the madness isn't going to stop.
Even if you knew every FAANG in existence that would account for a very small fraction of the population. It might be true for this class, but you can't expect everyone to be a able to retire by 40.
Even if everybody could, they wouldn't because they are immersed in a culture that celebrated consumerism at every instance. You can't just turn a switch and now you live self-sustainably.
My assumption here is that FAANG employees are not fundamentally different from the rest of the populace along that particular dimension (desire to inflate lifestyle). I chose them in particular to demonstrate that even when we have the choice, we can easily opt not to take it. Of course many do not have that choice.
And yes, I agree with your second paragraph. "The culture" celebrates it — but that culture is not violently enforced top-down by a handful of people twirling mustaches. We all participate in our own little ways — and the more of us that step off the treadmill, the less those messages find footing, in a virtuous cycle. Again, it's not about blame. But for those of us who have the capacity and desire to decondition ourselves, it's very much worth doing. It can affect the feedback loop more powerfully than we think.
> I chose them in particular to demonstrate that even when we have the choice, we can easily opt not to take it.
I see now. But I still think it's a side effect of what society currently celebrates which is consumerism.
> but that culture is not violently enforced top-down by a handful of people twirling mustaches
That's assuming it's the only way to force a population into a specific behaviour, by force. It's actually the least effective method in my opinion. There is also the digital panopticon.
Blame and victim is just a way to give structure to the world. It's not essential. Not even in violence, in the Roman republic it was very well accepted to put women and children to the sword when pillaging a city.
And sure, all changes start in the private sphere, even if it's a more general movement in society. If people stop buying stuff, there is someone consciously or not choosing not to buy that specific thing.
I just think that it's the same with clothing. If you leave for the people to choose not to buy clothing made by slaving children that's just not going to happen if they cost a fraction of clothing made otherwise. It's also not a matter of prohibition because that goes against people's individual freedom to choose. You just have to give society enough time so that it gravitates towards willing to choose differently, meanwhile advocating for the change you want to see in your immediate community.
Perhaps "retire" is the wrong word. One can still work (whether for pay or not) and improve the lives of the people around them without staying on the consumption treadmill. Very few actually do. Again, this isn't meant as a judgement — it's just highlighting that we each have a role to play in slowing down this insane freight train.
This is completely the wrong approach. You can't dedicate your entire life to one specific task and expect when you retire to suddenly be able to "improve the lives of the people around (you) without staying in the consumption treadmill" because all you know is the consumption treadmill. Thinking otherwise is just wishful thinking.
If you see yourself improving the lives of people around you later in life, which is commendable and the right thing to do, you have to start now, while you are still in your prime years. If you leave it when you are older chances are you'll be just another John waiting in line for the next Black Friday.
Have you tried doing anything other than work that isn't consuming something?
I have, from drawing to music, from writing novels to doing programming projects on my free time.
It's not very fun, you aren't good at most of it and it's very frustrating. It's also very rewarding being able to overcome limitations and building up skills. But it's first and foremost very demanding. You can't expect someone that just got retired to suddenly spark in creative energy, even if they intimately wanted to do everything.
Watching Netflix I suppose. Sleeping (although I'm sure some get paid for that in the right circumstance) ... Even watching Netflix could be a slog if you're doing it for some purpose (e.g. to clue up on cultural references) and it's an exertion of effort.
Don't you agree that this limits a lot the perspective of what you do when you retire, if retiring means not working anymore?
Maybe we agree that it's all work, but there are types of work that even though they're frustrating, they are also rewarding in specific ways that is interesting for those that retire.
Retiring is just retiring from employment. I suppose I'm drawing a distinction between formal employment and all forms of work. Yardwork is a nice example enjoyed by retirees.
Personally if I do anything for 8+ hours a day 5 days a week it starts to feel like a job around 2 or 3 months in no matter how much I love it, and if I do much less than that I start to feel lacking in structure and progress.
I’ve gone through extended periods of unemployment (by choice, not in a stressful way) before, and it’s wonderful but by month 3 I’m always kinda over it.
Retirement for me will probably look pretty much the same as working except I won’t necessarily pick a job that pays well.
I pretty much optimize for PTO when choosing jobs, so I really never have this dilemma. My current job offers 8 weeks PTO (but I make much less than I would at a FAANG). To me, that’s better than retirement.
That explanation makes no sense, obviously. Human beings have been human beings long before things even cost money and will exist long after money is gone.
I'm happy to accept the idea that people are simply brainwashed into thinking they need money and that is the root of their problems, but needing money is not a problem for a human being in and of itself.
Edit: but I think you said it yourself, you seem to think that you're forced to live a certain lifestyle, that's not true. You want to live a certain lifestyle and that lifestyle takes a lot of money.
> Human beings have been human beings long before things even cost money and will exist long after money is gone.
That thinking assumes that money and human behaviour is in a one direction. You first have human behaviour and then you have money, so it would stand to reason that one is subject to the other. However, in reality the relationship is of co-dependency. Human behaviour adapts to the availability of money and what it buys. Have you ever seen trying to reintroduce a wild animal after it's being treated for a long time? You can't just throw it in the jungle and expect them to survive.
> needing money is not a problem for a human being in and of itself.
Which I'm reading that is not essential, following the previous paragraph, which I disagree. Take electricity out, most people wouldn't be able to survive too long. We weren't dependent but we've built lifesyles that are and we are trapped in it. Which doesn't mean we need to return to jungle, it's just that we need to treat the relationship between humans and the economy with much more respect than that.
> you seem to think that you're forced to live a certain lifestyle, that's not true.
I believe you are thinking about a ostentatious lifestyle. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about lifestyle where we are used to electricity and supermarkets. Where everything is taken care of so that we hyperspecialize our skill sets.
My last layoff was a lot more impersonal and they still called me.
I had expressed a couple of months before my desire to leave. They then called me to say it was "a hard decision but it was best for the company to let me go".
I almost laughed. How hard is it really to let someone go that wants to go?
Worse than using a pre-recorded video is doing a live meeting with a default script. These corpocrats are like robots.
I'm from the US, so employment here is at will. There were layoffs at every company that I worked for, and are entirely expect by anyone what has worked a while, when the economy turns down a bit.
Out of them all, the "red envelope on your desk" was the best approach, in my opinion. It let people have a moment to themselves to react to and accept something that they were, at that point, unable to change. Then, the manager would have one-on-one with everyone, to explain the packages. In my opinion, I wouldn't want a manager to tell me. It would be awkward and unnecessary, since it's usually entirely out of their control.
It has to be really clear what's the purpose of the interview. You want to measure how technically competent someone is, but in practice how competent someone is in any organisation has more to do with internal communication and institutional knowledge than technical skills. That means without technical skills it's certainly impossible to be productive, but technical skills by themselves don't mean guaranteed success, not even to lower the uncertainty of failure.
Which is funnily something opensource doesn't suffer from. You just have to prove identity to the commits you signed in previous contributions, so the problem of proving technical skills in the opensource community is replaced by the effort of building trust.
The answer therefore could be to replace technical interviews by sending out assignments to candidates to have them contribute to opensource and come back with results. This has the upside for candidates that if multiple companies do such assignments they only have to contribute once to be eligible for multiple hiring processes.
The project could be catastrophic for cafes for unforeseen reasons, but those are surely not going to be the same as for Airbnb. You'd have to come up with a plausible threat scenario, otherwise your extrapolation of the analogy has no substance.