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Comment by globalnode | Hacker News Reader

i think people trying to argue that we would be more productive is a symptom of the productivity disease. where all we value is productivity and thats the only way we can justify more non-work time. i personally just think we should all have more time to do what we want, whether that is being productive on personal projects, talking to people, playing games, or doing nothing. happier people right? why should 10% of the richest people enslave the rest of us.

edit: forget dems v pups, black v white, democracy v communism, its all about class struggle, probably always has been. i bet those 10% can pick and choose how productive they want to be and how much spare time they have lol.

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> its all about class struggle

That's the foundation of Marxist theory.

In America, however, anyone can become wealthy.

Marxims is such a lazy evaluation system. Discarding culture altogether, refusing analysis of religion, its basically a Proof Of Non work, when it comes to sociology and analysis

I think it’s unfair to say that it’s “lazy.” Neo Marxists understand the way those factors affect impact economics but because they’re very difficult to quantify in a heavily quantitative focused academic environment you’ll see less focus upon it, even when analyzing standard fare free market capitalism. I consider it a double standard to put burdens of analysis more upon one ideology than another. Sociology and religion are already highly qualitative disciplines by nature of the limits of science and our known physical reality (eg. we can’t time travel let alone reliably) and the kind of advantages systems like feudalism, monarchism, mercantilism, etc. work with authoritarian centralized systems is consistent across many societies including why some cultures tend toward syncretism and why others reject certain tenets and customs. The Nordics weren’t Christian, after all, and they absorbed it much more than American indigenous while Black Americans have very different relationships to Christianity than African blacks such as in Somalia and Ethiopia - this isn’t the wheelhouse of economists typically in academics but various humanities departments unrelated to business. Those influences and trends usually get labeled under the standard generic realities of imperialism given so much orchestrated power influences societies en masse while most bottom up movements against these structures tend to come from humanities focused areas away from economic interests like the arts, but this is why the Soviet Union and even China suppressed these freedoms because of the tendency to cause discord and dissent in a precarious society. As such, most leftist literature, especially outside academia (already an institution that must exist within the confines of a funding society), sounds predominantly like they’re criticizing basically every dominant human social construct, which is where the ideological position is cornered. This isn’t to say that I agree with this kind of discourse either because it doesn’t convince people beholden to these dominant constructs.

Why do people focus on things that have never worked? Studying Marxism is analogous to studying astrology. It's the most failed economic system ever tried.

When you study Marxism you're studying an economic point of view, not a form of government. IIRC most of his work is observational and there's just not much to disagree with once you break essays down to a bullet-pointed outline.

The only thing you should be upset about with Marx is his prose.

The Labor Theory of Value is a basic component of Marxism and is demonstrably false.

The other tenet is looking at everything through the lens of class struggle. The modern incarnation of that is interpreting all of history in terms of race. Social mobility in free countries like the US shows that the class struggle theory is woefully inadequate.

Time would be better spent studying free markets, the law of supply and demand, etc.

Its more aching to theology, as the economic model is very simplified, assuming all constraints can be easily overcome - once you sparsed out the oversimplified sociological model. They have no concept for a limitation of resources, no concept for organizational complexity, no concept for investment pooling- beyond "the party of benevolent revolutionaries" controls all. Any toddler could come up with something more coherent..

If they did, why are they constantly surprised, science gives you prediction power- scientific analysis, should make you the one who surprises others. "Eclipse.. now!" is science, not "Why is it suddenly dark! Must be xyzs fault!"

> In America, however, anyone can become wealthy.

its mostly luck, not merit ;)

Nope. It's merit. Jobs, Musk, Bezos, Buffet, all exceptionally hard workers and risk takers.

Saving 20% of your income and regularly investing it is the path to decent wealth for about everyone. See "The Millionaire Next Door".

https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising-Amer...

BTW, a couple years ago, I was being driven home from the car repair shop after I dropped my car off. I struck up a conversation with the driver, who turned out to be a refugee from Afghanistan. He had come to the US a year previously with nothing but the clothes on his back. He got a job, saved his money, bought a car and started a car service. He was telling me all about his plans to expand his business.

The fellow was already well on his way to becoming wealthy.

The 10% richest people create the jobs for you by cleverly investing you know

I was all with you right up until the class conflict stuff. Nobody's enslaving anybody. Well that's not true, we're mostly enslaving ourselves. There are endless easy opportunities in life. For instance go teach English in Saudi Arabia and you'll earn around $60k a year which doesn't sound like much until you account for the fact you pay 0% in taxes and have a cost of living well under $1k a month.

Just live frugally, dump your excess into index funds, and you'll likely be a millionaire in a decade. Yeah it's Saudi Arabia, but the price is right. And from that point one never needs to work another day in their life if they don't want, since typical returns on a million $ are more than enough to pay for cost of living in like 90% of the world.

Yet approximately 0% of people will take this advice. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of people generally prefer to seek the easiest, most popular, lowest friction choices. Options like I'm mentioning here only exist precisely because most people won't take them. But it's a sort of paradox in that there's absolutely nothing stopping them from doing so.

maybe class struggle was the wrong terminology, but the more i see of problems in the world the more i start to think its about money/power vs "all the other busywork" we get bombarded with daily.

Leaving the place you have lived your whole life, the place where your family and personal life is and going to another country for work for 5 to 10 years will destroy the past life they had.

After 5 10 years that person will almost become part Saudi due to living in another country. And after he comes back no one will be that close, even close family members will feel something different due to the person being away/(out of physical touch) for 10 years

0% of people will take your advice because it's half-baked and you didn't actually research the requirements (hint: simply knowing English is not enough) to get such a job. Or you purposefully omitted the requirements to make your point that it's "easy".

A word of advice: if you want to give advice, at least be realistic.

The requirements beyond being a native speaker, especially for the demographic of a forum like this, are not real show stoppers. And my advice is similar to the path I took with my own life, though not in Saudi Arabia. And it sent me on a journey that ended up way away from teaching English, but that's the nature of life.

The unspoken benefit of doing things like this is that it also exposes you to endless opportunities because the expats you meet half way around the world tend to be an exceptionally interesting batch. It's certainly a path I'd recommend to absolutely anybody who's not content with the typical treadmill of life.

> There are endless easy opportunities in life. For instance go teach English in Saudi Arabia and you'll earn around $60k a year which doesn't sound like much until you account for the fact you pay 0% in taxes and have a cost of living well under $1k a month.

Just be born a single male with knowledge of Saudi, English and ability to teach and then lock yourself away for 10 years in Arab world living like a second class citizen. What the fuck am I even reading? Let me guess, for women it’s “just open an OnlyFans account”? I swear to God, the shit I read on this forum when it comes to things outside of tech.

You don't need to know Arabic to teach English in Saudi Arabia. And that generalizes to the overwhelming majority of the world. And no you wouldn't be a second class citizen. Saudi Arabia has one of the highest immigrant populations in the world, far higher than e.g. the US as a percent - about 40% of the population.

> Nobody's enslaving anybody.

> Saudi Arabia

I have some news for you.

"Sacrifice your one and only precious youth for happiness" is the TL;DR here. Also, the Saudi's are very choosy about who gets to show up and teach - a girl I went to high school actually went - after she got her masters in education.

I'm not saying some people shouldn't do this, but everybody can't. I (mid 40s male living in Canada) used to be a huge proponent of living beneath your means and did in fact sock away 20% of my income into investments. But the K shaped job market, real estate market, and cost of living in general has made that far harder to do today. I had a dirt cheap apartment in downtown Toronto ~2004-2007 before I bought a place, managed to have a fun youth AND save by simply not participating in lifestyle creep (the number of young people I knew that blew money on fancy German cars and other bling as tech salaries started to grow still makes me shake my head).

But that same apartment I rented for $700/month is now $2500 and requires a letter of employment (read they only will rent to professionals) to apply for.

If moving to Saudi Arabia to teach English is an option in your life then you are already in the top 10% by wealth.

You mean worldwide, by nature of being an English speaker? Probably. But people don't really care about that. They want to keep up with the Jeffersons and Saudi Arabia allows a means to do that, at least relatively. On the off chance you somehow meant something else, relocation costs including airfare/etc are included as well as a return ticket.

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