6 ms·

We’re already there. Your individual labor isn’t enough to make a living unless you subscribe to the altar of a feudal FAANG. This is preposterous. > Collectiv

by bix6 7mo ago

We’re already there. Your individual labor isn’t enough to make a living unless you subscribe to the altar of a feudal FAANG. This is preposterous. > Collectively, the wealthiest 1% held about $55 trillion in assets in the third quarter of 2025 — roughly equal to the wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans combined. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-three-decades-federal-reserve/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-three-d...

jmye 7mo ago
> We’re already there. Your individual labor isn’t enough to make a living unless you subscribe to the altar of a feudal FAANG. This is preposterous. You think you already can't "make a living" without working at a FAANG? Is this a serious post?
- estimator7292 7mo ago
  Yes. That tends to happen when you don't increase the minimum wage for multiple decades.
  - senordevnyc 7mo ago
    Damn, I hope no one tells the hundreds of millions of global middle class and upper middle class households who don't work for FAANG that they don't exist!
- underlipton 7mo ago
  He's right. It's not just FAANG, but if you're not within about 2 or 3 degrees of separation from FAANG or a subset (not even the whole thing) of SP500, you're hosed. Even then, it's not a panacea. McDonald's employees can confirm. And it's because only those companies are big enough to cut deals to shield themselves and their subjects from the massive amounts of debt the world economy is being forced to service; everyone else is dumping a double-digit percentage of their labor into covering the bad bets of our banks.
  - scottyah 7mo ago
    Except for all the small business owners that are doing just fine, and many are more than fine. You just don't want to be a corpo who is competing with FAANG, or anywhere where you have to "share" any margins with them.
    - underlipton 7mo ago
      2 or 3 degrees of separation If money is trickling down to you from FAANG, you're benefiting from their largesse - or, rather, being exploited by the control they have over your source of income, as both an individual and an business owner. FAANG throwing their weight around to force-underpay suppliers becomes the problem of the retail worker whose wages are paid by underpaid consumers. And so on.
- ceejayoz 7mo ago
  I had to drop off my health insurance when the bill hit $4,850.24/month. Millions did the same. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/aca-enrollees-uninsured.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/aca-enrollees-uninsured.html
  - bloppe 7mo ago
    That sucks and I hope congress gets their shit together soon, but there are a lot of non-FAANG companies that offer insurance.
    - ceejayoz 7mo ago
      That money black hole hits companies too. A $50k/year job typically can't throw in $60k in healthcare benefits.
      - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
        It’s not that much. https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/cost-of-employer-sponsored-health-insurance https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/cost-of-employer-sponsored-h... A small company can use a PEO like Rippling (a YC company) where employees are “co employed” with the actual company and for taxes/HR/benefits with for Rippling. It’s not like contracting. Everyone from the CEO down is “co employed”
        deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
        ceejayoz 7mo ago
        It really is. The US saw an average of $14,885 per-capita healthcare costs in 2024. Higher now.
        raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
        I’m never going to defend the American health care system as I sit in a country now for six weeks where I fully plan to become a resident of post retirement mainly because of the healthcare even if I don’t live here full time.
- bloppe 7mo ago
  For a lot of people on HN, "making a living" means owning property in a VHCOL area.
  - WarcrimeActual 7mo ago
    Correct. This is a space occupied disproportionately by spoiled rich nepo or otherwise kept silver spooned babies.
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
  - anigbrowl 7mo ago
    Those used to be quite reasonable cost of living areas. We're not talking about owning a mansion in the Hamptons, but a decent-sized apartment in a downtown area or a nice single family home in a pleasant neighborhood.
  - _DeadFred_ 7mo ago
    For a lot of people on HN, they grew up in VHCOL places that used to be affordable and are trying to keep the lives they've had since birth. I was forced to move, lost connection to my friends and half my family, all the places I knew and had memories/attachment to, habits/hobbies. I understand why they are fighting to keep their lives and not give up and in a way die and start a new, lonelier, much different life. I don't understand how that is nepo/spoiled/rich behavior, it's just basic normal human behavior. Thinking it's totally cool to displace people is also normal human behavior, just to me the shittier less justifiable of the two.
    - bloppe 7mo ago
      I agree with all of that, but it's not representative of everybody that grew up in the VHCOL area. A slight majority of residents in the Bay Area (used as an example) own their own home. If you grew up there, and your parents owned their own home, your family has benefited enormously from the meteoric rise in house prices. Those people (long-time residents) are thrilled by the influx of tech cash and actively pursue NIMBY policies to restrict the housing supply to keep prices as high as possible. Most of the tech workers actually moving to the Bay Area and renting would much prefer a massive increase in the housing supply to bring prices down. California is an especially egregious example because none of the inherited familial homes are taxed appropriately, which lowers liquidity and drives up market rates further. If you wanted to create a landed gentry, California Article XIII A is the gold standard for a policy to do that [1] Of course, a lot of families never end up owning a home in an area that will experience that kind of appreciation. But the idea that it's "newcomers vs. life-long-residents" is wrong. It's actually more about the tension between the life-long-residents who own property and pursue NIMBYism vs. everyone else. [1]: https://law.justia.com/constitution/california/article-xiii-a/section-2/ https://law.justia.com/constitution/california/article-xiii-...
- commandlinefan 7mo ago
  When I was 8 or so (early 80's), I read a news article that said something like "in the near future, robots will do all work and humans won't have to work at all". The news article made it sound like it would happen before I reached adulthood and even then I could see the problem there: "who decides who gets to live in the big house at the top of the hill and who decided who has to live where I live?" Communism/socialism/wealth distribution/planned economies is one potential solution, but it's an awfully ham-fisted one and definitely not one to put into place until it's absolutely necessary. I kind of suspect that a lot of people, like OP, are kind of hoping that now is the time, but it definitely isn't, at least not yet.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
matthest 7mo ago
The cost of living crisis is almost singularly caused by poor governance, not feudal tech lords. NIMBYism prevents new houses from being built, driving up the cost of housing. Healthcare is for-profit, yet not allowed to operate like a true competitive market, with heavy regulations restricting providers to a few that the government favors. Thus it's essentially an oligopoly, driving costs sky high.
- mft_ 7mo ago
  The ‘cost of living crisis’ that most people refer to is about food, clothing, fuel, electricity, gas. Much of this is driven by feudal corporate lords, and their gouging business choices. Some is driven by geopolitics. Issues with the affordability of for-profit healthcare is mostly an issue in the US, as far as first-world countries go. And the root cause there is decades of allowing money and big business to directly influence politics, rendering meaningful change close to impossible without a Bernie Sanders-esque president who’s strongly motivated to tear the whole system down.
  - IAmBroom 7mo ago
    The current pricing crises with food, fuel, electricity, and gas are currently being driven 100% by America's Caligula and his party of elected senatorial horses. And specifically his tariffs, but more generally his inability to comprehend anything beyond self-gratification.
    - mft_ 7mo ago
      There's been a 'cost of living crisis' discussed in many countries --not just the US-- since roughly the end of the pandemic. For obvious reasons, there are other factors responsible for this - not just Trump. Trump's recent foray into Iran has indeed hit fuel/gas prices, the supply chain of some regional goods, and will have a knock-on impact on other goods subsequently due to rising fuel costs. The impact of tariffs on consumers is largely confined to the US.
  - matthest 7mo ago
    Respectfully disagree. Food, clothing, fuel, electricity are too expensive, but they are comparatively much less of an issue compared to rent and healthcare costs. Rent and healthcare are the 1A and 1B issues of our time. As far as healthcare goes, the entire system is a mess. We already tried the Affordable Care Act to get more people covered, which only skyrocketed costs. The only way out is to increase the competition in the market, AKA supply side. Bernie Sanders is only familiar with demand-side solutions, which do not work. Sanders himself seems completely oblivious to the housing crisis in his own state of Vermont, which is being mitigated everywhere else through supply-side solutions.
raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
Please. The median household income in the US is around $85K https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/ The median individual household is $55K https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/ Neither are living on the streets.
- bix6 7mo ago
  https://www.lmtribune.com/local-news/achilles-takes-on-risch-status-quo-20711676 https://www.lmtribune.com/local-news/achilles-takes-on-risch... > By my estimate, about 60% of Idahoans don't earn a livable wage Sure boss it’s all fine and dandy.
  - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
    And that has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t need “FAANG money” to live a comfortable life in Idaho… Besides cry me a river for the people in red states who keep voting for politicians who are voting for policies that hurt them as long as they can “own the libs” and see ICE mistreat brown people.
    - bix6 7mo ago
      Why are you so defensive of rich people? Idaho has an affordability crisis and it is partly caused by rich people from out of state using their FAANG (or equivalent rich work) to box them out of properties.
      - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
        I am not defending rich people - that would be the people who defend the current President and his cronies like in Idaho who support him and voted for him 70% It is just plain not true statement that you need “FAANG money” to afford to live in Idaho.
      - bdangubic 7mo ago
ericmcer 7mo ago
What do they mean by "assets"? Is it securities in the form of stocks/bonds/etc? If so they own a bunch of bits on a server somewhere that technically represent an amount of goods/services they could never use in 10,000 lifetimes. If Elon had 10 billion eggs in a warehouse it would be real easy to fix the price of eggs. We could also reduce healthcare costs by making Bezos & Zuck stop going to the doctor 4,000,000 times a day. The reason peoples labor isn't granting them the goods and services they want is way more complex than just: "the billionaires are taking them all". You could kill every billionaire tomorrow and distribute all their wealth and it would only make shit cost more.
- _DeadFred_ 7mo ago
  You are so close. The rich don't buy all the doctor visits, they buy whole farms/doctor practices and place a tax paid to them on every transaction. We are switching to a society structured for maximum extraction everywhere because there is so much capital at the top looking for places to park, and why wealth disparity is so bad for a society. The feudal lords got paid on every transaction and with the current disparity the rich are buying their way back to that system. Poor spend money to survive, circulating through the system. Rich park excess money in PE buyouts of previously owner owned dental practices, HVAC, rental properties, etc and 'optimizing' for maximum extraction. Some capital is needed to fund new things, but excess turns EVERTHING into rent extraction with barons taking their cut above all else. More and more of the services/things in life are owned not by the person that started the business, but by the rich whose money 'is just bits and has no impact on the poors'. Rich don't compete for doctor appointments, they just extract more and more $$$ by owning every doctors visit, every practice, every corporate farm. And the poors can't compete. Hence you end up with a feudal system because of the disparity. The rich should have enough to enjoy a good life and to have freed up investment capital in the system to start new things, but not enough to re-convert society back to feudalism where they own all and get paid a percentage on everything, always, just for existing.

by bix6 7mo ago

jmye 7mo ago

> We’re already there. Your individual labor isn’t enough to make a living unless you subscribe to the altar of a feudal FAANG. This is preposterous. You think you already can't "make a living" without working at a FAANG? Is this a serious post?

estimator7292 7mo ago
Yes. That tends to happen when you don't increase the minimum wage for multiple decades.
- senordevnyc 7mo ago
  Damn, I hope no one tells the hundreds of millions of global middle class and upper middle class households who don't work for FAANG that they don't exist!
underlipton 7mo ago
He's right. It's not just FAANG, but if you're not within about 2 or 3 degrees of separation from FAANG or a subset (not even the whole thing) of SP500, you're hosed. Even then, it's not a panacea. McDonald's employees can confirm. And it's because only those companies are big enough to cut deals to shield themselves and their subjects from the massive amounts of debt the world economy is being forced to service; everyone else is dumping a double-digit percentage of their labor into covering the bad bets of our banks.
- scottyah 7mo ago
  Except for all the small business owners that are doing just fine, and many are more than fine. You just don't want to be a corpo who is competing with FAANG, or anywhere where you have to "share" any margins with them.
  - underlipton 7mo ago
    2 or 3 degrees of separation If money is trickling down to you from FAANG, you're benefiting from their largesse - or, rather, being exploited by the control they have over your source of income, as both an individual and an business owner. FAANG throwing their weight around to force-underpay suppliers becomes the problem of the retail worker whose wages are paid by underpaid consumers. And so on.
ceejayoz 7mo ago
I had to drop off my health insurance when the bill hit $4,850.24/month. Millions did the same. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/aca-enrollees-uninsured.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/aca-enrollees-uninsured.html
- bloppe 7mo ago
  That sucks and I hope congress gets their shit together soon, but there are a lot of non-FAANG companies that offer insurance.
  - ceejayoz 7mo ago
    That money black hole hits companies too. A $50k/year job typically can't throw in $60k in healthcare benefits.
    - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
      It’s not that much. https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/cost-of-employer-sponsored-health-insurance https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/cost-of-employer-sponsored-h... A small company can use a PEO like Rippling (a YC company) where employees are “co employed” with the actual company and for taxes/HR/benefits with for Rippling. It’s not like contracting. Everyone from the CEO down is “co employed”
      - deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      - ceejayoz 7mo ago
        It really is. The US saw an average of $14,885 per-capita healthcare costs in 2024. Higher now.
        raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
        I’m never going to defend the American health care system as I sit in a country now for six weeks where I fully plan to become a resident of post retirement mainly because of the healthcare even if I don’t live here full time.
bloppe 7mo ago
For a lot of people on HN, "making a living" means owning property in a VHCOL area.
- WarcrimeActual 7mo ago
  Correct. This is a space occupied disproportionately by spoiled rich nepo or otherwise kept silver spooned babies.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- anigbrowl 7mo ago
  Those used to be quite reasonable cost of living areas. We're not talking about owning a mansion in the Hamptons, but a decent-sized apartment in a downtown area or a nice single family home in a pleasant neighborhood.
- _DeadFred_ 7mo ago
  For a lot of people on HN, they grew up in VHCOL places that used to be affordable and are trying to keep the lives they've had since birth. I was forced to move, lost connection to my friends and half my family, all the places I knew and had memories/attachment to, habits/hobbies. I understand why they are fighting to keep their lives and not give up and in a way die and start a new, lonelier, much different life. I don't understand how that is nepo/spoiled/rich behavior, it's just basic normal human behavior. Thinking it's totally cool to displace people is also normal human behavior, just to me the shittier less justifiable of the two.
  - bloppe 7mo ago
    I agree with all of that, but it's not representative of everybody that grew up in the VHCOL area. A slight majority of residents in the Bay Area (used as an example) own their own home. If you grew up there, and your parents owned their own home, your family has benefited enormously from the meteoric rise in house prices. Those people (long-time residents) are thrilled by the influx of tech cash and actively pursue NIMBY policies to restrict the housing supply to keep prices as high as possible. Most of the tech workers actually moving to the Bay Area and renting would much prefer a massive increase in the housing supply to bring prices down. California is an especially egregious example because none of the inherited familial homes are taxed appropriately, which lowers liquidity and drives up market rates further. If you wanted to create a landed gentry, California Article XIII A is the gold standard for a policy to do that [1] Of course, a lot of families never end up owning a home in an area that will experience that kind of appreciation. But the idea that it's "newcomers vs. life-long-residents" is wrong. It's actually more about the tension between the life-long-residents who own property and pursue NIMBYism vs. everyone else. [1]: https://law.justia.com/constitution/california/article-xiii-a/section-2/ https://law.justia.com/constitution/california/article-xiii-...
commandlinefan 7mo ago
When I was 8 or so (early 80's), I read a news article that said something like "in the near future, robots will do all work and humans won't have to work at all". The news article made it sound like it would happen before I reached adulthood and even then I could see the problem there: "who decides who gets to live in the big house at the top of the hill and who decided who has to live where I live?" Communism/socialism/wealth distribution/planned economies is one potential solution, but it's an awfully ham-fisted one and definitely not one to put into place until it's absolutely necessary. I kind of suspect that a lot of people, like OP, are kind of hoping that now is the time, but it definitely isn't, at least not yet.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

matthest 7mo ago

The cost of living crisis is almost singularly caused by poor governance, not feudal tech lords. NIMBYism prevents new houses from being built, driving up the cost of housing. Healthcare is for-profit, yet not allowed to operate like a true competitive market, with heavy regulations restricting providers to a few that the government favors. Thus it's essentially an oligopoly, driving costs sky high.

mft_ 7mo ago
The ‘cost of living crisis’ that most people refer to is about food, clothing, fuel, electricity, gas. Much of this is driven by feudal corporate lords, and their gouging business choices. Some is driven by geopolitics. Issues with the affordability of for-profit healthcare is mostly an issue in the US, as far as first-world countries go. And the root cause there is decades of allowing money and big business to directly influence politics, rendering meaningful change close to impossible without a Bernie Sanders-esque president who’s strongly motivated to tear the whole system down.
- IAmBroom 7mo ago
  The current pricing crises with food, fuel, electricity, and gas are currently being driven 100% by America's Caligula and his party of elected senatorial horses. And specifically his tariffs, but more generally his inability to comprehend anything beyond self-gratification.
  - mft_ 7mo ago
    There's been a 'cost of living crisis' discussed in many countries --not just the US-- since roughly the end of the pandemic. For obvious reasons, there are other factors responsible for this - not just Trump. Trump's recent foray into Iran has indeed hit fuel/gas prices, the supply chain of some regional goods, and will have a knock-on impact on other goods subsequently due to rising fuel costs. The impact of tariffs on consumers is largely confined to the US.
- matthest 7mo ago
  Respectfully disagree. Food, clothing, fuel, electricity are too expensive, but they are comparatively much less of an issue compared to rent and healthcare costs. Rent and healthcare are the 1A and 1B issues of our time. As far as healthcare goes, the entire system is a mess. We already tried the Affordable Care Act to get more people covered, which only skyrocketed costs. The only way out is to increase the competition in the market, AKA supply side. Bernie Sanders is only familiar with demand-side solutions, which do not work. Sanders himself seems completely oblivious to the housing crisis in his own state of Vermont, which is being mitigated everywhere else through supply-side solutions.

raw_anon_1111 7mo ago

Please. The median household income in the US is around $85K https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/ The median individual household is $55K https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/ Neither are living on the streets.

bix6 7mo ago
https://www.lmtribune.com/local-news/achilles-takes-on-risch-status-quo-20711676 https://www.lmtribune.com/local-news/achilles-takes-on-risch... > By my estimate, about 60% of Idahoans don't earn a livable wage Sure boss it’s all fine and dandy.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
  And that has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t need “FAANG money” to live a comfortable life in Idaho… Besides cry me a river for the people in red states who keep voting for politicians who are voting for policies that hurt them as long as they can “own the libs” and see ICE mistreat brown people.
  - bix6 7mo ago
    Why are you so defensive of rich people? Idaho has an affordability crisis and it is partly caused by rich people from out of state using their FAANG (or equivalent rich work) to box them out of properties.
    - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
      I am not defending rich people - that would be the people who defend the current President and his cronies like in Idaho who support him and voted for him 70% It is just plain not true statement that you need “FAANG money” to afford to live in Idaho.
    - bdangubic 7mo ago

ericmcer 7mo ago

What do they mean by "assets"? Is it securities in the form of stocks/bonds/etc? If so they own a bunch of bits on a server somewhere that technically represent an amount of goods/services they could never use in 10,000 lifetimes. If Elon had 10 billion eggs in a warehouse it would be real easy to fix the price of eggs. We could also reduce healthcare costs by making Bezos & Zuck stop going to the doctor 4,000,000 times a day. The reason peoples labor isn't granting them the goods and services they want is way more complex than just: "the billionaires are taking them all". You could kill every billionaire tomorrow and distribute all their wealth and it would only make shit cost more.

_DeadFred_ 7mo ago
You are so close. The rich don't buy all the doctor visits, they buy whole farms/doctor practices and place a tax paid to them on every transaction. We are switching to a society structured for maximum extraction everywhere because there is so much capital at the top looking for places to park, and why wealth disparity is so bad for a society. The feudal lords got paid on every transaction and with the current disparity the rich are buying their way back to that system. Poor spend money to survive, circulating through the system. Rich park excess money in PE buyouts of previously owner owned dental practices, HVAC, rental properties, etc and 'optimizing' for maximum extraction. Some capital is needed to fund new things, but excess turns EVERTHING into rent extraction with barons taking their cut above all else. More and more of the services/things in life are owned not by the person that started the business, but by the rich whose money 'is just bits and has no impact on the poors'. Rich don't compete for doctor appointments, they just extract more and more $$$ by owning every doctors visit, every practice, every corporate farm. And the poors can't compete. Hence you end up with a feudal system because of the disparity. The rich should have enough to enjoy a good life and to have freed up investment capital in the system to start new things, but not enough to re-convert society back to feudalism where they own all and get paid a percentage on everything, always, just for existing.