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I don't want to be mean about it but blows my mind that some progressives are so single-minded about protecting menial dead end jobs from automation. this is literally equivalent to the "if you get rid of slavery how are slaves going to eat and take care of themselves" argument from the 1800s.

@sun I'm not in progressive circles but i haven't seen them fighting for menial jobs at all but advocating for effective safety nets and cracking down on the overt corruption. Ironically it seems that UBI is the likely compromise between Progressives and power.
An exception would probably be customer service because people would much rather talk to an underpaid offshore human than an opaque and obtuse chatbot.
The Pope's encyclical talked about this, arguing that unions aren't enough to safeguard people in current times.

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@gabriel I tried to qualify with "some" because yeah there are definitely people that do talk about this and never stopped talking about it. I brought it up because I keep running into it on Other Decentralized Social Network.

I feel the same way about UBI, it seems possibly economically haunted though, but something has to be done in the near term.

@sun the weird thing is that I do see the right doing the same dance you describe, just from a different angle.
They don't understand how inflation and the cost of living rising has effectively priced people out of human labor outside of highly profitable (and often anti-social) rackets.

This segment of the right wants the young and the non-rich to effectively eat the (financial and social) costs associated with all of the above and thank them for the opportunity to build character.

I've been thinking for a while that the next big "culture war flashpoint" is going to be old vs young.

@gabriel @sun its a lot of misguided internalization of capitalism :cat_sad:

they still believe human value is "does labor for a billionaire" so preserving the human suffering to make lines go up is preserving virtue. if you don't believe that dancing for the rich is virtuous the argument doesn't follow at all. social credit (now "UBI") was C H Douglas having a crack at economics and realizing that economics is actually deeply retarded at the conceptual level and tried to engineer one instead. we now do it but its called the "federal reserve" and the inflation is given to banks (who are so good at efficientlly allocating capital they efficiently allocate all of it away and need bailouts about once a decade.)