Pretty galling that we have one of the most prominent capitalist cheerleaders out here telling us we need more friends and money when they have such an outsized influence on the reasons we have neither.
The world we inhabit (and by we I mean most of us who are workers and make a living by selling our labor) isn’t really for us. We are cogs in the machine that is essentially propping up the lifestyle of the capitalist class. The world is for them. Those of us here on Hacker News are closer to being human than say a Janitor and our status affords us more luxuries but we are still just machines even if some of us might become human.
To mitigate the risk of the workers taking too much power there has been a lot of effort spent atomizing workers and smashing unions over the years. Combine that with social media that seems to have the (probably unintentional) side effect of making us all hate each other we dont tend to have many friends these days.
Money is more obviously just stolen from us by the capital owning class. Directly through government intervention and wage theft, and more subtly through what Marx calls surplus value.
If there's a lot of surplus value in building a chair, that's a sign that we need more chairs. If you can't generate surplus value with the 7th coffee shop in the same city block, that's a sign there's too many coffee shops.
Any system that aims to remove surplus value removes this signal, which leaves you with a centrally controlled economy/system - and those tend to not only never work (at basically any scale) but tend to make everyone's life worse and worse over time and/or fail catastrophically.
Also, for what it's worth, I think you might be projecting on to some assumptions you have about janitorial work.
My intuition is that the missing "surplus value" exists within the answer to that question.
The option to start their own business is right in front of them. They even have a group of like-minded individuals with complementary skills that they could form a co-op with. Since they don't do that, obviously they're getting something from being a W-2 worker. It seems to me that they're not accounting for that something when asserting that there's some surplus value they're creating but not capturing. More accurately, that "surplus value" is being traded for whatever it is they get from W-2 work (e.g. a steady buyer for their labor).
IIUC Marx says roughly that laborers are beholden to capital owners because they need access to that capital to be able to perform their labor. But lots of programmers/IT people have better equipment at home than their job provides (e.g. multiple large 4k displays, powerful CPUs, plentiful RAM). Many also have hobby homelab or colocated machines that they could easily run a business off of. They don't need access to someone else's capital, but they still sell their labor.
It's the same as when people say that geo pay is "fair" because of cost-of-living differences. You're buying something (e.g. living 15 minutes from the ocean in an area with year-round perfect weather and lots of things to do) with that cost of living. Otherwise--obviously--you'd go somewhere else.
For everyone who starts there own business there are two to four orders of magnitude of employment contracts so almost by definition starting your own business can't be a solution for everyone.
1. Show me the system proven to be "better". The one you're willing to live under. Take your time I'll wait.
2. Even in capitalism you have choice. Go work for a union shop. Go work for a collective ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation ). If you dont like those, start your own company.
I feel like this article is targeting a generation... Its message is mixed, but the conclusion is spot on. You need money, friends, and a thick skin/patience (and all that is hard work, on top of your job).
I don't need to show you something proven to be better to ask that question unless you have some kind of creationist-like belief that all systems have been discovered and tried.
1930's United fruit. I dont think we're gonna argue that they were "good" but their impact was bad in the face of weak governments.
In the US we have our 3 branches. We also have Adams 4th branch (jury nullification). There is the 4th estate / first amendment. And then there is corporations. Corporations having some influence on government is good but the US is leaning into too much territory, and Europe too little. Change isn't hard in the US, it's motivating people out of apathy to get it done that is hard.
Shockingly most capitalist countries have it easy. There is a famous story about a grocery store and how it killed the USSR: https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...
If you want change it isn't about "honest about the suck" its about motivating me and everyone else to buy into something enough to put down the phone and get off the couch and make that change happen.
We're allowed to complain about the shortcomings of the system we live under and as humans we find connection by finding commonalities with others, even though we may not have a solution for any of the problems. You might be unable to have problems you can't fix, but everyone else has to live with them.
You're blaming an economic framework for what in the majority of cases is failure of government. Frankly half a million homeless Americans is far better than the current alternatives of Russia or China... It isn't a very good point.
in 1950 the average American home was 900 ish sq ft. Today the average American has 900sqf of space IN their home. We went from united fruit (misery where governments were weak) to fruit, coffee, tea, chocolate, cobalt, nickel... Americans got fat, and everyone else had the same level of suffering (maybe).
Candidly it's been "a large proportion of the planet living in misery" forever. We're still the same monkeys who raped and murdered the neanderthals out of existence, we haven't really evolved since we salted the earth at Carthage.
Look at the USSR, everyone was going to get a house, and a car and a.... Status wasn't about money it was about who got one first. At a point in Chinese communism status was indicated by pens (how many, if you keep them in a pocket)... The way you got ahead in these systems was graft, bribery and birthright. At least in the US and EU there is some sense of being able to elevate myself and a path to get there. The problem is that some people don't want to take it, they don't want to put the work in. The reality is that their quality of life is going to decline in the continuing global future because there isn't enough to go around.
The current trend of wealth leading to decline in population (birth rate below replacement) is fascinating. The US makes up for it with immigration, china and Japan not so much, and Europe is going to have a cultural shift because of it. The next few decades will be interesting.
The reality is that we're picking the option that sucks the least. I, am not happy about it, but no one has shown up with a better alternative that WORKS.
except that the USA is a rich country, from the point of view of capitalist competition, for more than 100 years. If a place like the USA cannot solve the plague of misery and homelessness (not to talk about the lack of basic health care) then what can you expect from the rest? It is definitely a failure of capitalism to solve these fundamental issues. The USA and other countries should seriously rethink their economic system before it is too late.
Im not sure what this is, but there is no place or point in history where a mass of people has been more well off than the US at present. Fraud, corruption, homelessness were always going to have some degree of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905889
What is interesting is that there are places in the states where they are doing a great job with homelessness. Houston springs to mind, and that (politically) is shocking till you look at why and how they fixed it... They removed the incentive to compete, and changed how people are placed.
That is so false, just compare present USA to USA 30 years ago.