"saving jobs" should mean a reduction in how many people are burdened with work. automation means less labor from humans for the same result, it saves us jobs.
imagine how many jobs would be saved if everyone used transit to the best of their ability, consolidating maintenance of countless cars into a comparably tiny fleet of buses
imagine a politician boasting how many jobs they saved in their district by getting the pointless military base closed. less work needs to be done here now, so we can relax more!
I wonder how many resources cell service networks dedicate each year to swapping the exact same customers back and forth. or maintaining separate systems to provide and account for a service that is largely indistinguishable to most customers. we could save a lot of jobs
open source software saves jobs
@else doesn't it mostly just make them unpaid? 😬
@wolfgang only because ✨Economics✨ says that things we share have no value and deserve no compensation, even if everyone is actually benefiting. but economics says a bunch of other nonsense that wastes jobs too
long, philosophizing about what a job even is, slavery, violence regular and sexual
@else like, yeah, but i was thinking about it in terms of "a job is some form of work that must be done by a person OR ELSE" (no pun intended) -- so most societies HAVE to have SOME number of jobs to be able to function (food, infrastructure, childcare)
jobs can be a Job as defined by Law and registered with israel's Tax Authority and The Institute for National Insurance and involve signing draconian 20 page contracts like my last office job,
but in my mind they can also look like being forced to marry an abusive man and birth and raise his children
or accidentally creating a piece of vital internet infrastructure and having no one who could serve as your replacement (for technical and/or political reasons) and if you delete it or even if you just quit and stop maintaining it, big important infrastructural software starts to fail
or doing art commissions online so you can pay rent and various bills and not get kicked out of your apartment/get disconnected from [essential service]
or growing wheat in your family's fields and taking some percentage of it up to the temple in jerusalem three times a year to give to the priests who would (send someone to) exile/imprison/kill you if you ever stopped
or going to get fresh water from the well so your family doesn't die of thirst today
*some* of these might get compensated in terms of currency, but not *all* of them
open source stuff can be a hobby, like my living room bus sign; or it can be a sponsored, paid, legal job like linus torvalds or dan abramov; but it can also be an accidental, unpaid job, like the leftpad guy whose name i forgot (Azer Koçulu, after duck duck going)
i suspect(?) that turning existing stuff into open source software can sometimes lead to that third kind of thing, which,,, uh,,,,, isn't good maybe?
