The best paying jobs are generally the most scalable jobs, as you can derive income from/add value to more revenue streams with minimal time cost on your part.
That doesn't automatically correlate with parasitical roles, but there is an overlap.
Might have some truth to it. Human attention does not scale (ie. impact many other people) very well, and jobs where human attention is crucial, like in teaching & care, don't pay very well.
Because taking advantage of market failures is much easier to profit from than producing actual value, and neoliberal political ideologies prevent us from correcting for that with regulation.
I'd value my kids being taught well, me taken care of if I'm in a hospital or old etc. No machine can compete with the human care. Machine can help, but not replace a human.
This is not a satisfactory answer. First, "human care" is not a direct way of "producing value". Second, if these are the only " interesting jobs" we should be taking, how would society be able to afford it?
Because people who value specifics about a career or have a passion do it more out of that passion because they know it doesn't come with high pay. Take teaching for example.
Also people working for non profit or other socially beneficial companies probably know the company budget goes to help more people not to pad CEO pockets...
The lowest rung of essential jobs are the easiest ones to get so those most desperate for income basically are forced into legal slavery.
And it is slavery. In Texas to rent a 1 bedroom apartment you need to work over 90 hours per week, assuming you earn twice minimum wage, maybe even more...
Those who take the soulless jobs are taking jobs reserved for people just like them who value money above everything else and who will walk over anybody to get it. They're not as likely to have imposter syndrome because they lack humility and are narcissistic. So they're not as likely to be a pushover and accept standard pay...
I wish we all could just earn the same amount but society has decided in a weird way who gets to thrive and we gets to barely survive.. It's not fair but it is what it is.
The question is in the context of a hypothetical society where everyone is paid the same.
In our current society, cleaning diarrhea in bathrooms is low pay is a consequence of lack of UBI (i.e. incentive to feed and house yourself) and high supply of people willing and able to do the job of cleaning bathrooms. Although, with a combination of lower fertility rates and lower immigration rates, I expect that to change.
If current society can build things that land on the moon & mars, along with nuclear ICBMs among other things, but cannot build a self cleaning restroom, perhaps it deserves to fail.
I do however think that is not the case, & that it is a comparatively simple issue nobody has given too much of a fuck about yet, as highly capitalistic societies give zero fucks about improving anything the general public may have access to.
Those other things have almost no budget or even have to worry about maintenance beyond the first use (rockets startups are potentially changing that of course).
I think you are overly pessimistic. There has never more a better time in history for a person with an idea to get funding for crazy ideas like this because of capitalism. They just have to make money.
For an idea like this to be worth it and succeed, it has to be cheaper than that person willing to do it manually. High minimum wages and benefits like single payer health insurance will definitely speed this up.
Based on the fact that they are not in widespread use already, and I have never heard or seen one, it seems reasonable to assume that they do not exist, or are very expensive, or have some other limitation.
I would be interested in looking at a link for these bathrooms that do not require human labor for upkeep.
Either way, the point is different types of work exist with different difficulties/desirabilities, and people need incentives to do the less desirable and/or more difficult work.
If you expect people to slog through medical textbooks and training for 12 years to earn the same as someone checking out groceries, you might be living on a different planet.
Hard to imagine you’re posting in good faith when using the search engine of your choice with text “self cleaning restroom” comes up with more than enough.
That said, don’t think further debate with you will be anything close to fruitful.
edit:
In the year 2022, anything on the internet containing close to
> I have never heard or seen one
Very much leads me to believe the poster has an incurable case of brain worms
A product being available and a viable product worth buying are different things.
I work in real estate development, and we have built gas stations and hotels, and very recently. Either we are wasting a ton of money by employing janitors and housekeepers by not knowing a viable self cleaning bathroom exists, or there is some other problem with self cleaning bathrooms.
>I have never heard or seen one
>Very much leads me to believe the poster has an incurable case of brain worms
Or it means that self cleaning bathrooms would be such an amazing innovation that every single new retail/hotel/gas station/convention center/Starbucks/airport and ANY place with a public restroom would rush to install.
And yet it is, objectively, not seen anywhere by me in SF/SEA/NYC/PDX/LA.
What is more likely? That the product, if it exists, has severe limitations which make it uneconomical. Or a post on HN is correct that all these airports/hotels/malls I go to, with recent renovations or new builds, simply did not know about them.
