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Comment by skee8383 | Hacker News Reader

The higher educated white collar class is coming to terms with the fact they are just as disposable as the rest of us.

Exactly. Since reality has now hit them in the face after the VC fuelled tech bubble utopia that finally popped with the cheap money disappearing afterwards.

So what of the conditioning of employees by telling them: 'We're all a family', 'Sticking together in the long term!' and 'Everyone wins, yay!'. I don't think 'families' do abrupt layoffs en mass to their own in the morning.

The era of cruising on cheap money is over. It is time to learn to adapt with AI.

Which class do you relate to and as a function of which type of job?

Everyone is disposable all the way up to the CEO.

We are all workers, we are the working class whether we are educated or not.

The capital owners want the working class to fight amongst themselves because it allows them to continue enriching themselves off the backs of the working class.

Even if you own some stocks or have a 401k, if you depend on a salary to pay your bills then you are a worker

It annoys me in the UK how people claim that "Tommy who 'does up houses' and flips them or rents them out" is a "working class builder", where as Billy isn't working class because he types on a keyboard.

In the UK working people, especially those earning above minimum wage, are taxed far more than the capitalists of the world like Tommy who can structure his income to pay just 30% marginal taxes rather than 60% plus.

Honestly it's the same in the US. But unfortunately the ones who fund the political campaigns are usually the ones with the lower tax rate, so that doesn't change.

Actually there are different levels of working class. A guy earning $18k per year working in retail isn't exactly in the same boat as the manager of the store making $80k a year.

That was a story made up by capital owners to keep the working class fighting amongst itself. The reality is that anyone who works for a wage is being taken advantage of

I have > 500k net worth which using the 4% rule gives me 20k a year but I still work. Am I a capitol owner or working class?

If you can quit your job and live purely off your investments then you are a capital owner, if you cannot do that without adjusting your lifestyle you're working class

It's called being middle class. middle class != working class, But i don't expect you to be able to see through the decades of propaganda.

Again, middle class is a concept invented by capital owners to keep the working class fighting amongst themselves. If you depend on a wage to survive, you are a worker

Working class is defined as those who must sell their labor in order to survive. If you cannot live off income of your investments alone and must work for a salary then you are a worker, you are working class

The middle class are those who have the capital to be capitalists to some degree, but not enough capital that they can live entirely off that capital, still requiring some kind of job to make ends meet. Someone earning $18k per year at their job could be middle class and someone earning $80k per year at their job could be working class. Their job income doesn't tell us anything with respect to their capital holdings.

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