Could you elaborate?
I think back in the 90s when I was a teenager I thought it to be a good thing that there is a rise in status for a class of people characterized by clear thinking.
Could you elaborate?
I think back in the 90s when I was a teenager I thought it to be a good thing that there is a rise in status for a class of people characterized by clear thinking.
The older I get, the more I realize how many problems in society is because there are different "classes" of people. The more we can eschew that, the better it becomes for most people. While yes, I also see myself as having "clearer thinking" than many people , maybe because of the thousands of hours building and maintaining software, I'm not of the impression that my life deserves a higher status than others merely because of this. It's not "they think right and they think wrong", it's just "everyone thinks differently, but it's all valid thinking".
We all should be in the same 'class', but some people will be paid more for a job that takes intelligence or years of study.
The older I get, I realize some people never change, will always have the same backwards or harmful thinking, and I avoid them instead of just accepting it.
> some people will be paid more for a job that takes intelligence or years of study.
Sadly, it seems so, even if the effects of the jobs on daily life differ a great deal sometimes. The world would succumb faster if we had no garbage collectors, yet they get less pay than a programmer who the world could easily survive without? Makes no sense to me.
We would all die in a week if we went without water, yet water is cheaper per gallon than gasoline or printer ink or perfume. It’s a question of scarcity and supply curves. Water, even clean water, is not particularly scarce if you leverage industrial systems to purify it. Other products require much more complicated supply chains and are produced at a much smaller scale than water, which makes them more rarer and more expensive.
The skills necessary to develop efficient and effective software are much more scarce than those needed to remove trash, or pick crops, or provide elder care. That’s why the former is paid so much more.
You're explaining how things are but the parent is indicating that's not how things should be.
He's not describing how but why. And at a fundamental level it's something that can't be overcome. If you can only have 10 of one thing, yet can have 5000 of another, and both have even remotely comparable levels of demand/necessity/etc, then the 10 is always going to end up much more valued.
Even take some sort of idealized anarcho-communal society. Imagine two people have a dispute and threaten to leave over it. One's a highly skilled doctor, and the other's a garbage collector. Our equal society's going to suddenly become just as unequal as any other simply because the doctor leaving would have a much greater negative effect than the garbage collector. And that reality would permeate in the day-to-day happenings, creating classes even in an idealized classless society.
A society with no garbage collected will fall apart much more quickly than one without healthcare.
I'd agree, but any other person can pick up the slack of being a garbage collector. Hence the notion of one having thousands of potential garbage collectors, while far fewer doctors.
The basic services that keep us alive (e.g. farmers producing our food) tend to also be "easy" (it is physically demanding, but doesn't require years of study to start and you quickly learn by doing). This also means that the vast majority of people would be able to do this kind of jobs. Our economy pays more for scarcity, i.e. jobs that are in demand and at the same time require more qualification, so that the number of people needed in that position tends to be less than the current amount. Both views have sense, they just start from two different points.
"The basic services that keep us alive (e.g. farmers producing our food) tend to also be "easy""
The reason you think that is that you know nothing about agriculture. But it isn't true. Right now, farmers in the US grow about 5x as much food per acre as farmers in other countries. If you were in charge of farming in the US, that surplus would likely disappear in a single season. You would also likely damage the soil which would make cleaning up after you take 4-6 years.
Everyone thinks things they know nothing about are easy. But they rarely are.
PS This is why I never tell people I'm a programmer. I don't want to be associated with people who think like you.
From having worked with farmers, the actual logistics of running a farm are very complex. Farming's no longer an easy job because the demand for productivity means you have to harness a whole stable of technologies and understand to some degree advanced finances, floral biology, geotechnics, and meteorology. And yet farmers still get paid little relative to the breadth of knowledge and skills required for running a farm. It's just that farming is still considered a blue-collar job because it was the domain of the poorest for millenia, where as software engineering in any form is relatively new and thus specialized and so considered white-collar.
You're right, running now a farm that is profitable and can stay on the market is very different from doing so 200 years ago. But knowledge is just one aspect. The other aspect I mentioned is having less people in the field than what the market asks for. In the specific case of farmers, I think that modern farms are so much more efficient that we need way less than before, even if the world's population grew. So, while there's a gap between the knowledge required and the earnings, I think this can be explained by farms having a much greater output now, and so the market doesn't ask for more farms than what we have. This could be false at a global scale, but I think it is true at a country-level scale in most of the developed countries. Hence why farmers aren't paid much in those countries.
Farmers aren't really paid, they sell goods at market prices. Modern farms are more similar to operating a manufacturing business than they are to a salaried position or profession. They don't earn high incomes compared to white collar professions but they do have high revenues and they pay themselves a reasonable middle class income on average with some added benefits from owning large assets and land. The important part about comparing farmers to programmers is that they are both now operating in highly competitive markets with high automation where a single individual can leverage their knowledge and ability using that automation to produce many times more what a person could using only their own labor.
> Farmers aren't really paid, they sell goods at market prices.
"Programmers aren't really paid, they sell services at market prices." — I guess nobody gets paid?
As a farmer myself, when I give someone something I produced and they give me back something in return, I consider myself to be paid. If I did not receive much value in return for what I gave, I'd reasonably consider myself to have not been paid well. I have never met a farmer that would consider that usage unusual. Payment refers to a transaction within the realm of a human activity. The good or service that is being traded between humans is immaterial. While you are free to define words as you see fit, your assertion doesn't really reflect how this is actually used in practice, generally. The rest of the earlier comment makes it clear that the commenter understands how a farm business works.
Did someone seriously just down-mod a farmer in a sub-discussion about running a farm?
PS To the "clear-thinking" guy at the top of this thread...this is why...you only think your thinking is clear. If its a topic you know nothing about, devs (not necessarily you) tend to assume there isn't anything to know and that's almost never true.
No, nobody would seriously press a button that does nothing but increment/decrement an integer. Imagine the thought process that would have to go into thinking that was something worthy of one's time and attention. Not even those who struggle with clear thinking would be able to come up with a story so outlandish and contrived as to start seeing it as an activity to want to get involved in.
It is easy to accidentally press the button and not notice, though.
Did you seriously just appeal to authority yourself?
I'm not the farmer who posted...so no.
What he means to say is that because you are a farmer you are a member of the capital holding classes rather than the lumpen proletariat.
</sarcasm>
Most programmers are of the capital holding class too. At very least they will own a computer, which is all the capital you need for 99% of what programmers do. There are exceptions, but there are also exceptions in farming.
The capital holding class isn't anyone who holds capital. It's anyone whose main function in society is based on holding capital. Think of a landlord.
Land isn't traditionally considered capital. The buckets are normally land, labor, and capital. The closest thing we broadly see to someone whose function is holding capital is someone who owns stock in the stock market. It is likely that most programmers own stock. If I were a betting man, I expect that programmers have more impact on capital than farmers do. But we still have to split hairs over what "main" means.
One interpretation, which is what I suspect most would go to, is where one's income is primarily derived from owning stock. So, in other words, old, retired people. But I don't think anyone here was thinking about the retired. The discussion was about people actively producing food and software.
Another possible interpretation is about impact. If those stocks didn't exist, a lot of the capital wouldn't have been able to be created, and thus there wouldn't have been jobs to go with it; meaning that owning the capital makes it one's main function as without it one wouldn't have a job to go to. But I can already hear you furiously typing how that isn't a satisfactory take. I'd agree.
Maybe it's about attention? Someone who actively watches over to their capital would be seen as it being their main function, while someone who leaves their capital ownership up to a financial advisor so they don't have to think about it wouldn't. But then we're back to the computer. Most programmers watch over that capital, if nothing else. That doesn't really work either.
The only remaining interpretation I can come up, given the connotations often associated with landlord, is a group of people not like by another group of people. But that doesn't have anything to do with capital at all, so... Consider me stumped on what this has to do with the discussion (if we are to ignore the explicit sarcasm involved).
Maybe no garbage collection is the back pressure missing from the voracious consumption machine.
> "everyone thinks differently, but it's all valid thinking"
I don't agree that all thoughts are created equal.
I thought it more in the sense of: if a clearer-thinking group has higher status, then clear thinking would be encouraged among the population.
(This did not happen that much, ofc.)
I would not characterize software people as particularly "clear-thinking".. there's a huge buzzing cloud of unexamined cognitive biases and thoughtless herd behavior that swirls around every software organization I've worked for.
I'd even go as far as to say that software people, as a group, are particularly bad at clear thinking. What software people tend to be great at is thinking within a space where the inputs are already clear. But where the inputs start messy, they typically struggle to find clarity more than most others.
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