Children are the same way. All that time they spend playing could be spent in a factory making sneakers.

I don't know about your kids, but mine would make some shitty sneakers :-)

They'll be fine after a few days of training.

> if go into any downtown anywhere in the world at 7 pm to 8 p.m. you will see people drinking beer in bars.

Those people are still working, they just don't know it

People write all sorts of nonsense for newspapers and get paid for it. Just because you personally don't value some labour doesn't mean it's not valuable labour.

I'm not arguing from first principles here. Workforce participation is down. This is just a symptom. I'm not against having free time, but against companies who ask you to work for them for free. If people had the ability to make money with their time and effort, that guy would be more likely to be paid for his post.

SE provides a venue for these types of discussions, and in exchange does a small amount of advertising to make the venture profitable. How is that exploitative in any sense of the word? Do you have the same attitude towards social clubs that charge fees?

I don't go to SE for the "venue". I usually get there via a Google search, which means the only draw is the content. And hopefully Google would give me the same info if it were on any other site that paid their writers.

you don't go for the venue, but others do - the asker and the answerer who generated the content in the first place. You're just getting the benefit of their exchange due to SE's existence. I don't understand why you have an issue with SE hosting content in exchange for permission to advertise on it. I have to pay amazon/digitalocean to host my content - if it costs something for a host to provide it then they can either make the money back somehow or constantly lose money.

But the only thing SE has to offer is other people's content. And I don't have a problem with them making money, but with not sharing any with the people who are the reason the site gets money. They're not even middlemen who take a cut, they're getting 100% of the revenue.

but that implies that content is the only valuable thing, and distribution and hosting are negligible. If anything, it's the other way around - content is abundant and quality distribution is the hard problem. That's the reason the marketing industry is one of the largest around.

If people want to try to make money from their Q&As they can post them on their own site and either charge for access or advertise, but then they'll need to market it to get revenue so then they become like an SE but only for their own content and they'll make very little money anyway. That's basically the position of a professional blogger and very few of those make any real money.

Right, that's pretty much my whole point. Money gets concentrated. Employment is low.

yeah - people who provide services become successful. It's a pretty good system as long as we can keep the less successful people out of poverty. Equality of outcome is possibly the worst idea in history.

But we're not keeping them out of poverty. Facebook has a homeless encampment directly across the street. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/31/facebook-cam... Are you in favor of any kind of equality?

of course - equality under the law. People like to act like equality of outcome is a natural extension from legal equality but it simply isn't.

I know we don't keep people out of poverty right now, and that's something that needs to be fixed. But if you think equality of outcome (i.e. eliminating economic disparity) is the solution to that then you may want to read up on the USSR and Maoist China. Capitalism is pretty good at raising the living standard of the whole population, even if it does end up creating billionaires at the same time.

I'm in favor of democracy. I think the government should represent each person's interests equally no matter how rich they are. I think the only reason we didn't have a violent worker's revolution in America is that we were able to pass the socialist platform democratically.

welfare existed long before socialism and is pretty distinct. Systems of welfare were passed democratically, as they should be. The main reason the West in general didn't have any worker's revolutions (excluding Spain) is that the capitalism+welfare situation we have actually works really well.

The implicit assumption here is the only reason people don't spend 100% of their time working is the inability to find an employer.

No, I'm saying people are less likely to work for free when they can find work that pays instead. Seeing lots of people do work for free is a symptom that lots of people are underemployed.

Only because you've classified every activity as "work". People have hobbies where they do things purely for entertainment.

So if HN added advertising to support the site, you would totally stop posting here, right?

Not unless I could find a place that would pay better for my posts.