7 ms·

Call me a crank, but personally, I'm getting annoyed by people who love to blame tech companies for everything. "This unending hamster wheel of capitalism and t

by whack 10y ago

Call me a crank, but personally, I'm getting annoyed by people who love to blame tech companies for everything. "This unending hamster wheel of capitalism and technology is driving us all to the brink of insanity" Maybe that's true, but instead of blaming tech companies and brogrammers, maybe try taking a look in the mirror. You want to escape the rat race? Pack up your bags, move to bumfuck nowhere, and spend all your time reading medium blog posts. I guarantee you, you don't need a whole lot of money to do that. Or if that sounds too drastic, just sit at home for the holidays, take the subway, cook your own meals, and clean your own house. Personally, that sounds like hell to me. I like traveling to other cities and staying in people's homes. I like taking an uber to get around sometimes. I like ordering food on seamless and hiring house cleaners on Handy, so I'll have more time to do the things I actually enjoy. And if you don't want to do any of the above, that's fine too. Just pretend all of the above companies don't exist and do what you want with your life, instead of complaining about tech companies and "brogrammers" providing services that cater to other people besides yourself.

branchless 10y ago
> And if you don't want to do any of the above, that's fine too Most people have no choice on this. They have to work and it's just to subsist. Typical of hacker news that this would be the most up-voted comment. Regarding tech, the main change tech has brought is to allow very accurate tracking of debt. Most debt is created through land. Surplus value goes to the landlords and banks. Before this was not completely efficient, now banks can react to productivity changes much faster. Prices are set by the highest bidder. Tech has enabled "side jobs" which means they can outbid others for rent / mortgage (renting fiat money from a bank). Banks scale up fiat money creation in response. Other workers must respond and they too need a side job. If we all worked 3 days a week it would be enough to pay the rent. If we all worked 7 days a week it would be enough to pay the rent. But we cannot coordinate this as workers. Tech is working against workers. Economic rent extraction is now fully efficient.
- rampage101 10y ago
  Not everybody is struggling out there... tech has some of the highest salaries for any industry. It is workers that are not in tech like traditional taxi drivers which are losing out badly to these innovations.
  - branchless 10y ago
    yes, which is a hell of a lot more than people who work in tech, hence my point that these people don't choose this, it's thrust upon them by our flawed system which sees surplus value flow to the banks who create credit out of nothing to capture said surplus value.
    - jacobush 10y ago
      Wow you got voted down
      - ithinkinstereo 10y ago
        "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair
- neffy 10y ago
  Close, but not quite. > Banks scale up fiat money creation in response The US money supply approximately doubles every 10 years, it's remarkably consistent modulo the occasional hiccup. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2 You're right, that that the markets will reprice very quickly, and roughly speaking the more there is (stuff, workers, etc.) the lower the price will be. This would be much less of a problem if money was more evenly distributed, or if there was an efficient tax system in the US. Mostly the problem (if it can be described as singular one) in the US, and elsewhere, is the failure to tax the financial sector properly and redistribute that money back into the public infrastructure.
  - branchless 10y ago
    I think we should cut this at the source. I never like taxing bad things where alternatives exist, let's just stop banks creating money. They should be intermediaries of funds not creators. https://bankunderground.co.uk/2015/06/30/banks-are-not-intermediaries-of-loanable-funds-and-why-this-matters/ https://bankunderground.co.uk/2015/06/30/banks-are-not-inter... I think it's not possible to stop land speculation so it should be taxed to pass the gains onto the people. As most money is issued against land let's have a land value tax. Secondly let the state decide how much money can be created each year via an agreed growth target, set by...look away now if you are a neo-liberal zealot...the state. Thirdly use LVT to provide an efficient basic income and to do away with income tax. Why do we tax work? We tax carbon to stop people emitting carbon. The current "system", if one can even confer such a name on such a dog's dinner, is insane. Regarding US M2, do we really have step jumps in productivity? Is it not reasonable that we see this trend upwards in a smooth(-ish) fashion? If so then bank issuance tracks productivity gains, no? #### EDIT ##### Will have to stop posting now as whenever I post about finance and question banks hacker news emits a fake "you are submitting too fast" message which I just got now replying to a different thread about zsh on a different page. I also cannot edit my top level comment two above this. What a great platform for debat HN has. Clearly they are confident in their model of lending and taking a cut and someone posting conflicting information that questions usury is no threat to them at all!
    - 10y ago
- dlss 10y ago
  > If we all worked 3 days a week it would be enough to pay the rent. If we all worked 7 days a week it would be enough to pay the rent. This is wrong. The reason rent is going up is because there's more demand than supply. Reducing the amount of money everyone has by a constant factor (in this case 3/5) will not change the supply/demand imbalance, so it won't solve the problem. Put another way: the reason rent is so high is to prevent some people from being able to purchase the product. There's not enough of it to go around. You're basically blaming the best known system for allocating scarce goods for the fact that scarce goods exist. If you look at countries that try to act on the above notion, you'll find that high prices are replaced with impossibly long lines. And shortages. This is because reducing the price will only increase the demand for that good. A better world view would be: if the baby boomers hadn't all had kids at the same time, we wouldn't be experiencing housing shortages. This theory (though incomplete) at least puts demand increases front and center. You could also blame cities for not allowing/supporting the construction of new housing. That theory (though incomplete) at least puts the supply shortages front and center.
  - branchless 10y ago
    Rents are set by wages, prices by credit. http://i.imgur.com/oWxV1po.jpg http://i.imgur.com/oWxV1po.jpg People live in one home, whether we work 3 or 7 days. You are confusing cheaper products garnering more demand with a flat need. This is why we should tax land: the supply is constant. Demand is up due to financialization of housing by the banks and greedy landlords are their foot soldiers. Edit can submit no more due to the usual HN censorship so this last edit for the guy below: You are just talking across me with no regard to my point at all. The graph is from the ft and the y axis is linear, it's from 2012 with no cutoff due to a change in trend. I'm not saying don't compete, my earlier post stated that when we all work more or smarter in aggregate the banks take the gains and we all end up running to stand still. That was my point.
    - dlss 10y ago
      > Rents are set by wages, prices by credit. NO. Prices are set by supply and demand. No one is being forced to take out a loan, and if they could buy a given home with a lower loan, they would. Hence the loan is only enabling demand. You could say the same thing about employment, or inheritance, or tax breaks. The only reason prices change is because supply or demand changes. You are basically saying that you'd like everyone to just accept their lot in life, and not compete with you for your current house. And in exchange you'll not compete with those in houses you'd prefer. And you're blaming the banks because they're helping those who don't agree that you deserve the hose more than they do. When supply is scarce, prices go up. The value of the good does not go up. What is that extra price doing? That's you bribing the owner of the good to sell to you, and not to some other guy. You're paying to make the price so high that the next guy in line would rather live somewhere else, share a room, or go homeless. > http://i.imgur.com/oWxV1po.jpg http://i.imgur.com/oWxV1po.jpg The image, though interesting looking, is missing context. What units is the Y-axis in, and why does the X-axis only go to (what I assume is) 2012? > People live in one home, whether we work 3 or 7 days. People aren't born with homes. If you lost yours, someone would move in. Where do you think this other person is currently living? Why do you deserve your home more than they do? How should homes be allocated if not by whoever is willing and able to pay the most? Who will make new homes in this new system of yours? (an especially worrying problem since I think you suggested all the construction workers only need to work 3 days per week, and housing is already scarce)
beevai142 10y ago
If someone wants to fight the "unending hamster wheel of capitalism and technology", then certainly shutting up is a bad strategy. The reasons for making noise about this given in the article are not personal, but ideological. Presumably, it works as intended if it feels annoying.
- whack 10y ago
  But the enemies he's railing against have nothing to do with the cause he's trying to champion. The central message of the blog post is to let go of consumerism, which I can certainly get behind. But consumerism has nothing to do with the latest generation of tech companies. Costly hotels existed long before AirBNB came along. Taxis existed long before Uber came along. Restaurants and maids existed long before Handy or Seamless. If you want to be anti-consumerist, if you want to minimize your living expenses, go right ahead. But vilifying Seamless, and the people who would rather use Seamless and spend the extra hour reading instead of cooking, is just masturbatory righteous-indignation.
- jack9 10y ago
  > "unending hamster wheel of capitalism and technology", then certainly shutting up is a bad strategy Whut? I'm not sure that has ever been effective at reversing course. Sometimes a society has changed course, but that's just because this message got lumped in with the have-nots, which is unrelated. This sentiment has never been satisfied, so I'll disagree that shutting up and moving on is a bad strategy. It's the ONLY strategy since it's tied to frontiersman thinking of having too much after enduring risk.
bsder 10y ago
> I like <lots of serfdom economy stuff elided> The point isn't preventing YOU, the consumer, from doing this. The point is that most people as the supplier aren't doing Uber, AirBnB, etc because they like it. They're doing it because they don't have any other good alternatives. Most of the people on the supply side of the serfdom economy are gaining very little benefit. This is a real problem.
- whack 10y ago
  > They're doing it because they don't have any other good alternatives. So champion proposals that would grow the economy, create more jobs, increase the median hourly wages, and/or improve the social safety net. I don't see how vilifying Uber or AirBNB is going to help accomplish any of the above. P.S. There is no way for you as an individual to be a supplier on the Seamless, but that still hasn't spared them the author's wrath. I don't think the author really has a clear idea of what he's complaining about.
  - jacobush 10y ago
    Can't we rant and wail a bit about how increasingly broken shit looks? Why always champion a proposal to fix things? But thanks for the idea that vilifying Airbnb is not going to help anyone. I agree. They exist only because we let them fill that particular part of the biosphere. Maybe we shouldn't let them.
    - closeparen 10y ago
      Who do you think is made better off by keeping that role in the biosphere vacant?
      - jacobush 10y ago
        To keep the analogy, some species we remove from the biosphere and replace with others. Airbnb and Uber etc look like the fast spread of an invasive species.
  - 10y ago
l33tbro 10y ago
While I agree with a lot of what you've said, I think you missed much of the point of the article. It was written by a comedian, and therefore I read it as meaning to be provocative and not to be taken entirely at face-value (eg, the title of the article). Therefore, I think answering something intentionally provocative with another polemic (eg, "move to bumfuck nowhere" etc) only prevents you from engaging with the actual issues being raised in the original piece. What I think the piece really is talking about is where things are headed on the cultural and socio-economic compass for the peons (sic), and how that's being framed through this clever, winking, yet ultimately Orwellian language of the culture that validates and encourages what are arguably destructive social forces: being "always on" and "shut-in"-style social isolation.
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
> Or if that sounds too drastic, just sit at home for the holidays, take the subway, cook your own meals, and clean your own house. The problem is that many people are doing all of that and still hustling frantically just to afford meals to cook and a house to clean. They more I look at your post, the more it seems like you're genuinely unaware that poor people exist.
zeroer 10y ago
> Personally, that sounds like hell to me. Vive la différence! There's never been a time in human history where moving to bumfuck nowhere has been a better or more stimulating option.
ohnotthatguy 10y ago
You know I did pack my bags, bailed on Silicon Beach, (Silicon Beeeeyaaatch!!!) and moved to bum-fuck nowhere. It actually cost me a considerable amount of money to sew up all my affairs. (cancel contracts, get rid of a lease, make arrangements) It's incredibly cost-prohibitive to break a routine in an American city, and relocate. It took some clever bureaucracy hacks, negotiating a complex sea of contingencies, and ultimately a good deal of material sacrifice to make it happen. The 'rat race' is not exactly 'designed' at all. As an inadvertent consequence, it is not designed to allow one to leave it easily. It seems that you view these services, which are luxuries, as options for the people that have to provide these services in order to survive in the modern American urban environment. They generally can't afford these luxuries. Nobodies blaming, or complaining about tech companies providing services. People are blaming tech companies and complaining about the effects of tech companies arbitraging value from economic systems that already existed, further increasing the concentration of wealth (which is ostensibly access to resources) among those who can already afford to invest in building the mechanisms to arbitrage said value. And, quite frankly, some of us are getting annoyed with people who defend companies that actually influence legislature on local and national levels to enable this arbitrage to the detriment of the citizenship of these regions, while shoving advertising, and news stories in our faces, labeling this arbitrage as the quintessential if not sole definition of human progress. Also, this article was comedy, and hilarious.

by whack 10y ago

branchless 10y ago

> And if you don't want to do any of the above, that's fine too Most people have no choice on this. They have to work and it's just to subsist. Typical of hacker news that this would be the most up-voted comment. Regarding tech, the main change tech has brought is to allow very accurate tracking of debt. Most debt is created through land. Surplus value goes to the landlords and banks. Before this was not completely efficient, now banks can react to productivity changes much faster. Prices are set by the highest bidder. Tech has enabled "side jobs" which means they can outbid others for rent / mortgage (renting fiat money from a bank). Banks scale up fiat money creation in response. Other workers must respond and they too need a side job. If we all worked 3 days a week it would be enough to pay the rent. If we all worked 7 days a week it would be enough to pay the rent. But we cannot coordinate this as workers. Tech is working against workers. Economic rent extraction is now fully efficient.

rampage101 10y ago
Not everybody is struggling out there... tech has some of the highest salaries for any industry. It is workers that are not in tech like traditional taxi drivers which are losing out badly to these innovations.
- branchless 10y ago
  yes, which is a hell of a lot more than people who work in tech, hence my point that these people don't choose this, it's thrust upon them by our flawed system which sees surplus value flow to the banks who create credit out of nothing to capture said surplus value.
  - jacobush 10y ago
    Wow you got voted down
    - ithinkinstereo 10y ago
      "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair
neffy 10y ago
Close, but not quite. > Banks scale up fiat money creation in response The US money supply approximately doubles every 10 years, it's remarkably consistent modulo the occasional hiccup. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2 You're right, that that the markets will reprice very quickly, and roughly speaking the more there is (stuff, workers, etc.) the lower the price will be. This would be much less of a problem if money was more evenly distributed, or if there was an efficient tax system in the US. Mostly the problem (if it can be described as singular one) in the US, and elsewhere, is the failure to tax the financial sector properly and redistribute that money back into the public infrastructure.
- branchless 10y ago
  I think we should cut this at the source. I never like taxing bad things where alternatives exist, let's just stop banks creating money. They should be intermediaries of funds not creators. https://bankunderground.co.uk/2015/06/30/banks-are-not-intermediaries-of-loanable-funds-and-why-this-matters/ https://bankunderground.co.uk/2015/06/30/banks-are-not-inter... I think it's not possible to stop land speculation so it should be taxed to pass the gains onto the people. As most money is issued against land let's have a land value tax. Secondly let the state decide how much money can be created each year via an agreed growth target, set by...look away now if you are a neo-liberal zealot...the state. Thirdly use LVT to provide an efficient basic income and to do away with income tax. Why do we tax work? We tax carbon to stop people emitting carbon. The current "system", if one can even confer such a name on such a dog's dinner, is insane. Regarding US M2, do we really have step jumps in productivity? Is it not reasonable that we see this trend upwards in a smooth(-ish) fashion? If so then bank issuance tracks productivity gains, no? #### EDIT ##### Will have to stop posting now as whenever I post about finance and question banks hacker news emits a fake "you are submitting too fast" message which I just got now replying to a different thread about zsh on a different page. I also cannot edit my top level comment two above this. What a great platform for debat HN has. Clearly they are confident in their model of lending and taking a cut and someone posting conflicting information that questions usury is no threat to them at all!
  - 10y ago
dlss 10y ago
> If we all worked 3 days a week it would be enough to pay the rent. If we all worked 7 days a week it would be enough to pay the rent. This is wrong. The reason rent is going up is because there's more demand than supply. Reducing the amount of money everyone has by a constant factor (in this case 3/5) will not change the supply/demand imbalance, so it won't solve the problem. Put another way: the reason rent is so high is to prevent some people from being able to purchase the product. There's not enough of it to go around. You're basically blaming the best known system for allocating scarce goods for the fact that scarce goods exist. If you look at countries that try to act on the above notion, you'll find that high prices are replaced with impossibly long lines. And shortages. This is because reducing the price will only increase the demand for that good. A better world view would be: if the baby boomers hadn't all had kids at the same time, we wouldn't be experiencing housing shortages. This theory (though incomplete) at least puts demand increases front and center. You could also blame cities for not allowing/supporting the construction of new housing. That theory (though incomplete) at least puts the supply shortages front and center.
- branchless 10y ago
  Rents are set by wages, prices by credit. http://i.imgur.com/oWxV1po.jpg http://i.imgur.com/oWxV1po.jpg People live in one home, whether we work 3 or 7 days. You are confusing cheaper products garnering more demand with a flat need. This is why we should tax land: the supply is constant. Demand is up due to financialization of housing by the banks and greedy landlords are their foot soldiers. Edit can submit no more due to the usual HN censorship so this last edit for the guy below: You are just talking across me with no regard to my point at all. The graph is from the ft and the y axis is linear, it's from 2012 with no cutoff due to a change in trend. I'm not saying don't compete, my earlier post stated that when we all work more or smarter in aggregate the banks take the gains and we all end up running to stand still. That was my point.
  - dlss 10y ago
    > Rents are set by wages, prices by credit. NO. Prices are set by supply and demand. No one is being forced to take out a loan, and if they could buy a given home with a lower loan, they would. Hence the loan is only enabling demand. You could say the same thing about employment, or inheritance, or tax breaks. The only reason prices change is because supply or demand changes. You are basically saying that you'd like everyone to just accept their lot in life, and not compete with you for your current house. And in exchange you'll not compete with those in houses you'd prefer. And you're blaming the banks because they're helping those who don't agree that you deserve the hose more than they do. When supply is scarce, prices go up. The value of the good does not go up. What is that extra price doing? That's you bribing the owner of the good to sell to you, and not to some other guy. You're paying to make the price so high that the next guy in line would rather live somewhere else, share a room, or go homeless. > http://i.imgur.com/oWxV1po.jpg http://i.imgur.com/oWxV1po.jpg The image, though interesting looking, is missing context. What units is the Y-axis in, and why does the X-axis only go to (what I assume is) 2012? > People live in one home, whether we work 3 or 7 days. People aren't born with homes. If you lost yours, someone would move in. Where do you think this other person is currently living? Why do you deserve your home more than they do? How should homes be allocated if not by whoever is willing and able to pay the most? Who will make new homes in this new system of yours? (an especially worrying problem since I think you suggested all the construction workers only need to work 3 days per week, and housing is already scarce)

beevai142 10y ago

If someone wants to fight the "unending hamster wheel of capitalism and technology", then certainly shutting up is a bad strategy. The reasons for making noise about this given in the article are not personal, but ideological. Presumably, it works as intended if it feels annoying.

whack 10y ago
But the enemies he's railing against have nothing to do with the cause he's trying to champion. The central message of the blog post is to let go of consumerism, which I can certainly get behind. But consumerism has nothing to do with the latest generation of tech companies. Costly hotels existed long before AirBNB came along. Taxis existed long before Uber came along. Restaurants and maids existed long before Handy or Seamless. If you want to be anti-consumerist, if you want to minimize your living expenses, go right ahead. But vilifying Seamless, and the people who would rather use Seamless and spend the extra hour reading instead of cooking, is just masturbatory righteous-indignation.
jack9 10y ago
> "unending hamster wheel of capitalism and technology", then certainly shutting up is a bad strategy Whut? I'm not sure that has ever been effective at reversing course. Sometimes a society has changed course, but that's just because this message got lumped in with the have-nots, which is unrelated. This sentiment has never been satisfied, so I'll disagree that shutting up and moving on is a bad strategy. It's the ONLY strategy since it's tied to frontiersman thinking of having too much after enduring risk.

bsder 10y ago

> I like <lots of serfdom economy stuff elided> The point isn't preventing YOU, the consumer, from doing this. The point is that most people as the supplier aren't doing Uber, AirBnB, etc because they like it. They're doing it because they don't have any other good alternatives. Most of the people on the supply side of the serfdom economy are gaining very little benefit. This is a real problem.

whack 10y ago
> They're doing it because they don't have any other good alternatives. So champion proposals that would grow the economy, create more jobs, increase the median hourly wages, and/or improve the social safety net. I don't see how vilifying Uber or AirBNB is going to help accomplish any of the above. P.S. There is no way for you as an individual to be a supplier on the Seamless, but that still hasn't spared them the author's wrath. I don't think the author really has a clear idea of what he's complaining about.
- jacobush 10y ago
  Can't we rant and wail a bit about how increasingly broken shit looks? Why always champion a proposal to fix things? But thanks for the idea that vilifying Airbnb is not going to help anyone. I agree. They exist only because we let them fill that particular part of the biosphere. Maybe we shouldn't let them.
  - closeparen 10y ago
    Who do you think is made better off by keeping that role in the biosphere vacant?
    - jacobush 10y ago
      To keep the analogy, some species we remove from the biosphere and replace with others. Airbnb and Uber etc look like the fast spread of an invasive species.
- 10y ago

l33tbro 10y ago

While I agree with a lot of what you've said, I think you missed much of the point of the article. It was written by a comedian, and therefore I read it as meaning to be provocative and not to be taken entirely at face-value (eg, the title of the article). Therefore, I think answering something intentionally provocative with another polemic (eg, "move to bumfuck nowhere" etc) only prevents you from engaging with the actual issues being raised in the original piece. What I think the piece really is talking about is where things are headed on the cultural and socio-economic compass for the peons (sic), and how that's being framed through this clever, winking, yet ultimately Orwellian language of the culture that validates and encourages what are arguably destructive social forces: being "always on" and "shut-in"-style social isolation.

PhasmaFelis 10y ago

> Or if that sounds too drastic, just sit at home for the holidays, take the subway, cook your own meals, and clean your own house. The problem is that many people are doing all of that and still hustling frantically just to afford meals to cook and a house to clean. They more I look at your post, the more it seems like you're genuinely unaware that poor people exist.

zeroer 10y ago

> Personally, that sounds like hell to me. Vive la différence! There's never been a time in human history where moving to bumfuck nowhere has been a better or more stimulating option.

ohnotthatguy 10y ago

You know I did pack my bags, bailed on Silicon Beach, (Silicon Beeeeyaaatch!!!) and moved to bum-fuck nowhere. It actually cost me a considerable amount of money to sew up all my affairs. (cancel contracts, get rid of a lease, make arrangements) It's incredibly cost-prohibitive to break a routine in an American city, and relocate. It took some clever bureaucracy hacks, negotiating a complex sea of contingencies, and ultimately a good deal of material sacrifice to make it happen. The 'rat race' is not exactly 'designed' at all. As an inadvertent consequence, it is not designed to allow one to leave it easily. It seems that you view these services, which are luxuries, as options for the people that have to provide these services in order to survive in the modern American urban environment. They generally can't afford these luxuries. Nobodies blaming, or complaining about tech companies providing services. People are blaming tech companies and complaining about the effects of tech companies arbitraging value from economic systems that already existed, further increasing the concentration of wealth (which is ostensibly access to resources) among those who can already afford to invest in building the mechanisms to arbitrage said value. And, quite frankly, some of us are getting annoyed with people who defend companies that actually influence legislature on local and national levels to enable this arbitrage to the detriment of the citizenship of these regions, while shoving advertising, and news stories in our faces, labeling this arbitrage as the quintessential if not sole definition of human progress. Also, this article was comedy, and hilarious.