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AA-BA-94-2A-56

368 karma · joined November 22, 2019

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AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Just Be Rich (2021)
I haven't personally written anything beyond this comment, but what I'm getting at is the economic concept of externalities. These are the economic results to the environment/people/society as a whole, that are difficult to measure.

A liquor store opens up next door to your home– economic activity goes up, but drunks sing sea shanties at 2am keeping your family awake, resulting in you losing your job due to bad performance, then property values plummeting.

An oil company moves into town and starts fracking. Quarterly profits are high, and the town's economic activity rises, because it has more patronage at the local pub. There are more jobs, and everyone buys themselves a new pickup. But people get sick, and the water goes brown. A charity purchases hundreds of thousands of plastic bottles of water. Economic activity goes up. Microplastics, people start taking extra time to shower/bathe, wash dishes, and health problems. Profits are up, but did society actually benefit? In the long run, people will move away from the town, leaving it in economic ruin. All because the company did not care about externalities.

One example of this concept is Broken Window Economics. If you broke a window, economic activity/GDP would go up because someone would be employed to fix the broken window. But was anything of value produced? Did society truly benefit?

OP is essentially ignoring externalities. He is making the most of a system designed to benefit him at the expense of poorer people, and washing his hands of any guilt because the effect is invisible to him. But that's a fallacy. The rich get advantages that nobody else gets, like being able to avoid tax in totality (essentially getting a free ride, while everyone else pays for society). There are many other ways that society is wholly optimised to make things better/easier for the rich.

I digress. To answer your question, without pointing out socialist authors (who are right on the money with their criticisms of capitalism), I can really only tell you my own thoughts about it.

I'll leave you with this quote on the tragedy of the commons:

> Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. -- Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons

AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Just Be Rich (2021)
Yep you're right, thanks for the correction.
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Ask HN: User communities that aren't Discord?
Yep the copy needs to change to "Discord-alternative"
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Just Be Rich (2021)
This article feels like an attempt to morally wash one's hands of the moral stink of capitalism. Do you really think that because you're in tech and not mining, that the accumulation of wealth is any less driven by exploitation?

By the way, I don't know the answer to this. I myself am a landlord. But if we're getting into morality, let's fully examine this.

11.5% of Americans are below the poverty line. The same economic system that makes is possible to become rich enforces a roughly 5% unemployment rate. This unemployment rate is necessary to prevent a wage price spiral. There are people who are paid a lot of money (Federal Reserve), whose job it is to pull levers and turn dials until the unemployment rate is at that magic 5%. They actively ensure people can't make a living, to allow you the chance to accumulate wealth.

You may not be directly responsible for their poverty– but their poverty makes your accumulation of wealth possible. Without a 5% unemployment rate, the delicate balance of the economy cascades into oblivion in a wage-price spiral.

So here's my moral question– do you then owe them anything? Do you owe society anything?

Maybe there is something wrong with "just being rich" if you don't attempt to use some of your money for the betterment of your community and society that is actively made worse to allow you to get rich.

If you want to get rich, get rich. But don't fool yourself into thinking that it's morally good. It can be, but it's probably not. Because it's probably at the expense of others in some direct or indirect way.

By the way I'm pulling punches here. This is a very gentle response to try and get you to think differently about your ethics.

---

If you're the sort of person that always needs to feel morally right, then I would say getting rich probably isn't for you. Any moral argument you can come up to protect your ego would be fragile, and easily undone.

AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Zed Editor automatically downloads binaries and NPM packages without consent
I actually completely agree with you, although at the very least users can be expected to not be rude. Although, I don't think anyone in this thread (so far) has been rude.
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on One Million Checkboxes
I jumped to a random spot, very far down. I decided to write HELLO in checks. I didn't get past the H before someone found me and griefed it. Must this 1 million checkbox ledger of art, devolve into madness? No matter how far I scroll there is nothing discernable. A wasteland of meaninglessness. This is just chaos.
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Ask HN: Why does SQLite (in production) have such a bad rep?
SQLite is excellent at on-dick storage, but why would you use it in lieu of PostgreSQL? It seems less scalable.
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Plant-based substitute leather developed from pineapple leaf fiber and rubber
I am also aware of this fact, which is why I myself have real leather boots, phone case, etc. However, it's not very forward thinking to not develop alternatives that are vegan, because it may be possible that the world eats less meat in the future, and therefore produces less animal leather.

I also haven't heard the answer to my question– how is this particular alternative to leather, based on rubber and pineapple leaves (and not plastic), particularly bad for the economy or the environment?

AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Plant-based substitute leather developed from pineapple leaf fiber and rubber
Your assumptions are doing a lot of the heavy lifting in your comment. At the moment hydrocarbon-based vegan leather is inferior economically and more fossil fuel intensive. I don't necessarily agree that a vegan leather based on rubber and pineapple leaves (agricultural bi-product) is going to be more economically or fossil fuel intensive.

Do you have experience in this industry or something, or did you just pull this out of your ass?

AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Ask HN: What single line of code would you put on a programming shirt?

    def sleep():
        return sleep()
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Why not just embed Neovim?
I'm impressed by the part about using headless Neovim in tests.
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Ask HN: How to structure Rust, Axum, and SQLx for clean architecture?
Architecture looks good. I went off the deep end looking into ways to structure Axum projects. I looked into separating services and having them talk to each other with channels.

In the end, the best practice for engineering software is usually to keep it simple. I've had to learn that I'm too often trying to overengineer things, and I end up getting nothing done.

AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Are YC Acceptances Out
This is built in. My university had an academic census date. After that date, you are unable to take on or drop any courses. This is probably the same for other universities.
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Ask HN: Best Email Client for Mac?
Mail.app. It's free, no ads, simple and yet featureful.
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Are YC Acceptances Out
Because a university has an academic calendar that they adhere to?
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Tokyo – Salary Expectations
That's kind of low ngl.
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Cancer under age 50 increased 80% from 1990 to 2019
I spend 0 time worrying about stuff like this.
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Cancer under age 50 increased 80% from 1990 to 2019
I think a SAD puts upward pressure on this number, and modern healthcare puts downward pressure on it.
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Intermittent fasting linked to a 91% higher risk of cardiovascular death
> That which is put forward without evidence, can also be dismissed without requiring evidence.

Wake me when there's a study with a methodology. This is just a press release.

AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Ask HN: Apple Store advised (my mom) M3 MacBook Air over the M2. Ideas/Advice?
Realistically the M2 will last several years though
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Ask HN: Has the use of 'Ask HN' posts decreased since the release of ChatGPT?
For once an accurate answer.
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Don't fuck with paste
Shouldn’t CMD+F be reserved to searching the current document/context?

Something like CMD+K should be used for a more global search.

AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Don't fuck with paste
Stripe’s API documentation does this and it gives me the shits, because it seizes up my M2 MacBook Pro for several seconds.

I can’t believe that it’s 2024, and I can’t simply grep some documentation.

AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Ask HN: How to re-kindle my interest in computer science?
A lot of newer technologies solve problems that only very large companies face— mostly to do with scaling multiple systems and synchronising their state.

It’s in these companys’ best interest to recommend these technologies to all developers and companies, because it increases their pool of available hiring talent.

That’s how you get startups writing from the ground up, a micro-service backed SPA with layers of abstraction for the data to pass through; when honestly, a SSR monolith backed by MySQL would be better for them.

AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Portable EPUBs
This makes me wonder if EPUB pagination is possible? I know nothing about it, but if the format is standard enough, it might be possible to hack together an endpoint that returns the requested page(s).
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Ask HN: Is C++ logic code using WASM faster than JavaScript logic code?
Varied answers in here, but honestly it depends. We’re not at the stage where one is clearly better than the other.
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source
I'm interested to know what people's insertion latency is on Neovim with similar IDE-like plugins, and LSP and Copilot running.
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source
Huh? I haven't seen remote SSH used in the past few companies I've worked at. Usually it's a local docker setup.
AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Help me stop hating rust
To answer your last question;

Start with the Rust book.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

Then do Rustlings until the syntax becomes muscle memory.

Then join the Discord and start doing little projects.

You won’t get up to the proficiency of other languages as quickly in Rust. It takes longer. For me it’s taking a lot longer, but I enjoy it.

AA-BA-94-2A-56··on Capitalism and Cozy Games
I love the job a lot, but I can't get myself to work more than about 4-6 hours a day. I mentally burn out and get so exhausted I need to lie on the couch to recover.
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