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Comment by supperburg | Hacker News Reader

She said she would like to teach critical thinking. How unbelievably rich. The host made the excellent point that in this market, the hardest you will work is determined by how hard people in general are willing to work. The market decides how hard you are expected to work, not your boss or the Illuminati. It’s the same something-for-nothing logic-vacuum that led to communism and the massive corruption that followed.

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>The market decides how hard you are expected to work

That's like saying house prices in San Francisco are set by how much people are willing to pay. It's true but hides the real problem which is housing is unaffordable for many in that area.

> That's like saying house prices in San Francisco are set by how much people are willing to pay.

They literally are.

> It's true but hides the real problem which is housing is unaffordable for many in that area.

Area has finite amount of estate. The only "solution" is to create ghettos of human hives which lead to classes of problems on their own.

Some people own multiple homes. Some people rent out those second homes. Some turn them into glorified hotels via AirBnB and the like. Some merely sit on them as an investment vehicle or a tax avoidance scheme. These people are leeches on society, artificially increasing housing prices while providing no real value.

> The only "solution" is to create ghettos of human hives which lead to classes of problems on their own.

As a general rule, one can assume that anybody who refers to humans as an infestation or their homes as hives is not a good person. Have the day you deserve.

> As a general rule, one can assume that anybody who refers to humans as an infestation or their homes as hives is not a good person. Have the day you deserve.

Anything concrete to say, aside from weak ad-hominem?

I grew up in post-USSR, I'm pretty sure I know much more about human hives than you do. And I never said anything about infestation. Every family should have their own home.

> The only "solution" is to create ghettos

There's a list of reasonable things they haven't tried yet.

It doesn’t hide anything. If the price is too high then something is wrong. In your case it’s restraint on supply and in labor the problem is people who don’t know the value of what they have and never put any consideration into making themselves difficult to push around. They jump into precarious financial circumstances, but expensive things and pump out babies and when it comes time to negotiate they have zero leverage. The behavior of the average American is retarded and spoiled. That’s why people from Asia come here and shoot straight to the top — because their parents actually make deliberate decisions to advance their socioeconomic position.

Harsh words, but true. +1

The best thing for most people to realise is that "life's not fair, deal with it".

A convenient philosophy for those who gain an advantage from the unfairness.

Perhaps, but also for those that simply want to try to improve their lives without the baggage of constantly feeling that the world is oppressing them.

Personally, whatever little I have is probably 1/3 luck, 1/3 hard work, 1/3 good decision making. I've never inherited a single $1, don't have a CEO relative to hire me, etc... but what good would it do to blame the world for any of that? Life _isn't_ always fair, whatever.

Exactly. I have had several opportunities in life to get a significant advancement in income, but it would have meant doing something unethical, so I passed.

Sounds dangerously close to "life's not fair, keep your mouth closed and do nothing about it".

Not really, life _isn't_ fair, so do what you can to make the most of it.

No matter who you talk to, everyone will have their hardships, but complaining about it rarely makes things change for the better. I'm not saying one shouldn't advocate for change or try to change a broken system, but for your situation to improve, often the only thing you can do is just try harder and hope for a little luck.

I support the "work reform, unionize, know what you're worth" camp of this "antiwork" crowd, I 100% agree that workers should be more open about wages, try to organise and show solidarity... I'm a salaried worker myself and my quality of life is very much correlated to that of the AVG worker. That doesn't mean I believe that I can fix the world and all of its ills, nor do I care to.

edit: typo

Amazon warehouse algorithm disagrees with your assessment.

It still falls under the general free market principles. Distribution runs on a very thin profit margin, and if it wasn't Amazon in the lead, it would be Walmart, or others.

You sure about that?

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...

It’s not the Illuminati, it’s that no one looks.

Bosses have a way of deflating wages by demanding more hours and effort, too.

The market is like a programming design pattern; kind of a hand wavy concept to fuel discourse. It’s still easily corrupted biology in charge. Repeating the same old semantics is keeping you from seeing the corruption already there.

While I agree on substance with your comment you seem to have a strange interpretation of communism. I very much recommend to read e.g. the brief, very readable and very illuminating Communist Manifesto if you would really like to understand where it came from and what its ideas were before Stalin and Mao made it just a veneer on top of a dictatorship. I'm in no way a communist but I can fully appreciate its ideals and aims (e.g. the idea that everyone should receive resources according to their needs).

Sidenote: it is also worth to actually read Smith (especially books 2+3 of the wealth of nations) to understand that rather than a believer in an invisible hand he was deeply critical of laissez-faire capitalism and saw a need for the state to intervene and manage its excesses and abuses.

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