7 ms·

Modern "economy". There are a bunch of thousands of guys with a couple to a couple hundred billion each. There are millions of people desperate to own a house

• dang 3y ago
  You started a hell of a flamewar with this. Could you please not do that on HN, regardless of how bad things are or you feel they are? We're trying for something different here, such as not burning to a crisp. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  Money is not wealth. Once you have more of it than is necessary for basic needs, you have to figure out a way to get rid of it and exchange it for real wealth. Investing it in "tech" is an easy and dumb solution to the problem.
  • Ekaros 3y ago
    Also wealth is not money... Owning million of unliquid asset is not money.
  • boxed 3y ago
    The problem is that the 0.1% don't seem to really understand this. If they did we would se massive investments in basic science and medicine from them. But we don't. Instead most of them seem to treat their wealth as internet points to compare to other super rich.
    • bombolo 3y ago
      They want investments with short term returns… and basic science isn't that.
      • boxed 3y ago
        But that's exactly because they're being stupid. Only basic science or medicine has any chance of making any significant impact on their lives. And most of the potential basic science impact will do so via medicine. Being a billionaire won't protect you from cancer and multi resistant bacteria. They are missing an opportunity to increase their life span and life quality and do the same for their children. Only very few billionaires understand this, Bill Gates being maybe the most obvious example.
        • bombolo 3y ago
          Bill Gates is a lot of talk but I suspect he's using his funds to push microsoft onto poor countries that would otherwise default to linux.
          • boxed 3y ago
            You are very mistaken.
• kortilla 3y ago
  > What could be better? Reality. Most of tech is not funded by existing billionaires.
  • jokethrowaway 3y ago
    This. If life were as op (beautifully) put it, the world would be much better. At least the rich guy would try to innovate. Most billionaires get rich in ways that are worthless, when they're not damaging to society. We allow governments to send people to die in wars just so their friends producing weapons will make a profit. Most of the money around gets stolen from the little guys and given to the big guys. Think about your taxes funding banks' bailouts or inflation. Tech is not perfect, every large organisation eventually resemble the politics and stupid games of powers you see in every government or other criminal organisation. The waste, the inefficiency, the idiotic rules. Stay in small companies, create value for real people, maybe even start one (with no VC) if you want your chance at making some cash without going insane.
  • kubb 3y ago
    So let's say you want to start a company that makes some stupid AI cookbook and you want money to payroll people. How do you do that without investor cash?
    • kortilla 3y ago
      Where did you get the impression that investor cash is tied to billionaires?
• c03 3y ago
  This reads like Sin City. Please do more Noir style writing.
  • baq 3y ago
    This isn’t noir writing, I found it an accurate if a bit cynical description of reality
• moandcompany 3y ago
  "The stock is the product." Jack Barker
• MichaelZuo 3y ago
  It's a bit weird to label millions of people, including presumably yourself, as 'poor suckers', is this a joke?
  • mschuster91 3y ago
    > It's a bit weird to label millions of people, including presumably yourself, as 'poor suckers', is this a joke? Your average millionaire is closer in wealth to the average homeless person than he is to the average billionaire. A single catastrophic event - be it some kid getting paralyzed on your backyard trampoline, an investment gone wrong, a company going under because it can't compete with Chinese government-backed price dumping, disaster that rips apart one's home that has gotten uninsurable, cancer, or early-onset dementia - can wipe out their wealth in the blink of an eye, whereas the billionaire can afford to sink half a billion into a yacht and still have not made a dent in his wealth.
  • trashtester 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • kubb 3y ago
    It's an oxymoron, that highlights elite's dismissive attitudes towards the working class. You might stumble upon oxymorons in all kinds of non-technical literature in various languages.
    • MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Can you explain how that is an 'oxymoron'? because I'm having trouble squaring the intended meaning with the dictionary definition.
      • kubb 3y ago
        Poor is an expression of compassion, and sucker is dismissive. They're contradictory.
        • 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• borissk 3y ago
  Actually compared to the economies of past societies, the modern economy in the West is amazing. If you work hard, have a little bit above the average intelligence and potentially a bit of luck you can make a lot of money. If not I guess you can make excuses. The simplest way to organize a group of people, animals, organisms is to make one of them leader and have the rest follow him. This is the way our ancestors behaved for hundreds of millions of years and it's hardwired into our brains.
  • bombolo 3y ago
    I'm sure you're completely unaware of the fact that your world view comes from protestant religion, which equates richness with god's favour, thus ending up considering poor people as worse sinners who don't deserve a better life due to their moral failings. People of other religions and cultures don't necessarily share your same faith (I realise you think you're being completely rational, but to an external observer you are not).
    • trashtester 3y ago
      I'm an atheist, but this is what I learned in school (by Protestant Christian Socialist teachers): Matthew 19:23-26 American Standard Version (ASV) And Jesus said unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, It is hard for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
      • bombolo 3y ago
        In my experience that bit is more forgotten in protestant countries rather than catholic ones. As in, in catholic ones rich people aren't seen as model of virtue and everybody knows that "hard work" won't get you there.
        • trashtester 3y ago
          > In my experience that bit is more forgotten in protestant countries rather than catholic ones. I think you're misunderstanding the "hard work" part. Unlike (perhaps) in the US, the work ethic part of northern/Germanic countries is not about working super hard to get rich, but rather to do the job with the integrity and effort that is reasonable, given your health and abilities. The typical reward is not to get super rich quickly. But if you uphold the ideal, you deserve respect, even if you're cleaning staff or the janitor. Similarly, NOT living up to the ethical standards will be damning regardless of social status. Cheating and corruption comes with harsh social punishment, especially for those near the top. Remember that we're talking about the part of the world that pratically invented both Social Democracy and the Nordic Model. Now, I also have family and contacts in various places in Southern Europe and South East Asia, some of which as very wealthy. What these ALL have in common is that various types of corruption and plutocracy are just facts of life that are taken for granted, and nobody cares. Now my own hypothesis is that religion plays only a small role in this difference, and that this is mostly a consequence of the difficulty of surviving as a farmer in Northern Europe during the medieaval era, and especially in Scandinavia. People used to live on isolated farms or in small villages, where the farms would barely produce enough food to sustain the family of the farmer. Those who did not work at least moderately hard usually would not survive, and there was little left over to give to either the poor or the nobility. This led to an egalitarian outlook, where people who wanted to live off the produce of others were not tolerated easily, regardless of whether they were beggars, thieves or barons. And since production was low, there was little to tax or steal, anyway. In warmer climates, farm yields were much greater, which caused success to be much more about social relationships than hard work at the farm.
• oneshtein 3y ago
  So, we few have few variants to chose: a) everybody are poor; b) some are poor, some are in the middle; some are rich. Variant (b) is bad because some are poor.
• robertlagrant 3y ago
  This isn't exactly untrue, although the numbers are off, I think, but no one seems to invented a better alternative. If you have money because you stole it from your citizens, or because you sent your serfs to die in a war, that's infinitely worse than because you did something someone else thought was valuable and they paid you for it.
  • mihaic 3y ago
    Only very few people are asking for a completely different system, they usually demand fine-tuning the system so that it improves median life quality. It used to be that the philosophy before was to have the least amount of intervention on the free market, and it's now that there should be no interventions whatsoever. Isn't that an extreme position?
    • trashtester 3y ago
      There is probably no country in the world with no intervention, or even close. In fact, there are massive intervention in pretty much every country. Actual lassez-faire economies was mostly a thing in the 19th century. Since then, regulatations have been accumulating constantly, and total government spending increased to GDP increased from about 10% to 35-75% in most if not all western countries.
      • mihaic 3y ago
        Yes, but many of these have one form or another of "take from the middle class and give to everyone else". I wasn't arguing that governments don't do anything, it's that they don't do enough to limit the size if the parasitic rich class, while the original post was saying that this is the best system we've got.
        • trashtester 3y ago
          > limit the size if the parasitic rich class Do you consider it ok to dehumanize your fellow humans by comparing them to parasites? Also, how can you be so sure that the metaphor even works? Do you truely believe that everyone else would be better off if the top 0.1% richest people in the world had never been born, and never started all those big companies they own? Because that's what it means to be a "parasite". To consume resources you have no part in creating. Or is the word "parasictic" ONLY used as a means to dehumanize a group you detest, without even being meant to be seen as a metaphor? I don't mind having a discussion about how to best distribute the economic output of the economy, but calling one group or another parasites is not a good start.
• throwawaylinux 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    > What could be better is to be happy with what you have. This statement requires further qualification; for example, you certainly wouldn’t say that to someone in an abusive relationship - or someone living in poverty.
    • throwawaylinux 3y ago
      It does not. I obviously did not say or imply that everybody can be happy with what they have. People who have more than you existing doesn't have to be a reason that you're unhappy though.
      • DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
        > I obviously did not say or imply that everybody can be happy with what they have Versus: > What could be better is to be happy with what you have. Contradiction detected.
        • throwawaylinux 3y ago
          I'd love to help but I'm not sure what words you're struggling with. "Could", perhaps? Or is it just the hypothetical nature of the question and answer that is not talking about a specific person's complete life situation, but responding to someone moaning about how terrible life is because "the rich guys", that bypassed you?
  • tromp 3y ago
    The rich man is not he who has a lot, but he who needs little...
  • bombolo 3y ago
    [flagged]
• Tenoke 3y ago
  You need to be really blinded by cynism to not see how much better modern life is for average people or how many people benefit from advancements and scale which wouldn't be possible without billions of dollars worth of investments.
  • willvarfar 3y ago
    Is this accidental to the billionaires, or is this their intended outcome? And could the investment come from alternative sources if the billionaires didn't exist?
    • Tenoke 3y ago
      >And could the investment come from alternative sources if the billionaires didn't exist? In theory, sure. In practice, pretending that the current system has been making things worse or that we have a viable realistic and better alternative is flat-out wrong.
  • kubb 3y ago
    Is it OK to be content with how much better things are now than before we had modern dentistry and combustion engines, without questioning how entire macroeconomic phenomena contribute to our modern wellbeing? We improved, can we improve further?
• mihaaly 3y ago
  Nice summary.
• gsatic 3y ago
  Things are always changing. The US and its mindless dynamics definately could use a kick in the teeth to speed up the change. But its happening with interest rates rising, dedollarization etc. Some rich folk who think nothing is changing and their behavior doesnt need to change, their story wont end well. They dont have as much control over anything as they think. In fact I think rich people are going to take the biggest hit mentally, financially, socially cause its very precarious having wealth without control over what happens tomorrow morning.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• trashtester 3y ago
  How do you define "poor"? Net worth of less than $10M? Income less than $1M? Unless you set very strict limits for "poor" like that, the people that the ultra rich hire tend to be rather well off, or at least comfortable, themselves ( by that I mean net worth of >$1M OR income of >$100k. Actual poor people don't built state of the art tech. At best, they work as cleaning staff or in the cafeteria of those companies. Or maybe in the assembly plant in a foreign country. (And even those may feel wealthy when compared to their friends and family.) Those who resent the ultra rich the most tend to be those who are themselves quite comfortable, often affluent even, but really hate it when other people are even more successful than themselves. They often pretend to care for "the poor", but really all they want is to pull down anyone more successful than themselves.
  • CapstanRoller 3y ago
    >income of >$100k This is barely "middle class" now, unless you live in the middle of nowhere or like a college student. $100k/yr stopped being impressive long ago. Even the FAANG rich boys are closer to the janitor than to the CEO.
    • trashtester 3y ago
      $100k/yr probably still puts you in the top 1% by personal salary per year, globaly. And about 3x above the median in the US. I'm not arguing that it makes you rich, but you're definitely NOT "poor" if you have such an income. Anyway, comparing to the CEO on a linear scale is kind of absurd. Anyone making less than half of what the CEO does is closer to the janitor than the CEO. Still, if you make exactly half as much as the CEO of these companies, you're still objectively rich. And why do you think you should be closer to the CEO than the janitor in the first place? Do you think your job is that much more important than making sure the power is on and the toilets are not stuck? If someone is gunuine about protecting the "poor", they should first ensure that the janitors and cafeteria workers are not poor, before they demand raises that would take them even further away from those that really ARE poor. It appears to be quite typical for those claiming to be poor (while having an above-median income and wealth) to have just the attitude towards those below them that they blame the "rich" for.