231–240 of 511 posts
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The ultra wealthy hired the best to win a game of financial manipulation that the rest of us didn’t even know was being played. The median salary would be six figure if the share of productivity gains was distributed like it was in 1970.
Is the average salary six figures?
There are plenty of places where you can get a cheap house or a cheap apartment and work on passion projects to pay the bills.
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It wouldn't be Hacker News without the constant stream economically-illiterate ideas for "improving" our lives in the comments!
I'm not sure what you mean? Could you explain? Does it really bother you someone could be ignorant of something here?
Someone who understood basic economics wouldn't assert that investors are ruining the housing market for individual family buyers without explaining how the housing market or one particular housing market is different from all the other markets were investors are helpful for bringing products and services to individuals and families. I am sympathetic for example to the argument that the housing market in Vancouver and perhaps other parts of Canada is being distorted to the detriment of families by wealthy Chinese wishing to establish a safe trove of assets outside the reach of the Chinese government. But there are more barriers to Chinese investors (and Chinese visitors) in the US than in Canada, and the US is 9 times more populous than Canada, so that makes any particular severity of distortion cause by Chinese investors at least 9 times less likely in the US than in China. Non-Chinese investors who have an accurate understanding of the other investments available to them, on the other hand, will tend to invest in housing only when they seriously expect the demand for housing to increase--"expect" as in actually willing to put money on the outcome, not merely to opine on the outcome in internet forums--so their investment helps out families on net by helping to increase the supply of housing to meet the increase in demand.
>Does it really bother you someone could be ignorant of something here?
I'm not sure I understand the question. If you'd phrase your comment as a question about economics, I wouldn't've replied like I did (with a complaint in the form of sarcasm). Most humans are vulnerable to misinformation if it is repeated sufficiently often by a sufficiently diverse set of writers or speakers, and certain economically-impossible or -implausible arguments are repeated often enough on HN that I consider it worth my time to try to counter.
It's pretty simple really. If the reward from working is barely enough to cover the necessities, then there is technically no difference between working as a free citizen, and being forced to work as an indentured servant, other than a vague notion of freedom, which in that case is the freedom to decide between working and living on the streets. And people don't like being indentured servants. History should have mad…
What an incredibly privileged perspective. Do you think that actual indentured servants would agree with you on this?
My theory is that this is all true, and it’s fantastic. Generally, over the last century, in year X, nobody wants to work anymore compared to year Y (Y This is a success of social democracy and it is a success of technology. We can afford to have people work less hard and still be richer than we ever were. It’s the success story of western progress and the rest of the world is going through the same steps as we speak…
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I have heard the argument that a negative effect of the post WW2 "feminist" movement (by that I mean women in the work force) has had the long term effect of causing prices to simply adjust to the dual income household, to the point that now it is a necessity. It is a privileged family today that can afford to live comfortably on only one salary.
That argument, like all arguments that somehow equate wages with inflation, would hold water if the productivity of the workforce was constant. We know that it isn't. Productivity of the workforce is ever increasing. The generated wealth simply doesn't make it to the workforce.
And I don't, by any measure, mean that all of it does, but nowadays we have luxuries we simply didn't have before, are these not fruits of that increased productivity?
When did anyone want to actually work? Everybody strives for as much as possible of money at at least possible work needed to get that money. But the question has edge cases where some reforms should be done. 1) On one hand you have businesses that want people to do a lot of work for not enough money and then complain... in my country, that means that either the right government gives them foreign workers, because th…
As a tech lead, the big problem I see now is that people are not hungry anymore. The best engineers I've ever worked with were consistently asking for more and leveling up the team at the same time. Now, the post-covid hires, especially the junior engineers, just do the bare minimum to scrape by, and they seem totally unbothered by it. One new hire on my team spends upwards of 2 hours per day "walking her dog." I eve…
I walk my dog two hours a day. I just work around my meetings (sometimes can take the meeting whilst walking) and ensure I still work 5-8hrs on tasks. Is your gripe that you think she should be glued to her desk 9-5? I don’t know what her role is, but as a software engineer I can’t say I’d ever be interested in a job where someone wanted to micromanage me like that. As long as the work gets done why care?
I've religiously filled out time-sheets, in various forms) for 30 years, and I don't think they have been looked at more than a few times by my managers since my work gets done, and more. But I know for damn sure the laggards get scrutinized.
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i agree 100% , but what is the solution to that ? just raising wages en masse erodes the power of money and leads to inflation.
You could remove all the arcane laws, regulations, and zoning which make constructing new houses ludicrously expensive. Most people would be perfectly happy to live even in a shoddy log cabin built by them and their family if it meant they would could save those hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars they would've spent otherwise to improve their lives in other ways. This alone could be enough to shave dec…
Does that mean no high density residential? I can’t see how individuals build apartment buildings.