121–130 of 228 posts
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American revolution? Is that one a flop? (I mean for now, future trajectories aside.)
Quite possibly the only popular revolution of the modern age that didn't end in massacres. Probably because it was, despite all the rhetoric, controlled by a group of generally conservative oligarchs who really weren't trying to shake things up that dramatically.
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i understand your sentiment here, and in the view of history this is true. The problem is that now, or very soon, we are/will be in a state where the 1% can easily put down the 99% politically, socially, financially and yes militarily. So there may be a reckoning at some point. But it will and badly for the 99%. This was mostly true throughout history as well, it's just become a more certainty now.
100.000 british men simply cannot control 350 million Indians, if those Indians refuse to cooperate. Throughout history it has been the case that sustained perceived inequality inevitably leads to revolution. We're nowhere near that point, but if trend lines continue and the middle class gets wiped out, it will happen. Democracy is supposed to prevent things from getting that bad, but we have seen that free elections…
In particular, it seems to imply that the wealthy are inherently rentiers. By the logic of this article, virtually all investors are "functionless investors" since they are not directly investing in a business by buying shares from the business. Of course, this neglects the fact that having a market for shares is in fact necessary for anyone to buy shares in the first place.
Also, it would be nice to have a definition of how exactly the wealthy are "dysfunctional." They seem to be pretty functional at accumulating wealth. But they're also pretty functional at expanding and building a wealthy society—Apple made Steve Jobs very rich, but it also made all of us a little wealthier as well.
As for justice, today's rich are more meritocratic than any in the past.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i understand your sentiment here, and in the view of history this is true. The problem is that now, or very soon, we are/will be in a state where the 1% can easily put down the 99% politically, socially, financially and yes militarily. So there may be a reckoning at some point. But it will and badly for the 99%. This was mostly true throughout history as well, it's just become a more certainty now.
"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."
HN tends to be extremely reactionary to posts like this. Perhaps because the tech/startup scene is all about getting rich quick, or perhaps because HN has come to partially reflect the personal views of PG. There will be a reckoning. The world is 'unsustainably unequal' at the moment. There are huge problems on the horizon - superbugs, climate change, resource depletion, environmental degradation, overpopulation. The…
i understand your sentiment here, and in the view of history this is true. The problem is that now, or very soon, we are/will be in a state where the 1% can easily put down the 99% politically, socially, financially and yes militarily. So there may be a reckoning at some point. But it will and badly for the 99%. This was mostly true throughout history as well, it's just become a more certainty now.
They don't seem to be doing so hot politically. The poor Koch brothers can't even buy a primary election anymore.
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"In the example of home rental, making homes available for rent enables families to live in accommodations that they would not be able to purchase. These accommodations are not without cost to the owner: Taxes, utilities, maintenance, security and administration are all associated costs that rent payments offset. What the rentier provides in most cases, is a better quality of life than the family could have if they w…
> the competition for rental property is so fierce now that in many places, monthly rent to the private landlord is higher than a monthly mortgage payment would be to buy a similar property. This is not a malfunction of the market. Economically renting is always expected to cost more than buying. Renting has advantages over buying: * No need to have a significant amount of cash to deposit * Flexibility to move out in…
One of the greatest necessary advents in the near-term for prosperity of all is the correction of housing towards smaller, more affordable dwellings out of control of the rentiers racket that has now infected property ownership at a near global scale.
From a developer perspective many aspects of the current system (with respect to resource usage and allocation) look like technical debt. Governments may try to make ends meet with limited budgets and come up with sometimes nonsensical or just not really thought out solutions to problems. Meanwhile the world learns about the Panama papers and related things, getting the impression, that not everybody is happy with co…
...but in the world of software, everyone wants programs that work better. The very rich have no short term interest in a system that's hard to game. Therefore they're going to use their considerable influence to prevent just that.
> If you buy some shares in M&S or BP on the stock market, the money you pay goes to the previous owner, not the company. You are what Keynes called a ‘functionless investor.’ When such so-called ‘investments’ pay off they extract wealth from the economy without creating anything in return. This doesn't seem very coherent. How could a company ever sell stock to raise capital, if the people who bought that stock didn'…
A better way of putting it would be that your investment might improve the economy only via side effects (e.g. the investor who you purchase the shares from is able to invest that money in a new business venture or buying actual goods, or a boost to the company's share price from your buying activity [if you're a massive fund owner] encourages new businesses to start up in that industry or makes it cheaper and easier…
Your same logic could be applied to consumers. Any one individual buying products does not keep the economy functioning. We could say they're "functionless consumers."
Except if you extend that logic to all consumers, there is no economy.
Similarly, any one secondary investor might not make or break the existence of functional capital markets. But if you extend that logic to all secondary investors, suddenly there are no longer any primary investors.
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Why does government have to do something? Don't you suppose it's part of the problem? We have an economic system imposed on us that is unsustainable and redistributes from the poor to the wealthy in the name of economic stability, "growth" and "creating jobs" as if optimizing those metrics will necessarily be to the benefit of anyone but the top.
Because in the end, the "government" is the only thing maintaining some order. There is no civilization without it - and anyone that tells you differently just can't visualize where "government" exists in their example. When the rules of society get out of whack, government can either help solve the issue, or double down on bad policies. When they do the latter, they eventually become chapters in history books. Yes,…
Government is merely one component of society, (or "civil"-ization, if you want to be somewhat more colonial about your usage). Specifically, it's the axis of society where we condone the non-consensual use of physical harm (or threats thereof) for various purposes.
I guess what you are saying is that the list of purposes should be unconstrained ('whatever it takes to meaintain order'). My contention is that in general, an unconstrained mandate exacerbates social inequality because the agents of government will have self-reinforcing biases, and their unconstrained judgements can be weaseled into whatever justification they choose. Specifically to address your position, the pursuit of 'order' is ill-defined, and historically has led to very bad things like colonialism in the somewhat distant past, and things like racial profiling in more recent memory.
What constitutes 'order' is a very normative and subjective concept - for example, you might consider a group of young minorities hanging out on a stoop to be 'disorderly' and sic the police on them.