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Comment by vanillameow | Hacker News Reader

I mean I understand that you want your business to not fall behind right now, sure. But I don't understand people in management who are audibly _excited_ about the prospect of these developments even behind closed doors. I guess some of them imagine they are the next Steve Jobs only held back by their dev teams, but most of them are in for a rude awakening lol. And I guess a lot are just grifting. The amount of psychotic B2B SaaS rambling on Twitter is already unbearable as is.

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How does the saying go?

>Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Offtopic but, the funny part about that statement is that the only place the socialist ever got the poor's support was in China during its civil war and then only because Mao was directly giving (bribing) them with land in exchange for their support. Everywhere else the main population of socialists were government bureaucrats. Ironically, all authoritarian ideologies (fascism too) happen this way, with low level government officials being the most zealous and the core supporters. The whole "revolution of the people" narrative is just propaganda, like your quote.

"America Added 1000 Millionaires A Day In 2025, 40% Of World’s Millionaires Now In U.S." from https://www.forbes.com/sites/dougmelville/2026/01/05/america...

"Altogether, according to an estimate by UBS Wealth Management, the United States is home to ~22m millionaire households — roughly one of every six households." from https://thehustle.co/originals/the-insane-growth-of-americas...

Looks like the Americans have the right idea and Steinbeck ultimately didn't.

I mean technically I'm a millionaire because I own a house. This said the scale from the time the quote was written till now would mean I need like 20 million +

I feel fairly confident in asserting without bothering to check that there are proportionally more $20-millionaires in the United States than there were in Steinbeck's time as well so Steinbeck is still on the wrong side of history. While capitalism certainly needs to be regulated to curb its worst excesses, far more than it is now, it's abundantly clear that it has outperformed the alternatives.

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