You're a Slave to Money, Then You Die
churchlifejournal.nd.edu
churchlifejournal.nd.edu
After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water, get smallpox vaccine, live to play with your kids and watch them grow up...
Bill Campbell: "It's not about the money."
Ben Horowitz: "What's it about, Bill?"
Bill: "It's about the FUCKING money.
Lone Starr : Listen! We're not just doing this for money!
Barf : [Barf looks at him, raises his ears]
Lone Starr : We're doing it for a SHIT LOAD of money!
If you can't see the slave analogy being what is nonsensical here then nothing I can say or do is going to convince you. So I guess by your definition you are either a slave or a slave owner. Oh well.
Not sure why you think snark is a relevant method here. But each to their own of course.
Step 2. Make sure you yourself are exceptional as far as step 1 is concerned.
Step 3. Make money while asleep.
It's like saying "everybody should buy second hand things to save money", ignoring the fact that the saving comes from many not buying second hand.
This idea that black swan events keep knocking out all the gains just isn't true, looking at the numbers. But if you don't like stocks, buying real estate and renting it out is also a good option.
Compound returns are a nice bonus if they come, but not necessary. Sensible frugality is the important part.
You don't need compound gains.
> This doesn't work for people who want to have children, who may have healthcare conditions, who need to take care of their parents, etc.
I'm not sure what this has to do with my point. You need to save more than you earn. If you can't or don't want to, so it goes. Not everyone's a winner.
Anybody seeking more freedom ought to attempt to build a system that generates revenue without your presence being required.
Investing, swing trading and software are the most straightforward paths.
Software particularly. A couple thousand hours of sweat, toil and despair and you might just create a perpetual cashflow generating machine.
But who "generates" those assets you are investing in or trading? Will the action of investing or trading generate them? The cycle must start somewhere.
> Software particularly. A couple thousand hours of sweat, toil and despair and you might just create a perpetual cashflow generating machine.
Perpetual may be a strong word no? Your software will need attention, improvement, etc., its value will drop in time, someone will launch a slightly better version of your software in an attempt to capture your success, or even launch a company where people rent their money to produce something you simply can't compete with.
What about the rest of the things the world needs and are beyond the possibilities of an individual but not beyond those of large groups renting their time? Imagine a highway, or a spaceship.
This is irrelevant to the individual. The cycle already exists.
> Perpetual may be a strong word no?
Yes, I'm being slightly facetious. But the possibility of a creating a money-making asset that is unpegged from a 40 hour work week is very real.
Of course there's still work to do but the work is invested in an asset that you own rather than being rented out to an employer. This makes all the difference.
Sorry to be so blunt but that's a very superficial view and mostly wrong. The cycle isn't "already there" more than the internet, running water, or toilet paper on shelves are "already there". You're asking why would any farmer bother raising cattle and growing crops when they could just go to the supermarket for milk, meat, etc. It's only irrelevant if you don't care about understanding what we're talking about.
> Of course there's still work to do
Your premise was to build a system that generates revenue without your presence being required, in contradiction to your follow-up.
> the possibility of a creating a money-making asset that is unpegged from a 40 hour work week is very real
Agree on this. I'm sure working a classic job is not the only way to make money but my point was different.
So far all of the ways mentioned here for making money by decoupling yourself from the 40h work week are either actually conceptually the same as "renting your time", or work because so many others are renting their time, and they are the niche.
You're either self-employed (you invest the money, produce the asset, and collect profit), or you employ others to bring you profit (you don't produce the asset, just invest money and collect profit). Either way there's no way to remove the "asset producer" from the equation without turning it into 0=0. And just like anything else on the market the higher the supply, the lower the price. The more people only invest for a living, the smaller the returns for each and the fewer assets that are actually created.
What is the first step to fixing this? Bring voting into the 21ST century AND NOT HAVE VOTING SOFTWARE BE CONSIDERED A TRADE SECRET[1].
Voting shouldn't be as onerous today and things like the Sun Light foundation[2] should be a household name.
We have all met jerks in our lives. People who lie,deciet, and cheat to get ahead. How is having the government covered in obscurity good for anyone?
1 - https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190706/17082642527/votin...
At least according to some Greeks and Frenchmen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition#Democratic):
> The idea that democracy is associated with sortition remained common in the 18th century. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu writes in The Spirit of the Laws, "The suffrage by lot is natural to democracy, as that by choice is to aristocracy."
Sortition is still an interesting idea. Especially for filling up larger decision making groups like a parliament. So that the law of large numbers can work.
It wouldn't be that useful for selecting a single post like president.
As a slight modification of straight up sortition, I would suggest that instead of picking the members of parliament directly, we still have everyone vote for their preferred candidate, and use sortition to pick out as many votes as we have seats to fill. (With some sensible mechanism for when the same candidate comes up more than once in the votes.)
That procedure would sidestep many of the problems that come up thanks to Arrow's Theorem in more conventional procedures or citizen's commissions etc.
Looks like they need more help: https://sunlightfoundation.com/2020/01/02/farewell-and-thank...
And as soon as the mob realizes it can vote itself bread and circus, it's all over.
The founding fathers said exactly that.
And the mob in general is in thrall to the media, which is pretty much a wholly owned operation of the ruling class.
So, I guess, in the end, you get what your ruling class wants anyway, with the unwitting mob just a means to its own control.
See https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4hlaxi/did_b...
Were you thinking of another source?
Also, political parties appear part and parcel with democracy, but that part of the discussion is so often left unloved.
The author conflates modern pseudo classical liberal rhetoric and application with intellectually sincere thought. It is hard to read this article and take him serious. Boiled down, this is just a piece of rhetoric. There is very little intellectual value.
When the alternative is not something a reasonable person would choose, it's common courtesy to not pretend it's an actual choice.
Eg a classic gold standard, fractional reserve banking and private note issue. Like they had in Canada or Scotland.
"...the distribution of wealth and popular acquiescence in the vicissitudes of the market—the hoi polloi might vote themselves welfare states or even socialism."
Word salad is understatement of the day.
That paragraph presents a single coherent line of thought. They could have chosen simpler individual words, but there's nothing difficult in the phrasing or structure.
And they should have. I can put together a sentence using a lot of words most people won't know. It will be a valid sentence, and it will mean what I want it to mean, but a lot of people won't be able to understand what I intended it to mean.
That’s more or less the definition of lazy writing. Like a kid starting off with “It was a dark and stormy night...”
I'm not sure why you refer to “padding”. “Hoi polloi” is just as concise as any of its less flavorful synomyms (e.g. “common people”). The use of this phrase actually makes the piece more concise, as it removes the need to explicitly indicate the (already fairly obvious) attitudes of the upper classes to the people below them. Some things are significant enough to be worth indicating but not important enough to be worth mentioning.
If you aren’t familiar with “hoi polloi” (and again, it's not actually a very obscure phrase at all!), it takes a few seconds to look it up in a dictionary.
As a simple experiment, take the article and write down the meaning being conveyed including subtext next to it.
Effectively the information could be lifted directly from the speech and was very straightforward, but hidden among a lot of meaningless drivel. I am saying the author’s stile similarly lets the add a lot of padding due to their approach to conveying information.
I find it quite disappointing.
(I've been reading a lot about the APL family lately..)
httpp://www.openculture.com/2016/05/george-orwells-six-rules-for-writing-clear-and-tight-prose.html
The sad thing is that none of the words in the quoted passage are obscure at all. If you don’t know at least most of these words, it’s safe to say that you have a poor vocabulary. This is really, really easy to fix if you just change your attitude. Instead of being angry with someone for knowing more words than you, just look up the words that you don’t know.
Then you can respond to what the person is actually saying, instead of unfairly assuming that they're a charlatan.
The humanities should aspire to that, rather than (or at least in addition to) "big words for big ideas".
(There is actually a much longer, and arguably more successful, tradition of humanists engaging with popular audiences. We remember the scientists who were good at it because they were so exceptional.)
I suspect you haven't read the article, which in fact is at the level of a freshman humanities student. Not everything has to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Feynman also wrote plenty of stuff vastly less accessible than this article that you and I wouldn't understand - at least not without investing a lot of time and effort. But God forbid that anyone in the humanities write something that requires you to (gasp!) use a dictionary.
The sheer arrogance and imbecility of the typical attitude towards the humanities on HN is really something to behold. Oh, why can't you all be more like this cool physics dude who we think is God's gift to literature because he dictated some amusing anecdotes about strip clubs and colored paint?
Let me try to restate a bit better. Feynmann wasn't the first, even in physics (Faraday may have been). But for Feynmann to do what he did in his lectures, he had to find a simpler way to present it - not because the words were hard, but because the mathematics was.
What I want from the humanities is a bit different. Not easier words, but fewer. There's an article about a fifth the length of this one waiting to be written. It would have the same content, too, and would be far more readable (and read!) by non-humanities types. I suspect that even many freshman humanities students would appreciate the difference. (If you're a humanities major, you don't lack for pages to read.)
Now, if you want to say that this wasn't written for the HN crowd, that's probably true. But it got posted here, and here we are.
I assert that there is a possible way of writing that 1) is acceptable within the humanities, 2) does not "dumb down" the content trying to be communicated, and 3) is much more accessible to the non-humanities reader. But I'm not a humanities person myself, so I could be dreaming. 1) might be fundamentally opposed to 3).
Imagine if someone in the humanities expected the sciences to operate under such constraints. Why do you keep using these complicated "equations"? Why is this book about fluid dynamics packed with obscure terminology and strange diagrams? (I guess it must just be padding.)
You are putting words in my mouth that I did not say, and I deny you the right to do so. Did I say "ever"? No. I said that, when talking to those outside the humanities, they should talk differently. (And what is the humanities if they only ever talk to themselves? Physics makes a difference to the world by what it enables us to do, so if the physicists talk only to themselves and to the engineers, they still can change the world. But if the humanities talk only to themselves, that's... not very helpful to society.)
And, despite me explaining it, you continue to misunderstand what I said about Feynmann. When talking to those who aren't at your level in the discipline, can you still make it understandable to them, without making them first have to get to your level? How far can you go to do so?
The problem that I see is that the humanities no longer seem to know how to talk to the culture at large. That's a real problem, because if the humanities are what they think they are, the larger culture needs them. The humanities need to talk to those outside the humanities, and to do so in a way that those outside can understand.
Pop science is fashionable, but 90% of it is fluff or pure nonsense. The level of scientific knowledge of the general public remains miserably low. Are the humanities doing so much worse in engaging the public? This is not obvious to me.
I'm confused now about why you brought Feynman into this. Initially, you seemed to be contrasting successful pop science with unsuccessful attempts by the humanities to communicate with the general public, and suggesting that humanists should ape the communication style of Feynman and other famous scientists. I found this odd, since humanists communicate with the general public all the time, to a much greater extent than most scientists. Just read any high quality newspaper or magazine and you'll find lots of accessible articles by humanities professors, authors, critics, etc. (The article we're talking about is one example!)
Perhaps it would help if you could just give an example of some work in the humanities (not necessarily recent) that you actually like. Presumably you don't think that there's never been any good or accessible work in the humanities. So rather than pointing to Feynman, why not tell us which humanists other humanists should be emulating?
The culture at large doesn't have the patience. (They may not have the vocabulary either, but they definitely don't have the patience. And if they don't have the vocabulary, they don't have the patience to look the words up in a dictionary, either. One word, maybe. A bunch of them, no.)
> Pop science is fashionable, but 90% of it is fluff or pure nonsense. The level of scientific knowledge of the general public remains miserably low. Are the humanities doing so much worse in engaging the public? This is not obvious to me.
Fair point. But the sciences have an alternate path to "engage" the public. We use Maxwell's results, even those of us who don't understand Maxwell's equations. Science gives us ideas and things that use them. Those who don't understand the ideas can still use the things (within limits). But the humanities just produce ideas. (And, I suppose, cultural artifacts. But the cultural artifacts are primarily a vehicle for ideas.) If the ideas aren't penetrating the surrounding culture, the humanities have in a sense failed.
Feynmann wasn't doing pop science. He was taking the real thing and making it accessible to people who, by any normal standard, didn't yet have the tools to access it. I wasn't making a plea for the humanities to ape his style - nobody could do that - but rather his drive to make the ideas of physics available to "outsiders" (motivated outsiders, outsiders who were on a path to become insiders, but still at the moment outsiders, at least for the topics being discussed).
> The article we're talking about is one example!
The article we're talking about is accessible to anyone with a college vocabulary and perhaps 15 minutes of undivided attention. The college vocabulary may be not all that common, but in my view it's the 15 minutes of undivided attention that's the real dealbreaker. That has become a much bigger barrier in the days of 140 characters. People will read things that take 15 minutes, but they read it with a different mindset. If what they're reading doesn't pay them back for their attention, quickly - in the first 30 seconds, say - they're out of there. They're not going to invest 15 minutes for a payoff that may or may not be there.
So, like Feynmann in the sense of reaching out to communicate the ideas of a field to those who don't seem to be ready for them, can the humanities communicate to people like that? Maybe so, but not with articles like this. They take too long to get to the payback.
(In fairness, though, while Feynmann was talking to freshman, he did probably have an hour. But the issue in his case wasn't time, it was mathematical and scientific maturity.)
For examples that do what I'm asking for (not that I necessarily like it), would you accept rap music? I specifically picked rap because you can get a lot of lyrics in a rap song. You can actually say something there. And you can still do lots of allusions and metaphor and imagery. And people actually listen - not just college kids and people that read "high quality" newspapers.
For a completely different example, see Francis Schaeffer's "He Is There and He Is Not Silent". Schaeffer is a Christian philosopher. The book in question is a philosophical sketch, really, not a fully-fleshed-out in-depth argument. But he connects basic things to very deep things in a very simple way, and he takes very few pages to do it. You don't necessarily have to agree with his conclusions to see the density of his writing.
Of course, density also takes a long time to read. But he meets my "payback in a hurry" criterion. (He does it by making me stop and think for several minutes, but he didn't take long to get there...)
Ok, we agree then - I am just baffled that you consider this a problem.
There's something to be said for meeting 'the kids' at their level. So sure, super accessible stuff is great. But there's also the possibility of a downward spiral. The abundance of accessible, no-effort fluff wears down people's attention spans until it's impossible to have any serious public discourse about anything. If people are objecting to an article which takes 15 minutes to read and requires some level of literacy, then I think we might be well into the inner grooves of that spiral.
I think the super accessible stuff needs to be written in a way that says "There's more here to understand, and it's worth the effort to do so." So that someone who reads it is tempted to reach for the 15 minute article, or the several-hour book. (In fact, links at the bottom would be helpful in this. "For more information, go here...")
The linked diatribe could be distilled to a 100 word paragraph and nothing would be lost.
They also are praised when they focus on user experience. Using dense prose is a poor user experience.
I find no fault with their conditioning to be egalitarian.
Note that my point isn't arguing that humanities is without marginal value, only that the average value is not evolutionary advantageous. As such, it therefore fails to provide for most than its professors. In my view there is a commonality stretching back to Homeric bards. The storytelling gave value, but didn't feed or lead the community.
I'm not sure what you have in mind when you state that tech folks mock the humanities. The point being laid out is that this particular piece is unnecessarily obtuse with its verbose prose, to the detriment of user experience.
Your comment is actually a lot stodgier and more obscure than the article itself.
My prior comment was a representative example of the issue. That you found it stodgy and difficult to follow highlights the same issues the parent commentator points out about the source article.
It could be surmised as a 'earn your complexity' ethos.
It's apparently what every obsessive Marx reader ends up producing. Zizek for example. Perhaps it's a clever tactic to lure defenceless and impressionable minds, perhaps just a form of insanity.
This particular author also has a wider thesis that thinking about all of life and the laws of the universe in terms of market interactions has come to replace mystical and religious thinking.
Postmodernist arguments and critiques are like the blue/gold dress. Some people see it as pure obscurantism, just all white noise. Other people see it as full of interesting ideas.
I've never seen these two groups successfully hold a conversation about it without getting progressively angrier at each other, mostly devolving into insulting each others' intelligence (like many of the replies to your comment).
Add a layer of politics on top of that, to really rile people up, and this whole thread is just a recipe for disaster.
I was really into stuff like this for a few years. After a while, this argumentative style just stopped landing for me.
To each his own though. I go back to the blue/gold dress. I can't explain my issues with it without just making people angry, advocates can't explain why it resonates without frustrating the other side.
So... I just want to say sorry if you thought the link was some kind of offensive misdirected attack on something you like.
If you like this stuff, go for it, knock yourself out.
He presents some content. Not in the easiest form, maybe, but you're insinuating there's nothing else in there, when really it's more of a refusal on your part to engage.
people on hn do this constantly - as if precise language anywhere but in stem is a sign of an inferior argument. god forbid you have to do the background reading on something in order to truly understand.
>Like the student and other forms of personal debt that prepare undergraduates to say two words—“Yes, boss”—the ideal of the entrepreneurial self serves a fundamentally disciplinary function: reinforcing the precarious nature of work in today’s digitalized, low-wage, precariously employed, and increasingly automated capitalism, one in which you are casually expendable and which places a premium on everlasting metamorphosis: upgrade your skills, your profile, your resume. But don’t worry, complain, or God help you, call a union: losing your job or seeing your skill set rendered obsolescent is an opportunity for “growth,” creativity, empowerment. When your own exploitation can be recast as a project rather than a problem—a source of fulfillment rather than an instance of injustice—then solidarity with others can be vilified as conformism, the herd instinct of normies, the last refuge of losers and mediocrities.
The polis, bazaar, and pulpit have always been at odds as a triumvirate. My bet is on the bazaar. Even when people are put in jail economics is manifest, using cigarettes or other trinkets as currency for favors and meager supplies. The "market" the author rails against is a strawman.
Today is Easter, when we commemorate the empty tomb....
(fwiw to anyone: I wrote about how I know what I said. Link is in my profile.)
That will rub some people the wrong way, me among them though not the way it would have once, I’ve someone what mellowed with age.
Edit: I think I have a great deal of compelling evidence that is meaningful to me. Any other person has to decide if it is meaningful to them, but it is extensive (as I have written).
It is generated from my own extensive notes, using a tool linked from the homepage: http://lukecall.net
General discussion welcome if you like. I especially appreciate feedback (see site footer for example) on the usefulness and/or navigability & skimmability of the way the content is presented. (Font is the html default, so can be configured in the browser to suit one's general preference. Putting things all in one document would make it huge, and it would be unclear at any given time what should be included vs. omitted as the links go deep in many directions.)
Thanks.
(edit: Is there a link visble to you in my profile? I am of course happy to put it here also, but was only curious if that works as I thought :) All the best to you.)
2. What makes it preferrable to Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Jehowah's Witnessing, Buddhism? Is it more correct in its doctrines?
3. Why not Paganism or an animalistic religion? Do people have a right to believe in the existence of Zeus or Thor?
4. Wikipedia says "Most of the archaeological, historical and scientific communities do not consider the Book of Mormon an ancient record of actual historical events." - is Wikipedia wrong here? What are the eternal consequences for people who get this wrong and think the Book of Mormon is baloney?
1. 2nd bullet here: http://lukecall.net/e9223372036854587340.html , etc: I was born to it, but my ancestors on various branches went through a process of investigation and prayer to decide for themselves, and really I had to do the same thing to stick with it (as in the above link and its subsequent ones), as it is a significant commitment (and hugely personally rewarding: peace in this life, and hope of Eternal life in the world to come, really). Also Mormonism is a misnomer: Mormon was an ancient American prophet whose abridgment etc is called the Book of Mormon, but ... details on the name here: https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/style-guide .
2. We believe that a) Christ created this world and others under the direction of the Father (they are one in purpose and act in harmony, and both speak authoritatively since Christ has received the Father's delegated authority to speak as God to us); b) Jesus Christ is the Jehovah of the Old Testament; c) He was known to Adam and Eve and those of their posterity who chose to follow the truth, but others chose not to, and various beliefs spread among the nations at different times; d) that God has given truths to his children at different times via inspired persons, according to what they were willing to receive and what was best for them (my wording, but see https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/al... ); e) that after Christ's mortal ministry, death, & resurrection, and the deaths of the apostles, that the doctrines were changed by men and worldly philosophies, and the true authority to administer ordinances was lost until being restored (re-established) through Joseph Smith in the early 1800's as part of the preparation for Christ's 2nd coming (see https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/restoration... in various languages or just click English); f) that the Church has the authority to administer the teachings, ordinances, etc today under Christ's direction; and g) that it is the (edit: fix errant paste) only true and living church on the earth today, and guided by living prophets (as Noah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc), and apostles. We respect, love, and are engaged in various partnerships and friendships with various religious and humanitarian organizations across the world, and we appreciate all the good done by all who are sincerely trying. (Site also has links on that.)
3) As above, those are not reflecting known, revealed truth from heaven. But, from our Articles of Faith:
"11 We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.
"12 We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law."
(https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/pgp/a-o...)
4) Each person has to decide for themselves. Many evidences have come to light since the B of M was translated in ~1830, about ancient civilizations (some collections I have linked, and I added an interesting linguistic one to Wkp about uto-aztecan ties to near-eastern languages), but I also read (and believe) statements repeatedly that such will never provide final "proof" either way, but each person needs to ask the Father for themselves, in the way He said (as noted on my site, with references), to get a reliable answer. Such as described in scriptures linked at http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854743866.html etc.
Also importantly, we believe that everyone will eventually have the opportunity, in this life or the next, to learn truth and receive all that they are or would have been willing to follow, including the essential ordinances, and the opportunity to live in family units forever. That is why we build temples worldwide and do family history work. I believe literally in the Lord's words including "...blessed are all they that mourn, for they shall be comforted." (references linked here: http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581793.html )
I hope that helps. There really is a lot more info and means to answer questions if you look. :)
Christ is a just and merciful judge, so all will be right in the end, and we will each eventually have the necessary understanding to choose for ourselves. There are different "degrees of glory" (uh ... lifestyles?) in the hereafter, very roughly summarized as a) the Celestial Kingdom (for those who repent aka believe in Him and change their ways accordingly (usually a process as one continues to learn & improve oneself), receive essential ordinances, making and keeping covenants aka 2-way promises where He sets the terms, with God, and who can have eternal families forever etc goodness all around); b) the Terrestrial Kingdom for honorable persons of the earth who were not valiant in the testimony of Jesus; c) the Telestial Kingdom for wicked who eventually paid the price of their own sins and receive a degree of glory (which, I'm under the impression, is better than this life), and d) outer darkness, reserved I think for those who really knew Christ but severely rejected him. But don't rely on me: go to the official sources (scriptures like Doctrine and Covenants section 76, general conference talks, etc).
(minor edit/s above)
> many intellectuals deny that “neoliberalism” is anything more than a cipher, an elastic anathema for whatever its users find objectionable in contemporary life
All this talk of isms is supposed to be enlightening guidance, but ultimately governments need to set rules and tax rates and respond to various challenges. The mapping from ism to action is hardly ever direct and often ends up lost in mystery and obscurity.
To me corporatism is against the principle of capitalism and free market.
Anyway, this article could have been written by Marx himself.
We might as well say, you're a slave to oxygen and water, then you die.
To me, the infrastructure and experimentation and science that leads to all homes having reliable, potable water is miraculous.
There’s very large swaths of the planet where you are supposed to drink only bottled water, from a bottle unsealed in front of you.
Is that the "natural" order of things? Certainly it isn't, at least no more than markets or money represent a "natural order." In fact, we can make a convincing case that the tainting of fresh water is the direct consequence of this kind of market-oriented thought.
Given the context of this article, it's then worth asking: were the "markets" of the Magdalenian also "robust"?
The author seems less concerned with what "happens easily" than with what is taken as a kind of natural law. The dominant ideology of the present (for which he is presenting an intellectual history) supposes that market forces are this natural law. It is this supposition that cannot stand up to long term history. We are better off reading anthropology and sociology when trying to understand the origins of money and exchange than we are economists, who simply invent facile notions of their origins seemingly out of thin air
This article seems to want to return to a pseudo-Rousseau view of the world where the wilds are religious.
Let's look at it from this perspective: what percentage of your country's workforce is actively involved in providing clean water?
If it were such a huge effort to provide for relatively basic human needs, then I'd imagine we'd have more people working on that and less people working on advertising, entertainment, rent-seeking, making & marketing disposable novelty products, etc.
As for what portion of the population is needed to provide clean water, I don’t see how that is a useful or measurable metric. Certainly the discovery process of cleaning the water, the materials science in creating the pipes, learning about lead poisoning and changing that, and so on and so forth is a huge effort in my books.
Also, going forward, access to clean water is looking like it will be a source of conflict. It’s not in the timescale of the next 5 to 10 years, so people take it for granted, but certainly the grandchildren of today will have to deal with procuring this “effortless” resources.
One might even say the same for oxygen in developing countries where poor people have to live next to factories under a permanent cloud of pollution. They literally can’t go for a run because of a lack of clean air!
More people have mobile phones than have access to improved sanitation.
Without it, you die early of disease.
Humanity really didn’t even control their poop all that well until a couple of hundred years ago with the invention of the modern toilet and the S-trap.
“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
It's not the same story.
Edit: I'd like to see the downvoters argue against the notion that some work is more essential than other work. Hasn't the COVID-19 crisis opened your eyes to this reality?
That's in the site guidelines too: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
It was talking about honest, real work.
The fact that you say you read the article and this attack was your best comment... well I’d say one of these comments is basically worthless and it’s not the guy who pointed out the problem with the title.
Furthermore, a lot of people go to the comments first for a variety of reasons. Nothing wrong with that either.
* Fiat currency
* Economics is not a real science
* I understand what the author is trying to say, but I don't like how he says it
* I didn't read the piece, but website that published it is problematic
* The title is clickbait, and I'm unaware of the concept of newspaper headlines
Many on the left seem to deeply in favour of preserving the status quo, and seems to not have the means or methods or vision of changing the very broken systems into something better.
The left and the right, as a major distinction between either and status-quo-favoring centrists including neoliberals, have in common the idea that radical change is necessary; the idea has been expressed in terms I roughly paraphrase as "capitalism has failed, and in the face of that, we'll have either socialism or fascism", a statement with which leftists in my circle would not disagree. The difference between left and right lies not in seeing a need for change, but partly in means and entirely in desiderata.
For many, you're a slave to religion and then you die. People have used religion to control society way before capitalism became popular. To this day, it continues to control thoughts and behaviors of billions of people. Those who have acquired power in religious institutions abuse their power to influence all sorts of antisocial behavior. Society hasn't only an issue with capitalism but also religion. There's a strong argument that religion remains the greater threat.
Where is it, then? You haven't laid out a single argument, only broad, unfounded statements.
Meanwhile lots of people with well-paying jobs, like airline pilots for instance, took a blow putting them on practically the same level as low-paid workers and gig workers.
If this crisis continues for a long-enough period of time, it might just bring about a substantial reorientation of the global economy, and perhaps a new balance between capital and labor.