Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction • Hacker News Board

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#111

Post by mantas » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 1:10 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #93

mantas wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.

Yes, severely capping funding, or even banning all private funding and giving all campaigns a fixed stipend off public money, is probably one of the most important things you can do for the health of a democracy. It has nothing to do with what GP was suggesting of "banning campaigns" lol

But essentially it’s very close. The result here was that private campaigning was rediced a lot. Debates are mostly state-organized. Big portion of posters are on state-designated special billboards. There’re still some ads on all sorts of media, but there’s less of them and they’re less intense. Private events are next to nonexistent. Compared to US, I’d say campaigning, when put on a spectrum, is closer to being banned than the other side.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#112

Post by close04 » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 1:46 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #78

kjkjadksj wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And allowing for infinite money to pay for propaganda is somehow not Stalinist?

If you're happy to accept almost literally everyone as Stalinist I suppose so. But if the word is going to mean anything then no, spending a lot on propaganda isn't Stalinist. It is routine governance. If you intend to organise people politically it is going to take a lot of propaganda.

Routine governance in Stalin’s time is what we now call Stalinism. “Just the way we do things” doesn’t tell you much about the quality. Unlimited campaign spending has a huge potential to consolidate power and allow more spe ding in a positive feedback loop.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#113

Post by dleeftink » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

danaris wrote: post #107

eleveriven wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize pretty quickly that hierarchies (then and now) are often deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward, not just accidentally emergent

I disagree, though only slightly: I would say that it's rare that a hierarchy is deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward. Rather, many hierarchies emerge organically, but those at the top seek to eliminate any that do not funnel surplus upward. It's less a process of deliberate construction , and more a process of deliberate curation . Something like cultural bonsai.

The continue the bonsai metaphor: would its inevitable demise tell us about how hierarchies can be uprooted? Or conversely, that existing hierarchies that are well tended to rarely meet their end?

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#114

Post by anon191928 » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 2:08 PM UTC

eleveriven wrote: post #28

docsaintly wrote: post #5

This series will really make you examine social hierarchies, including the ones that exist today. They are no accident.

You realize pretty quickly that hierarchies (then and now) are often deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward, not just accidentally emergent

Even YC is designed that way, they fund people that can get into MIT or stanford or harvard maybe? Others with great records are rarely accepted, this is a known fact

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#115

Post by kiba » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 2:08 PM UTC

k__ wrote: post #94

martin-t wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today's social structures exist because they evolved through history and shifting incentives. I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.

Japan seems to get at least the real estate stuff right. No nationalization needed when houses aren't worth investing in. Also, give people something else worth investing into. Make laws that move all the incentive out of the housing market and into something that helps in the long run. Energy, research, etc.

Land value tax would be a good addition to the Japanese model. Raise the tax high enough, land prices are zero, leaving behind only the value of the home. Homes, like cars, will naturally depreciate in value. No weird artificial depreciation of houses needed.

You can still have investment in real estate, but it will be a competitive market. You can't sit on land and let it appreciate without putting in the work, because appreciation of land means higher taxes.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#116

Post by kiba » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 2:13 PM UTC

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #98

corimaith wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan has relatively cheaper real estate because of their lax zoning laws and frequent earthquakes drive the long term value of construction down. Everywhere else in Asia with similar laws people do pour their savings into real estate. It dosen't really have anything to do with what you are saying because the Nikkei underperformed relative to FTSE or S&P 500.

>Everywhere else in Asia with similar laws people do pour their savings into real estate. Isn't this because most of Asia has just copied the western capitalist housing asset monetisation scheme with Japan being the only exception?

What do you mean by monenization scheme?

Land are worth something because it's undertaxed. If you tax land high enough, the price of land is zero. This means you don't have to take out a loan to buy the land, but maybe you need to do so for the building. Lands in cities are often high enough that they exceed the value of buildings. So, land price being zero save you money up-front, but you have to pay higher taxes on the land.

The improvements are naturally depreciating assets. Your house, much like your car, fall apart over time without maintenance. Ideally, you aren't taxed on improvements.

So, in a properly functioning market, you can buy property, but it's depreciating in price all the time, while you are left with a tax bill on the land. Each time, land value roses, you are left with a higher tax bill every year.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#117

Post by echelon_musk » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 2:29 PM UTC

I'd normally be frustrated with all of the grammar mistakes, as it indicates to me that the author can't be bothered to proof read their own work before they expect others to read it.

However, now I see the mistakes as an indicator that it hasn't been written with an LLM which then makes me more inclined to want to read it.

Conflicted.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#118

Post by bell-cot » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 2:50 PM UTC

cantor_S_drug wrote: post #41

bestouff wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There is in one sense the king and the pawn are similar. Pawns are many, kings are few. If one pawn sacrifices itself to sacrifice the king, then kings ought to fear pawns and not take undue advantage.

If you look at history, that's really not how elites react to violence (or its threat) from the 99%. Regicide is a Crime against God - meaning the social order which puts the elites on top. Vs. peasants are expendable at scale if the elites feel that they need to violently defend their elite status.

And this ain't chess, where Pawn x King is just another move. Nor 1960's America, where Mr. Oswald could buy a rifle and 4X scope by mail order, then get a job in a convenient book depository. If an assassin manages to kill a king, then 100:1 that it's an inside job - the perp is either another one of the elite, or acting his behalf.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#119

Post by antisthenes » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 2:52 PM UTC

ljf wrote: post #14

adastra22 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a trope?

Yes https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/medieval-peasant-only-work...

I think the origin of the trope is that the peasants sat around doing nothing during winter, when there was nothing to plant or harvest.

It's probably true that there was less work in the winter (although you still had all your maintenance tasks, e.g. repairs and preparing firewood), but this was compensated by much more intense labor in the spring and summer.

Overall, though, it makes no sense to say medieval peasants worked less than people do now, it's likely very comparable, and the variations would depend on the quality of your soil/irrigation and how much you were going to get taxed.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#120

Post by bee_rider » Sat, Sep 13, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

kjkjadksj wrote: post #9

roenxi wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, trivially. The tricky part is building a system that the median citizen (and the officers in the military) can verify has been optimised that way vs competing, poorly optimised systems that sound good. Factor in the median citizen has maybe a couple of hours to do research, isn't very principled and doesn't understand game theory well. Also consider that high status people are perfectly happy to set up an "exper…

Banning campaigning would go a long way. The state already mails out voter information containing a little stump speech of each registered candidate at least for Californian elections. Further advertisement is purely propaganda and leads to establishment victories over merit and a genuinely attractive platform.

I think this would be pretty tricky to do. For example, I love the idea of limiting candidates to a little stump speech pamphlet that gets included in the voting materials.

But, what if instead of doing typical advertising, a candidate coordinates secretly with people outside your jurisdiction. Co-conspirators could spend months or years running stories about some issue—crime, homelessness, drugs, etc, that might even have some kernel of truth (but be wildly overblown). People in your society might jump in with their own stories related to the problem, legitimate stories of things that happened to them, but filtered up by “the algorithm.” Then, the malicious candidate can just reference the well-known (overblown) issues in their pamphlet. It’s perfect because they don’t even have to make or defend any specific claims, just gesture broadly at the fears that individuals have self-selected.

What do we ban? Getting your news from outside the jurisdiction? Discussing your experiences? Politicians meeting people outside jurisdiction? I don’t really see it…

I dunno. My gut feeling is that we just have to come to terms with the idea of democracy requiring some sort of media literacy. But then if people were good at identifying ads and ignoring them, they wouldn’t be used so widely.