This is over 20 years old, and I'm sure doesn't hold true in all areas, but at least at one point there was high demand to be a "san man" ("san" as in "sanitation") in NYC:

> It's a coveted job to be a New York City san man. When they last gave the qualifying test, 30,000 people took it. The General waited five years after passing the exam before a job came open, which is typical. And though the work is grueling, the pay-- if you're actually on a truck-- starts at $40,000 and can go to $60 after just five years. [note: this is in 2003 dollars!] A good winter, meaning one with lots of overtime for clearing snow-- they clear snow, too-- can make for a $90,000 year for a senior guy.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/249/garbage

These guys are/were unionized, which certainly helps.

For manual labor I thought the guys I know who do garbage pickup have a great job - their hours are shifted so they work from 4am to noon so they have plenty of time for hobbies and family outside of that. All the time sitting and driving the truck is hard though they rarely have to handle anything manually with standardized bins and hydraulic lifts.

I don't know if I would call it high pay anywhere ive lived. It is okay pay around me right now in a less prosperous area of the country for not requiring tools or previous skills. But the main thing going for it around here is stability of hours, a decent amount of holidays off, and you don't have to destroy your body.

Garbage collectors where I live used to make $30-$35/hr starting wage. It was a good job and they always had applicants.

Now they have the trucks that dump the bins without getting out of the truck. The driver's make $18/hr.

I guarantee you that a lot more people would be willing to put up with it for $10 million a year.

okay, so the lack of robots/supply increases garbage collector wages, which broadly results in wealth distribution vs robots.

Japan's employment rate is hard to compare, in that many of these job just wouldn't be seen as real jobs in any other country ("bullshit job"), and it's compound by half of the population being over 50. A high employment among the elderly could just be masking the harsher truth when that upper half passes away.

It's still 10s of millions of people who could be given a job (and some hope and purpose too btw)

Edit: btw I agree there's more to life than work. But when you're unemployed and hoping for work, competing against robots and LLMs is quite crushing.

I'd highly recommend watching Perfect Day by Wim Wenders. It's a really sweet film.

"Hirayama cleans public toilets in Tokyo, lives his life in simplicity and daily tranquility. Some encounters also lead him to reflect on himself." -- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27503384/

There's a subreddit for the NYC sanitation dept because it's so competitive to get into.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DSNY/comments/1rwayil/what_was_the_...

People will clean garbage and shit for a DB pension, stability, not sitting at a desk, and avoiding corporate politics.

All of these things are easier to give to sanitation workers because human waste is a recession-proof good and it's less affected by boom-bust. Many people want these jobs.

If you're a tech worker that likes a clean office and new technology this is boring.

But I'm sure there's a sanitation worker going on a similar rant about how terrible the tech industry is.

Japan is very different than most cultures in cleaning after yourself. It's very ingrained in their psyche, e.g. school students are trained to clean their classrooms in organized way.

So your argument might hold for other countries, but not for Japan. Cleaning is a pretty honorable thing to do there (and it's super-clean as people trash way less).

Unlike many other developed countries, foreign employees working in cleaning and maintenance are still a minority. This is gradually changing, but I believe the main issue is that young people are completely uninterested in this kind of work. Most people working in these industries in Japan are old rather than foreign. The average is probably over 50+, and there are quite a few people working past retirement.

I clean shit for free often.

I wouldn't like doing it past the point of exhaustion for low wages and with poor treatment though.

You’re allowed to type shit. We’re all adults here.

Out of curiosity, what percentage of a fried chicken snack's final cost do you think is labor from that 7-11 worker?

Different from the USA, 7-11 in Japan and China are mainly self checkout at least, so they can technically run a store with less people since they don’t have to man cash registers to get people checked out.

This is a linkage in theory but in practice it's an indirect linkage and the 7-11 owner does not have a handbook dictating how prices rise or fall relating to labour costs.

As evidenced by the non arrival of across the board 10% rises in meal costs when tipping is banned.

TL;DR cost and price linkage is not amenable to simplistic claims about the impact on pricing.

> You don't wanna YOLO understanding how employment rates are calculated.

You're way better off YOLO'ing reading the documentation about how they are calculated than listening to the myriad pundits deliberately trying to mislead people and drive conspiracy theories.

This is all documented on the websites of the various statistical agencies, and you can just read their docs.

Correct. I was using labor participation rates. As a society gets depressed and has a hard time people stop trying (ie they no longer count as unemployed, which doesnt count the people who are no longer trying to get a job).

Similar to how as police systems fail, people stop reporting things assuming nothing meaningful will happen anyways. And then there's less reports of crime, so magically "crime is down" -- high fives to the police system... (/s)

Strict immigration controls are a good thing. The people immigrating to your country should bring value, not problems. They should be positioned to contribute to your society, rather than take from it.

Specifically in this conversation, if Japan can use physical AI and robotics to create X goods and services, wouldn't it be better (for the Japanese) to divide X by the Y population of Japan, rather than Y + Z population of Somalia?

Miti is basically a second government with real power, finance and expertise, and they appear to bet on the correct things, it should have happened earlier but from what I have seen they are moving faster than EU on the semiconductor and robotics fronts.

Indeed. Gotta keep that body in a tip-top shape so that we can pull off all-nighters at some dude's AI startup while eating pizza and pretzels.

This happens, but it's not representative. Interesting belief, it seems like it should be self-extinguishing, the cultures that don't believe this kind of thing will tend to take over over time.

Lol my wife is in better shape now after kids than when she was pregnant, and she was in amazing shape before.

For some people having kids crystallizes the importance of health, etc.

Nothing will destroy you physically, mentally, and emotionally than grinding 12hrs a day just so you can make someone else’s wealthier.

This is something that really needs to be done in the states imo.

IIRC we don't have a sovereign wealth fund, but we should in order to provide a social safety net for our citizens, especially with all the uncertainties regarding the future right now.

The funny thing is that dishes and laundry are already automated and people are still complaining about them.

Do we need a humaniform robot to move the clothes from the washer to the dryer? Maybe we just need smarter appliances.

The solution is more teachers, smaller class sizes and not underpaying and abusing teachers to function as nanny’s also charged with raising your children.

This isn’t exactly a mystery problem, we’ve understood clearly how to educate humans well for quite a while. It’s just that doing it properly is “eXpEnSiVe” as if the alternative, isn’t quietly orders of magnitude worse, and more costly.

So the solution is to have less ladies in charge? Who's going to wipe snot off the kids' noses, pull legos out of their mouths, and tell them not to hit each other?

Why would people not like artists?

This short-term thinking makes me pessimistic about UBI. Everyone's addicted to work despite automation and AI creating less need for work. And thinking we live in a zero-sum game where if someone else is benefiting, it must be hurting them somehow so they must block it. If someone's getting a "handout", they're a lazy bum.

Why would you have to work harder when employers of jobs no one wants to do (for a given wage) have to either increase wages or embrace automation research and development (thereby likely speeding up its systemic adoption and reducing the necessity for manual work even more)?

Where developing countries have vendors on the streets, industrialized nations have vending machines instead, by pure economic and demographic necessity. The existence of an automation tool doesn't imply a human having to work harder somewhere else.

And why do you assume people would sit around doing nothing? I don't think that's a natural thing for most people to do.

How financial and social systems are set up seems to be very much a societal choice, unless it goes against some physical, basic economic or global trade limitation.

Interesting note on the native tribes though!

UBI is a solution to there not being jobs at all if they're all automated. Now whether we actually get to such a level is debatable.

> In the US, native tribes get ubi when they turn 18.

This is a myth; fact check please.

> A world where nobody has to work sounds horrific.

Why?

Viva La revolution

The robot vote is a critical and quickly growing minority group since Wall-E v Sanders determined that all sentient robots were to be treated as citizens. Immediately after, Citizens United was rendered useless and large corporations moved their investments from campaign finance to literal voting machines.

Japan has a very low cost of living. Work/life balance, however, is not good. And neither is the increasingly hostile immigration policies.

Ridiculous cost of living in Japan? What do you mean by that?

> They look at what happens to people that aren't xenophobic and they don't want that.

They did sakoku before the technological means that would even allow them to see this was a thing. It's baked deep in the culture.

> japan is going to shit because of all the immigrants

> japan is better than pussy thanks to it being strict on immigrants

pick whichever convenient