How much do construction costs matter to the price of housing?

Re:How much do construction costs matter to the price of hou... by VikingCoder on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @03:20PM (#30365161)

Going off on a tangent here:

There's a sci-fi novel I want to write some time...

You know how some countries have mandatory military service?

Well, what if all of the "Essential" jobs, all had mandatory service?

I want to do my own cherry-picking, selecting the "Essential" jobs, and especially those that are toilsome but that you can do with not a lot of training, and then do the math to see how many hours each able-bodied person in a country would need to do each job, in order to satisfy all of the needs of everyone in that society (able-bodied, or not.)

And then build up a story around some people who are finishing their Essential Jobs, and are deciding whether to Retire into living off the dole, or whether to transition into some Skilled labor to live in more luxury.

And then there's the fact that automation is making it so that less and less actual manual effort is required for the Essential jobs. So, does the society start categorizing new jobs as Essential, or do people end up with more discretionary time?

I feel like this would have made a pretty okay Star Trek culture to encounter...

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Re:How much do construction costs matter to the price of hou... by OnionBlender on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @03:52PM (#30365522)

The Expanse briefly mentions this in one of the books. Earth has universal "basic" income but if people want to go to university they have to do 2 years of working less desirable jobs to show they can handle working.

I heard that Starship Troopers book had something like what you described but I haven't read it.

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Re:How much do construction costs matter to the price of hou... by ghaff on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @04:09PM (#30365700)

In Starship Troopers, as I recall, you had to serve for some period in order to be a citizen/vote. I don't remember if this was necessarily military service (although that is certainly what the book highlighted).

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Re:How much do construction costs matter to the price of hou... by chillacy on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @06:28PM (#30367302)

Nit: Basic in the expanse is not actually basic income, it's more like basic services: https://twitter.com/jamessacorey/status/902940152007462912

(Tweet from the author)

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Re:How much do construction costs matter to the price of hou... by Hemospectrum on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @03:23PM (#30365196)

You could approach this idea from the opposite direction: Put all essential jobs under military jurisdiction. There's real-world precedent illustrating some of the ways this would (and wouldn't) work.

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Re:How much do construction costs matter to the price of hou... by someguydave on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @03:29PM (#30365254)

>Put all essential jobs under military jurisdiction.

Under that scenario the relative fairness of paying for jobs to be done would be replaced with the relative unfairness of being friends with the right people in the "plumber corps" to fix your toliet.

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Re:How much do construction costs matter to the price of hou... by xboxnolifes on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @03:37PM (#30365355)

If there is some sort of national mandatory essential service, that will happen regardless of what organization it falls under if it is ran poorly.

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Re:How much do construction costs matter to the price of hou... by someguydave on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @05:28PM (#30366683)

yes, it will happen in all cases where government bureaucrats decide who gets what resource

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Re:How much do construction costs matter to the price of hou... by JoakimOA on Thursday February 17, 2022 @02:54AM (#30370552)

Adding another sci-fi book recommendation that explores these themes; in The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi there is a moving city on Mars where citizens that run out of time, their currency allowing them to live in the city, have their consciousness transferred to machine servants that maintain the city. Being a servant for a number of years earns them enough time to return to their bodies and the city.

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Re:How much do construction costs matter to the price of hou... by vl on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @03:45PM (#30365444)

Have you read Heinlein's Starship Troopers?

While not exactly your setup, it explores what happens in a society like this.

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Re:How much do construction costs matter to the price of hou... by cool_dude85 on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @03:35PM (#30365330)

>There's a sci-fi novel I want to write some time...

>You know how some countries have mandatory military service?

>Well, what if all of the "Essential" jobs, all had mandatory service?

Corvee labor, aka a sci-fi novel about a concept in existence since Ancient Egypt.

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Re:How much do construction costs matter to the price of hou... by kiliantics on Wednesday February 16, 2022 @05:28PM (#30366692)

Check out "The Dispossessed" by Ursula Le Guin

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