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Comment by aleem | Hacker News Reader

Three worst addictions: Heroine, Carbohydrates and a monthly salary - Nassim Taleb

It's more common for people who are in-between jobs to take things that would be otherwise compromise their monthly salary income. It's less common for someone to quit a high paying job and take on a risky endeavour.

Relatedly, the Tarzan strategy is another way to mitigate this risk (side projects or finding your next gig before just quitting the current), etc. Called Tarzan because you hang on to the next rope before letting go of the current one.

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> Three worst addictions: Heroine, Carbohydrates and a monthly salary - Nassim Taleb

Nassim Taleb is a bit of a wack.

This sentence doesn't make sense. I really hope it was taken out of context, because otherwise, there's absolutely no value to it other than glorifying risk for the sake of it. May as well be talking about gambling money away.

Huh, just a couple of centuries back maybe 90% of world population was self employed. It was not the greatest risk but simply a way of life.

A couple of centuries back, wasn't most of the world population subsistence farming in conditions broadly described as serfdom?

yes, describing the serfdom as "self-employment" reminds how some in US describe the slaves brought here back then as "immigrants" or "labor migrants".

Being a subsistence farmer was incredibly risky. One bad year and your whole family starves to death. People only did that because there was no alternative. As soon as the industrial revolution came, people left their "self employment" en masse to work at a company.

Not even "work at a company". Most of the dairy farmers here where I'm from are part of a collective called Arla where the independent dairy farmers collaborate, effectively building their own safety net with an organization that could support them if they had a bad year.

Companies are not required, but social safety nets are hugely important for modern systems of production.

At least in the case of England, it wasn't initially voluntary. The enclosure acts removed their ability to farm and feed themselves, removing the last benefit they received from feudalism. It was from lack of means to farm anymore they moved to the city.

That's because it wasn't risky to get a job as a helper to a working professional, learn their trade while doing the worst/easiest part of the work, transition to doing skilled work while having your helpers do the crapwork and the professional did inspection and finishing, then either taking over the shop from the professional, partnering with the professional, or opening your own shop with your already established customers.

So completely unrelated to the modern world.

Self employed in the sense of being part of the gig economy (serfdom), working all day for a modest living under Uber (local ruler of the day). The risk was dying when the next war broke out or it stopped raining for a year.

I would think alcohol would be worse than carbohydrates

I take Heroin here to really mean all narcotics including alcohol. I think crystal meth would be worse than heroin anyway, but have no direct or indirect experience.

Low carb diet is and giving up alcohol completely: I recommend people try.

Taleb forgot workaholism.

alcohol is a carbohydrate with a twist.

That's neither chemically nor biochemically accurate.

You twist carbohydrate and you get hydrocarbons. It is just linguistically accurate :)

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