You're not as scarce as you think you are. I'm not as scarce as I think I am. And if you look into me, I think you'll find I'm reasonably scarce.

Union? If that's what it takes. Guild or professional organization? Preferably. Unorganized? It sucks.

That sounds wonderful, but is it actually legal in the modern world?

How the hell is someone living off $1200/month?

A welfare state doesn't have to run off revenue from taxing workers. It can tax the robot owners who make the massive revenues from the robotic productivity.

And they had better. We're soon entering a world in which we can either increase welfare income and leisure time, or we can have food riots among the one-third or one-half the population without jobs... and any allies of theirs among the still-employed who have taken wage cuts due to competition from the reserve army of the unemployed. Make no mistake, with even research scientists losing jobs, these mobs will have intelligent, ambitious people leading them.

Or we can create loads of stupid make-work jobs while nodding and smiling and winking and nudging and quietly crying ourselves to sleep every night because everyone knows their "jobs" achieve nothing for mankind but still require 50 hours/week and pay like crap. Currently I think that's the most likely path; I believe they call it the "service economy".

As noted by tbannist below, most stocks nowadays don't pay dividends. Any ownership you might have is temporary, and the way to make money is to bet right, to buy a stock that goes up and then sell it for more than its original price. Such transactions don't build lasting wealth, they build one-time windfalls. Now, yes, if you hold the stock for a really long time and its price goes rather far up, your one-time windfall can be pretty big. But it's still a one-time windfall rather than lasting wealth.

We discussed on a Reddit thread a day or two ago how much stock you would need to buy in a large, stable, dividend-paying company like a utility to make about $5000/year in dividends. The approximate answer was $80,000 worth of stock. Someone who's been working in a good job for something like 10-15 years might have that much saved up nowadays, but at that point in their career they probably want to buy a house. Oh, and if you get $5000/year from $80,000 of stock, it takes four decades for the investment to pay off its own price (unless you sell the stock for a one-time windfall, of course).

And let's not even get started about the rates on savings accounts and certificates of deposit these days! Most savings accounts I've seen now pay 0.1% APY interest. The particularly good accounts and most CoDs pay as much as 2% or 3%, just barely keeping up with inflation and even, in some years, still falling behind inflation. Gone are the days of putting your money away in savings, and finding that within five or ten or fifteen years the magic of compound interest has given you twice as much or half again your original investment.

Gone are the days of easy investment and easy wealth from living frugally and saving. We've got every right to be pissed off about this.

And the counterpoints are Groupon and Twitter, which to this day have no actual value proposition.

Sounds like your girlfriend is incurring brain damage from not sleeping enough. I don't see what's lazy about having time for sleep, work, and life.

Actually, I dislike telecommuting because my bosses are more anal about hours than productivity, particularly when telecommuting. If I come into the office, I get at least a little capability to manage myself, despite having fixed minimum hours. If I work from home, I need to be accountable for pretty much every half-hour.

I'm entirely in favor of socializing health-care and limiting the work-week... or at least, for decency's sake, passing a law saying that the legally required 30-minute lunch break must be on the clock. And housing prices? They have to crash. They simply have to crash. I'm 22, and I demand that houses crash because I see no way I'm ever affording a house, otherwise. You simply can't have houses rise faster than inflation every year without putting them out of the reach of all but the most wealthy, eventually. In my city, you need to work 10 hours/week to pay for an old fixer-upper of a one-bedroom apartment, ha, let alone a house!

I don't think 10 hours/week for a real job will ever be realistic because, as you noted, there's a basic number of overhead-hours per employee every week for non-menial non-shift work. Bring the hours/week down too low and the overhead starts taking up a large percentage, fair enough.

But on the other side, yeah, "40" is right. It's not really 40 hours/week of work in the way factory workers had 40 hours/week. Well, at some employers they expect that, but I've never seen one where they really get that. Somehow we still end up with the "culture thing" of not admitting that we can, in fact, be productive in less than 40 hours/week of butt-in-chair -- despite the fact that objective measurements of productivity have skyrocketed.

Productivity has gone way up, but somehow it's just meant that the rich get richer while the rest of us work more and harder to keep our heads above water.

It's the government's fault for setting unrealistic price floors? Bullshit. Most people's labor in most jobs is worth more than $7.25/hour. The fault lies in both business and government for setting up 40+ hours/week with 0-15 vacation days/year as a de jure and de facto norm that everyone in the labor market has to abide by, whether that's efficient, or desired, or not.

What's actually efficient, at this point, would be to institute universal health-care (removing the requirement of 32/35+ hours a week to receive health-care), remove any notion of non-hourly employment from our law-books, and then simply enforce a law saying that part-time wages and full-time wages must be identical for the same job. Then we let workers and employers figure out between themselves how much actual work they need to do and how much leisure they can take.

Ironically, the world of academia actually has more vacation time than American industry. Yes, those guys working at the forefront of human knowledge, doing one of the few remaining jobs that can't currently be automated in any fashion? Yes, them. They have more vacation time than you and me.

Of course, they work plenty hard because they don't get grants to pay their salaries if they can't produce research, but they still manage to take about a month's actual vacation every year, with some seasons also seeing reduced workload (due to the teaching semester being out).

No joke at all. How much money do you think you would need to earn in a year to just get by? Now, how much do you have to work, at your skill and experience level, to earn that? How much to earn 50% more? Twice your needs? Now how much would you need to work if you derived a capital income from the automation process?

Even many of today's decently-paid middle-class workers are working more than they really need to, just because our culture has fixated the labor markets (from both directions: employer and employee) on the idea of the 40+ hour work week.

Idleness is great. For a lot of people, idleness would be great if they could afford any without starvation and homelessness.

People bring this stuff up at General Assemblies of the Occupy movement, only to be told it's too "out-there" and obscure for an anarchist-founded populist left-wing movement to adopt.

Milton Friedman was also a supporter of a citizen's income program for alleviating poverty. He didn't believe that capitalism plus automation would somehow equal jobs for all; he believed that society could afford to provide everyone in the market with an equal baseline (which some would consume, and some would capitalize, etc) without distorting the beneficial mechanisms of markets.