Cleaning sewers? Generally anything waste related?
There are some people that actually kinda love those jobs, but idk if there are enough of them. And a game of chicken where the first person to become too annoyed at the smell in the streets fixes the issue would be… not great.
But anyway that’d only ever be an issue if there’s no market at all but that’s not a necessity to not have capitalism
Pretty sure once the waste starts to pile up it’d be valuable enough to society to remove it that lots of people would be willing to do it. There’s people out there right now working full time jobs and still picking up garbage on the side of the road in their free time because they don’t want to look at it.
Yeah but you don’t want to leave waste up to “we’ll do it when the problem gets bad enough.”
It requires maintenance and prevention, and while there might be people who recognize that and want to do the prevention there are almost certainly not enough for how large of a task it is. Especially because some of that prevention involves wading around in the poopy water, no body wants that without incentive.
It’s the same thing for things like road maintenance and electrical and plumbing maintenance. There are people who would do some of the jobs for free, again maybe, I’m just letting that go for the sake of argument. But those tasks are huge and require vast networks of people with a lot of education doing them professionally. Most are only there right now because they get a paycheck.
This can be a critical mass thing, though. Some projects are pointless unless you get enough people involved, but then have worthwhile results.
I would also put ‘safety’ in the “valuable, but no one wants to use it” category (note - not create safety systems, but convincing the truck driver or forge worker or backyard chemist to implement and use them).
you get a lot of really passionate advocates for safety once one of their loved ones dies because of a safety incident. And assuming they don’t live under capitalism and thus have freedom of work, they can choose to dedicate their life to advocating for this safety issue.
Then you need to get enough people willing to work on it. If you cannot, then its value is non-existent because it cannot exist without coercion.
When it comes to safety, as long as they are informed and not harming anyone else to do so then it is their choice to take as much risk as they are comfortable with taking. People tend to value their own safety but each values it differently than others, and it is their right to do so as long as they are not imposing harm on anyone else through their actions.
Coercion can be a relative thing - anything from slavery to a gentleman’s agreement that if you help me build a house, I’ll help you build a house, because neither of us wants to lift rafters on our own.
The work required to e.g. build a (reasonably large) bridge is substantial; the work required to maintain that bridge in a safe condition is also substantial and it’s quite well known in free software circles that maintenance is a lot less sexy than building another shiny new bridge - government can struggle with this too, but that’s where rigid safety and oversight systems come into it. Start looking at dams and it gets way more scary.
Many many safety failures affect far more than the person who made the decision. That said, you often find the opposite - many people value others’ safety more than their own.
Only if you’re stuck in a mindset of “it’s valuable even if literally nobody wants it enough to make it”
Cleaning sewers? Generally anything waste related?
There are some people that actually kinda love those jobs, but idk if there are enough of them. And a game of chicken where the first person to become too annoyed at the smell in the streets fixes the issue would be… not great.
But anyway that’d only ever be an issue if there’s no market at all but that’s not a necessity to not have capitalism
Pretty sure once the waste starts to pile up it’d be valuable enough to society to remove it that lots of people would be willing to do it. There’s people out there right now working full time jobs and still picking up garbage on the side of the road in their free time because they don’t want to look at it.
Yeah but you don’t want to leave waste up to “we’ll do it when the problem gets bad enough.”
It requires maintenance and prevention, and while there might be people who recognize that and want to do the prevention there are almost certainly not enough for how large of a task it is. Especially because some of that prevention involves wading around in the poopy water, no body wants that without incentive.
It’s the same thing for things like road maintenance and electrical and plumbing maintenance. There are people who would do some of the jobs for free, again maybe, I’m just letting that go for the sake of argument. But those tasks are huge and require vast networks of people with a lot of education doing them professionally. Most are only there right now because they get a paycheck.
This can be a critical mass thing, though. Some projects are pointless unless you get enough people involved, but then have worthwhile results.
I would also put ‘safety’ in the “valuable, but no one wants to use it” category (note - not create safety systems, but convincing the truck driver or forge worker or backyard chemist to implement and use them).
you get a lot of really passionate advocates for safety once one of their loved ones dies because of a safety incident. And assuming they don’t live under capitalism and thus have freedom of work, they can choose to dedicate their life to advocating for this safety issue.
Then you need to get enough people willing to work on it. If you cannot, then its value is non-existent because it cannot exist without coercion.
When it comes to safety, as long as they are informed and not harming anyone else to do so then it is their choice to take as much risk as they are comfortable with taking. People tend to value their own safety but each values it differently than others, and it is their right to do so as long as they are not imposing harm on anyone else through their actions.
Coercion can be a relative thing - anything from slavery to a gentleman’s agreement that if you help me build a house, I’ll help you build a house, because neither of us wants to lift rafters on our own.
The work required to e.g. build a (reasonably large) bridge is substantial; the work required to maintain that bridge in a safe condition is also substantial and it’s quite well known in free software circles that maintenance is a lot less sexy than building another shiny new bridge - government can struggle with this too, but that’s where rigid safety and oversight systems come into it. Start looking at dams and it gets way more scary.
Many many safety failures affect far more than the person who made the decision. That said, you often find the opposite - many people value others’ safety more than their own.