Hacker News Reader

Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

> I will export millions of dollars in products that I produced here, or I will die trying

Why? Really. Maybe I’m in a midlife crises but I care about money less and less. I used to get a a lot of satisfaction from the simple fact of seeing the number on my bank account increase. Not so much in the past decade.

My computer, phone, speaker, camera and other tech toys are amazing and not that expensive. Great food and beverage are not that hard to come by. A good house is indeed expensive in most of the world, but after that, what does one need that requires “millions of dollars”?

View on HN

Millions of dollars of product (e.g. gross revenue) is a statement about scale and impact, not personal profit.

> what does one need that requires “millions of dollars”

Stop working?

Not dying when you no longer have health insurance

Most countries are not like the US with its crazy health system.

You still get better and prompter health care when you pay more money in pretty much every country.

Like most things, it depends.

There’s no money you can pay to get a donated organ faster in most decent countries. There are treatments too expensive for even the best health plans and are only available through government sponsored systems. You couldn’t buy yourself a vaccine ahead of anyone else for any price during the covid peak, etc.

Health is as much a collective issue as it is an individual one.

Those things are all available to the ultra-wealthy.

For your last example: https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/03/how-rich-and-privileged-...

That's why I prefaced the statements with “most decent countries”, etc. The U.S. health care system doesn't qualify as decent for the richest country on earth in the XXI century, unfortunatly.

No True Scotsman arguments aren't particularly interesting.

Canada, England, Brazil are far poorer and have way better health systems. I don’t understand how that’s a No True Scotsman fallacy.

The US has the best healthcare in the world, period. It's just not cheap. Brazil isn't even remotely comparable.

The best healthcare is available in the US, but it is not the best health care system. The system is awful in almost every possible dimension. And tying it to employment is one of the worst features.

The best healthcare system is the one available to most people, period.

And you’re right, Brazil’s is not even remotely comparable to the US. It’s universal, completely unrestricted and covers continental distances for over 200 million people. It’s not only free, but a fundamental right guaranteed by the country’s constitution.

If one has a serious disease like cancer and is not a millionaire, guess where there’s a greater chance of survival.

Also, when large scale sanitary solutions must be applied, like, you know, during a pandemic, wouldn’t it nice to have a way to reach millions of people other than improvising mass vaccination campaigns in stadiums and fairgrounds?

I mean, Jair wasn’t exactly a hero in the pandemic. There’s probably better examples.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/10/27/toll-bolsonaros-disastro...

He was disastrous. Fortunately he wasn’t reelected, may become unelectable and possibly imprisoned.

Any half decent administration could have aced with Brazil’s capillarity of health infrastructure and pro vaccination culture.

He managed to create an antivax movement and embezzle vacine money.

Universal, completely unrestricted, free, fundamental right... What a rosy picture you're painting. You can't possibly have ever dealt with this crap if that's what you think. I gotta wonder if you're even brazilian.

This is a system that tells citizens they have a constitutional right to health and that providing it is the state's responsibility. Rights are incredibly expensive though. Giving people "rights" is amazing when you're up for election. When the time to actually pay up comes, though, politicians can't leave the room fast enough.

The result is of course scarcity. There isn't enough for everyone. How do you manage scarcity in a supposedly universal system? Rationing, triaging. The system is forced to decide who's eligible for medical resources. People show up at the "basic health unit" at 3 in the morning and stand in massive lines so they can try to get a consult. There's often a literal quota of how many exams doctors can order per period of time, even cheap blood tests. The amount of bureaucracy you need to go through to get something like a CT scan or even an ultrasound is truly incredible. It can literally take years just to get a consult with a specialist who will actually fill out the paperwork you need. When faced with all this, most people just give up. Some seek the private sector. Others seek the justice system which just pens out an order for the city to pay up, screwing over literally everything and everyone else. They do that with the private sector too, making it increasingly unprofitable.

So we have a population that demands the best from doctors even though they have few resources with which to provide care. There are places in this country where doctors don't even have a sink they can use to wash their hands and yet they are are expected to attend to patients and solve all their problems in ten minutes each. That's how poorly developed this country is. If you're a doctor in these parts, defensive documentation is a vital skill: you have to literally write down stuff like "I wanted to do X but couldn't because X wasn't available" lest they accuse you of criminal negligence. This is especially true in emergency care, there are places here where you're essentially practicing war medicine. Emergency care basically turned into a dead end job that only doctors fresh out of medical school accept so they can make some money while they prepre for residency. Anyone with options would rather work elsewhere where they can practice medicine with a minimum of quality.

So people expect you to do more with less, sometimes with nothing. Do they value your work more for it? No. Doctor salaries are decreasing, autonomy is decreasing, insatisfaction is increasing. Doctors themselves don't get even paid on time: government being like 3 months late on payments is very common today. Another common practice: some small town mayor offers ridiculously high salaries to attract doctors and then just stops paying them when the money runs out. Sometimes a judge will even prevent doctors from leaving due to lack of payment because apparently the people have a constitutional right to their slave labor. Result: doctors wised up and now these regions just don't get any medical assistance at all because you'd have to be stupid to accept a job there. As a result, Lula wants to import doctors from Cuba and put them to work there.

This is also a huge theme here. Government just blames it all on doctors. Doctors don't want to go work for free in some shitty undeveloped region or the literal Amazon jungle? It's because they're mercenaries who care only about money. Their solution isn't less corruption and actual development of the nation but turning the medical profession into cheap labor. Lula is literally quoted saying "we need to create a new generation of leftist doctors who accept working for less". His solution to all this is to flood the job market with doctors by importing them from Cuba, increasing the number of medical schools, you name it. Low quality medical schools created just to pocket the sweet government student loans, often without even so much as a hospital for students to practice in. Quality of doctors is declining. Doctors screwing up classic myocardial infarction cases are making national news. Government couldn't care less, politicians don't get treated at such places, they go to Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital.

Brazilian healthcare isn't cheap either. It's just incredibly corrupt and eternally dependent on political will for funding. In the middle of the pandemic politicians got caught overpricing items like respirators and pocketing the difference. In the middle of the pandemic with everyone's eyes on them. Imagine the corruption that goes on in a normal day.

Brazilian health care system? Better than the USA? You gotta be kidding me.

In the US care, particularly specialist care, is both expensive and de facto rationed by lack of supply. Need a psychiatrist? No insurance accepted and a 3-6 month wait.

Hmm, not true in my experience. Family members have insurance paid psychiatric care and got their first appointments within a couple of weeks. I get that this is variable in different areas and insurance plans, but you stated no insurance and 3-6 months wait as general facts. That is incorrect.

Definitely variable - I am in Seattle and this is the state of affairs. When I was in NYC the same or worse. In WA state there are effectively zero in patient beds to the extent people in crisis are warehoused in ERs or jail. Where are you? Not specifically about wait time, curious where you rank. My experience in WA and NY ranks 11 and 15 in the US, so most Americans fare worse:

https://mhanational.org/issues/2022/mental-health-america-ac...

He's an economic migrant in a country where you don't need health insurance. He won't die.

You can with a lot less.

But the problem is, after a while, you get addicted to working. Some kind of Stockholm syndrome in the wheels of capitalism.

> Some kind of Stockholm syndrome in the wheels of capitalism.

Status seeking is independent of economic system.

I find “capitalism” has become a placeholder word for “emergent systems we don’t like”. After all, ≈50% of GDP is government spending which is closer to socialism than we might like to admit.

The single biggest drive that seems to grease the wheels is our natural desire for status. For the middle class this often is shown by our property purchases - bidding against others until we can only just afford the repayments for a house in a nice neighbourhood. We then spend many working years trying to pay off the mortgage, and we often upgrade if we get more income.

It appears most obvious when we look at other cultures, where the drive for status shows up in other ways. For example a truck owner in Northern Pakistan spending equivalent of 7 months of wages adding custom bling to his truck: https://youtu.be/1quNm7Ctd-Q?t=21m58s although he justifies it “such decorations are good for business: shows the client I am doing well”.

Once we start talking about "a lot less" the options to not work become scarce.

For instance, my estimate is that with the minimum number of millions ($2M) one can support a family while unemployed in the USA and pretty much the rest of the world. With 4% SWR such family will have $80K per year, which is more than the median household income. They will pay little taxes and will qualify for a subsidized ACA health plan.

If you are talking about less than a million, you won't be able to support a family in US. It is possible in a 3rd world countries, but it is not always an option for a lot of people.

Let me answer you honestly and in depth:

Why? Why not? If I am alive, I may as well make an effort, since I have a finite time to do so. It's fun. It's a challenge.

I know a couple of men in their 50s, one is relatively wealthy (some tens of millions of dollars), and I have often seen him on top of a machine with a wrench in his hand at 6am. Sometimes it's 3am. He starts a new company every year or two and adds it to his holdings. He owns farms and factories, and runs all of them personally. (it baffles me that he has enough time) I know another man who's relatively broke (owns his house, not much else) and says he is too old to try any new ventures. I suspect a large reason for their wealth disparity is their attitude disparity.

Money is also more than the ability to acquire toys. Money is power, and money is freedom. Money is time. Money can pay other people to save you time. You can save thousands of hours over the course of your life paying other people to mow your lawn, wash your car, paint your house, repair your engine, and re-tile your bathroom.

Money can buy you citizenship anywhere you want, and if war comes, you can just pay to fly away.

Money can establish schools, medical research orgs, and human rights charities. Money can buy media and reshape politics, or it can pay for scientific instruments that have no other funding, and it can secure the future for people (or other things) you care about. Paul Allen built a telescope array, the world's largest airplane, the living computer museum, a cell research institute and a brain research institute, and a ton of other fantastic stuff that would otherwise have no funding.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute is still one of the wealthiest charities in the world, he's been dead for 50 years and we are all still benefiting. That wouldn't be the case if he spent it all on yachts and mansions.

Money can keep an old-growth forest from turning into an apartment complex.

Money also makes all kinds of new things possible, and allows you to do things "The Right Way", i.e. to overengineer for the sake of beauty and reliability, cost be damned. Money can replace a cinderblock and plywood hovel with marble and oak. Money can build you a house that can ignore tornadoes and earthquakes. Money can pay engineers and machinists to create things that would never be commercially produced.

Money means I can work on what I want to work on: difficult and time-consuming things.

Money means I can buy the local schools all of the equipment I think the kids should have, and more importantly, I could pay for staff to make that equipment useful and not just sit in storage because none of the teachers understand telescopes or computers or 3D printers.

I could pay for our town to have a planetarium. On that note, if I were rich enough, I could embarass Zeiss and build the most ridiculous optical planetarium projector ever known.

Like it or not, money is also respect, awe even. I want to be the husband most wives could only dream of, in terms of success.

I want to buy my children education they can't get at school, by doing things with them the school cannot afford to do.

Money means you can participate in expensive hobbies that introduce you to people that you'd otherwise never meet. Those people are often interesting.

I want to set an example for my fellow citizen, and show them that it doesn't matter that we live in a shitty town in the middle of nowhere, if you just refuse to concede that our disadvantages cripple us, you can still win. We're human beings after all.

I don't even own a house yet, but I started another company 6 months ago, and this time I have no business partners to blame and no outside investors. It's all me. Moving to a small town in the middle of nowhere on the other side of the world just makes it more fun, it's life on a higher difficulty setting. I relish the challenge.

I could probably rant about this for hours, it's not that we need the money, it's that without it, so much less is possible.

We (humans) just achieved fusion, and that machine cost billions. It wasn't a toy. Money is the power to build the future.

You're describing so many things wrong with humans as a species, or at least modern humans. We shouldn't change things just because we can. We shouldn't assume that if we're able to extract natural resources its also our right to use them without question until they're completely depleted.

Why should we assume that every invention, every technology, everything we call "progress" is actually advancing in a good direction?

There's a balance to everything. We wouldn't be human without the ability to invent, to use tools, or to contemplate the future. We need to respect that power though, not lean into the shiny objects and power we can buy with a currency that itself is an entirely man-made system designed to feed a system of taxes and perpetual "growth".

This is a bad theory because it could apply to literally any time in the past or in the future. It’s infinitely variable and not falsifiable thus unscientific.

Meanwhile, progress (aka people trying to make the world better) will continue whether you like it or not, bringing benefits to practically everyone forever. Pessimists may temporarily stifle progress, but the genie has been out of the bottle for the last 400 years or so. Good luck trying to stop people from wanting better for themselves aka solving problems.

I specifically ended my comment saying we need to be responsible with this power, not abandon it completely.

I said nothing of pessimism or pessimists, or that progress shouldn't be made. I strongly question how you could possibly know that anything we do with the intent of making the world better could possibly bring benefits to practically everyone forever.

Everything has side effects and more often then not we can't predict them. What we do today with the best of intentions can be a huge mistake that we only realize years, decades, or centuries later. That doesn't mean we should hide in a cave and do nothing, but it does mean we need to be extremely careful with where we lean in and change things and where we don't.

I disagree to some extent that we should not change things just because we can: we grow beautiful ornamental gardens and weave silk and make cheese because these things please us and not necessarily because we need them; nature would never produce such order. We are the masters of our world. Nature, too, has merit, but nature makes flood and famine and disease -- we can engineer against those things.

Money is an instrument of labor also; it's possible to be rich, carbon negative, and without using up any depletable resources.

In fact, more efficiency (less resources used to produce a good) means more profit, doesn't it?

Money is the only reason a lot of endangered species are still alive. Here, rats eat ground-nesting bird eggs. Only money to build fences and island sanctuaries and establish breeding programs saved them.

> it's possible to be rich, carbon negative, and without using up any depletable resources

Arguably it's currently only possible to do so if you're rich, but as more and more rich people do so the marginal cost of living such a lifestyle decreases.

"humans shouldn't change things" is group-think that has pervaded morals & values.

Nobody really believes that. You're not living in a mud-hut. You've decided the balance should be less than whatever that guy said, but it's all relative. You are ridiculously wealthy and having such an incredibly outsized impact compared to any non-human animal that the relative difference between you and the GP is effectively nil.

See my last paragraph, we agree on this

You know, I'm re-reading your comment again later, and you're right about some of the things we do because we can being detrimental.

We don't often weigh those decisions, we do first and figure out the consequences later. That happens less now with environmental issues than it used to, but we do things just because we can, we fill the night sky with satellites and we build AI without pausing for even a moment to consider if we should. We may regret some of this later. Maybe it will work out, maybe it won't, but we won't stop to figure that out in advance, we'll find out the hard way.

Still though, we eradicated smallpox, hedged famine in most countries, closed the ozone hole, build networks that allow instant global communication by wire instead of by ship.

It may all yet work out, we'll see.

This is wildly unhealthy and un-selfaware.

Rich people become rich by paying other people less than the value of their labour. Sometimes, that's to the net benefit of the community, since the value of the labour involved is increased by a superior process. Often, that is to the net detriment of the community: for example, a landlord.

The reality is, the impact of a wealthy person is almost always small, and usually negative-on-net. That's why, in the thousands of historical examples of titanic changes brought about by new ideas or state-level policies, we have so few examples of wealthy people changing things for the better.

Who did JK Rowling underpay to get to the top ?

People can make money through success in positive sum games, which wouldn’t require exploiting other people.

Sure. It's just not the norm. JK Rowling is essentially one of a kind. The tech sector is an outlier too, in that it is normal for founders to be significant technical contributors. In most of the economy, rich people become rich through rent seeking.

If the problem is people gaining through rent seeking, then attack rent seeking itself, rather than rich people in general.

There are poor people who make money through rent seeking too, by playing zero sum games. These zero summers should be targeted rather than the entrepreneurs, artists, writers, and musicians who play positive sum games.

There are entire industries behind people like Rowling - book publishing, movie production, etc., subject to all the same exploitation of surplus value.

It’s similar to how we benefit from cheap manufacturing labor in other countries, performed by people we don’t know. Who did we underpay to get our luxurious lifestyles? The fact that we can’t name them is part of the sleight of hand that allows us to ignore the exploitation, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

> Rich people become rich by paying other people less than the value of their labour

This is actually completely wrong. Believe it or not, many of the richest people get rich because they pay their employees more than they think they are worth.

Explain to me why you would hire somebody if they lose you money.

Value is subjective, you can't point to x worker and calculate exactly how much "value they create" to the company, because many things a company does are not possible or nearly impossible by individuals. If you calculated how much value each employee brings in by subtracting what the company would have made in their absence, that would often result in being more than the company makes for most high skilled jobs.

That's why I said worth not value. You can define what a person thinks they are worth by asking them.

Please provide just one example.

> I know a couple of men in their 50s, one is relatively wealthy (some tens of millions of dollars), and I have often seen him on top of a machine with a wrench in his hand at 6am. Sometimes it's 3am. He starts a new company every year or two and adds it to his holdings. He owns farms and factories, and runs all of them personally. (it baffles me that he has enough time) I know another man who's relatively broke (owns his house, not much else) and says he is too old to try any new ventures. I suspect a large reason for their wealth disparity is their attitude disparity.

Or perhaps energy disparity? The guy who serially starts companies and works from 3am in the morning is probably in the 99th percentile in terms of raw energy available to him.

> We (humans) just achieved fusion

There’s no sense in which that statement is true.

We’ve been doing fusion for 80 years. What was recently achieved was a small increase in efficiency of fusion. We’re really not all that much closer to being able to use it to generate useful power than the first fusion reactor 65 years ago. We’re still not even close to being able to produce more energy than we used to drive the reactor, and there’s a high probability that this won’t change in another 65 years.

> and that machine cost billions. It wasn't a toy. Money is the power to build the future.

Not if it’s wasted on impractical ideas like commercial fusion power, or colonizing Mars. Money without intelligence behind it wastes resources and destroys the planet.

> you can still win

The true cost of this alleged “winning” isn’t measured in money.

Most interesting people are not in private clubs. A lot are in public forums, virtual or not, such as this.

If you're looking for wives that are impressed by monetary success I think you're in for a lot of disappointment, but to each their own.

Build a school for those left behind.

If you want to build schools, why not get a job at the department of education?

Is that a serious question?

Look I know hacker news is biased towards thinking the solution to everything is "do a startup, become a billionaire, use your money to solve it" but there are legitimately other ways of getting things done, for example engaging with the civic process to get things solved through democracy.

I couldn't agree more. Where I think we disagree is the idea that working for the Dept. of Education will have one "opening schools" in the same (meaningful) way as the parent comment intends.

If one invests the ambition into rising into a position of power in the department of education, their impact on educating the youth will be many times bigger than that of the rich guy's who just throws some money at school building, but otherwise has no clue and no impact. This is often why ambitious people choose the public servant career path - they want to have a real impact.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com