Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

read.lukeburgis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 165 posts

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#151

Post by kiliantics »

brutusborn wrote: post #107
kiliantics wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people in rich countries depend an awful lot on people in poor countries making stuff for them and keeping them rich

It’s not a true dependency because they could do it themselves - it’s just a bit more expensive. Remember we are comparing catastrophes here; while Bangladesh might starve and lose most of its land, at the same time the US will probably just need to spend a bit more on food and make their own clothes. Both are affected, but orders of magnitude difference in the affects. Rich will still be rich, just a bit less.

Resources are not homogeneously distributed either though. Coltan for your smartphone has to be mined by children in the Congo before being shipped to fabs in China, etc. Most supply chains are just so global and complex. Reorganising to have local production in well off nations will be very extreme, not just "a bit more expensive"

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#152

Post by gruez »

arbitrary_name wrote: post #136
badpun wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Median house in the 60s is not the same as median house in 2022. You could probably buy a median house from the 60s (i.e. 1000 sqft, no air condition, in a polluted area (this was pre-EPA time, so almost everywhere was polluted) etc.) right now for way below current median.

I hear this every time. It doesn't effing matter if i don't have the option to buy a 1960s size house, let alone the newer larger home, die to price increases and high interest rates. Your analysis does not explain away decades of mediocre wage growth in the face of inflation in healthcare, education and housing costs.

> I hear this every time. It doesn't effing matter if i don't have the option to buy a 1960s size house, let alone the newer larger home, die to price increases and high interest rates.

I mean, you could, either in the form of apartments (which are essentially smaller houses) or houses in less desirable areas (shittier houses).

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#153

Post by brutusborn »

kiliantics wrote: post #151
brutusborn wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a true dependency because they could do it themselves - it’s just a bit more expensive. Remember we are comparing catastrophes here; while Bangladesh might starve and lose most of its land, at the same time the US will probably just need to spend a bit more on food and make their own clothes. Both are affected, but orders of magnitude difference in the affects. Rich will still be rich, just a bit less.

Resources are not homogeneously distributed either though. Coltan for your smartphone has to be mined by children in the Congo before being shipped to fabs in China, etc. Most supply chains are just so global and complex. Reorganising to have local production in well off nations will be very extreme, not just "a bit more expensive"

You're right that there are exceptions, but I don't think this would make life for Rich people much worse. Worst case Rich countries will Annex resource rich countries, or just use predatory loans to gain control like China. As always happens, poor powerless people are the losers.

If you beleive the article, the only reason the majority world supplier of Coltan (Australia) stopped producing is because of cheap African labour. https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/the-conflict-mineral-colta...

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#154

Post by badpun »

arbitrary_name wrote: post #136
badpun wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Median house in the 60s is not the same as median house in 2022. You could probably buy a median house from the 60s (i.e. 1000 sqft, no air condition, in a polluted area (this was pre-EPA time, so almost everywhere was polluted) etc.) right now for way below current median.

I hear this every time. It doesn't effing matter if i don't have the option to buy a 1960s size house, let alone the newer larger home, die to price increases and high interest rates. Your analysis does not explain away decades of mediocre wage growth in the face of inflation in healthcare, education and housing costs.

But you do have an option to buy an 1960s house. They weren't all demolished - they're still here and naturally some are for sale.

> Your analysis does not explain away decades of mediocre wage growth in the face of inflation in healthcare, education and housing costs.

Wages are typically computed per household. In the late 1960, a tsunami of divorces and single-parent households started occuring (something that wasn't widely culturally accepted before then), which makes comparisons of household wages before and after an apples to oranges comparison. It's basically bad stats.

Re: rising costs of (higher) education and healthcare. It's partially similar to the housing situation. The standard of service people get (and expect to get) today is dramatically higher than in 1960s. In 1960s, we didn't even have MRIs... Nowadays medicine is packed with expensive technology and drugs - that has to inflate the price. Similarly, today's university environment is a combination of an university of the past with a high-class resort (the student facilities are basically on the level of good hotels in many cases) - that's gotta inflate the price too. Add extractionary practices of the medicine insurance companies cartel and university administrators on top of that, and that pretty much explains current prices.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#155

Post by TheFattestNinja »

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #88
TheFattestNinja wrote: post #16

The post is kind of all over the place, more like an internal reflection than a normal message to others, but it does resonate with me on one point specifically: I am an "official" millennial, born 1989. One thing I have noticed (in an anectodical, personal and subjective way) is that my age bracket, especially those I would consider higher on an intelligence/success curve, appear to be so much more closet-nihilist t…

Agreed with your take on nihilism. But gen Z is 10x moreso. On average they are so Jaded. Theyve seen everything shocking under the sun (woman fucking horse? Check. Nun eating shit out of a priests ass. Sure. Eels in a vagina. Yep. Man beheaded by terrorists. Uh huh). And then with this over exposure to all the worst the world has to offer comes a sort of paradoxical closed mindedness. Where everything is "been there…

Maybe. But I don't think that being desensitized equals being nihilist, nor I believe genZ has had more exposure to "shocking" content than millenials. Things like 2girls1cup and rotten.com existed before genZ was even a commonly used word.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#156

Post by TheFattestNinja »

themitigating wrote: post #23
TheFattestNinja wrote: post #16

The post is kind of all over the place, more like an internal reflection than a normal message to others, but it does resonate with me on one point specifically: I am an "official" millennial, born 1989. One thing I have noticed (in an anectodical, personal and subjective way) is that my age bracket, especially those I would consider higher on an intelligence/success curve, appear to be so much more closet-nihilist t…

Perhaps it's anxiety caused by people who want power. "Vote for us because things are getting worse"

Maybe, but is that new? I suppose the tone of political discourse has been going down over time. Not sure how that would cause this though: anxiety is kind of the opposite of "I want to see the world burn".

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#157

Post by TheFattestNinja »

Tokkemon wrote: post #99
TheFattestNinja wrote: post #16

The post is kind of all over the place, more like an internal reflection than a normal message to others, but it does resonate with me on one point specifically: I am an "official" millennial, born 1989. One thing I have noticed (in an anectodical, personal and subjective way) is that my age bracket, especially those I would consider higher on an intelligence/success curve, appear to be so much more closet-nihilist t…

We also lived through 9/11 at a very formative time, which didn't help matters.

True, but not sure it's a leading cause: I think many of us were way too young for it to "matter" (as defined as <= 14yo), as we didn't quite understand yet how shattering of the established world order that was. Like, we knew it was a big deal because of our elders reactions, but I feel it might have happened a tad too soon to be a root cause.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#158

Post by TheFattestNinja »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #92
TheFattestNinja wrote: post #16

The post is kind of all over the place, more like an internal reflection than a normal message to others, but it does resonate with me on one point specifically: I am an "official" millennial, born 1989. One thing I have noticed (in an anectodical, personal and subjective way) is that my age bracket, especially those I would consider higher on an intelligence/success curve, appear to be so much more closet-nihilist t…

I was a born in 1987, and I think I'm onto something similar. Older folk believe more deeply in the legitimacy of financial abstractions because they were adults before the cracks started to show. They have a stake in continuing the fiction that hard work == rewards. Younger folk see the abstractions as a farce that we don't really believe but that we bring out whenever we feel the need to justify an injustice that w…

Maybe it is a matter of being aware of "injustice" (for lack of a better word) too intensely, and then just becoming jaded to it to carry on. But it feels a bit too self-justifying to me, I'm wary of explanations that are too charitable to oneself. I hope we can find a way to channel that into self (and external) improvements instead.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#159

Post by TheFattestNinja »

jimbokun wrote: post #113
hgomersall wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a different take on why we want to see the world burn: we can see the world on fire, but seemingly lots of people don't (at least, not enough to do anything about it). We hope that if the burn increases a little bit now, people will notice before it starts burn uncontrollably in a few years, so start working to stop the fire.

That may accurately explain how many people are feeling, but it's a very stupid take in my opinion. I don't know that there is much historical precedent for a "controlled burn". When things go tits up, there's generally a big increase in suffering that comes along with it, and still no guarantee things will get fundamentally better after that.

Agreed. Things always fail slowly, then suddenly. And then people get hurt.

But otoh the only "real" traction we are getting for issues like, in this case, climate change seem to be relatively recent and caused by more and more catastrophic, tangible effects (80% of Pakistan under water, heatwaves, tropical storms becoming a regular occurrence in the coastal US, you name it)

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#160

Post by TheFattestNinja »

jesuscript wrote: post #30
hgomersall wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a different take on why we want to see the world burn: we can see the world on fire, but seemingly lots of people don't (at least, not enough to do anything about it). We hope that if the burn increases a little bit now, people will notice before it starts burn uncontrollably in a few years, so start working to stop the fire.

I too have a different take on why we want to see the world burn. We’re watching as we get trapped into the void, the proverbial rat race. We have a specific vantage point, dead smack in the middle. We see both ends of the race clearly, with boomers in retirement at the end, and GenZ/Y at the beginning. All racing. At the beginning of the race we see the incessant vain jockeying of a group trying to socially manipula…

But why wouldn't disenchantment towards the rat race lead us more towards a "I'm just not going to play the game and enjoy myself doing art or whatever" rather than a "maybe the current conflicts will explode spectacularly and destroy the status quo" mindset?

As mentioned, this seems to be more prevalent in people who are, objectively, well-off in the financial department, so it's not like they "hate" the system per se and could afford degrees of financial independence that many others will never be allowed to.

Post reply on HN