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Comment by iammisc | Hacker News Reader

Why are you being downvoted? You're absolutely right. There's fewer and fewer ways to be self-employed these days. Even traditional avenues of wealth creation (real estate rentals, for example) have been closed to everyone except those with the most capital. Whereas you used to commonly see apartments rented by some older widow who had acquired a few properties or inherited them. Today, more and more seem to be owned by large landlord corporations. Public economic policy (lack of anti-trust enforcement) is not helping.

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The days when a house might cost one year or at most two years income are long gone.

Back then a common scenario was buy a house, fix it up a bit, save, use first house's equity and the savings as down payments on a second house. Next thing you know (if nothing goes wrong) you own a bunch of houses and have a semi-passive income stream to live on.

There are very few places in the USA where that is even remotely possible any more.

And real estate has been the most common path to wealth for a century or more.

ADDITION: Of course the houses were rented out for the income.

Median home value in FL is $226.6k

Median income in FL is 58k. That's 3-4 years of income. Not much different.

the only places where housing prices have gone nuts are the coastal cities, which 'everyone'[1] wants to live in for cultural reasons.

[1] everyone is in quotes because it's abundantly clear that there are two classes of people in the us, those that matter to the elite and those that don't, and only those that matter want to live in the coast cities.

HN is very much against the whole anti-work movement and still likes to push a bootstraps narrative as a collective. It makes sense when you think of what Y Combinator is and the kinds of people it attracts.

What are you suggesting as an alternative? Less economic opportunity?

Just that there is a future where those who don’t want to work a menial job aren’t forced to do so in order to survive. Which may mean accepting a lower level of productivity. But a lot of people get bored without work, and extra money to buy nice things will always motivate people, so there will still be a large labor pool and automation can take care of the rest.

This technocratic vision of the future does not square away with human nature and reality.

Much more likely is a Butlerian Jihad to destroy automation and return us to a more pastoral way of life, even with advanced technology.

Only socially awkward engineers, business majors (most of whom are incredibly anti-social contrary to common perception), and finance types actually believe in this vision. Normal people are horrified, or will be once they actually experience what this entails.

Humans are not meant to lack meaningful work.

Is it meaningful work if it can be easily automated by contemporary technology but we choose not to?

And I agree that we do need meaningful work on a human level; it’s why I don’t say “nobody should work”. But meaningful work might only mean two hours a day. If that’s all you want to do, you’re prolly not gonna be able to afford a new iPhone any time soon but you shouldn’t go hungry, homeless or untreated.

> Humans are not meant to lack meaningful work.

Citation needed.

The opposite claim 'humans are okay lackin meaningful work' also needs a citation, as its easily demonstrably false in history.

Contrary to popular belief our civilization is not the only one that has come close to being able to provide basically all its needs. Many other civilizations have and eventually the class whose needs are provided for disintegrates due to their own decay. We will make claims that the 'barbarians' sacked rome, and while this is technically true, they are not the reason for the decline of the Roman Empire. The truth is, by the time the barbarians attacked, rome was a shell of its former self. In times past, the Roman army would have put an end to the barbarians. But the societal decay from the elites of the empire meant the systems that preserved them there slowly fell into disrepair.

Broadly speaking we are witnessing the same thing now except at a grander scale because now even for the lower classes it's not obvious they need to work.

But the comment I replied to was not 'anti-work'... far from it

> Why are you being downvoted?

Lack of proper capitalization.

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