The Number go up rule: Why America refuses to fix anything | Hacker News Reader

The Number go up rule: Why America refuses to fix anything

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The number go up, until it doesn’t. The whole philosophy of prioritizing short term profits over all else is counterproductive for the same people who want the number to go up. Boeing and SpaceX are good examples on this front. Boeing management has been prioritizing profit by cutting corners to maximize the shareholder returns quarterly. And eventually you cut enough corners that your company starts declining. Meanwhile SpaceX keeps working on long term goals and eventually starts taking away contracts from Boeing.

The numbers for those are still going up and there was zero accountability for anything.

Embedded growth obligations have had deranging effects on our institutions. At some point, likely soon, the ability to kick the can down the road any longer will end.

The current administration seems to have the goal of acceleration of that end.

I think I would say it's more of an unintended consequence than a goal.

Yarvin, Thiel, Musk, Vance, and all of the other Project 2025 acolytes have explicitly and directly stated that the dismantling of every single civic institution and incumbent system is their goal.

Not reform, not improvement-- destruction.

They have literally written down, stated in interviews, repeatedly, that these are what their goals are.

They want to cripple the government, neuter every check on their power, and use the ensuing chaos to reshape the United States into a series of neofeudal states where "accountable monarchs" (tech billionaires who think they're gods) rule over the masses.

This isn't hyperbole.

And they are using the bloated, dementia-addled, shambling corpse of a god-king to do it while half of everyone stands around refusing to believe that they are doing what they stated and wrote down they were going to and the other half cheers them on because they're "sticking it to the dirty Mexicans, DEI welfare queens, and trannies".

"Unintended consequence" my ass.

What is happening, and will continue to happen, is by active conscious choice and design.

Did you mean "Yarvin" instead of "Yavin" - like Curtis Yarvin?

Yes

Unless it’s some veiled Star Wars reference…

Obviously they don't understand that the supply chain they depend on requires effecting governance and a high trust society, the first 2 things that are about to evaporate.

I guess they think they can do these better, too, better than the current "inefficient" government. If you want a high trust society, just introduce a social rating system, right?

> They have literally written down, stated in interviews, repeatedly, that these are what their goals are.

Something I find baffling - even disturbing - is the number of apparently intelligent, reasonable people who hear what these bad actors say, read what these bad actors write, but repeatedly construct alternative interpretations that amount to "when they say they to want break our society, they actually mean something else"

A friend wants observed to me while I was ranting about something:

They would solve the problem if it weren't so valuable.

Off-topic but I'm curious, so please bear with me: did you dictate this message or type it? As an ESL speaker, I'm always super surprised as to what native speakers might mis-type phonetically (in ways that would never occur to non-natives), like "wants" for "once".

As a native English speaker, I am actually shocked that I didn’t notice the wants/once discrepancy until you mentioned it. My brain must have either autocorrected or it was in ‘phonetic mode?’ when I read it.

Me too. I'm usually pretty good at proof reading but my mind skipped that one entirely!

not OP but as a native, that's a speech-to-text error 100%

As a non native speaker I make these errors in my own as speech to text machine which is my brain and body. I'd sometimes write the wrong word that's phonetically ~~different~~ the same while typing, if I'm tired or in a hurry.

I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean here.

You write the wrong word, which is phonetically different (so a completely different word), but you write it "the same" (so you write the right word)?

This just happened, while discussing my rank in a video game:

"i hit be for the first time last week, but im a mid C at best"

"be" should be "B" in this case.

(the "different" in my previous post was "strike through" in markdown with the ~~'s. That didnt come across)

Oh OK. I'd only seen native speakers make those kinds of substitutions before. TIL

Dictated it. I really should proofread more often but it fails just enough to make that not worth my while.

I am sorry - - I will try to proofread more often. English is hard enough without having to go through homonym-like substitutions to figure out what we mean!

Why have health care when you can make more treating symptoms without a cure or prevention?

Why have enough housing when rents go up during scarcity?

Why make life better for your working class citizens when you can import fresh ones to exploit?

Seems like there is a systemic problem that is causing the same issues in many countries.

On the healthcare front, it would actually more profitable for insurance companies to fund preventative health care and healthier lifestyles. Instead they focus on denying coverage as a way to generate profits.

Don't have to pay for the costs of denying preventative care if we just deny coverage for the expensive stuff too! taps forehead

They can only deny a certain percent of care that they’re supposed to pay out before they come under scrutiny and lawsuits are filed. Preventative care can dictate better outcomes for pretty much everyone covered.

For insurance, but health care is bigger than insurance.

Pharmaceutical, hospitals, equipment manufacturers.

Not everyone profits maximally from healthy people.

Correct. But incentives within the industry should balance everything out if each of these players tries to profit maximally the right way.

“Should”

Lobbying and regulatory capture have led to a less than free market, that people expect to function as a free market, but the government intervention has been too great.

Don't insurance make money on margin? That is what they are allowed to charge above their payout rate. Thus as long as payout rate goes up at right speed compared to their payin they will earn more the more they spend. It is not like premiums are set to go down ever.

There are a lot of things that come to mind when I read this.

First, it use to be the case that companies provide jobs for life and they were more tuned to helping society rather than just looking at the bottom line. That has changed over the years.

Healthcare in the US has been on a steady decline. HMO middlemen and insurance companies with a deny claims profit model are only making it worse. Luigi event comes to mind. Hospitals in other countries offer same if not superior service for a fraction of your US copay. The ICE article on Medicaid data https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44605618 seems to has some ulterior motive to reduce the Medicaid usage by non-citizens.

The two tiered system of justice has always existed, we just have better ways to highlight it with mobile devices and social media. If we look at how the Arab Spring was enabled by Twitter, more of this is happening. But at the same time deepfakes are offering a new way to discredit truth tellers.

Large entrenched monopolies love new regulation as it builds a regulatory moat that prevents new, smaller competitors from entering the market. This will only drive people to markets outside of the US or to find ways to use AI to reduce the number of human jobs needed.

AI whether we reach AGI or not is already good enough to replace a good chunk of jobs. Larger companies that are not model companies move a little slower and it will take a year or two to catch up before people realize what happened. Education has not adapted slow enough, so there will be a large number of college grads in debt who will not be able to find jobs.

The US 35 trillion debt is not helping car loan rates and mortgage rates. There will be a whole generation of young people who will not be able to afford a house, part of the American dream. This will further push the divide between the Elite and boomers and the younger generations.

Almost no mention of America's dire affordability/availability problems with housing. Nor spiraling costs of education - though that might be more of an out-of-control arms race, or negative-sum game.

In fairness, the US has so many problems (mostly of its own making) that it would be hard to enumerate them and give them fair treatment in one article. Plan A appears to be monetising the debt, which as far as I'm aware hasn't worked out well for any major power, ever. And it isn't clear that is a top-few problem right now what with the multiple-front military issues they are facing, some fairly important parts of the political system breaking down and the apparent problems manufacturing goods and services.

The issue seems to be that the US voting public is overwhelmed by the complexity of understanding what a good idea looks like or what is in their own interests. A lot of that can be laid at the feet of the Boomers though. Hopefully they pull through, the US has historically had a remarkable ability to lurch out of disaster and sort of shamble on into accidental prosperity.

>The issue seems to be that the US voting public is overwhelmed by the complexity of understanding what a good idea looks like or what is in their own interests.

I can't agree. The highest profile elections we are offered have, in the recent past, been choices between absolutely terrible options. In 2016 we could choose between a largely reviled Iraq War supporter and Trump, in 2020 the senile Biden and Trump, and in 2024 a continuation of Biden's term, represented by a poor politician hand-picked by the party and Trump, the one-term loser.

In my adult life, the best candidate I have been able to vote for is a guy whose signature achievement in office was passing a heritage foundation Healthcare bill centered around fining me for not bolstering Blue Cross' bottom line. How am I supposed to vote in my interests?

This is why I continually advocate for more federalism in our government (the way we used to have, before the Civil War and the New Deal rebuilt the country around the federal government). The presidential elections encompass so many issues, with so much at stake, that they invariably become messy elections which suck all the oxygen out of the room. What we need instead is to make the presidential office (and Congress too!) as boring and limited as we can get away with, and let those decisions be made as locally as possible. Obviously not all things are practical to solve locally (defense being the classic example), but a lot of things are. For example, there is no need to have the federal government dictating standards for education, let states do that. There's no need to have the federal government dictating what drugs are legal, let states do that. When we limit the power of the federal government, the government as a whole will become more responsible to the will of the people, because your political power won't be filled diluted the way it is now.

My political power would most certainly be more diluted - down to nothing - if we moved to a "state's rights" type system. As it happens, I live in Florida, so my choices for state and local office have been much worse than they have for president. I could absolutely not cast a vote in my interests if more power was at the state level.

As hard as it seems to be, moving to a state that's more in line with your values might be a good idea.

The problem with moving states is that there's a devil to pay when you loose your support network (family, friends, local coworkers). And the cost of moving isn't realistic for some.

I totally understand. Everyone has to weigh the cost for themself. Someone whose family is in danger just has to pay the price and move. Some might judge they can do more good by staying and fighting against the local bad actors.

It starts with the understanding that there's no such thing as a national politician whose every policy will align with your interests, unless you are the politician in question.

How was Harris - who would have at the very least continued the sane economic policies of the Biden administration, a “terrible option” compared to Trump who repeatedly and with much enthusiasm, said he would pursue as much disruption as possible with tariffs, ice raids, and poor foreign trade policies?

How are these equivalent to each other? That’s such false statement I don’t know how anyone can give it a pass at this point

You've given the game away. How was Harris a terrible option compared to Trump? She was not. But critically, she was only not a terrible option when compared to Trump!

Maybe you might feel that Harris was herself an objectively good option, one who would successfully solve some of the problems brought up in the article. I personally find that very hard to believe.

> the sane economic policies of the Biden administration

Because those very same "sane" economic policies didn't actually do much perceivable improvement to the lives of most Americans. TFA even mentioned that Harris probably would've fired Lina Khan because "number must go up". Sure, being able to cancel Netflix with a button is nice but people want fucking healthcare and for there to be a shred of dignity in working an honest living.

People in 2020 were suffering, so they voted for change. People in 2024 were suffering, so they voted for change. People in 2026 will be suffering, so they'll probably vote for change...people in 2028....

They were sane. As in, were not insane. As in, they wouldn't have deliberately wrecked the economy and not guaranteed economic uncertainty.

Whether they were applicable to the day to day realities of many Americans is beside the point I'm making. It of course matters and goes a long way to explain how the Democrats lost the election in 2024, however, the policies weren't going to intentionally lead the US economy into a recession and promote economic uncertainty, shatter trust with our historic allies etc.

The problem is that over time, traditional economic measures have ceased to accurately model the average person's quality of life. What use is a growing GDP when most people can't afford to buy a house until their mid-thirties? What use is the S&P 500 reaching an all-time high when daycare costs $2000/month?

Of course if you're looking at things purely from a logical, calculating, "lesser-evil" perspective Harris is the better candidate, but a lot of people can plainly see that their quality of life has gotten worse compared to how their parents and grandparents were doing at their age. A large amount of people who see things getting worse and feel like they have nothing to lose is how you get political extremism and candidates like Trump winning elections.

Yep, I think a lot of people genuinely want to disrupt the status quo. Sure there are some very questionable things attached, but in general people are extremely good at ignoring things if they get a better deal out of it.

> Of course if you're looking at things purely from a logical, calculating, "lesser-evil" perspective Harris is the better candidate, but a lot of people can plainly see that their quality of life has gotten worse compared to how their parents and grandparents were doing at their age.

I am perplexed by this blend of comments. It reads like a desperate attempt to whitewash and normalize the trainwreck that is the Trump administration. Trump is not in the same category as any other president in terms of utter destruction and dismantlement of social safety nets available to US citizens. They are not the same.

It's baffling and completely unserious to even insinuate Harris, by extrapolating Biden's work and legacy, would be equivalent or comparable to the hostility the Trump administration exhibited towards the working class and low income families. Biden fought hard to push forward policies like the student debt forgiveness program, which Trump-supporting republicans did everything in their reach to eliminate and revert. They are not the same. Even suggesting they are is insulting to everyone's intelligence.

I dislike the mentality that if someone criticizes one party, it means they must automatically support the other. Those are two different things! Personally I think this administration is the worst for America since the Reagan administration.

> I am perplexed by this blend of comments. It reads like a desperate attempt to whitewash and normalize the trainwreck that is the Trump administration. Trump is not in the same category as any other president in terms of utter destruction and dismantlement of social safety nets available to US citizens. They are not the same.

The point I was trying to make is that US-style capitalism, where the government exists to serve large corporations and the people who run them, inherently results in social and political instability. Ignoring the average person in favor of stock market gains creates a large number of people who are hopeless, see things getting worse, and feel like they have nothing to lose, which is when you start seeing right-wing populists winning elections.

> It's baffling and completely unserious to even insinuate Harris, by extrapolating Biden's work and legacy, would be equivalent or comparable to the hostility the Trump administration exhibited towards the working class and low income families. Biden fought hard to push forward policies like the student debt forgiveness program, which Trump-supporting republicans did everything in their reach to eliminate and revert. They are not the same. Even suggesting they are is insulting to everyone's intelligence.

The Democrats have shown time and time again that they don't care about earning people's votes. Even the gains the Biden administration had made for things like antitrust law and consumer protection were set to get rolled back under the Harris administration. "At least we're not Trump" is not an inspiring message. I think it's been telling that when the Democrats had a narrow majority in Congress during the Biden administration, over and over they threw up their hands saying "we don't have the votes" and let the Republicans stop Biden from implementing his agenda, but now that the Republicans have a narrow majority suddenly Trump has all the power in the world to dismantle the government piece by piece. After what happened with David Hogg getting forced out of the party for saying that maybe we should have some younger people representing us (note that 3 Democrat representatives have died in office this year), I genuinely believe that party leadership would rather keep losing elections than give an inch to even the most milquetoast reforms. We're left with a party of septuagenarians whose skills are in clinging to power, not delivering positive results for their constituents.

BTW I screwed up the formatting since I was tired when I wrote this, pretend the first paragraph I wrote is smushed together with the second paragraph.

Ah yes, fought so so hard for student debt relief. And codifying Roe...

Where's the Senate parliamentarian nowadays? Sure doesn't seem to stand in Trump's way

ALICE has done good work here[0] in calculating a realistic inflation rate, and it contrasts quite a bit from the official CPI. I've also read that the 1990s changes to the CPI drastically cut the official inflation rate by excluding more things from the calculation. If that had not happened, inflation would have tracked more realistically to the average person in the US

[0]: https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index

They're not equivalent, but that doesn't mean either is in working people's interest.

One has nothing to do with the other in terms of the discussion at hand.

They aren't equivalent as you said, and thats what I am solely discussing

> (...) in 2024 a continuation of Biden's term, represented by a poor politician hand-picked by the party and Trump, the one-term loser.

Pause. Even though I'm not a US citizen, it is very hard to try to spin Biden's term as anything other than one of US's best governments in decades.

Comparing Biden's term to any of Trump's terms, specially the utter pyrrhic trainwreck that is the current term, and proclaim they are comparable is simply something not rooted in reality.

Try to be serious.

Again, I ask whether you think Harris or Biden produced objectively good results, or fixed any of the problems identified in the article. I agree that both are better choices than Trump, but my exact point is that I can't cast a vote that is actually in my best interests.

Concretely, I lost real pay under Biden; at the same time, buying a house where I live probably is half again as expensive as it had been. Even my most narrow economic interest is that both these problems get fixed. Do you think Harris would have done that?

> Again, I ask whether you think Harris or Biden produced objectively good results, or fixed any of the problems identified in the article.

I beg you to pause, take a deep breath, look at any of Trump's terms, and compare it with the output of Biden's administration.

Do that, and you simply cannot say with a straight face that there was no choice or difference in outcomes. Not even as a joke.

If you are honest with yourself and with everyone, you will acknowledge how outlandish that idea is.

Let's be serious.

You're repeating yourself. You are arguing that Harris and Biden performed better than Trump would have (and is, now). I agree. I am arguing that Biden was not, and Harris would not have been, acting in my best interests.

That's an absurd argument to make considering how pyrrhic Trump's terms have been. It implies both are somehow equivalent in the utter destruction of people's interests and support infrastructure. They are not equivalent. There ain't a comparison possible. Framing Trump's trainwreck of an administration to any president's reads like a desperate attempt to normalize the damage he's doing.

Bush stole an election, lied to the UN to start an illegal war, and killed a million innocent people.

Biden let hundreds of thousands continue to die not taking serious action about COVID (Trump of course did the same, and they both did it previously for Line Go Up reasons). He crushed strikes, he failed to pass promised reforms despite congressional majorities.

Nobody here has said they're equivalent. Nobody. Biden not being as bad as Trump does not mean Biden was working for the interests of the working class, is what is being said. If your political project refuses to engage with the working class, you can't blame them for not voting for you.

Lmao well given the quality of US governments the last 4 or 5 decades, you're really not saying much

> In fairness, the US has...

True. But the ever-upward cost of housing is obviously a major locus of one-way asset prices, and The Number Go Up Rule.

Didn't it? Why build housing if scarcity increases rent

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