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Inefficient Design

organize poor people and build things with them
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The market rate of the work of an unintelligent or uneducated person is below the cost for a person to live. As technology progresses the percentage of people priced out of the job market increases.

Some want to distribute a basic income and allow each person to decide how and what to contribute to society. Some want to build gutters for them to rot in. The latter set is driven by the belief that everyone can and should work. That belief fails to take into account the fact that ANY job these people can do can be done less expensively by a robot. So any work for them must ordinarily be make-work.

Furthermore some people unable to find work are just lazy, some have a disability, and some are undereducated and priced out of the education market. The labor market is not efficient enough to sort them one from the other.

I propose the following form of organization.

A large group (say, 100) of the unemployed, in return for their welfare check, are expected to gather in a warehouse. They are given cheap, durable computers and some appropriate design and building supplies. Importantly, they are not required to do anything but show up and not commit any crimes or trash the place. No one checks their work. There are one or two security guards and a janitor. Each group is told the whole group will receive a bonus if it can solve X design or robotics problem, with no time limit but the first group to solve it gets the bonus.

Now the most driven and educable can be expected to learn about robotics. Everyone else can be expected to help where they can or just spend their time on Facebook or porn, which is also allowed. The most capable leaders will naturally end up in charge, and everyone will have a chance to meet other people, practice teamwork, and generally not be wasting away at home.

Those who can be educated will thereby gain experience and knowledge. No one else will be particularly put out. And even though they won't turn out work at the level of a roboticist, or make a return on the cost, they will slowly solve real-world problems. Ideally even those not working on the team's goal will end up doing something more practical than if they weren't around other people. Ideally they'll find ways to work together and maybe start the occasional side business.

The maximum value for their time is thus extracted, the best will have a way to move up in the world, and the disabled and unwilling won't be any worse off. And in the rest of society the people complaining about welfare will have a lot less to say.

The only downside I can see to this is it can very easily degenerate into workhouses if mismanaged.

Voice, Jan 15 2017

"Children need to be profiled in kindergarten" http://www.stuff.co...social-inequalities
Apparently, much can be learned from testing 3-year-olds. [neutrinos_shadow, Jan 19 2017]

They can work at getting people across the river https://www.youtube...watch?v=063T59wkk-4
[pashute, Jan 20 2017]


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Annotation:







       If there is money in the answer to a problem, some business will try to beat your team to the answer. Net effect, the team has cost money but not earned money (because that business got the money first).
Vernon, Jan 15 2017
  

       I think the only short-term solution to the unemployability of uneducated people is charity. The longer-term solution is education. For the simply unintelligent (and the unintelligently simple) there is no solution other than charity.
MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 15 2017
  

       You're axe must be really sharp by now, [Ian].
MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 15 2017
  

       There is an element of replusiveness in this idea.... that the entire purpose of life is to 'work', and therefore those who for whatever reason are unable to contribute to the production lines become a problem - a nuisance to the swept into some factory of stupidity wherein a few might get lucky and start to make some new kind of lighting up clothes pegs or other such nonsense.
xenzag, Jan 15 2017
  

       // there is no solution other than charity //   

       Actually, there is an alternative, but it is very much a "Final Solution" ...   

       <obligatory Soylent Green reference/>
8th of 7, Jan 15 2017
  

       Baked by Lada, Volga, Fiat, Chery, Yugo, Peugeot...
RayfordSteele, Jan 15 2017
  

       !!!!!Advertising!!!!!   

       the kinds of people that show up are strongly sorted on what the advertising attracts. That causes "purpose" to spontaneously appear. I think the idea is to generate the occasional fresh new autodidact, so that could be advertised towards.   

       Or you could just do citywide wifi if you didn't care if they were making physical objects or online content.
beanangel, Jan 17 2017
  

       //There is an element of replusiveness in this idea// [marked-for-tagline]
theircompetitor, Jan 17 2017
  

       There is very little hope for those left out of the previous generations education farce.
Children need to be profiled in kindergarten and then taught 'mostly' in the way their little brains are already hardwired in order to find their own genius, irregardless of wealth and thus contribute to society as a whole, without the impetus of money to compensate for, when we finally clue into the fact that money is just a concept and caste is just a crime committed by our forefathers against one another.
  

       We should be 'way' smarter than them by now, but instead of using our smarts to elevate, we use them to subjugate.
It's disgusting.
  

       Ponzi schemes just never last boys.   

       //Children need to be profiled in kindergarten// I believe Homeland Security has this in hand.
MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 18 2017
  

       //when we finally clue into the fact that money is just a concept and caste is just a crime committed by our forefathers against one another.//   

       Root of all evil, ok, but this is nonsense.
theircompetitor, Jan 18 2017
  

       //money is just a concept//   

       Yes, but when human groups larger than a roving band of chimpanzees have to get along somehow, concepts matter.   

       Besides, I don't really have the time or inclination to barter for everything.
pertinax, Jan 21 2017
  

       Well... the way I see it a country's wealth is generated by its people. It is not generated by its government, or its learned, or its wealthy, or its leaders of industry, it is quite literally generated by the sweat and blood of its lowliest citizens who directly pay for the infrastructure with their taxes and their lives.
As such these citizens should be entitled to an equal portion of the wealth of their country as shareholders in its profits rather than 'only' being on the hook for its debts. In this way cash can be slowly phased out and in its place dividends are redeemable for goods and services in the form of credit to begin with.
  

       As I've stated in the past though it would take a benevolent dictator to stop the rampant Ponzi scheme that allowing money-lenders to have any power has caused modern commerce to become.   

       For instance one of 'my' very first acts as benevolent dictator would be to force the sale of every foreign owned tourism industry holding, (current fair market value), to revert back to the ownership of the country being toured. Its citizens would be designated shareholders in the industry as a whole and those working in this industry given a larger share equal to their service with the option of collecting dividends as wages or drawing only a portion of the credit while reinvesting the rest back into the industry.   

       If such a thing were implemented in, say, Mexico, the tourism dollars spent there would line the pockets of the citizens of Mexico and not whichever foreign interests currently own those facilities.   

       How long do you think it would take Mexico to pull itself up from third world status if tourism dollars stayed there?
Applied world-wide, it then becomes advantageous for a people to do everything in their power to create an environment which others want to visit.
Changing the incentives changes the outcome. People begin to apply more pressure to their respective governments to open their borders and encourage visitors as they see other struggling countries pull themselves up out of the muck. War becomes very bad for business under such a plan.
  

       //it is all because of HR departments in businesses//   

       That is the nugget of wisdom I extracted from the foregoing. Even the term, "human resources" is deeply evil - suggesting that people are comparable to machine tools or office furniture, whilst at the same time failing to treat them either as humans or as resources.
MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 22 2017
  

       Can anyone, anyone, face up to the paradox of a system of production so efficient it can build robots to do basic tasks, but yet cannot "afford" quality of life for the human beings. We don't need a robot apocalypse apparently we are all ready to bow down to our all-to-human overlords.
WcW, Jan 24 2017
  

       ...and I'm sure [Max] and [8th] are grateful for that, although I'm not sure about the "human" part in the case of at least one of them.
Voice, Jan 24 2017
  


 

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