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Comment by igor47 | Hacker News Reader

I hate the jobs argument. It's like saying, "we should keep the concentration camps open, what are all the guards going to do". Any antisocial/harmful activity will employ people to do it, that doesn't mean we should condone it.

Even more -- our civilization has a certain amount of productive capacity. I'm not saying we can or should have a central state planner to determine how to allocate it, though tax policy is often aimed at steering it. But I do wish that those skilled mechanics and engineers who work on private jets or yachts or cruise ships (and the raw resources used in their construction) would go instead to, like, more housing and offshore wind and nuclear reactors etc...

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I hate the jobs argument.

Man, I hate to digress this much, but I've recently seen the absurd end result of this thinking. Local Redmond, WA city council incumbent candidate running this year said they would work to support local business that have been hard-hit by COVID, et al. This councilperson's solution: advocate for return-to-work policies. The implied outcome being that the returned-to-office workers will suddenly visit those businesses now that they're back in the office. (One can read my almost-a-direct quote on Carson's campaign website.) Well, at least we know who David Carson works for, and it ain't you.

I am not local to redmond. But isn’t that town just dominated by Microsoft? And aren’t they going back to office regardless of what some town council member says one way or the other?

But isn’t that town just dominated by Microsoft?

Used to be, not so much now I don't think. Of my neighbors within a few houses of me: one Google (used to be MSFT), one Facebook, one game studio (who's games you might have heard of), Microsoft neighbors one house over, my Microsoft spouse, and me working at a small hardware company. But that's just anecdotal, and even if it's accurate, it's still a town that largely thinks of itself as a "Microsoft town" AFAICT. (Aside: good $DEITY, maybe my neighbors don't all work at Microsoft, but do any of them not work in software?)

But you're on the right track, as I thought perhaps it was just an easy nod to the largest employer in town, and maybe it is. But the statement was so logically asinine that I'm not exactly sure what his intent was.

> Well, at least we know who David Carson works for, and it ain't you.

It's pretty rare to have a government that works only for you. Probably the only people to experience that are absolute monarchs and the like.

David Carson has constituents, and some of them have interests different than yours. Welcome to democracy.

As an aside: one of the irksome things about software engineers and other tech people is they frequently embrace the idea of "creative destruction," but I think that's mainly because they imagine themselves as the ones who will always be doing the destroying and reaping the benefits, instead of as the ones who will be destroyed.

You hate the jobs argument but made a nazi reference in the same paragraph?

What is your counter argument here?

good job pretending to care about rigor.

That roping nazis into every discussion is a super cheap and intellectually lazy rhetorics.

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