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Comment by foxglacier | Hacker News Reader

While I admit to not having been able to read the article, this is very true. In my country, everyone has access to free healthcare, housing, food, and even tertiary education for most people, especially the poorest. But there are still endless complaints about poverty. Sometimes a person will have to live in a (free) hotel because all the immediately available free housing is in another city where they don't want to live despite being still perfectly well developed and comfortable.

We'll never get rid of poverty because people keep raising the bar no matter how wealthy they get.

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Poverty perception is relative. Most people judge their position on the poor/rich scale based on their sorroundings, rather than in absolute value.

Also to the point on raising the bar. I think that is not a bad thing.

This is the key point.

We can look back on people who were royalty in their time, but by modern standards, they would've been living a poor life. No AC in the summer, no proper medical care and the possibility of dying from a mild tooth problem, only having access to food that's in-season, zero running water, needing to have your poop hauled away in buckets, needing to spend all day just to travel 15 km, being blamed for a random crime and executed days later with no real evidence.

Being a rich person in the renaissance period seems like it'd be nice if you only look at paintings glorifying the lifestyle. But when you sit down and think about the nitty gritty daily life, it would suck compared to an average modern lifestyle. Yet the rich back then were surely quite comfortable, just like the rich today are. And the rich centuries from now will look at the mega rich today and be amazed that they lived such quaint lives without food teleporters and instant cancer zappers and weekend trips to the balmy shores of Ganymede.

Saying the poor can't be dissatisfied with the inequality in society today because "things were worse in the past for the poor" can really be extended to anyone and anything. There's always something in the past that was worse than a typical bad experience today. But the past is full of horrors that we should learn from and not repeat.

> No AC in the summer, no proper medical care and the possibility of dying from a mild tooth problem, only having access to food that's in-season, zero running water, needing to have your poop hauled away in buckets, needing to spend all day just to travel 15 km, being blamed for a random crime and executed days later with no real evidence.

I think this is greatly exaggerated. Actual royalty had access to vast amounts of physical and mental labor that only the billionaires of modern society could rival.

No A/C? You can pay people to bring ice into your house and cool you. No medical care? You could have a surgeon invent an implement to pull an arrow out of your skull and save your life, just because you are important enough for that. Only food in season? You could pay people to bring you food from other places far away lands no one has ever seen in such seasons.

Modern world has conveniences, but so many people cannot afford any labor at all. Royalty had leisure time that most modern people can barely afford.

Where are you getting ice from in 1500s Italy? You get an arrow pulled out of your skull, but what are you doing with the resulting infection? People bring you food from far away, but there's no refrigeration and it's hauled at 15 kilometers a day. You can pay someone a lot of money to bring avocados from 1000 kilometers away by foot today. But you won't want to eat those avocados. Get bit by the wrong mosquito? You're possibly dead from malaria, and no doctor can treat you. (People still die today, but you're much, much more likely to survive) Get syphilis? Your body is going to slowly rot away. Having a kid? Better have a few backups, because even the children of the rich dropped like flies.

Labor was cheap in the ancient world. But the reality is that machines and technology do a lot of work better than a human hand. No matter how many people you hire, nobody is cooling and preserving your food as well as a typical $500 refrigerator. And nobody is cooling your house as well as a $500 AC either. Air conditioning revolutionized the world because it made lots of places that were borderline inhabitable habitable. It doesn't matter how rich you were, life in Saudi Arabia wasn't as comfortable as it is today. Vaccination, antibiotics, windows, and AC made tropical areas much more habitable for everyone.

> Where are you getting ice from in 1500s Italy?

The Romans had ice available even for common people. They harvested it from the mountains. Ice can be stored a surprisingly long time if kept out of sunlight and packed correctly. I know less about 1500s Italy specifically, but obviously the technology existed if people wanted to do it.

> You get an arrow pulled out of your skull, but what are you doing with the resulting infection?

An infection was bad news, but by no means guaranteed. Soldiers frequently suffered horrific wounds and survived, assuming they weren't on an interminable hell campaign with no chance to recover. It's actually quite surprising how resilient people are.

> People bring you food from far away, but there's no refrigeration and it's hauled at 15 kilometers a day.

Where are you getting the 15km number? Of course it depends on the topography, but also the mode of transportation.

> You can pay someone a lot of money to bring avocados from 1000 kilometers away by foot today. But you won't want to eat those avocados.

It really depends on what you are eating. Trade did bring all sorts of exotic food items hundreds or thousands of miles.

What other mode of transport did you have? ships was all. even if you used an oxcart (not a horse - they eat too much for this work) it was slow.

okay 15km is too short. Average walking speed is 5km/hr and you would expect to walk 10 hours a day. So movement would have been more like 50km per day.

You ignored my point that however you slice and dice it the royalty could afford ample leisure time that modern day people cannot, even the upper classes spend more time working than almost anyone from nobility.

There are massive numbers of people who simply don't work at all today. There are plenty of people with inherited wealth doing nothing, just like royalty before.

A child of a movie star today is living a much more exciting and relaxmaxxed life than a typical prince 500 years ago. And they don't have to march out to battlefields sometimes, get massacred by their cousins or constituents, or die of being inbred. Guarantee you that you could take any prince from centuries ago, show them first class on an airplane and beach resorts in French Polynesia and they'd 100% prefer "settling" for that over slow carriage rides between cities.

The original statement was:

> We can look back on people who were royalty in their time, but by modern standards, they would've been living a poor life.

But now you have shifted the goalposts to say the modern day royalty lives better than hundreds of years ago royalty. That is obvious, and not what anyone was claiming otherwise.

>No medical care? You could have a surgeon invent an implement to pull an arrow out of your skull and save your life, just because you are important enough for that.

...and die 2 weeks later from an infection because antibiotics haven't been discovered yet

>Only food in season? You could pay people to bring you food from other places far away lands no one has ever seen in such seasons.

The lack of air freight means even if you can send some guy to get it, by the time it arrives it'll be rotten.

But the example I am giving from real life did not die of an infection 2 weeks later

"No AC in the summer"

Have you ever been in a castle? Thermal mass is highly underestimated from my experience. I suggest the likes of Foix in warm southern france in the peak of summer. Walking into one of the lower rooms where the doors are wide open and such is like walking into a fridge.

Raising the bar is good but there are people who will exploit the feelings of people who perceive to be disenfranchised (and will cherry-pick some aspects where they are really worse off now compared to the past) and they will inflate their anger and may lead to destroying the actual progress that has been made.

This can happen with the best of intentions too.

Free housing & food? Which country is that?

The UK is infamous for housing illegal immigrants in hotels, and they don't just get free food but free money, too. Oh, and free healthcare.

Free money, housing, and healthcare for everyone is also the law here in Germany, which is why we get flooded by illegal immigrants too..

..and that's why these Western European welfare states are collapsing. You can only afford something like this if your population overwhelmingly consists of educated, skilled people with a strong work ethic who would never voluntarily sign up for welfare. Once you allow millions of foreigners into the country who are neither educated nor skilled nor have a work ethic such systems start to collapse.

Maybe read and spread less Russian propaganda. Illegal immigrants never get anything in EU, other than Schengen entry bans.

Illegal migrants that claim asylum in Germany and Sweden have never got any public services, housing or other support?

Really, that is your position?!

I don't think asylum seekers are typically considered illegal immigrants. I think that's more individuals who either don't seek legal status, or have tried to get a legal status but failed and stayed in the country anyway.

And I don't think Sweden and Germany are giving free housing to individuals that overstayed their visas.

I'm in France, healthcare is also for the illegals in the form of AME (Aide Médical de l'État).

https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F3079

Please read this article in German: https://www.merkur.de/lokales/muenchen/so-viel-gibt-muenchen...

They get not only free housing, but also free food and even a janitor! That’s better than significant part of the population does. Do you think, that delivery driver or a nurse can afford more?

> ..and that's why these Western European welfare states are collapsing.

No, it's not. The weight of illegals on the welfare system is a rounding error compared to the effects of an aging population. And if you were familiar with people in this situation rather than spitting out far-right talking points you'd know that's it's not an enviable situation and not one they yearn to stay in.

So then why do millions come to the US to work backbreaking jobs in the agriculture or construction sector risking deportation and receiving no such benefits? It turns out the greatest economic impetus for migration is not available social services but available work of better pay. Same reasons why software engineers flock to the coasts. You see migration into Germany because literally all of south and eastern and the poorer parts of western europe are clamoring for finding work in Germany. And of course also middle easterners and africans, which the right wing media seems to fixate almost exclusively and not the constant flow of slavic people doing the same for the same reasons, probably owing to skin color and religion and the ease of slanting rhetoric along those lines for propaganda purposes for the bigots of the right wing base.

All the free claims of facilities here ONLY exists to support corruption. These free things are not materially helping poor people hence everyone seems to be unhappy. For example, in India it takes almost $700k per km of road construct while in the US, it takes only $120k per km to construct the road.

And when it comes to other attributes like quality of the road, speed of the construction or durability of the road.... It's far worst than the USA.

All the Indian govt programs only exists to support their corrupt contractors and not for helping people genuinely.

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