this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
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This makes the fundamental assumption that the job has to be done by a human.
In this day and age, a whole lot of "poor people jobs" can be automated (at least to some degree). That happens whenever the supply of people available to do the job cheaper than the capital cost of the machine dries up.
Everybody raising their qualifications to work "better jobs" is one way to do that.
This would be a better argument if eliminating jobs didn't mean the people who used to work that job die in poverty if they can't adapt to a new job.
It isn't an argument at all, merely fact. The dynamic applies regardless of whether we like it or not. Jobs will be eliminated, some humans will be made redundant and be unable to adapt into higher-value labour.
At that point, the only real choice in the matter is whether society pays these people to sit around and do nothing (welfare), requires them to work a meaningless job or lets them die of poverty.
Unfortunately, too many people (and almost all US politicians) consider "let them die of poverty" to be the correct and moral choice.
Yeah that's fucked up.
When there is less work to do, god forbid we get creative. Like having all the people doing less work overall. No, let's gamble on the lives of some people. These people!
Especially americans could do with some more vacation days. Between fewer work days and fewer hours per work day I'd probably choose the former.
Where I live we have 5 weeks of paid leave every year, ends up being a pretty nice balance.
Your name checks out.
Bootlicker.
Or we could have free higher education to help people learn those skills rather than say fuck em if they dont have the money to pay for it
Even with free higher education, there are people who either don't want to or can't participate. Here in Sweden for instance we've had huge troubles integrating the MENA migrant wave of the 2010s into the job market, despite education being not just free but compensated by the gov:t.
A decade after the fact and this group is still hugely overrepresented in unemployment unfortunately (>5x). Many fuckups in that puzzle, but availability of education isn't one of them.
Some jobs absolutely should be done by humans. I don't want kids being taught by machines. They need human interaction to do many things, from learning how to appropriately take turns with others, to having someone guide how they hold a pencil.
It's unfortunate that so many of us who dedicate ourselves to educating the next generation still can't afford a living.
100%
Sad part is that teachers being treated badly seems to be pretty common in the western world, even in welfare states (albeit not as bad as the US).
My grandfather was a teacher and given how much I enjoy teaching and giving others that joy of understanding I absolutely would've been a teacher in a different world.
It's by design. A society with the capacity for critical thinking wouldn't put up with the 1%'s bullshit.
When I was in the US the last time (must be around 20 years ago) there was a man in booth in a parking garage. It was something I had naver really seen in germany before. All our garages were already automated back then.
Later I thought about that and got to the conclusion that this person's work must be cheaper than just putting up an automated system.
The US seems to have a few other jobs that I had never seen in germany. Greeter, bagger, sign spinner.
I don't know what it looks like today but for me that looks like jobs just to make people work.
I'm in the US and I park in a large hospital's parking garage a few times a year because one of my doctors has their office there.
They have automated systems AND a human in a booth. I think the human is mostly there to fix problems because the automated system uses paper tickets to track your time in the garage.
Many times in the past there has been a human standing at the ticket dispensing machine who would push the button as you roll up and hand you your parking slip.
Americuuuuh!
Anecdotal but around where I live in the US all the garages/lots have gone automated. You use an app or take a ticket to scan when you're leaving. I'm all for automation but we really need to offset its societal impact with something like UBI.
The position criticized in the tweet is that people don't care about workers in poverty now because they imagine a future in which that worker has a better job, and they forget about the person then put in poverty working the first position. The point is that the imagined future does nothing to help the real person suffering now nor reduce overall suffering even if it were realized.
Your imagined future of automated post scarcity has the reduced overall suffering part but it does nothing for people still waiting for their shitty jobs to be automated. You also don't suggest any way of enforcing an equitable distribution of this automatic production rather than allowing it to be owned by the same people who own everything now, who have chosen to structure the current economy to keep so many in poverty.