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I dont think you have to go georgist for that take, adam smith’s whole “free market” originally meant “free from economic rent”

It will only be a dystopia to people like us. It will be a near post scarcity utopia to our betters!

That’s not even it, because in the small company jira won’t be such an oppressive system.

This dunk might work outside of the US, but inside raving about freedom has always been justification for a power grab

It would only be at all valid if it was forwarded to employees who weren’t in a customer facing role.

Saying that you’re required to give a content warning to an account manager for material related to your business relationship puts the burden of responsibility onto the victim. Dealing with the psychological impact is the responsibility of their employer, not the customer.


No, even in a customer-facing role, you won't have to put up with every s**. I mean, it's a business for electronics, not a porn-shop or moderation for explicit material at some social media-platform. There should be a line on what they have to tolerate.

And the test is “did it come from my employer to a customer I am responsible for?”

Considering the parallels between havana syndrome and stuff like chronic fatigue syndrome, it may already be!

Read the article or just the headline?

Don’t they give got a minimap?

What are they actual differences?


What happened to the theory that the deaths were decreasing because we burned through our buffer of people susceptible to deaths of despair? That always seemed reasonable to me.

Surely as time goes on and wealth inequality increases, the number of people "susceptible" to deaths of despair will only increase.

But this attitude smells an awful lot like the stupid person's eugenics. Let's not cater to it.


I feel like actual material wealth matters much more than relative wealth or inequality for this metric.

Eh. Most costs that matter scale to relative wealth, and the cost scales accordingly, and we have more homeless people than any rich country on earth, and we have no community worth a damn—we have snap, medicaid, and section 8, and our kind neighbors are rabid to end them all. This is, in most ways, the worst country on earth to be poor in. If i were poor in cincinnati suburbs I'd kill myself too.

Perhaps there's another place where poverty is a greater curse, though. But I would rather be poor in Burundi or Haiti than Ohio—at least I can sleep outside without dying and my neighbor won't fucking shoot me for existing. But this is what i get for living in the us, the place with the most evil people to have ever lived.


Wealth inequality doesn't cause this kind of despair. We have the greatest wealth inequality in history, but also the objectively best quality of life in history by most metrics (extreme poverty, hunger, starvation, death from disease, infant mortality...)

It does not matter to me if Elon Musk makes another billion dollars if I am making more as well. That does not cause "despair" to a well adjusted person.

Extreme poverty on the other hand (which has been decreasing) does cause these deaths. When people have nowhere left to go and no hope, they to turn to drugs.

Mental illness is another cause. I wonder if we should have gotten rid of asylums.


If bothers me if he spends that money exerting an outsized influence on my political institutions, though. Wealth inequality isn't really about wealth so much as power. I really don't care if Musk or anyone else lives more comfortably than me, but I do care if they have more than one figurative vote in how my society functions.

When is having an outsized influence allowed? Someone who pickets for a candidate will have an outsized influence; so will celebrities with many followers, etc.

You can't solve every problem, but that isn't an excuse to solve no problems. If you can buy an entire platform that functions more like public service or utility than a company and modify its political alignment, you have too much power.

But that does not address whether the wealth inequality in question causes despair (it almost certainly does not).

What makes you think wealth inequality doesn't cause despair? Despair strikes me as the expected and desired effect.

Hunger and struggling to pay one's bills -- those cause despair. Envy surely does not (and should not). And anyways the claim that relative wealth inequality (as opposed to actual poverty) causes despair is an extraordinary claim and it requires that you present extraordinary evidence.

What do you mean by "objectively"? This smells like pinker-esque spinelesness. Like a "you can buy a smartphone if you ignore the world is dying" tone.

Yes, you can buy a smartphone. But most of what makes us care for each other has died. Why not kill yourself today, Sisyphus? There are fewer reasons than ever.


Because my life does not run on envy. It does not bother me that Elon is $100B richer when global outcomes have improved dramatically as well. Comparison is the thief of joy.

As long as conditions are materially improving, we are doing well. It is up to people to maintain a psychological outlook commensurate with their incredible quality of life gains. If they don't manage to do that, that is a personal failure caused by envy, not an inherent structural problem with wealth inequality.


Surely you mean extreme poverty has been decreasing as a percentage of population, not in real numbers?

Yes of course.

well if you read to the end of the article you might find out.

Is this why Seek has been broken for the past 8 months

It works fine for me on my pixel 10.

It worked like garbage on my Samsung Galaxy devices.


Works fine on my iPhone…

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