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>I suggest that US federal law should require that workers compensation be linked to how much they increase the well-being of the human race

Ah yes, I can’t wait for our future Bureau of Labor Assessment that will magically and accurately measure every profession’s impact on human well-being, and then also magically enforce some kind of earnings grab from the baddies. Sounds like a great plan!

You realize you can’t hand wave this stuff, right? Doesn’t work.

You have an excellent point.

There needs to be some kind of fix for the amount of energy wasted on zero-sum and negative-sum games.

Right now it knows that teachers and nurses aren't sociopaths and it uses their empathy against them. The cliché about teachers buying school supplies with their own money is sadly true. And when COVID hit healthcare workers didn't strike for higher pay.

Capitalism was never a values system and it doesn't reward nice guys.

> US federal law should require that workers compensation be linked to how much they increase the well-being of the human race.

Define “well-being” in a way that would satisfy the putative crowds of proletarians clamouring to send the unproductive to labour camps. I’m a musician who makes nothing tangible; would your requirement send me to the Gulag, or is art still a positive contribution to society?

I'm amused by the idea that HFT people are rent seekers, but I think they're more like plaintiff lawyers: gaming the system, rather than lobbying to change it (although they probably are doing that, too).

It's a mafia of skimmers.

I don't really fully agree with this but that's not the point. What worries me is that even if you are right, the first class makes the rules and wouldn't lead the transition into the system you describe

Correct. Read Animal House for a fairly accurate portrayal of what happens.

Yeah, fraternity members have drunken toga parties. Shivers

I wasn't aware it was novelized, though. Only saw the film.

I’m a moron. Should have been Animal Farm

Are you talking about “animal farm - a fair story” (loves the subtitle) by George Orwell ? A great read indeed, brings both brain food and entertainment.

Mostly became a vegan anarchist after reading it. It directly criticize revolutions and totalitarianism but the parallel with any regimes is logical. The roots of injustice is in power and control, which happens in any regime even the most democratic and liberal ones.

Not saying we should abandon laws and governments, but let’s not defend them in the sake of justice and fairness.

Hahahaha. Yup I was. My brain is broken from lack of sleep.

That was quick, going from HFT to NAZI in a few sentences.

Not true. The most effective thing against first class is not working a job or paying taxes, hilariously geared towards SKILL and these doctor/MBA hacks with all their education, state and media control can't stop it. The universe enjoys hilarious irony.

There's actually 4-5 if you believe the first paper in my bio, which I do. i think you'll get a lot out of it.

Almost a great take, but how can you logically you lump poor people into this mix? How is a poor person a rent seeker?

> Germany's Weimar republic, where an elite class that knew how to manipulate the workers could take advantage of a predictable economic collapse and predictable hyper-inflation to gain power.

Not sure it was "predictable" or "an elite class"; the Nazi party were to a great extent outsider-populists, and they won the middle class by pitching themselves as the less drastic change than the Bolsheviks. Certain markers of the old elite got banned under Nazism. "Mensur" fencing. Especially insanely: banning the old German font https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur

The hyper-inflation was merely an incredibly stupid response to a forex crisis caused by the reparations. The country was legally obliged to hand over gold marks; it attempted to print Reichsmarks in unlimited quantities to buy goldmarks, which of course caused a forex collapse.

There is, of course, no US forex crisis or inflation crisis, just a rather nasty transient bump caused by the war disrupting global natural gas prices. The US is doing rather well. It's Europe where we need to watch out for far-right parties who think they can solve the problems with mass murder (usually of refugees).

This is a pretty novel application of horseshoe theory, where somehow MBAs and the poorest among us are in the same bucket?

Stalin would be proud. Send them all to the salt mines.

Hahaha. Pretty awesome to read this on HN, the juxtaposition is quite funny.

I didn't get "poorest" out of gp's mention of welfare recipients. I took it to mean corporations who rely on government subsidies to make a profit, a good example being the huge percentage of Walmart workers on gov food assistance. I think you also get tax breaks for hiring people on welfare programs so it's almost like double dipping welfare on Walmart's end.

By "welfare recipients," I mean poor people on welfare who could work if they had a better attitude.

I mean the kind of people that were offended when I offered them each a cheap flashlight during a power outage. (We were all standing outside.) One of them said he would take what he wanted. He demanded the very best flashlights that money could buy. I declined, and I guess he thought I was tougher than him, so he eventually left after some more posturing. I never got his name.

I mean the kind of people who fake injury claims and collect disability for the rest of their lives, under 8 different identities. Their names were Tony and Theon.

do you also see, as the parent brought up with “… huge percentage of Walmart workers on gov food assistance.” and i’ll stick with walmart here for the sake of continuity, the other well know instance where walmart has a significant drain on local police departments. target brand stores, in the same neighborhoods don’t have this problem. target stores have significantly more people employed, which leads to a significant reduction in theft—would be thieves see an employee organizing, cleaning, stocking, etc… in just about every direction they look which discourages them from stealing. walmart just externalizes the cost onto the local police departments allowing walmart to bring in more profits.

do you consider what the parent pointed out, intentionally hiring below poverty wages, and the externalizing basic business costs onto local, often small town, police to be “welfare leeching?”

what about the companies who go out of their way to hire armies of accountants and lawyers to play games in order not to pay taxes?

what about the companies who engage in wage theft? there has been a number of reputable studies which show that wage theft may absolutely dwarf other forms of theft such as shoplifting.

if you consider these things leeching, then i think your point probably stands. but if one of those groups is not a leech, yet the other is, i don’t think your point stands at all.

if you do consider the instances i brought up to be leeches, which do you think “leeches” more? companies across the board who go out of their way to avoid taxes, wage theft, and externalizing costs? or poor people on welfare?

> One of them said he would take what he wanted. He demanded the very best flashlights that money could buy

This is such a bizarre encounter that it's hard to take it as representative of anything other than one weirdo.

I group those who do not contribute to society into the group that does not contribute to society.

This group ranges from Congress to homeless drug addicts.

Welcome to the revolution brother. Read about the Bolshevik Revolution, the theory and literature behind it, the thoughts and goals of the people behind it and I swear you’ll find kinship.

Personally, when I see someone who needs help, be it neighbor with a flat tire or a homeless person asking for a couple bucks as I walk by, I try to provide it. I often talk to people with some Venn Diagram intersection with your world view (as I know it thus far) and usually they’d literally give the wheel off their car to help the first subject in that hypothetical, and sometimes even go out of their way to give a sandwich to the second… but when it comes to policy they are so much more cruel. That’s my word for it, others call it pragmatic, or the free market.

I’m not saying that because I think I am one of the group who contributes, or one of the better, or what have you. Honestly, the sum total of my life has been going to war as a combatant, working for a defense contractor making missiles, working for a couple startups and large companies that you could sun up as selling advertising in novel ways, selling makeup, and getting people to pay slightly less for college if it’s online. Recently I’ve made a couple of new people that I hope to raise to be better contributors than I. But that’s it, I have no illusions that I’m some saint.

So, long preamble, but my point is that many of us don’t contribute to society, and don’t contribute in far more pernicious ways than a homeless drug addict. In comparison with a homeless drug addict my contribution to society has probably been markedly more detrimental, considering I used automation to deploy it on a mass scale.

In closing, look in the mirror, and unless you’ve been curing cancer, maybe cut the drug addict a break.