Hacker News Reader

There are parts I agree with when it comes to older people being out of touch - but I'm going to go a bit against the grain here even if some don't like it.

I have rarely met someone with a STEM degree who was entirely unable to get a decent paying job.

It is not unreasonable to say that some degrees are not as valuable as others and will be more likely to struggle financially. Its a game of statistics. You are more likely to struggle financially with a degree in philosophy than a degree in engineering. Because even companies themselves when hiring for completely unrelated positions to a persons degree will take into account the fact that the engineering graduate probably worked a lot harder than the philosophy graduate.

But I do agree that the average non-degree or "less valuable" degree holder from the past had a much larger chance of making it out okay than nowadays.

> I have rarely met someone with a STEM degree who was entirely unable to get a decent paying job.

I mean. Have you met anyone who's graduated in the past year or two?

I'm exaggerating, but seriously, I know multiple people who graduated with CS or IT degrees from reputable institutions, some with decent prior experience, and they've gotten nothing back for months if not years. Plenty of similar stories in this thread. It's pretty bad out there. Agreed that it's still probably better than the proverbial philosophy or art degree, but still.

philosophy is probably a bad example to use because i think it's actually one of the "liberal arts" majors that's actually very applicable to skills you need in the corporate world.

the skillset you get from philosphy make it a common degree for folks who want to study law. a big part of studying philosophy is learning how to construct and analyze ideas and arguments so you would be well suited for consulting, politics, marketing, etc.

Democracy and equality is crumbling in front of our eyes. Epstein's client list has disappeared in full public view, his footage is doctored in full public view and no one can do anything besides write angry comments or shuffle around legal paper that won't amount to anything. Everything just looks like a meaningless TV show, whatever new horrific thing happens it'll be on the news for a while and disappear - no one will face any consequences, all of us will just click the next article. We are serfs and no one wants to admit it, and we love individuality and isolation too much to have the kind of class-consciousness it would take to actually create change.

Propaganda is everywhere but so many people believe their countries are free of propaganda.

At what point did equality and democracy ever exist? The only things that substantially changed were who the lords were, the method of gaining power, and what shape the power structure took. At no point was there ever meaningful equality, not even before the law.

I think that's an overly simplified view of 2000 years of history. We've never had a utopia, but its safe to say we have more democracy now than in the feudal ages. There have been periods of greater concentration of unchecked power and lesser in history, some periods where government was stronger and wasn't captured as much by private interests.

The USA is currently a “democracy” and the government of the USA is the single largest human organization in history, and has powers that monarchs could only ever have dreamed of. Surely, you are correct that governments have had varying levels of power, but they were at all times comprised of or bought by oligarchs.

I agree with your point. I'll just add that in my country, at least, the facade of democracy seemed to provide society with infectious glimmers of hope. The hope is fading quickly, and the general mood is both sour and bitter, straining interpersonal relationships.

Anyway, I'm not sure how democracy can really work in huge super-complex societies. This is why we have the "iron law of oligarchy".

Democracy in the sense of representative majoritarianism cannot work as the representatives will be bought, coerced, or murdered. In an absolute democracy, when the majority cease to be useful the powerful will launch propaganda campaigns and/or manipulate the vote outcome.

Have you ever stopped and thought maybe there really is no Epstein client list and maybe he really did commit suicide?

Maybe the Epstein client list is the propaganda?

Why would Epstein keep a "client" list? What criminal goes out of their way to document their crimes? What service was he even offering? I don't think even the local drug dealer is stupid enough to keep a written list of clients.

If some shady forces killed Epstein in prison why didn't they just kill him before he got to prison? The shady forces can get to him in federal prison but don't know he is being investigated to go back to prison? Why didn't Ghislaine Maxwell die in a mysterious car accident?

Why do people care about a client list that makes no sense and not all this supposed video evidence?

Your post just shows you spend too much time on social media reading bullshit that you think is real and it is not.

"The list" is really a catch all to all sorts of Epstein-related information.

Even when you fly private, you need to provide a manifest of who is on the plane. There were hundreds of flights. The FAA has that information. One can argue it's not evidence of malfeasance and by itself it's probably not but there's also a difference once sharing a flight and, for example, visiting the island 60 times.

There are also documented connections to all sorts of people including Prince Andrew, the Clintons, RFK Jr (which he voluntarily disclosed [1]), former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Bill Gates, Alan Dershowitz, etc.

Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell, was a known Mossad asset, so much so that he essentially got a state funeral in Israel [2]. He also mysteriously died (drowned) on a yacht.

Ghislaine herself was herself convicted of sex trafficking. To whom? Nobody in particular. She has remained steadfastly silent on the issue.

It's also documented fact he got the plea deal of the century in 2008 that even allowed him to travel from jail anywhere he liked as long as he was back within 24 hours, even when there was grand jury testimony of SA of a 14 year old. The US attorney who authorized the deal, Alexander Acosta, became Trump's Labor Secretary until he resigned after details came to light following Epstein's 2019 arrest.

Between the home in NYC, the home in Palm Beach and the island there were hidden cameras everywhere. There are multiple, credible accounts of tapes that went missing following the 2019 arrest.

Nobody has ever really accounted for where his money came from and what services he actually provided.

Now extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and I don't believe the "Epstein was killed" has ever come close to meeting that standard. A disabled security camera is more likely the result of guards who wanted to sleep than do required rounds than they are of murder.

But there is absolutely information the government is sitting on and tons of evidence that he (or Ghislaine) are linked to 3 letter agencies in a blackmail operation (as a so-called "access agent").

This isn't even a partisan issue: the current administration has zero interest in releasing more information about this (and is trying to downplay it, even though Epstein is core foundational mythology for the MAGA cult) but we had 4 years of the Biden administration who didn't release it either.

[1]: https://front.moveon.org/rfk-jr-s-troubling-patterns-continu...

[2]: https://archive.ph/BVWjz

> Now extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and I don't believe the "Epstein was killed" has ever come close to meeting that standard. A disabled security camera is more likely the result of guards who wanted to sleep than do required rounds than they are of murder.

The failed security camera pointed down the hall Epstein's cell was in. No guard stations would have been visible from it. The security footage they did finally release was pointing directly at the guard station.

Also, that footage combined with the map shows if you entered the floor and went straight to Epstein's cell without going to the guard station, you wouldn't have been visible on the camera. So it doesn't even show what they wanted it to show by releasing it.

gen z is not going to college like millennials did. and i do think it was a moral failure for everyone to jump on an unsustainable bandwagon... they paid too much for a degree in the humanities and when asked about it they would say "well... its just what everyone does." mindless behavior hurts people and the economy so how is this not a moral failing? people should have stuck up for what they knew was right. everybody knew that the ultimate destination of this bandwagon was a world where everyone has a degree regardless of merit (thereby making degrees pointless and worthless) and the degrees cost half a million dollars for no apparent reason. people were intellectually lazy and they got scraped. big fucking deal.

> people should have stuck up for what they knew was right.

> everybody knew that the ultimate destination of this bandwagon was a world where everyone has a degree regardless of merit (thereby making degrees pointless and worthless)

> and the degrees cost half a million dollars for no apparent reason

These are harsh words to describe the actions of 17 year olds who were told basically their whole schooling lives that university was important.

its harsh times

"Failure to understand that means being surprised by the groundswell to Trump and Bernie in the 2016 election cycle they each represented change in their own way. Those who have benefitted from the current system simply don't understand that many want to tear down the system. They have nothing left to lose."

Sure, a few more poor people voted for trump and a few more rich people voted for Harris, but it basically rounded to 50-50. Rich people want to tear down the system too.

In fact, I think I'd want to see a breakdown by belief system. My gut is that generally speaking working class people believe in meritocracy more than rich people, and that is in fact why they voted for Trump. To not be lumped in with the 'DEI hires'(their perspective, not mine).

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-4446.12930#...

The above research suggests that poor people living with high inequality are more likely to believe in meritocracy.

The myth of meritocracy has successfully propagandized to an incredible degree. No argument there.

Think about the implications of that. There are people barely able to survive who will defend tax cuts for Jeff Bezos. These are modern day serfs. The believe the current economic order is good actually despite their bad personal circumstances. In fact, any bad personal cricumstances are the fault of [insert bogeyman group here] (eg migrants, trans people, black people, women).

And nobody seems to think about the period of history they fetishize (the 1950s) had the highest marginal tax rate of 91%.

The Democratic Party in the US is absolutely complicit in all of this. They've intentionally chosen to quash any worker momentum and absolutely refuse to address any of the legitimate material concerns of working people.

The current economic order is good.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

You're using inflation-adjusted metrics, but prices keep rising faster than inflation, and wages keep rising slower than inflation.

(Personally, my preferred measurement of inflation is "how much prices go up", but economists don't agree with me)

Prices cannot rise faster than inflation by the same metric. By definition the rise of prices—by whatever debatable metric—is inflation.

Wages have been rising faster than inflation, that’s link #2.

Well, I look at the inflation numbers, and then I look at the prices, and I notice that prices consistently rise faster than inflation. And I think that observed reality outweighs any vague theoretical justification. But I'm not an economist. I notice that economics seems to be the only "science" where if the theory and reality disagree, it means the reality is wrong.

Go look at the labor participation chart. It's bad enough people are giving up.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

Minus the Covid blip, not lately!

That's a result of secular growth in female participation. If you remove that it's almost monotonically declining.

“If you remove the workers who are showing increasing participation, the labor force participation rate is declining.”

Sure.

Well that's one interpretation of those charts. Here's another:

Real income has barely increased since 1980, as in 10% or less.

You may look at that and say well that's good because it's real income but it isn't. There are substitution issues with CPI. The housing component is lagging, relies on "in-place" rent and doesn't really reflect quality or size or housing affordability (just rents).

Look at other measures, like homelessness increasing 18% in 2024, consumer confidence and how for the last 20 years people have flocked to any political candidate that promises meaningful change, from Obama to Bernie to Trump to Zohran.

HN in particular and tech in general is a bubble. It insulates you to a large degree from the median experience. We are profoundly privileged. But privilege convinces some that everything is meritocracy when each of us is profoundly fortunate to be where we are (eg being born in a Western country, having a relatively stable family life, having access to education, speaking English and so on).

It's why the ZIP code you were born in is possibly the biggest predictor of your success [1].

[1]: https://www.lisc.org/our-resources/resource/opportunity-atla...

Real income has barely increased since 1980, as in 10% or less.

Real median household income is up over 36% since 1984 (the furthest back the linked chart goes: 1984 was in the middle of an economic expansion, so you’d expect a comparison with four years earlier to look even better).

And CPI has just as many potential substitution issues the other way: Hedonic adjustments are made, but it’s effectively impossible to quantify the value of decades worth of novel and improved goods that simply didn’t exist decades earlier.

HN in particular and tech in general is a bubble. It insulates you to a large degree from the median experience.

I linked decades of numbers about the median household, which you then numerically misrepresented. Bubble, pop thyself.

"And nobody seems to think about the period of history they fetishize (the 1950s) had the highest marginal tax rate of 91%."

Don't forget that it also had the highest level of tax dodging available through various mechanisms.

If you think the lengths people go to now are extreme to avoid taxes-- think about what they did were willing to do then.

As a non American I’d love to hear about this, any leads I can explore?

Offshore tax havens is the usual one. Panama papers put only a small dent in that. All sorts of stuff that's been cracked down on in recent years, like "take your salary through a one person company as dividends".

UK had a scheme where people would take out ""loans"" from their employer that would then be "forgiven". I believe this one blew up Rangers football club.

Fun UK example from the 70s: the tax on car parts was much lower than the luxury tax on cars, so people invented the "kit car" which you assembled yourself: the Caterham 7. Still niche popularity today.

Well, for one, people who owned small/medium sized businesses would put effectively their entire family on payroll to cut the businesses’ earnings and lower their tax bill.

> the groundswell to Trump

Thankfully that went so well!