> This is typical libertarian claptrap, from the Skilled White Male litany.
Perhaps I was understanding or explaining it poorly, but my understanding is that it's close to the opposite of the "typical libertarian claptrap", which I take to mean something close to "we need the concept of money (and a free market) to get people to work" (and consequently, if you don't work, you get no money, and therefore none of the stuff you need). The position I was talking about is very explicitly that, whether or not you work at all, you deserve food/shelter/healthcare/education/etc.
The point was not whether you can change the world with your work (I think that'd more accurately be the "G. H. Hardy claptrap"!), but why you do what you do, or not, e.g., I know someone who works in a bookstore who would be there even if salaries did not exist.
> shitty jobs need to be done
This statement has been the case for all of human history, and yet the mechanism by which these jobs manage to get done has changed rather drastically many times. Even assuming the current set of "shitty jobs" isn't changing, I see no reason the mechanism couldn't change again.
> In terms of your hand-wringing about full-time programming work, there are all sorts of ways you can work part-time in programming and part-time in something else. That you can't see this shows you haven't really thought about the problem seriously.
You are welcome to accuse me of being stupid, or to point out that these opportunities are incompatible with my other (unstated) requirements, but it's not fair to claim that I've not thought about the problem seriously.
Perhaps I was understanding or explaining it poorly, but my understanding is that it's close to the opposite of the "typical libertarian claptrap", which I take to mean something close to "we need the concept of money (and a free market) to get people to work" (and consequently, if you don't work, you get no money, and therefore none of the stuff you need). The position I was talking about is very explicitly that, whether or not you work at all, you deserve food/shelter/healthcare/education/etc.
The point was not whether you can change the world with your work (I think that'd more accurately be the "G. H. Hardy claptrap"!), but why you do what you do, or not, e.g., I know someone who works in a bookstore who would be there even if salaries did not exist.
> shitty jobs need to be done
This statement has been the case for all of human history, and yet the mechanism by which these jobs manage to get done has changed rather drastically many times. Even assuming the current set of "shitty jobs" isn't changing, I see no reason the mechanism couldn't change again.
> In terms of your hand-wringing about full-time programming work, there are all sorts of ways you can work part-time in programming and part-time in something else. That you can't see this shows you haven't really thought about the problem seriously.
You are welcome to accuse me of being stupid, or to point out that these opportunities are incompatible with my other (unstated) requirements, but it's not fair to claim that I've not thought about the problem seriously.