Hacker News Reader

Comment by cucumber3732842 | Hacker News Reader

>and longevity will have been forgotten and short term thinking will the be "norm".

Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk.

On a personal or organizational level there is no point in making investments that will turn profit over the course of decades if over the ~5yr horizon there's there's always the looming risk that the government will kick your craft out of the country at the behest of the people.

What happened to all the men who specialized in casting steels? What happened to those facilities? What happened to those companies?

The math is simple and they teach it in every business school in the country.

View on HN

Tech companies, pharmaceutical companies, real estate development companies, banks, and others plan for decades.

People also lend money and invest in equities like index funds to plan for decades.

None of those industries create the material or social plenty that make us all richer.

You cannot eat real estate or stock options, the medical industry is a drag on us all though obviously you can cherry pick examples where things don't look perverse.

Am I being trolled? People live in buildings developed by real estate development companies, people take life saving and life extending medicines made by pharmaceutical companies, and people communicate and navigate using the electronics made by tech companies.

The things they create (and not exclusively they, obviously the country as a whole creates too) directly lead to the share price increases and dividends that allow many or most people in the US to maintain purchasing power.

>Am I being trolled? People live in buildings developed by real estate development companies, people take life saving and life extending medicines made by pharmaceutical companies, and people communicate and navigate using the electronics made by tech companies.

When you look at indoor square footage per capita (so like include the average HNer's share of the Starbucks and Whole Foods they patronize) and square footage and compare that to unit development trends and look at the costs it looks like we're just building bigger boxes rather than more of them. Basically the same story of the winners carrying the average that you see in every other market segment. Real estate development is probably one of the best market segments that illustrates the "K shaped economy".

Likewise with medical. It's probably a fools errand to try and figure out whether wiping the elderly's asses is over sold or drugs are over sold and both sides claim they're creating Real Value (TM) and making people's lives better but when you zoom out and look at how much we pay for all that it's clear that something is very wrong and it's a monetary drag on us that prevents us from being to spend our money on hookers and blow and Big Macs (or whatever it is that we want to spend out money on).

I didn't mention the tech industry in my quip because it makes things people elect to use voluntarily (to an extent, try not having an email these days) rather than structures itself to essentially compel more money to be spent within it like the industries within real estate development and medical do.

Those are all very different topics/claims than

>Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk.

That raises the question, what came first: maths or evolution?

Of course we can apply the laws of physics and the theories of maths onto everything we see and experience around us but does that make them so - those experiences.

> What happened to all the men who specialized in casting steels? What happened to those facilities? What happened to those companies? Nobody plans for decades because nobody can afford the risk.

Take a more holistic view, what happened to all the stars and galaxies?[1]

The spiritual acceptance of the inevitable end of everything isn't taught in any business school and we are left to face/cope with that ourselves. If maths/business is your poison for coping, then so be it. I dislike reducing every experience to numbers and graphs, profit margins, win/loss and them/us.

I guess I'm trying to say is that even the biggest profit will have no longevity when compared to, even just human history, let alone the history of the universe.

[1] https://www.legacysurvey.org/viewer?ra=229.6352&dec=2.0739&l...

The thing is that profit is not the only reason people do something. Some people just like their profession, I would argue that this is kinda a requirement to actually become really good. So in order to actually matter for a good skill you must lack the very argument you argue with.

The leading of companies with people not actually skilled at the craft is still a historic anomaly.

Money is not the "only" reason people do things. But it sure helps.

Would we have nearly as many slime-balls scheming up ways to plaster ads upon everyone's eyeballs and record our every movement and click if not for the money in it? At a societal level almost nothing ever gets done at scale if there isn't money in it. You remove the financial incentive and things atrophy, new investment stops replacing old, etc.

Sure, but the incredible skilledness in a single craft, which we are discussing here, doesn't happen at a societal level. That is the hard work of an individual and has always been.

At the societal level it's a numbers game. These people are the end of a very long tail. If you reduce the area under the curve you also reduce the long tail.

Much of today’s world run on FOSS that says exactly the opposite. Gnu, emacs, Linux weren’t created for money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com