I do agree that housing as an asset is a bad idea. I regularly think that if you gave everybody a rent free room, society would be wildly different. People are running around to pay rent doing insane stuff just to get by. It's humanly painful.
Current businesses don't want a competitive labor market in the sense they have to compete for your time, they want drones to do whatever they want and want to pay bottom dollar for it. Just look at the massive outcry right now claiming labor shortages. Maybe there is some shortage but it's a well justified shortage in my opinion.
If you had a labor force with a real basic sense of security, people not worried they may get sick and their entire life's accumulation of assets from work will be washed away in an instant or they may be out on the streets looking for a warm bed, then you have a strong labor force that can negotiate reasonable working conditions. We don't have that.
We largely have a growing precariate class of people that seem to be sweeping in low to lower middle income that seems to be growing into the middle income brackets. A large bit of middle and upper middle are fine but even there, pressure seems to be growing.
To me it's mostly a sign of dislocated/fractured society with no coherent purpose. No calling for communism :)
Change education, add more pragmatic knowledge of everything to people's lives so they don't chase shiney and don't rely on money exchanges for things to happen in their day.
Maybe internet will help a bit here. Lots of people are learning about stuff through videos, we need to make it more tangible day to day I guess.
How many people out there are doing the 9 to 6 because of that? I am one of them. I have a software business idea, but I either need to:
1. Save a ton of money to pay the ludicrous levels of private health insurance.
2. Get married to a city or federal employee, so I can be on their health insurance.
In my case, it will be #2, but it's a total coincidence that she is one of those.
In the meantime, those of means have plenty of cushion to fall on, trying and failing over and over, until they hit it. Most of us don't have the option of failing even once.
The root cause of this specific issue isn't related to a lack of healthcare, but regulations propping up real estate as an investment category and preventing supply growth, in both countries. A lack of wage growth comes from fed policy to raise interest rates and slow down the economy just at the point where wage growth starts occurring, because they think it's inflationary in a major way, and the fed is public about this policy.
Bring full socialized medicine to the USA, and the housing & wage issue will definitely still remains, as it does in Canada. Entrepreneurship is probably worse overall in canada because of culture, some banking policies and overall lack of investment capital available for non-resource entrepreneurial activities compared to the usa. But yes, health insurance is a dampener on entrepreneurship too.
Mortgages currently dominate the average person's life.
Indeed, it's sickening, and there's a very well developed structure to stop the average person stepping outside of the system via a tiny house, van life etc.
Tiny homes are the mobile home of this generation, except less widely adopted. But they will depreciate, widening the gap between those who chose to purchase a traditional house and those who chose a simpler approach.
Van life and tiny homes are not suitable for 99.99% of families with children.
It’s not that small houses are bad. Small houses (as I’d define it 1000-1750 sq ft for a 3 bedroom) are great.
But I still see it written as “if those structures were removed” that those alternatives are a suitable alternative to a stick-built house for the majority of people. I think they are all sub-optimal solutions that people should not be forced into unless they want to.
Much of that is not unreasonable — e.g. I went to a high school which had a lot of children of migrant farm workers who were definitely held back by their parents’ need to migrate up and down California following the harvest. Stability has merit.
What I would focus on are the zoning laws forcing single-family houses, lawns, vast amounts of parking, etc. since those increase the cost of housing significantly and reduce supply. There are many owners who would consider subdividing housing, tiny houses/granny flats/basement apartments/etc. but can’t because that is banned outright or requires things like street access and subsidized parking which aren’t compatible with the available space.
Unfortunately, in the United States this also inevitably involves class and racism — the laws against density, people camping or living in vehicles, etc. usually trace back to fears of poor, often brown, people living outside of “their” neighborhoods and especially outnumbering the current residents. That sentiment is long-lived and hard to shake, no matter the professed politics of a community.
"I'm stepping out of the system" is actually "I'm too poor to stay in the system".
Even with money, staying into western dense urban cities only give you one kind of life.
i document some of my adventures here. https://www.instagram.com/l_eonine/
i think thats about as anti-marx as it gets, no?
Maybe your statement is true for the American society though
Like I'm a person who is part of this system because there's literally no other option. I want to get off Mr. Bone's wild ride but there's nothing really available to me.
I’ve taken long stretches off work and done all sorts of amazing, productive stuff during that time. I have friends whom I really respect completely fall apart when nobody’s ordering them around every day though.. they stop going outside, the lack of exercise and sunlight sends their meat suits into “depression mode”, and it’s a quick downward spiral
I’m hoping that having a whole society oriented around it would result in a more positive outcome
if you make people seek calm and good social bonds (through cultural creations mostly) you may avoid capitalism runaways
We already know. Look at housewives, people on disability, young people still living at home with their parents, and retirees. Arguably college students, too.
It is not the case that all (or most) people who don't have to pay rent suddenly spend significant amounts of their time volunteering. They pursue what they desire or find meaningful, just like everyone else. And it's not clear it's a better outcome than those who pay rent (or a mortgage).
It looks like ~65% of households own a home, and about the same percentage of homes have a mortgage; the average household doesn't even have a mortgage.
In-group vs. out-group baiting, mayhem, & loss-of-life ensue. (h/t Frances Haugen)
For example the very same liberal parents who chastise conservatives for promoting racial inequality will cry murder when there are attempts to racially desegregate the school their child attends by changing admissions, and they'll come up with the perfect rational for this contradiction after the fact. They will put their child first, regardless of the fact that their child is already far ahead because of socio-economic advantages, and that the disadvantaged kid even with the better education is still going to be disadvantaged compared to their kid.
It's even worse in a culture and economic system where selfishness is deemed a virtue.
Here on HN, you can see such heavily self-serving bias in discussions like this, where the emphasis is entirely on the positive aspects and negative concerns are shot down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28924751.
I'd say it's fair to call the process by which people justify doing bad things as "evil". I just wanted to correct the notion that Facebook employees think of themselves as villains.
Facebook is connecting people with each other.
Amazon/Microsoft/Google are collecting usage data to improve their products. Amazon and Microsoft think it's such a benign thing to do that there's no need at all to allow people to see or opt out of this collection. Google thinks that providing visibility into what they're doing is more than enough to make up for it. Apple thinks that making it explicitly opt-in is enough to justify it.
Defense contractors are keeping Americans safe and making the world a safer place.
High-frequency trading firms are providing liquidity.
Landlords are "housing providers"
Etc etc
The reason shows like Squid Games is popular is that it's all about where people draw lines.
Morality is all about choices, and your true morality isn't what you say, but what you do.
The interesting things is that the people who are most committed, who are unwilling to compromise their values even if it means sacrifice*, are often invisible. They don't make waves. They just do the right thing quietly. There are very smart people who don't make a lot of money, who choose to become teachers, or find some other uncompromised occupation. Other people see them as crazy, or naive idealists. Our culture really tends to look down on those people, since material wealth is how everyone is measured.
btw, I left my career in the tech industry and my high salary nine years ago, to work on social justice, to write, and to work with children. There are costs that don't bother me at all, like my ultra simple life living in a run-down rental. There are costs that hurt, but those have to do with living in a society where eschewing the benefits of capitalism isn't popular. Some analogies I've used: Imagine being a white person having 2021 views of race and racism, but you suddenly wake up in 1850, where even Abraham Lincoln is a white supremacist (he was!). People will shun you for voicing your 2021 views. You will be an outcast in the dominant white world. You might be able to find a home among black people, except they are slaves and will be afraid to associate with you. Or here's perhaps an easier analogy: Imagine that you one day wake up and feel deeply you can't eat meat anymore. It's your conscience. You deeply feel it is wrong. So you become vegan. Now imagine this was 50 years ago before veganism started to gain any traction. Again you would be isolated. People will look at you weird.
"In-group vs. out-group baiting, mayhem, & loss-of-life " existed throughout all of human history (and in much larger quantities!) before the age of Facebook. They will continue to exist long after Facebook displays its last newsfeed item.
The longer we try to blame a technology for humanities issues, the longer it will take to address the issues.
I think it is the people at Facebook are being blamed in the comment above, and not the technology, no?
> Facebook didn’t change anyone.
You’re right that human nature is not Facebook’s fault, however, you cannot logically use that to conclude that Facebook bears no responsibility. Facebook is changing people, and there’s evidence of it. You don’t get to claim human nature when feeding drugs or alcohol to an addict, or when being a bookie for illegal fights, or when pimping. Advertisers don’t get to claim human nature when advertising cigarettes to teenagers. There are plenty of laws on the books to prevent companies from trying to leverage the negative sides of human nature, and there are plenty of companies that are currently using our worst impulses to goad us into spending our time and money with them.
Facebook intends to normalize incredulity at all times, in order to maximize their own profit, and because of the scale of Facebook, it’s causing a net negative in human behavior. Fewer people would be choosing outrage, and less often, if Facebook wasn’t pimping it. Allowing people to form companies with this intention should be illegal, no? Or if you see this as purely human nature and think Facebook is not complicit, how are you suggesting we address the issues?
We're all constantly tempted to engage in sociopathic but well-remunerating work. (No doubt there is plenty of pro-social well-remunerating work - i.e. I'm not painting that as a zero-sum choice)
The question becomes, 1 - what choice does each of us individually make when faced with such a role, and 2 - more importantly, how easily can a company identify & recruit a sufficiently-qualified-yet-sufficiently-desperate individual for the same role who will go ahead and make such a moral compromise.
I think Facebook usage is fundamentally different from drugs/alcohol. A heroin addict can understand heroin is destroying their life, but be physically unable to prevent themselves from shooting up. I am not aware of instances (at any scale, I'm certain examples exist but exceptions don't disprove the rule) where people are aware that Facebook usage is ruining their lives but are incapable of discontinuing their use.
I noticed I wasn't getting anything out of Facebook years ago and decided to stop using it. Similarly, Instagram was fun and engaging until it was not and then I stopped using that too. My experience mirrors that of many people I know. Still more continue to use Facebook and Instagram, and while I personally don't understand how someone could enjoy using either at this point, they are autonomous adults who can choose to use/waste their time with whatever method they prefer. If there emerges a substantive quantity of people who begin to think using Facebook has a negative impact on their lives but who find themselves incapable of putting it down, I think a conversation about the broad approaches society could take to help people detach from these technologies would be appropriate.
>Facebook intends to normalize incredulity at all times, in order to maximize their own profit, and because of the scale of Facebook, it’s causing a net negative in human behavior. Fewer people would be choosing outrage, and less often, if Facebook wasn’t pimping it. Allowing people to form companies with this intention should be illegal, no?
I'm not completely averse to the idea of making something illegal if a majority of people find it to be a net negative. We just have so many aspects of society (broadly in many cases, but I can only speak specifically to American society) where profits supersede general welfare that it comes off insanely hypocritical to point to Facebook specifically while not addressing any of the others.
If you're an advocate of making Facebook illegal because it intends to maximize incredulity/outrage for profit then you would also need to make news programs (both national and local) illegal. You would need to make Twitter illegal. You would need to make YouTube illegal. Most (all?) large scale internet platforms depend on milking outrage for profit. News programs do the same. I'd be interested in having conversations about making all of them illegal. I would not be interested in a conversation about making one of them illegal.
But if we are going to be honest about why Facebook is becoming the public whipping boy, it's because Boomers who voted for Donald Trump used Facebook to talk loudly about why they like Donald Trump.
"Ruining their lives" is likely a bit too strong of language, but the potential negative influence of Facebook and complete lack of privacy is certainly becoming something of common knowledge, and yet people continue to use it. As a society you can make a pretty strong argument that it's been a net negative, and yet we're apparently unable to do anything about it. The whole enterprise of maximizing engagement positions some of the smartest minds in tech to maximize qualities of addiction.
In other words, there seem legitimate parallels to draw.
> But if we are going to be honest about why Facebook is becoming the public whipping boy, it's because Boomers who voted for Donald Trump used Facebook to talk loudly about why they like Donald Trump.
This seems a dishonest oversimplification. You can point to the 2016 election as a tipping point perhaps in how we view Facebook, but it was not because boomers were talking about why they liked Trump, it was because we began to realize at scale just how powerful manipulation (by state actors) on these platforms can be.
People using something that you think has a bad influence on them does not mean it's an addiction. They are simply making a different choice than you have made.
You can't (or, shouldn't, I suppose) make something illegal purely because you don't like that people use it.
The network effect is part of the drug. I know it's bad for me. I know it's bad for society. That provided the push for me to delete it, but it didn't make it less painful.
I still have instagram, for similar reasons as to why I had facebook. It's going to be difficult to delete that for the same reason, especially since I still somewhat actively use the product itself.
Like drugs, it's easier for some people to quit than others. You shouldn't lessen other people's experiences and assume that everyone can quit as easily as you.
Most people aren't advocating for Facebook to be illegal, but want some of their practices to be illegal. Yes, this should also apply to Youtube, Twitter, etc. My feeling is that the recommendation systems should be removed, and that they should only be allowed to show you content you've explicitly subscribed to.
Facebook is the whipping boy because they've expanded knowing they're doing harm, having internal research that shows they're doing harm, and ignoring the consequences. Twitter is as much to blame for Trump as Facebook. Youtube is as to blame for QAnon as Facebook. All of them have algorithms that make people more politically extreme.
It certainly does. Humans are as much a function of the environment as they are of their genes. Different generations have clearly different value systems.
If what you said were true, parents wouldn't try so hard to put their children in healthy environments, because an environment "doesn't make a good person into a bad person."
> The longer we try to blame a technology for humanities issues...
Again, by this logic, parents should not ever restrict how much screen time their children have. Nor never blink an eye no matter what websites their children spend lots of time on.
If an adult wants to spend all day in front of a computer screen, they can choose to do so. If an adult wants to spend all day on Facebook, they can choose to do so.
If you believe Facebook would turn you into a bad person, you are well within your right to not use Facebook.
I don't use Facebook, but that's because it's an unenjoyable experience. Not because I think it's some evil hypnosis device.
A dollar is presently worth half as much as in 1990. A 100,000 a year job in 1990 is equivalent to a 50,000 a year nowdays.
Every year the noose gets slightly tighter, the slack is slightly reduced, the competition is slightly increased, society become slightly more cutthroat, people are forced to do slightly crazier and crazier things to make ends meet and sacrifice their morals just a little bit more, work just a few more hours to make the same money.
Then new generations are born into a world that's much more competitive than their parents world 20 years previous, and start out thinking this level of competitiveness and craziness is normal.
And the water in the frog pot inter-generationally continues to get hotter.
We're literally on a slow unstoppable pathway to a third world country and no one even realizes it.
Or possibly creating the conditions for war.
That would have been insane a few decades earlier, and it's not just because of improving third world countries, but also because as you said the noose tightened - everything became more expensive, especially rent, working hours increased, two salaries became necessary, etc..
Take a look at the median US household income over the last 40 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
Median household income can mean two parents are working...
Take a look at inflation adjusted wage growth for a singular person over time.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2...
Good catch.
So apparently the fed allowing inflation rates to increase is also paralleled by wage increases somehow? I'm guessing due to the stimulation of the economy by the inflation?
A lot of housing problems result from the uneven and combined development inherent in capitalism. Physical and human capital floods to major sites of economic activity, leading to a positive feedback loop benefitting a small number of major cities. The rest of the country becomes a hinterland, sucked dry of business and anyone who has the option of leaving. In the UK, where I live, this is the major underlying cause of Scottish independence, and now the increasing calls for Welsh independence, and even Northern independence. The economy is asymmetrically built around London. That in turn makes it increasingly difficult for normal people to live in London (e.g. nurses and teachers). Zoning isn't going to fix that.
Rates are low everywhere, but housing costs are not exploding everywhere (in the West). Even with-in a single country like Canada, in the Toronto/SW-Ontario area prices are way up, but the Prairies are flat/down in most places.
> rather than a huge demand-side issue given asset price inflation consequent from QE, the expansion of private credit and the financialization of housing over recent times.
Some of the Commonwealth countries (CA, AU, NZ) have the higher rates compared to other countries (DE, CH, JP, FR), and yet have higher housing price rises:
* https://twitter.com/MikePMoffatt/status/1446515836504743956
You'd think the cheaper-debt countries would have the bigger rises in prices.
In Toronto/GTA, prices have been going rising especially since 2015, when there was no QE going on. But there was a whole bunch more immigration without corresponding construction.