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Comment by hans1729 | Hacker News Reader

> I imagine building solutions to problems I see in my surroundings. For some irrational reason, I feel a desire to give back to society.

I think there is nothing irrational about this. Look up “purpose economy”. Grinding away your life in the interests of some company that basically just wants to achieve financial gains is not satisfying at all, we’re just normalizing it because it’s lucrative and we live in a world where bills need to be paid. The future isn’t build by greed and hustle, but by ambition and dreams. Don’t let people tell you off for this. Artists don’t do what they do because they seek any kind of validation for it, yet they shape the cultures that we identify with. All relevant progress, both individual and societal, comes from people who don’t care for the established worldly order. The future is build by dreamers and visionaries, not by people who confuse the treadmill for a life worth living. You do you.

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> I think there is nothing irrational about this.

it's not irrational. Unless you ignore the lower needs on the Maslow's hierarchy of needs and spend your efforts on the higher needs.

The lower needs are basic - sustenance and safety etc. If someone is wealthy enough to meet these needs with time and resources to spare, then it makes a lot of sense to spend the extra resources on the higher needs.

But it is irrational to try to fulfil a higher need, when you don't already have the lower needs fulfilled first.

That’s true of course, it comes down to the relative position in maslows model. Maybe I just assumed that the HN-audience is at the top of the pyramid almost by definition, but failed to do the adequate elaboration. Thanks!

And that is why US is spending so much effort making sure the basic needs stay unmet.

I had to think about it. Is it a conscious design effort or just a function otherwise unrelated issues?

It's not a conscious design effort in the sense that the blueprints were designed and implemented this way. It's more that gradually with every political decision that is based on greed, we sink deeper in a world that is defined by it.

I don't think any social engineers have been quite so mask-off but I'm not sure.

It's the net effect of asset holders working in their collective self interest and a society that allows them to.

They are on the other side of the bargaining table from the needy and much, much stronger. The moment the lower classes obtain a bit of spare cash and start to think about climbing Maslow's Hierarchy, rent goes up and the spare cash vanishes. Or wages inflate away and shareholders benefit. In any case, someone with an asset is standing by to hoover up the cash.

It's not exactly malice -- it's self interest with lopsided power dynamics and neglect for side effects -- but the dedication with which people weave excuses around this process can really feel like it's malicious some times.

What money is the US spending in order to worsen it's own citizens basic needs?

Not needs it stubbornly refuses to subsidize, but actively making sure they remain unmet?

Universal health care for one.

Were you actually asking in good faith? This gets brought up fairly often.

Universal healthcare would be a fantastic move for the US.

I don't think the US spends money on making healthcare worse for people though. (Unless you want to argue that universal healthcare would be cheaper than the current standard and thus by way of opportunity cost the US is spending on worsening the healthcare of it's citizens)

The US actively spends money propping up a broken healthcare subsidized marketplace and means-testing people as a way to gatekeep Medicaid, both of which prevent people from accessing affordable/single-payer healthcare.

That is the primary logic behind universal health care.

The US is spending money adding more and more privatized middlemen to Medicare which is only increasing the inefficiency of the program. e.g.

https://www.levernews.com/seniors-medicare-benefits-are-bein...

I'd go with a TSA as an example of such spending. It's a net negative to the society - lots of money being spent to give an impression of security while it's proven that they clearly fail at their mission:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Admini...

Good point, I'll concede that one.

I think there is some level of malicious intent implied on the grandparent that I don't think you can attribute to TSA policy makers though.

If you are analyzing the impact of the TSA on basic needs in our current economy, it's very positive, providing jobs and causing minor distributed irritation that doesn't really count as a negative impact on basic needs.

(You can argue that it would be better to give the money away without requiring the jobs, but that ain't the world we have)

Getting off topic, but I imagine TSA might inhibit travel enough that the real net impact to business would counterbalance any new TSA jobs.

And it is funny that we’re not talking about security. This is a good example lol

The fact that it is a show doesn't make it negative towards basic needs. Like people that can't afford to fly aren't going to go hungry because of the TSA.

I wouldn't be surprised if slightly discouraging business travel is anyway a net positive (it's going to take more than an irritating line to inhibit necessary travel and some amount of travel is almost certainly waste).

Oh, I definitely agree with your point. But what I'm saying is if you remove the security theater from the equation, you are left with comparing the job creation of a "pointless" but legitimate institution, versus the costs of diverting that money to different programs as well as the cost to travelers.

> What money is the US spending in order to worsen it's own citizens basic needs?

Here's one that bugs me occasionally:

Gatekeeping who is allowed to benefit from societal help. Welfare, specifically. There's so much bureaucracy around identifying who gets welfare and who does not (not to mention the identification and enforcement of the "no" people who find ways to get the money regardless) that it takes a legion of employees to manage.

Very true.

I wonder how many people would be out of work if the US opted for universal programs (UBI, universal healthcare, guaranteed parental leave, subsidized childcare etc.) and in the process gutted much of the bureaucracy required to maintain the current systems.

My gut says thousands, but probably more right?

Well, including the armed forces, state, and local employees, there's around 24 million federal employees. So, if even 1% were laid off, that'd be over 200,000.

So yeah, I'd definitely go with the "probably more".

Even more relevant to the question: it introduces complexity that harms citizen's basic needs by putting in place knowledge inequities. You can make the tax code as complicated as you want, and the hyper wealthy will still be able to pay for people to understand it and squeeze out every drop of value because the absolute amount of money in play makes it feasible. Spending $200k to "save" $1million is a good deal. That's maybe a couple full time employees. If you wanted to save $100 instead, throwing $20 at is isn't gonna get you anything.

So all those people who can't "subcontract" their way through the complexity with specialists are left to their own devices. And they don't have the time or expertise to navigate it themselves. So the tests and checks and processes and discoverability weeds out deserving people constantly just in the hopes of preventing some "undeservings" from having access.

It'd be like writing an algorithm and every branch of logic you put in you have to do a random roll and throw an exception some percentage of the time. Each new branch compounding to filter more and more while also costing more and more to facilitate. But that execution reality is ignored so that the pure logic can be focused on in a vacuum.

It's all like the opposite of Blackstone's ratio regarding crime that "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer". Social programs are designed such that they would often rather let ten innocent people suffer than one guilty person benefit.

The defense budget increase is $70B this year, Covid spending was $45B and ran out this year for things like securing next gen vaccines and stocks of drug treatments.

Some people enjoy their work very much. They're not "grinding away". For example, I know salesmen who enjoy what they do a lot. People who build houses like building houses, etc.

> The future isn’t build by greed and hustle, but by ambition and dreams.

Those two are not distinct at all from each other.

BTW, dreamers don't accomplish anything unless it is accompanied by the other three.

I think it's important to note that the generic "artist" doesn't shape the world around us. A miniscule elite of artists shape the world around us. The vast majority live and operate in obscurity.

The future isn’t build by greed and hustle, but by ambition and dreams.

I'm struggling to think of a significant example of where this has been true in the past. Large scale change that someone can attribute to their own effort only seems to happen when they monetize it.

Linux? You could argue that red hat did the monetization there, but torvalds didn't, not before it got bigger.

Penicillin would also be one. It had to be forced on the industry because they couldn't monetize it, so you could argue that "more hustle would have helped".

> Penicillin would also be one.

Short term benefit, long term disaster. Penicillamine (metabolised penicillin) causes copper depletion reduces Interleukin-2 which increases the risk of some cancers and the effectiveness of the white blood cells.

To the OP: Find a problem you can fix, want to fix, monetise and try to stay legal.

I'm learning that govt legislation is sometimes a posterior covering position whilst trying to maintain some semblance of authority over the population. This can hold back innovation so where legislation controls your activities (food supplement legislation is a good example), and there will be, make sure you have the arguments figured out before hand because you might be calling upon them in court as one of your customers may be forcing you to court directly or indirectly whether you like it or not.

Re Penicilin: the 'short term' benefits of not dying from a lung infection are pretty significant though. We might have better drugs today, but it was quite a miracle back then.

I'm not knocking the use of antibiotics, but you never get a GP telling you to take a copper supplement after course do you?

Getting the diet right in the first place can also help enormously with prevention.

And I find some medical tests can actually qualify me with a disease just from taking some supplements, like taking creatine and then my estimated glomular filtration rate shows high levels of creatinine which is used to indicate some stage of kidney disease all because the test cant factor in creatine supplementation.

Or I could take above RDA amounts of B6 which will increase my immune system response but the test could also indicate me with a different type of disease, and its not until we are several tests later do the medical experts start enquiry about my diet? We dont live in the 1990's or earlier when vitamin and mineral supplementation was a novelty, its fairly wide spread now.

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