The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods | Hacker News Reader

The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods

onezero.medium.com

23 pointstaylodl22 comments

It's not clear the article describes or provides evidence for its headline. Anecdotes about well-off people having the luxury to short-term move overseas, buy webcams on Amazon, stocks etc. No justification.

Could have made the point by describing how while service industry workers are being impoverished, wealthier people, or those in other industries are doing as well as or better than before, but that's not the subject.

I think this is addressed here:

"For there’s the real rub with digital isolation — the problem those billionaires identified when we were gaming out their bunker strategies. The people and things we’d be leaving behind are still out there. And the more we ask them to service our bubbles, the more oppressed and angry they’re going to get."

Yea, I can’t imagine how angry my landscaper and pool service guys are that I have the gall to pay them money in exchange for services.

I haven’t seen either this week, perhaps they are at a meeting of the revolutionary workers.

Rich people often seem surprised that the peasantry don't view them as the benevolent foundation of their own prosperity.

Since neither you or I am rich, how would you know?

Since my landscaper and pool guy are both independent entrepreneurs, maybe they view me as a valuable customer?

Yes I know, no one is rich, we're all just various layers of middle class - even if we're hiring landscapers and pool service and think of ourselves as supply-side jesus.

So now living in a home with a pool is a mark of “the rich”?

Apparently half of Alabama now qualifies.

Yes, we are all rich in a sense in the programmer world. That pool guy in my town, Seattle, or the guy cutting my grass today where the air is dangerous with smoke, they are out in it and I'm not.

I was paying my lawn guy to not come during the early part of the pandemic, he wanted to come so I let him.

Flash news; it's possible to know something without directly experiencing it yourself.

It’s also possible to pontificate about things that aren’t really true. In fact it’s done often.

The author seems to suggest that most folks have some kind of ethical/moral dilemma around how to best look out for their personal well being by spending their money to make themselves as comfortable as possible. Pretty sure normal people don't think this way.

The author seems to be of the opinion that if others are suffering, it is each individual's moral obligation to suffer as well, and not to improve their own lives at the (potential) cost of others, or really even at all.

My own belief (at least, in theory) is that everyone should operate with the goal of improving their own lives, with the moral obligation being to improve yourself without dragging others down. And by doing so, in the distributed sense, the whole system will improve.

The problem of course naturally extends from there being a limited set of resources.

The secondary issue the author is complaining about is digital isolation, but that's not so much a problem of rich vs poor -- any group approaching a minimum level of wealth (which for a first-world country, is not set that high, relatively) is currently falling into the pit of digital isolation. Physical isolation (beyond your home) is generally more expensive, and reserved mainly for the very wealthy.

I didn't, I looked at the risks as objectively as possible and immediately switched to working remote forever (changing job in the process) and yes I realise I have the privilege of been able to do that and no I don't feel guilty about it either - it's not like I got into programming at 7 30-odd years ago with the intention of one day been able to withdraw into my bubble.

How can you do well while others are doing so badly? When evictions are happening, how do you buy a new graphics card? When food stamps are being cut, how do you justify an iPhone? It's normal to have empathy to other people in bad situations.

Couldn't you say that at any point in time? There hasn't been a time any of us were alive when, for example, kids in poor countries weren't starving or dying due to treatable diseases. So it seems your point is you should never live well, correct? I would agree if that's your view.

If you strongly believe this, then you should probably put your money where your mouth is, like this guy:

http://www.williammacaskill.com/

It's noble, but I guess it's up to you to chose your standard of living.

Empathy means you feel what impoverished people feel, but do you have to impoverish yourself also?

Also, as a whole, the world is better than it ever has been at any point in time. I think it might have Bill Gates that did an interesting talk about this, but I'm having trouble finding it.

It's a glass half full or half empty scenario I guess.

The disdain over the new tech-enabled, eco-friendly lifestyle that COVID enables and nostalgia for the cramped, overpriced, traffic-infested demand-based lifestyle of the past decades is the new luddism, and it can only come from overprivileged ivy league professors (I wonder if his university has increased their enrollment, despite now being remote, or if they continue being exclusionary).

Middle managers are getting in on that action as well.

Yeah, I know. Actually meeting other people IRL is so 2019.

ITT: People in privileged bubbles being irritated the article suggests they live in privileged bubbles.

> Yet while VRporn.com is certainly a safer sexual strategy in the age of Covid-19 than meeting up with partners through Tinder, every choice to isolate and insulate has its correspondingly negative impact on others.

Author seems too horny for this job.

Or not horny enough. pornsitedotcom's a poor substitute for physical intimacy.

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