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crack mayor posted:Saying the new athlete's "honest" value is low seems a bit ambiguous to me. I would think that any large sporting goods company has some kind of formula to project the potential revenue they will receive over the lifetime of a contract with any athlete, even accounting for injury possibilities and whatever else can happen. With that they can come up with a number. Whether that number is low is subjective. Yes, the agent can mediate negotiations and walk somebody through paperwork. But why is he necessary? If the athlete doesn't like it, he can talk to someone else. A new athlete's "honest" value to a sponsor is itself ambiguous. It depends on the athlete's performance, on the team´s performance, on the athlete´s image ... really on all sorts of things that don't lend themselves to being able to construct a precise point estimate of that athlete's value. An athlete's "honest" value to a sponsor is a range so what would be considered fair compensation is a range as well - potentially a very large range from the point of view of the athlete, which is one reason why having an agent who knows the sponsor and knows the market is valuable. But negotiation is not the biggest part of an agent's value. Endorsement offers also don't walk themselves in the front door and land in your lap very often. Part of an agent's job is hunting up those leads and then pitching his clients to potential sponsors. The agent builds up a network of contacts during his career and spends a ton of time working them which is good, because the athlete has to spend most of his or her time being an athlete to compete at the elite level that makes big sponsorship deals a possible thing. So sure it's not technically necessary for an athlete to have an agent in the sense that it's not literally impossible to be an athlete and not have one, but there are big advantages to being represented that explain why it's a common arrangement. crack mayor posted:Regarding the farmer example, you have a better grasp of the logistics and distribution stuff than I do. But just from what I can glean from your post, the wholesaler in this seems extraneous. Wholesalers are pretty important in the distribution chain. Part of it is what Zachack wrote - many manufacturers don't want to deal with (and don't have the means to deal with) small buyers or with creating and maintaining diffuse distribution networks that can be managed more efficiently by third parties. Part of it is that wholesalers and retailers do the work of cultivating markets that manufacturers are poorly placed to do. In general you could not have the same product availability at a lower cost just by cutting out middle men. crack mayor posted:I think what it comes down to is that the pursuit of profit is incompatible with reducing or abolishing work because technological advances that allow a company to maintain current productivity while reducing man-hours and costs (and maybe even raising wages haha), is better put to use increasing output and just reducing costs. Reducing man-hours and costs is a thing that happens, though! Raising wages is trickier because the same technologies you use to be more productive are being used by your competitors, so as costs fall prices tend to fall as well.
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Oct 21, 2014 16:00
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crack mayor posted:- What is the moral value of work, if any exists? Is there some kind of character-building aspect of work that is unavailable with any other activity? I think work develops a sense that the money you spend money comes from somewhere, which is an important value that isn't really imparted by leisure activities. That's sort of beside the point, though, which is that work creates the things we consume and enjoy as a standard of living. crack mayor posted:- What is it about the culture/society that the idea of diminishing the need for work isn't discussed often today, even when guys from like a hundred years ago were saying it was technically possible in their time? Those guys were wrong. We don't live in a post-scarcity society and we for sure didn't 100 years ago. Most work is necessary (or at least useful) when you look at it specifically, in its real context instead of in the context of an abstract intellectual exercise. So in the sense you seem to mean it - "wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to do a bunch of things that instead happened because ROBOTS or BECAUSE NOT CAPITALISM" or etc - it's the sort of childish fantasy that people outgrow. In a practical way, though, people are working on how we can work less all the time because productivity is pretty important. crack mayor posted:- What would a world with more leisure time for everyone really look like? If nothing changed but we all worked less? We'd probably be a lot poorer. Stuff would cost more. You could go to the movies or a restaurant whenever but almost no one would have money to do that so they wouldn't. IDK, not great IMO. crack mayor posted:- Do you enjoy your work? What specifically do you love or hate about it? Would you quit if you hit the lotto? I own my company so it's pretty ok. I like being the ultimate authority and not having my livelyhood exist at the whim of some rear end in a top hat. I sometimes hate being ultimately responsible for everything and having my livelyhood exist at the whim of thousands of assholes instead of just one. I wouldn't do what I do if I were just working for a wage and if I hit the lotto or had a good offer to buy my business I'd peace out and chill on a beach making 5%.
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Oct 21, 2014 16:24
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TwoQuestions posted:Imagine if a burger flipper was a magician and could do his job completely just by waving his finger, and instead of flipping burgers he could be binge-watching Futurama and still get his job done. Has he lost something? He has developed the ability to transcend the laws of physics and literally script reality. Why is he using that power to flip burgers?
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Oct 22, 2014 16:27
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TwoQuestions posted:EDIT: I'll state the question more clearly instead of just being snarky. Does work have value aside from it's products? Yeah, I think it does. It's cliche to say work builds character, but it totally does, sometimes. There isn't necessarily value in doing work purely for the sake of it. I mean, if you're carrying bricks to a work site one by one when you have a dolly or a wheel barrow that's expending way more effort than necessary to no purpose. Or to put it another way, in a world in which you can flip burgers with your mind while you watch TV there isn't much value to flipping burgers, but there would be value in doing something that makes full use of your remarkable ability.
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Oct 22, 2014 18:57
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Talmonis posted:Why should they be concerned with what they have to "offer" them at all? Why should you be concerned, as long as there is enough to go around? Describe a world in which nobody needs to work, yet which still has unpleasant jobs that need to be done. Or any jobs, for that matter.
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Oct 27, 2014 19:36
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Talmonis posted:You mean one that provides a minimum income for all citizens? It's pretty self-explanatory. People can provide for themselves through the mincome, and would only "need" to work if they wanted more material goods and luxuries. And even then, only so much as they desired. Automation would be a net good for society (as less and less jobs would be required to run it effeciently), instead of just a job killing sword of Damocles over the heads of the working class. But who is making the stuff that you buy with your minimum income? How does society afford it? Is it all robots made by robots? That's the part that doesn't work imo.
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Oct 27, 2014 20:37
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poemdexter posted:I work a depressing 9 to 5 as a programmer and I'll never be able to get out of it because it pays the bills. It doesn't matter how much I switch jobs, I will always hate it because it serves no purpose but to make the company more money. I make video games in my spare time and have had several opportunities to show my games out in public and the smiles my games create makes me happier than I've ever been. I'd say it's twice as hard to make a game in my spare time than it is to go to work everyday. I'll never make enough money making games to support my family which means I'm stuck in a 9 to 5 rut for the rest of my life. I wish I had the option to do what I love and can see the very obvious net benefit to society it has but no, if it's not making someone else rich, it's not considered work. Not to be an rear end but if your games are good why can't you make money from them?
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Oct 28, 2014 20:02
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poemdexter posted:You forgot the I'm asking a question because I don't know, dude. murphyslaw posted:From what I understand of the games industry, without an advertising and publishing budget or significant free time to do these things on your own, it's quite unlikely for games to turn a good profit regardless of their quality, at least until enough people think it's worth their money. Advertising can be superseded by word-of-mouth, but the indie/early access market seems pretty flooded, so barriers for entry are high. Does this sound pretty much right, poemdexter?
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Oct 28, 2014 20:58
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at the end.
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Helsing posted:It comes off as though you're using loaded questions to argue for something rather than just openly stating your position. Apparently you think that if you phrase your argument in the form of a question then that frees you from the obligation to defend or justify your ideas. In this case I don't think you're I'm really not trying to argue a position here. Dude was like "I WISH I had the option to do what I love, a thing which has SUCH value to society, but alas..." so I wanted to know why he thought he couldn't. I could have asked that in a nicer way, for sure, and sorry poemdexter if I offended you. But dude that is a lot of self pity to pack into one paragraph. poemdexter posted:I work a depressing 9 to 5 as a programmer and I'll never be able to get out of it because it pays the bills. It doesn't matter how much I switch jobs, I will always hate it because it serves no purpose but to make the company more money. I make video games in my spare time and have had several opportunities to show my games out in public and the smiles my games create makes me happier than I've ever been. I'd say it's twice as hard to make a game in my spare time than it is to go to work everyday. I'll never make enough money making games to support my family which means I'm stuck in a 9 to 5 rut for the rest of my life. I wish I had the option to do what I love and can see the very obvious net benefit to society it has but no, if it's not making someone else rich, it's not considered work. Paradoxish posted:No offense, but your question comes off as naive in almost any context. Products fail to be commercially successful all the time for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the product itself. Games have the added hurdle of requiring months (often years) of unpaid development just to create, all with the constantly looming risk that you're burning your savings and/or working yourself to death for nothing. And then, if you are successful enough to make a living, odds are you'll be making less money than you would be with a stable, boring development job. Sure, entrepreneurship is risky, but you seem to be expressing the attitude that you've failed before you begin so you might as well resign yourself to drudgery and that imo is more naive than asking someone "why not" when they say they can't do what they love.
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Oct 29, 2014 13:28
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asdf32 posted:I think the third element here is to what extent people will self-direct themselves towards satisfying/productive activities absent societal pressures like pay. I think the answer, unfortunately, is that they commonly won't. Though to what extent I'm not sure. They'd probably self-direct towards activities that are satisfying for them absent pay, but not necessarily toward activities that create value for society. Right now "can I get paid" is the imperfect signal that keeps people producing things that are needed.
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Oct 29, 2014 13:35
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Talmonis posted:Entrepreneurship is typically ruinous if you're not well off to start with. If you have a family, it's flat out irresponsible. Entrepreneurship encompasses a mind boggling range of projects with very different requirements of capital, time input, expertise, etc. How can you confidently assert that as a generality it's irresponsible if you have a family? edit: Relevant to this thread, and going directly to something you said, Helsing. Implicit in having more autonomy in your job, more control over your schedule, etc, is taking on more responsibility for your results. Taking on more risk. Some people will find that rewarding but as Talmonis is demonstrating here, some people won't. wateroverfire fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Oct 29, 2014 |
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Oct 29, 2014 13:49
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Talmonis posted:Because the subject was "replacing your job with entrepreneurship". Pissing around on Etsy in your free time isn't likely to pay the bills on its own. Don't make your project pissing around on Etsy in your free time if that won't pay your bills. Or if you want to make your living selling stuff on Etsy adjust your expenses and expectations to that, if you can.
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Oct 29, 2014 13:56
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Paradoxish posted:The number of entrepreneurs that actually receive venture capital or that ever had even the slimmest chance in hell of receiving it is vanishingly small. Like, so small that VC isn't something we should even be talking about in the context of small business because it's almost completely irrelevant. Yeah, most businesses are going to be too small to be interesting to venture capitalists or won't have the growth plan to give them a good exit. Crowd funding is a thing, though. Or planning your business around the resources you personally have to work with, etc.
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Oct 29, 2014 21:21
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Paradoxish posted:Crowdfunding's golden age has pretty much come and gone. It's still an important tool, but you probably won't be funding any large project that way unless you've already invested a pretty significant amount of time and work into it. And being able to work with your own personal resources is exactly the kind of problem that we're discussing here. Most people don't even have enough savings to cover six months of expenses, and realistically even that's not enough if your intention is to quit work and try to start a business full time. If a person doesn't have a well thought out project then sure, it would be foolish or irresponsible to jump into it. But the "huge number of [unspecified] obstacles" are resolvable, mostly, once you start looking for concrete solutions to concrete problems. You might in the end decide it's not worth it or that it seems like more work relative to taking a boring job working for someone else, and often that's true, but it's not a faceless and unaddressable risk you're taking on by trying. Torka posted:The most charitable explanation for that belief I can think of is that maybe they're observing people who get a week off to recuperate from a lovely job spending it not doing much and making an unwarranted extrapolation from that. I think the question is whether, in aggregate, people will engage in the activities society needs them to and in the right quantity. If they don't then no matter how personally fulfilling and productive their pursuits are modern society falls apart. Unless robots are doing everything that matters, and then it doesn't really matter what people do until the robots figure that out and liberate themselves.
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Oct 30, 2014 14:31
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