6 ms·

My office is based on a very uninspiring,private road,which among others,has a police station,UPS, post office, a couple of construction companies,music studio,

My office is based on a very uninspiring,private road,which among others,has a police station,UPS, post office, a couple of construction companies,music studio,law firm, recycling centre, furniture company and BMW centre. The road looks like crap,zero glamour.. There's a little cabin in the middle of the road- that's where the owner of the street is based.It looks like a cabin of a ticket inspector,while in fact it's the home for nearly 20 companies the guy has.The only clue is plenty of luxurious cars parked outside. 100 meters further,anothet shabby office,which turns out is the home of a nearly £30Million company,again the only clue are very expensive cars outside the office.Next to our office,is so called dark kitchen,which makes food for multiple restaurants listed on Deliveroo. Since they moved in, the road is always packed with mainly asian guys on scooters collectind meals for delivering.They all look overworked,tired and simply miserable. Makes such a contrast when you see all those Ferraris parked on the opposite side of the road...

core-questions 7y ago
While it's depressing, what alternative is there? No expensive cars for anyone? Should entire industries of engineers and designers making these artful creations be put out of business because you and I (and most of the people working on them) won't be able to afford one ourselves? Income disparity is natural. Regulation to prevent people from exploiting the system into higher income is good, but we'll never be able to make it so that the delivery driver and the corporate executive have the same standard of living, unless that standard is consuming gruel in a formless concrete cube somewhere.
- vkou 7y ago
  > While it's depressing, what alternative is there? For starters, how about, instead of 60% of the working age population working 40 hours to make ends meet, (with the other 40% mooching off them, through welfare, family members supporting eachother, etc), how about 80% of the population working 30 hours a week? It would create the same amount of wealth, but would distribute it a little differently.
  - stickfigure 7y ago
    This seems logical and tempting, but there obviously must be some reason societies haven't evolved to do this? My suspicion is that those remaining 40% are significantly less employable, and you can't just swap them in like a fungible good. I suspect also that as technical skills become more valuable - and our education system remains stagnant - that 40% number will grow.
  - blueline 7y ago
    >with the other 40% mooching off them, through welfare, family members supporting eachother i'd implore you to compare regular people welfare spending to corporate welfare spending if this is the view you hold
    - vkou 7y ago
      It's not a viewpoint I personally hold, but it is a viewpoint ~half the citizenry holds. (Including the folks who, without a shred of irony, personally benefit from this state of affairs.)
  - bartimus 7y ago
    Birthrate US: 1.8, China: 1.62, Japan: 1.44, EU: 1.6 Just allow the situation to resolve itself?
  - core-questions 7y ago
    How about that 80% working the full 40 hours? Have you looked around? There's no shortage of things that need to be done, fixed, maintained, repaired, overhauled. There's no dearth of resources to learn how to do this. I'd sooner see investment in apprenticeship programs and other efforts to reduce the "mooching" as you called it, than somehow thinking that having me work ten hours less a week is going to provide anything for anyone. How does me doing less work enable that? There's not a fixed supply of "work that can be done", by any stretch.
    - vkou 7y ago
      Why not 80 hours a week, then? Or 120? It's because I'm not trying to increase the amount of crap we produce. I simply postulate that we could get the same work done, by a better distribution of labour. Whether or not we need to produce more is another question entirely. > than somehow thinking that having me work ten hours less a week is going to provide anything for anyone. Take three people in your position, and you'll create a job for a fourth. And, after all, in our society, job creation is some holy grail that we need to bend over backwards on laws, regulations, and smart business sense for. Instead of compromising on those things, why not compromise on 'normal' working hours, instead?
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  No,not really. My comment was solely to depict the way I see these delivery drivers.I have nothing against rich people having businesses or expensive cars.
- kartan 7y ago
  > we'll never be able to make it so that the delivery driver and the corporate executive have the same standard of living, unless that standard is consuming gruel in a formless concrete cube somewhere. You moved the post from "delivery drivers" should get a fair salary to "everybody should have the same salary". The question is if delivery drivers should have a fair salary that allows them to have a decent life. Do you agree that "delivery drivers" should get a fair salary?
  - ricardobeat 7y ago
    > unless that standard is consuming gruel in a formless concrete cube somewhere. Why would that be? That’s a fallacy. We have the ability to produce far more than everyone would need to live a pretty abundant life.
    - kartan 7y ago
      > That’s a fallacy. I agree. Not my comment. I was just quoting.
    - core-questions 7y ago
      Maybe, but surely by now you can see that sustainability is a factor here. Produce how much, for how long? Is simply enabling unending consumerism until we run out of resources to be the highest calling of our species? Seems almost more depressing than the current dystopia to believe that we should keep it going for even longer just to ensure everyone gets an equal chance to consume their pile of fried meat.
    - malandrew 7y ago
      > We have the ability to produce far more than everyone would need to live a pretty abundant life. ... so long as that abundant life is location independent.
  - core-questions 7y ago
    > Do you agree that "delivery drivers" should get a fair salary? What is "fair"? One variety of "fair" is "getting a reasonable cut of the profit made from their actions", where "reasonable" is based on what the market will bear - i.e. if your labour is undercut by someone else, then it's a race to the bottom. This is what guilds and then trade unions originally evolved to deal with. Another variety of "fair" that seems to be gaining mindshare is the idea that you deserve a "living wage" for literally any full-time job, which is a new idea unsubstantiated by economic reality. It belies the fact that there are jobs that do have some demand, but simply aren't worth enough to the people who'd pay for them that they can supply a "living wage". And what's living? Is mung beans, rice, and a shared room in a house "living" enough or does everyone need their full maximized-carbon-footprint atomized solo lifestyle in order to "live"?
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Income disparity is natural I agree. Every time someone in history has tried to remove the gap it's ended in horror. But I don't believe those at the bottom shouldn't be able to get a better standard of living than they have now. Throughout history, raising the standard for those at the bottom usually makes the richest richer, but I'd argue that's a worthwhile tradeoff.
  - malandrew 7y ago
    More specifically, throughout history, opportunities that allow those at the bottom to raise their standard of living usually makes the richest richer. People can only get richer if there is productivity. Simply transferring wealth is not a panacea if it doesn't measurably result in productivity.
    - briandear 7y ago
      And penalizing productivity through confiscatory taxation kills productivity and wealth creation. Why bother working 40 hours if the government steals 20 hours of your labor to give to someone else producing less? Might as well just work 10 hours and have less of your your labor stolen. What’s the incentive for working harder if harder work just means you get to pay more for someone else? Why risk capital starting a business if you are going to end up in the same place as the guy that risks nothing? Redistribution kills economies and it kills innovation.
  - aylmao 7y ago
    > Every time someone in history has tried to remove the gap it's ended in horror. Has it? It's easy to recall the times it has because they make it to the history books, but there's been peaceful periods of reduction in income inequality too. Simply in the US, in the period right after WW2 income inequality fell in what is known as "The Great Compression"[1]. This was also an era of incredible progress and development of the US— everything from big developments around social issues (civil rights movement), huge cultural evolution (counterculture), big development in science and technology (moon landings, nuclear power, etc). When people don't have to worry about wether they can afford rent the next month, they can worry less about losing their job to immigrants, they can afford to quit a bad job to find a better one, open their own business, etc. In general not things you measure as economic standard of living, as the money you make and things you own, but that translate as less time spent stressed and more time spent being productive both economically and just culturally. The thought that to make things better for the poor we need to make them better for the rich too is awful close to trickle-down economics, which have proven again and again to be very much an unsound theory. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States#The_Great_Compression,_1937%E2%80%931967 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...
- twelvechairs 7y ago
  Sure you shouldn't expect everyone to have the same standard of living but you can bring a little closer with different taxation and benefits, minimum wage, better conditions, etc. Which leads to a society where we benefit from the creative spending power of a broader middle class (in that very Ford way) as well as the creativity of this person and their children who have more opportunity to be better educated and start businesses of their own
- defterGoose 7y ago
  I agree with you, partly. I consider myself pretty far left politically, but I recognize the disparity of mental capacity among workers and the relative societal value of different types of work. However, I think what OP is getting at is more the value of having a decent standard of living for everyone in the pursuit of even higher levels of general prosperity. The setting of an office park puts a deficit of such in stark relief. Perhaps, in this area specifically, we can see the value of a system like that which Europe has, where public mobility and urban renewal are top priorities. I, for one, think that it may be beneficial to our society in the long run to value labor over capital.
  - malandrew 7y ago
    We both value labor over capital and capital over labor depending on the market. The market is not either/or across the board. Not all labor is equal. As a somewhat specialized software engineer, my labor is generally valued over capital. What makes no sense is to expect all labor to be valued over capital since much of the labor is not the labor you need and you need to apply your capital to get the labor you do need.
    - defterGoose 7y ago
      I think in this thought experiment we are doing, it is reasonable to assume that all labor is labor you need, since someone has agreed to do that labor for economic gain. We're not talking about abstract labor, like someone spending time doing shitty art that no one wants to look at.
- rapind 7y ago
  It's true that income disparity is natural, and I would argue that it's good up to a point. We don't need everyone to earn the same and have the same standard of living. Work harder, make more! We just need to ratchet down the greed and manage the gap a hell of a lot better. I suspect an income ratio at or under 8:1 is sustainable, not 300:1 like we have now... especially since many of 300:1 mega-corps are subsidized through massive tax breaks. This doesn't have to be Russian oligarchs in charge of your bread rations. We just need worker co-ops, aka democracy in the workplace. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation for a working example of an alternative. Say you're an experienced developer. Maybe it would be OK if you only made twice as much as the lowest paid individual at your company? Maybe it would be OK if the CEO only made three times as much as you?
  - core-questions 7y ago
    I am okay with that ratio decreasing, but I don't see any way that that has any hope of being accomplished via policy changes any time soon.
    - rapind 7y ago
      I don't think it has to come too heavily from the top... if it does, then it starts to smell like already failed socialist experiments. Here's a few ideas that couldn't hurt though: 1. No more excessive corporate tax breaks. 2. No more offshore tax havens. 3. Equal footing for co-ops (subsidies, startup loans, etc.) 4. Teach alternatives to capitalism in schools, or least to think about capitalism more critically (this one's a stretch, it's already like a religion). Other than that, I think it needs to come from the bottom. If worker co-ops really are better places to work then the word will get out once there's more of them.
kartan 7y ago
You are describing an authentic dystopia. Technology promise was to work for humans. Now we are working for algorithms that push us to our human limits. It needs to change as it is nos sustainable in the long term. It just produces big profits in the short term. And, that is why is so difficult to stop.
- hnaccy 7y ago
  We're not working for the algorithms we're working for the owners. Fresh paint on old tale.
  - kartan 7y ago
    > Fresh paint on old tale. There is a lot of true in what you say. But, part of the problem is the level of efficiency. Where you needed before a chain of managers doing the dirty job and creating inefficiencies. An algorithm does not sleep, does not care that you have kids or you are sick, does not have compassion or gets angry. The root cause is the owner. Algorithms help, thou.
tw1010 7y ago
Yeah. Promises that "The future is going to be amazing" has been used time and time again throughout history to get people to accept going through troughs (of sorrows), waiting for futures that never come (or come only after they've entered retirement age). Can't believe we're falling for it again.
- Kiro 7y ago
  I think the present is amazing compared to the past.
  - tw1010 7y ago
    I'm guessing you're an engineer? Life certainly isn't amazing for people in society at large. There are people on the other side of the code we're producing. Something us engineers love to forget about.
    - jdnenej 7y ago
      Life wasn't exactly luxury for a farmer 200 years ago.
      - closeparen 7y ago
        According to the "inequality" framing, that is irrelevant, the important thing is that the lack of luxury was uniform across society.
      - tw1010 7y ago
        Sometimes I get a bit conspiratorial about the fact that whenever people want to give an example of how terrible life was in the past, they always mention primitive or agrarian times. It's almost never comparing life today with 100 years ago. (It's like they're finding a straw-man period.) But as Eric Weinstein has mentioned in plenty of interviews (e.g. in his latest one with Peter Thiel), life for the boomers were actually arguably better on average than it is for millennials today (and we're not talking about engineering millennials here).
briandear 7y ago
Those Asian guys on scooters save all of their money, then perhaps use that money to start a small shop or restaurant, then they buy some real estate, then in less than a generation their kids end up at Harvard. Look at the Vietnamese immigrant story in the United States after the Vietnam war. https://money.cnn.com/2016/08/12/news/economy/thuan-pham-refugee-uber/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2016/08/12/news/economy/thuan-pham-ref... https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/former-vietnamese-refugees-find-success-in-the-us/3341171.html https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/former-vietnamese-refu... > Vietnamese overall have higher incomes compared to the total foreign- and native-born populations. In 2017, households headed by a Vietnamese immigrant had a median income of approximately $63,200, compared to $56,700 and $60,800 for all immigrant and U.S.-born households, respectively. Further, in 2017, some 11 percent of Vietnamese families were living in poverty, a lower rate than for immigrant families overall (14 percent). https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/vietnamese-immigrants-united-states-5 https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/vietnamese-immigrant... Perhaps we should ask why there are so many “overworked and simply miserable” Asians compared to “native” born people who are more content to be underworked and living on the public dole, relatively speaking. The ability to work very hard and ultimately create a better life is at the heart of the immigrant experience. Rather than viewing that scene as a dystopia, we should view it as inspiring. Anyone with a work ethic and could also one day own a fancy car. It happens literally every day and at least in the US, the data supports it. Look at the success of the Vietnamese in the US compared to the success of other demographics. To top it off, in the US at least, most Vietnamese arrived with nothing, not even more than a few words of English and they turned it into a success story — and they did it without whining about politics or “inequality;” they just worked their asses off without complaint. They look “overworked, tired, and simply miserable,” because they are — but they understand that nobody owes them anything; if they are to be successful, they have to earn it with their own sweat and sacrifice. Some see misery, others see possibility. These guys on scooters don’t see themselves as victims like the more “enlightened” among us would suggest they are.
- foobarbecue 7y ago
  Ah the American dream, expressed only as an out of touch, rich white guy can: "perhaps you will open a restaurant and someday your kids might go to Harvard"

core-questions 7y ago

While it's depressing, what alternative is there? No expensive cars for anyone? Should entire industries of engineers and designers making these artful creations be put out of business because you and I (and most of the people working on them) won't be able to afford one ourselves? Income disparity is natural. Regulation to prevent people from exploiting the system into higher income is good, but we'll never be able to make it so that the delivery driver and the corporate executive have the same standard of living, unless that standard is consuming gruel in a formless concrete cube somewhere.

vkou 7y ago
> While it's depressing, what alternative is there? For starters, how about, instead of 60% of the working age population working 40 hours to make ends meet, (with the other 40% mooching off them, through welfare, family members supporting eachother, etc), how about 80% of the population working 30 hours a week? It would create the same amount of wealth, but would distribute it a little differently.
- stickfigure 7y ago
  This seems logical and tempting, but there obviously must be some reason societies haven't evolved to do this? My suspicion is that those remaining 40% are significantly less employable, and you can't just swap them in like a fungible good. I suspect also that as technical skills become more valuable - and our education system remains stagnant - that 40% number will grow.
- blueline 7y ago
  >with the other 40% mooching off them, through welfare, family members supporting eachother i'd implore you to compare regular people welfare spending to corporate welfare spending if this is the view you hold
  - vkou 7y ago
    It's not a viewpoint I personally hold, but it is a viewpoint ~half the citizenry holds. (Including the folks who, without a shred of irony, personally benefit from this state of affairs.)
- bartimus 7y ago
  Birthrate US: 1.8, China: 1.62, Japan: 1.44, EU: 1.6 Just allow the situation to resolve itself?
- core-questions 7y ago
  How about that 80% working the full 40 hours? Have you looked around? There's no shortage of things that need to be done, fixed, maintained, repaired, overhauled. There's no dearth of resources to learn how to do this. I'd sooner see investment in apprenticeship programs and other efforts to reduce the "mooching" as you called it, than somehow thinking that having me work ten hours less a week is going to provide anything for anyone. How does me doing less work enable that? There's not a fixed supply of "work that can be done", by any stretch.
  - vkou 7y ago
    Why not 80 hours a week, then? Or 120? It's because I'm not trying to increase the amount of crap we produce. I simply postulate that we could get the same work done, by a better distribution of labour. Whether or not we need to produce more is another question entirely. > than somehow thinking that having me work ten hours less a week is going to provide anything for anyone. Take three people in your position, and you'll create a job for a fourth. And, after all, in our society, job creation is some holy grail that we need to bend over backwards on laws, regulations, and smart business sense for. Instead of compromising on those things, why not compromise on 'normal' working hours, instead?
cosmodisk 7y ago
No,not really. My comment was solely to depict the way I see these delivery drivers.I have nothing against rich people having businesses or expensive cars.
kartan 7y ago
> we'll never be able to make it so that the delivery driver and the corporate executive have the same standard of living, unless that standard is consuming gruel in a formless concrete cube somewhere. You moved the post from "delivery drivers" should get a fair salary to "everybody should have the same salary". The question is if delivery drivers should have a fair salary that allows them to have a decent life. Do you agree that "delivery drivers" should get a fair salary?
- ricardobeat 7y ago
  > unless that standard is consuming gruel in a formless concrete cube somewhere. Why would that be? That’s a fallacy. We have the ability to produce far more than everyone would need to live a pretty abundant life.
  - kartan 7y ago
    > That’s a fallacy. I agree. Not my comment. I was just quoting.
  - core-questions 7y ago
    Maybe, but surely by now you can see that sustainability is a factor here. Produce how much, for how long? Is simply enabling unending consumerism until we run out of resources to be the highest calling of our species? Seems almost more depressing than the current dystopia to believe that we should keep it going for even longer just to ensure everyone gets an equal chance to consume their pile of fried meat.
  - malandrew 7y ago
    > We have the ability to produce far more than everyone would need to live a pretty abundant life. ... so long as that abundant life is location independent.
- core-questions 7y ago
  > Do you agree that "delivery drivers" should get a fair salary? What is "fair"? One variety of "fair" is "getting a reasonable cut of the profit made from their actions", where "reasonable" is based on what the market will bear - i.e. if your labour is undercut by someone else, then it's a race to the bottom. This is what guilds and then trade unions originally evolved to deal with. Another variety of "fair" that seems to be gaining mindshare is the idea that you deserve a "living wage" for literally any full-time job, which is a new idea unsubstantiated by economic reality. It belies the fact that there are jobs that do have some demand, but simply aren't worth enough to the people who'd pay for them that they can supply a "living wage". And what's living? Is mung beans, rice, and a shared room in a house "living" enough or does everyone need their full maximized-carbon-footprint atomized solo lifestyle in order to "live"?
cameronbrown 7y ago
Income disparity is natural I agree. Every time someone in history has tried to remove the gap it's ended in horror. But I don't believe those at the bottom shouldn't be able to get a better standard of living than they have now. Throughout history, raising the standard for those at the bottom usually makes the richest richer, but I'd argue that's a worthwhile tradeoff.
- malandrew 7y ago
  More specifically, throughout history, opportunities that allow those at the bottom to raise their standard of living usually makes the richest richer. People can only get richer if there is productivity. Simply transferring wealth is not a panacea if it doesn't measurably result in productivity.
  - briandear 7y ago
    And penalizing productivity through confiscatory taxation kills productivity and wealth creation. Why bother working 40 hours if the government steals 20 hours of your labor to give to someone else producing less? Might as well just work 10 hours and have less of your your labor stolen. What’s the incentive for working harder if harder work just means you get to pay more for someone else? Why risk capital starting a business if you are going to end up in the same place as the guy that risks nothing? Redistribution kills economies and it kills innovation.
- aylmao 7y ago
  > Every time someone in history has tried to remove the gap it's ended in horror. Has it? It's easy to recall the times it has because they make it to the history books, but there's been peaceful periods of reduction in income inequality too. Simply in the US, in the period right after WW2 income inequality fell in what is known as "The Great Compression"[1]. This was also an era of incredible progress and development of the US— everything from big developments around social issues (civil rights movement), huge cultural evolution (counterculture), big development in science and technology (moon landings, nuclear power, etc). When people don't have to worry about wether they can afford rent the next month, they can worry less about losing their job to immigrants, they can afford to quit a bad job to find a better one, open their own business, etc. In general not things you measure as economic standard of living, as the money you make and things you own, but that translate as less time spent stressed and more time spent being productive both economically and just culturally. The thought that to make things better for the poor we need to make them better for the rich too is awful close to trickle-down economics, which have proven again and again to be very much an unsound theory. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States#The_Great_Compression,_1937%E2%80%931967 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...
twelvechairs 7y ago
Sure you shouldn't expect everyone to have the same standard of living but you can bring a little closer with different taxation and benefits, minimum wage, better conditions, etc. Which leads to a society where we benefit from the creative spending power of a broader middle class (in that very Ford way) as well as the creativity of this person and their children who have more opportunity to be better educated and start businesses of their own
defterGoose 7y ago
I agree with you, partly. I consider myself pretty far left politically, but I recognize the disparity of mental capacity among workers and the relative societal value of different types of work. However, I think what OP is getting at is more the value of having a decent standard of living for everyone in the pursuit of even higher levels of general prosperity. The setting of an office park puts a deficit of such in stark relief. Perhaps, in this area specifically, we can see the value of a system like that which Europe has, where public mobility and urban renewal are top priorities. I, for one, think that it may be beneficial to our society in the long run to value labor over capital.
- malandrew 7y ago
  We both value labor over capital and capital over labor depending on the market. The market is not either/or across the board. Not all labor is equal. As a somewhat specialized software engineer, my labor is generally valued over capital. What makes no sense is to expect all labor to be valued over capital since much of the labor is not the labor you need and you need to apply your capital to get the labor you do need.
  - defterGoose 7y ago
    I think in this thought experiment we are doing, it is reasonable to assume that all labor is labor you need, since someone has agreed to do that labor for economic gain. We're not talking about abstract labor, like someone spending time doing shitty art that no one wants to look at.
rapind 7y ago
It's true that income disparity is natural, and I would argue that it's good up to a point. We don't need everyone to earn the same and have the same standard of living. Work harder, make more! We just need to ratchet down the greed and manage the gap a hell of a lot better. I suspect an income ratio at or under 8:1 is sustainable, not 300:1 like we have now... especially since many of 300:1 mega-corps are subsidized through massive tax breaks. This doesn't have to be Russian oligarchs in charge of your bread rations. We just need worker co-ops, aka democracy in the workplace. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation for a working example of an alternative. Say you're an experienced developer. Maybe it would be OK if you only made twice as much as the lowest paid individual at your company? Maybe it would be OK if the CEO only made three times as much as you?
- core-questions 7y ago
  I am okay with that ratio decreasing, but I don't see any way that that has any hope of being accomplished via policy changes any time soon.
  - rapind 7y ago
    I don't think it has to come too heavily from the top... if it does, then it starts to smell like already failed socialist experiments. Here's a few ideas that couldn't hurt though: 1. No more excessive corporate tax breaks. 2. No more offshore tax havens. 3. Equal footing for co-ops (subsidies, startup loans, etc.) 4. Teach alternatives to capitalism in schools, or least to think about capitalism more critically (this one's a stretch, it's already like a religion). Other than that, I think it needs to come from the bottom. If worker co-ops really are better places to work then the word will get out once there's more of them.

kartan 7y ago

You are describing an authentic dystopia. Technology promise was to work for humans. Now we are working for algorithms that push us to our human limits. It needs to change as it is nos sustainable in the long term. It just produces big profits in the short term. And, that is why is so difficult to stop.

hnaccy 7y ago
We're not working for the algorithms we're working for the owners. Fresh paint on old tale.
- kartan 7y ago
  > Fresh paint on old tale. There is a lot of true in what you say. But, part of the problem is the level of efficiency. Where you needed before a chain of managers doing the dirty job and creating inefficiencies. An algorithm does not sleep, does not care that you have kids or you are sick, does not have compassion or gets angry. The root cause is the owner. Algorithms help, thou.

tw1010 7y ago

Yeah. Promises that "The future is going to be amazing" has been used time and time again throughout history to get people to accept going through troughs (of sorrows), waiting for futures that never come (or come only after they've entered retirement age). Can't believe we're falling for it again.

Kiro 7y ago
I think the present is amazing compared to the past.
- tw1010 7y ago
  I'm guessing you're an engineer? Life certainly isn't amazing for people in society at large. There are people on the other side of the code we're producing. Something us engineers love to forget about.
  - jdnenej 7y ago
    Life wasn't exactly luxury for a farmer 200 years ago.
    - closeparen 7y ago
      According to the "inequality" framing, that is irrelevant, the important thing is that the lack of luxury was uniform across society.
    - tw1010 7y ago
      Sometimes I get a bit conspiratorial about the fact that whenever people want to give an example of how terrible life was in the past, they always mention primitive or agrarian times. It's almost never comparing life today with 100 years ago. (It's like they're finding a straw-man period.) But as Eric Weinstein has mentioned in plenty of interviews (e.g. in his latest one with Peter Thiel), life for the boomers were actually arguably better on average than it is for millennials today (and we're not talking about engineering millennials here).

briandear 7y ago

Those Asian guys on scooters save all of their money, then perhaps use that money to start a small shop or restaurant, then they buy some real estate, then in less than a generation their kids end up at Harvard. Look at the Vietnamese immigrant story in the United States after the Vietnam war. https://money.cnn.com/2016/08/12/news/economy/thuan-pham-refugee-uber/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2016/08/12/news/economy/thuan-pham-ref... https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/former-vietnamese-refugees-find-success-in-the-us/3341171.html https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/former-vietnamese-refu... > Vietnamese overall have higher incomes compared to the total foreign- and native-born populations. In 2017, households headed by a Vietnamese immigrant had a median income of approximately $63,200, compared to $56,700 and $60,800 for all immigrant and U.S.-born households, respectively. Further, in 2017, some 11 percent of Vietnamese families were living in poverty, a lower rate than for immigrant families overall (14 percent). https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/vietnamese-immigrants-united-states-5 https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/vietnamese-immigrant... Perhaps we should ask why there are so many “overworked and simply miserable” Asians compared to “native” born people who are more content to be underworked and living on the public dole, relatively speaking. The ability to work very hard and ultimately create a better life is at the heart of the immigrant experience. Rather than viewing that scene as a dystopia, we should view it as inspiring. Anyone with a work ethic and could also one day own a fancy car. It happens literally every day and at least in the US, the data supports it. Look at the success of the Vietnamese in the US compared to the success of other demographics. To top it off, in the US at least, most Vietnamese arrived with nothing, not even more than a few words of English and they turned it into a success story — and they did it without whining about politics or “inequality;” they just worked their asses off without complaint. They look “overworked, tired, and simply miserable,” because they are — but they understand that nobody owes them anything; if they are to be successful, they have to earn it with their own sweat and sacrifice. Some see misery, others see possibility. These guys on scooters don’t see themselves as victims like the more “enlightened” among us would suggest they are.

foobarbecue 7y ago
Ah the American dream, expressed only as an out of touch, rich white guy can: "perhaps you will open a restaurant and someday your kids might go to Harvard"