Comment on Scheduling is hard
greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days agoHow much work do we actually need to do to maintain our lifestyle? I’d say a lot less than we’re currently doing. Just think about all the waste that goes into Bitcoin. What about insurance, or any number of jobs. Humans create systems (or that’s what I got out of that episode of connections) but those systems are not necessarily efficient at benefiting equally.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Part of the reason I included the link to Connections was to illustrate just how many people are involved in maintaining our critical infrastructure. But of course the show can only highlight a tiny fraction of them.
You might think “oh, we don’t need insurance companies so we could eliminate all those jobs” but even if we did eliminate the insurance industry we’d have to replace a lot of the work that people at insurance companies do.
Take health insurance for example. You might say “we should get rid of health insurance and give everyone free, public health care!” Well, I live in Canada and we have free public health care. Guess what? We still have a health insurance company: the government. They do all the same jobs: receive and process health care claims, decide which treatments to cover and which to reject, and send payments to health care providers once the treatment is approved and the work has been completed. The only difference is that there’s no profit in the government system. Otherwise they’re still doing the same amount of work, so we still need all those people doing those jobs.
You might go on to say “why don’t we just eliminate the approval process and pay for every single treatment?” but that line of thinking shouldn’t get you very far. We don’t have unlimited doctors or unlimited hospital beds. There will always be far more possible treatments to give people than should be given. In the case of older people with terminal illnesses, you can spend essentially unlimited money on treatments in a desperate attempt to prolong their life… and prolong their suffering in the process.
greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
My disagreement with the show came primary from the premise that we rely more on technology than we do on people(not sure he was trying to make that point but the whole thing about loss of electricity leading to bad anarchy leads me to interpret it that way). However I also believe that with our technology we could be very close to a post scarcity world.
We could feed everyone, house everyone, etc. at our current level of technology. Should we decide we want to increase contentment by giving people more free time we could. It’s because some people value other things that we do it the way we do.
greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
My disagreement with the show came primary from the premise that we rely more on technology than we do on people(not sure he was trying to make that point but the whole thing about loss of electricity leading to bad anarchy leads me to interpret it that way). However I also believe that with our technology we could be very close to a post scarcity world.
We could feed everyone, house everyone, etc. at our current level of technology. Should we decide we want to increase contentment by giving people more free time we could. It’s because some people value other things that we do it the way we do.