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Comment by terandle | Hacker News Reader

> Think of it like WWII, only only instead of planting victory gardens to beat the Nazis, we're building AI apps and finding ways to create the economic value needed to cover the reckless bets being made by the elites.

LOL fuck this, the stock market deserves to burn to the ground.

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While there are a lot of problems with the current market dynamics, burning it to the ground would cause a ridiculous amount of suffering. We need to spin up a new alternative then wind down the market gently.

When did the HackerNews comment section turn into this? Low quality, aggressive, fervently anti-establishment.

Anti-establishment is sort of a requirement for doing a start-up.

Aggressiveness is a requirement for doing a start-up in times of constrained capitalism

Low quality is driven the by the availability of capital for dumb ideas.

So... a while now?

These startups backed by venture funds are anti-establishment? Are you joking?

This is a core tenet of Startupist religious dogma. People really believe it.

That is deeply cringe.

People like to think that they are anti-establishment and disruptive at a startup. They conveniently ignore who is writing the cheques.

Part of being deep in the establishment is that you have to proclaim you're anti-establiahment.

It's like the perfect pop song - "I kissed a girl" by Katy Perry.

Do I think she's kissed a girl? No, no I don't.

I have noticed that it coincides with the re-election of a certain political candidate (He who must not be named).

The facade of "critical and rational thinker" has all but completely fallen away and this place has revealed itself for the true ideological echo chamber that it is.

I'm anti-establishment because the establishment doesn't care about anyone but themselves. What are we doing all this work for? Progress would be getting universal healthcare for all in this country. Getting better work life balance. Being able to afford a home. Now it's just all the "haves" fighting bitterly to keep getting more and more until they have everything and nothing for anyone else.

That's one negative quality that Hacker News always had to me, compared to older hacker spaces such as newsgroups and Slashdot: The Petit bourgeois conformism and materialism. People always drunk the Venture Capital pseudo-libertarian cool-aid with too much enthusiasm here.

Being anti-establishment should not be viewed as a sin, unless in extreme cases.

100%. I work in tech and frequent this sub daily but it is morally and politically neutered to a fault. It is the enlightened centrist utopia.

I agree. HN basically became Reddit.

This comment of yours contributes nothing and is exactly the level one would expect of Reddit. If you want better, start by doing better yourself.

won't somebody think of the establishment

Have you looked at the establishment recently?

Some of us just want to see the (AI) world burn.

Since when are Hackers™ pro establishment? Also what's wrong with being anti-establishment exactly, especially the current one, or really most of the recent neoliberal ones?

The only problem is that the stock market is tied to a bunch of retirement/pension and other accounts. Yes stock market should burn to the ground but also I think pensioners and retirees shouldn’t be put out, just the finance bros and private equity folks which money is just a plaything.

Pensioners and retirees willingly dumping money into index funds without oversight are the dumb money that enables all of this.

So yes, they deserve a haircut.

Pensioners don’t have a choice where their stuff goes. A teacher or something simply doesn’t deserve that kind of hardship.

Pension funds should be diversified and have a mix of asset classes that includes more than the stock market. Ideally, most of these assets will move independently so if one is doing particularly badly the others can balance it out to reduce overall volatility. If your pension fund is too heavily weighted to the market, that's a management problem with your fund.

Deserve is a strong word.

We're talking about regular folks who want to do nothing else but secure their future in the face of a market that regularly tries to screw it up.

Can you explain why you suggest "deserve"?

Or perhaps we shouldn't have killed off the concept of pensions in the United States so we weren't all beholden to godforsaken 401Ks?

To be fair, the pensions also exploded in a lot of cases.

We really just need a more centralized and reliable method of holding money for retirement. Which we have, but we need to expand - SS.

Of course, lots of people think SS will explode, too. But it hasn't! Yet!

This is pretty myopic, or something. Shows, at least, a real ignorance about the available possibilities (or lack thereof)—at scale—to the common worker for “saving for a later day”.

But I’m all ears. Now that you’ve diagnosed how 401K investing fools get what they deserve, care to offer any alternative solutions as to the entire work force should have been saving towards retirement.

(kinda unrelated but) I personally hate these forced savings schemes from the government. At least in my country the rates are low so it almost feels like I'm donating the entire difference in rates between the pension scheme and the S&P500 + taxes straight to the government.

At least give those of us brave (or stupid) enough to do something different with the money the option to.

401k is voluntary

I guess. My company (and I believe most) highly incentivize it by offering matching funds. The company says, "want to save $1000 of your paycheck? We'll throw in $500". The general wisdom is, you'd be an idiot to leave money like that going unreclaimed.

Where I am there's actually a %-age of your salary/wage that's "returned" to you when you retire. You don't get a choice.

You can choose to contribute to an employer-match scheme (I do) or even fund your own pension account with monthly payments to a pension provider. But these are in addition to the above forced pension.

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