It's the exact same argument I keep making about tipping - if only everyone everywhere stopped tipping overnight, this stupid system would disappear. Underpaid waiters and drivers would find other jobs because suddenly without tips they wouldn't be able to support themselves.

I am also surprised that no one has seen the wisdom of my words yet :P

These are collective action problems [1]. Many of the biggest problems facing humanity are collective action problems. We’d have done a far better job fighting COVID, for example, if we could get every person in the world on the same page. Likewise for climate change.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

The situation you advocate for is common practice in many countries.

I'm likely missing nuances, but to me it seems that the key culprit is minimum wage laws in many US states having an exception for restaurant personnel. If a minimum wage was unconditional and high enough to live from, you wouldn't need tips to survive.

The US has a big cultural expectation of tipping, so even though the entire west coast, NYC, Chicago, and Washington DC have gotten rid of lower tipped minimum wages and effectively increased wages for waitstaff, almost all people still tip in all of those places. Even more, over the years, the standard tip amount has moved from 10% to 15% to now what seems like wide support for 20%. Not to mention that large portions of the population now tip for non waited transactions too.

It gets even crazier when you go out with people and they look at you like you’re cheap for calculating tip on pre tax amounts. There’s a lot of pride in the US for tipping, as if it’s a status symbol.

Nothing stopping you to not tipping. You don't need to wait for everyone to stop tipping for you to not tip right now.

In general I agree with your statement. But the grim reality is that good jobs are hard to get. It’s not always possible to find better opportunity. And you may not have the resources necessary to find something better (e.g. I can’t afford to go in a better job opportunity‘a interview, because I can’t get time off my current job, and I need this job to survive.

About 10 years ago I was living in San Francisco on less than $25k/year. Half my money went to rent, the other half went to food and the occasional movie. I couldn’t cook much, as I didn’t have a kitchen. I was able to increase my income because I’m educated, know some of the right things, and I got lucky as hell. But I was surrounded by people living on less who were flat out stuck. They all asked me why I was living there, and the answer was because I had started a business while homeless and got lucky enough that it was taking off. But I was super lucky to have that opportunity at all.

This is such a bizarre take. You're living in San Francisco, one of the most prestigious cities in the world, and yet you're describing your situation as if you're living in Sangvor, Tajikistan.

No one in San Francisco is stuck. [1] By skipping a few of those movie tickets and buying months in advance you could get a plane ticket out of there. In plenty of places in the US there isn't even an airport, not to mention outside the US.

> I couldn’t cook much, as I didn’t have a kitchen.

You don't need a kitchen. You can just have an electric stove in your bedroom. [2]

You're right in saying that you were super lucky. Lucky to live in San Francisco.

--

[1] Except for the mentally ill and people with other similarly valid severe disabilities.

[2] https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/07/19/us/0722-hkecon-pr...

You're right of course, most can leave. But in leaving you are leaving perhaps your best market (depends on what you do, but as an example, let's say you DJ). And also, by extension, you're sort of suggesting everyone making less than 6 figures leave.

I'm putting words in your mouth, I know, and I apologize. But it's the gentrification I am bringing up.

So many construction workers that repair roofs, install drywall, etc. in Silicon Valley live several hours away in Los Banos and have that crazy commute to get to where they can find employment.

Crazy world we live in.

The housing policy of San Francisco definitely makes lives more difficult than it has to be.

My point is more so around realizing the wealth of opportunity. Yes not every DJ will make it in San Francisco, but as you allude to, in most places in the world zero DJs will make it.

I don't claim that life can't be challenging in/around San Francisco. I'm claiming that it's less challenging than in almost anywhere else in the world.

Agree.

And do where? The money I knew how to earn was in San Francisco. I didn't know how to earn a living in a much cheaper spot. Everything I knew was there. If I scraped together enough money for a plane ticket, what would I do when I got there?

There are free government and non-profit social counseling services where people help you figure out what job you can do. There's also reddit and your friends/family for easier non-professional advice.

However, I think it's completely fine that you stayed in SF and made progress there.

As for your claim that you could earn some money in SF and not elsewhere - that's the core of my argument. My point being that San Francisco has more opportunity than pretty much anywhere else in the world. That you specifically could make money in SF, but not elsewhere.

No doubt that earning much less than plenty of other SF residents can have an emotional impact and make it look like your life isn't going so great. It's just that when you look at the US as a whole, or the world as a whole - then SF starts looking like a fountain of opportunity.

sure, but these are not jobs, they are things anyone can do, and might get paid for. If they got rid of the payments all together, people would still do it for free.

So volunteer work.

Basically, kind of like commenting on HN or answering questions on stack overflow

The implication of that is that Big Tech has been selling snake-oil, and the idealism attached to the Internet was misplaced.

Have they? I haven’t seen a single promotion on YouTube telling me I could make a living being a content creator.

I think people hype them selves up about it when they see the top 0.5% on YouTube and think they can be the same. Nowhere have I seen YouTube lie or mislead about this.

The problem is there are simply too many content creators. We don’t need “generic lets play guy 373628”. There is more than enough content pumping in to the system right now.

I mean, fine, YouTube doesn't get out with a bullhorn and yell "Make a Living with Videos!", but their incentives make it seem like a path to stardom.

"Too many content creators" isn't a problem. "Too much bad content" is.

> Too much bad content" is.

Is it? How else do you grow "good content", short of curating it (with all of the topdown biases and blind spots that that approach implies?)

On top of that, who decided what "good content" is? I occasionally get recommendations from Weird YouTube, and sometimes they're absolutely delightful. This sounds a lot like "nobody needs more than three broadcast channels"

The solution to "too much bad content" is to ensure that the producers of that content get so little reward that they decide to stop making that content - which is what's happening here.

Which incentives are you referring to here? As far as I can tell, all of the small Youtube creators are there because they enthusiastically want to make videos; I've never seen anyone say they wanted to do something else but Youtube tricked them into thinking they could get rich and famous.

Youtube IS a path to stardom, and a much easier one than anything preceding it, however people chasing stardom rarely care about money until they grow up and realize they don't know how to do anything else. It's not like the term starving artist is new.