yterdy

Incorrect. If anything, the period during and immediately preceding the Industrial Revolution (before those hard-won labor victories) is the outlier. The common thread in the traditional societies that still exist is a great deal of leisure time or light physical labor, even for farmers. Through the Middle Ages and up to the the advent of chattel slavery and industrialization in the Americas and Europe, labor schedules were quite mild and left plenty of time for leisure, socializing, labor outside of primary production duties (chores, cooking, etc., through which creative faculties could be exercises); much of the literature describing back-breaking labor, written by the privileged classes, was actually a form of propaganda or wish-fulfillment fiction.

I'd suggest reading The Overworked American by Juliet Schor. It provides an overview of historical modes of labor in the West.

And, note that the momentum-killer in all these cases was not organic, but institutions clawing back their riches - by hook, and certainly by crook, in many cases (I'm glad you mentioned GME). Return-to-office had every rational reason not to happen, and they forced it anyway.

1) It is one in a long line of contemporary and credible allegations of discrimination in mortgage lending, indicative of a systemic issue in American banking.

2) The activities of the American banking sector, through VC and other investment, drove the tech bubble whose slow bursting is seeing many HN-adjacent workers out-of-the-job or otherwise facing workplace difficulties.

3) These lending decisions are likely algorithmically-driven, an ethical concern that is, again, of interest to tech workers.

Essentially, the article describes an issue that is both of interest to anyone concerned about the financial health of American citizens, and to also entrepreneurs who are looking for an opportunity to disrupt a system that is not working well. I think it would be a good topic for HN to consider and discuss constructively.

(Maybe not of the firm that originally took the loan - but someone, eventually, because the alternative is economic collapse.)

On the note of "selling": after certain Boomer family members were complaining about the cousin in NYC who won't renovate and get that sweet ABnBux cashflow from her brownstone, I pointed out that our family had let go of 8 figures worth of property in my lifetime (for about 6 figures in cash), and that they had no right to pin our landed gentry hopes on her. Like water off a duck's back; I don't even think they understood what I was trying to say, repeatedly misinterpreting, "It shouldn't be all on her," to mean, "We could swoop in and finance it if only she'd let us." No, I meant, "You squandered your portions of the pie Boomering around in the 90s and early 2000s; leave her be."

They just... don't listen.

Beyond the perversity of using a company's own full faith and credit to eat it dead from the inside out (essentially admitting that the PE firms themselves are not respectable enough to be granted the credit directly), we have multiple instances of the government preempting the purchase and liquidation (and presumably the accompanying halt or even dissolution of production within) of certain companies for antitrust or even national security reasons.

Encourage a competitive market environment where there aren't just a handful of polarized "make it" companies that everyone is applying to regardless of fit or career objective because landing a job there is a golden ticket?

>reduced hunger, but not eliminated it

>potentially exacerbated homelessness, as the income/wealth floor for maintaining a household is now higher, globally

Additionally:

>there are more slaves in the world today than at any other point in history

>some of the worst genocides in history are within living memory

All of the above is the result of Western cultural and logistical immaturity in the face of its industrial over-development. E.g., notice how a major global shipping lane is currently inaccessible due to war (a war ultimately cause by Western meddling in the region). It should also be noted that we're in the middle of a mass extinction driven by this same dynamic.

Any positive assessment of the West's sophistication and development has to be tempered or even nullified by the reality that its efforts have served to worsen, let alone ameliorate, basic measures of civilizational quality. An extreme analogy, using fiction: I refuse to call the civs in universes like WH40K, Dune, etc. "sophisticated and developed", because they've simply transposed and magnified age-old failings and atrocities onto a cosmic scale. True sophistication and development may eschew technological complexity, if complexity is instead in the systems and processes that support self-actualization in the population.

To go back to the original point: if the introduction of indoor plumbing and the extension of civil rights in America had been switched chronologically, we'd be much better off as a society. If landing on the moon and the acceptance and election of a female president had been switched, ditto. So, yes, it's shameful.

You have been blessed not to grow up with a narcissist or vicarious striver as a parent.

Technically, cars are a means of transportation for people. However, an honest assessment of the American transit system might lead one to believe that the safety and comfort of cars (or the automotive industry and ecosystem) are more important than the people they're supposed to ferry. In reality, the system is complex, incentives and drives are many; a holistic view is more useful than forcing a tortured atomic hierarchy onto that system.

>Homelessness

>Hunger

>Slavery

>Genocide

As to our level of sophistication, also, a short list of scams that we've fallen for in living memory that have lead to civilization-level crisis:

>A bunch of guys learn how to fly planes so that they can crash them into buildings in order to draw us into a war.

>The aforementioned war.

>Banks sell people loans designed to default, sell insurance on those loans, get bailed out when the loans default and insurance is due on the failing loans.

>Governments promise that sort of shutting down in-person economic activity for 2 weeks will stop a disease with an infectiousness period of ~3 weeks that relies on person-to-person contact, while helping businesses that will benefit from an extended pandemic set up related operations

>Something something Eurozone austerity

And not in living memory, but rhyming nicely:

>A bunch of guys shoot a small-time royal in order to draw us into a war.

>The aforementioned war.

Re: built using debt: I also think there needs to be a social appetite for quashing greed in the process of delivering a vital social need. This is where the Security Council Compadres (including US) all fail.

I genuinely don't know what the answer is. Maybe it's not even a single solution, but instead an ebb and flow of the collectivist/individualist tide as social, personal, economic, civilizational circumstances demand.

Maybe I'm wrong though, and there are just people who would rather be alone, and that is their max healthful state. Even if this isn't the case, I think it would be wrong to assume access to those healing resources mentioned above is readily available to any given individual; it's probably not helpful to hound someone to get therapy because they say they don't like company. All of this also doesn't mean that there aren't people who feel the need to shack up BECAUSE of trauma.