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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I don’t think anyone intends public funds to be quite that sticky; public education is itself a public good, and having once attended a public school really has nothing to do with developing a product 20 years down the road.

    Also, writing open source code can support a viable business. Not every example has been successful, and some have been sold to hypercapitalist owners who wanted to extract more profit, others have failed to keep up, but Canonical is doing alright with it, Red Hat did for a long time, among others. Plenty of bigger tech companies also employ people to write open source software, despite it not being the company’s main business, React, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and so many other projects. Those engineers definitely aren’t working for free.










  • I mean, the problem isn’t the existence/obviation of jobs, but what we do next when it happens. If the people whose jobs are automated away are left out with no money or employment, that’s a serious problem. If we as a society support them in learning something new that puts their skills to good use, and maybe even reduce the expected working hours of a full-time job to 35 or 32 hours a week, that’s an absolute win in my book.



  • To me the question is whether the result of what you’re doing makes the world around you better or worse. Would the people living in your place be better off if you were out of the equation? Then you’re a bad landlord.

    If you’re making money from providing labor for the people who live in a place you own, and they’re paying your costs to do so, I think there’s a case for that being a reasonable occupation to hold. If there’s an issue with it, it’s not my highest priority, and there’s definitely some value in flexible housing stock for people.

    If your goal is passive income, or you’re making money from owning housing and denying that ownership to people who need a place to live, then you’re behaving as a parasite, and I think it’s reasonable for people to give you an amount of respect proportional to that.