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

You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

geohot.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 251 posts

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#211

Post by DiscourseFan »

pram wrote: post #159
DiscourseFan wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess they are, but that isn't material to the discussion, since they are selling goods not services, thus they don't extract "rents," unless anything that someone buys for some purpose is a "rent"; in that case, the super market is charging me "rents" to purchase their food so I can have it in my fridge.

I think your argument is just a bunch of pedantry but OK: Western Electric produced commodities for the Bell system. So did a lot of other companies, selling into a market that was functionally a monopsony. Yet the fact that this was necessary is tangential, the Bell system didn't exist to sell switches or phones. The phone network monopoly was AT&T's fief, the rent was the phone bill everyone had to pay! If you aren…

Why is every service considered a “rent”? These services basically depend on commodity production—bell may have had a monopoly on phone service but not on the phones themselves. Or the copper used to manufacture their cables, or the housing which their employees slept in or the food they consumed. Service monopoly =! Neofeudalism, just because it is a more recent phenomenon does not mean its unique, JP Morgan had a rail monopoly, nobody considered his business “Neofeudalism.”

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#212

Post by pharrington »

wickedsight wrote: post #118
pharrington wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are over a decade into Big Tech already making everyone's lives miserable (the malicious wielding of social media is something even the mainstream knows about now). His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this. There is some nuance in what "not working for big tech" means though. The general gist is to not take work making tools that can foreseeably be used to hurt people and t…

> His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this. This won't actually work though. The only reason we even have this discussion is because we're rich enough that pure survival isn't even really in our instinct anymore. Most of us haven't experienced actual hardship for years and we live in luxury. There are plenty people in the world who are smart and poor and living tough lives, wh…

If you're working in big tech and you truly believe you are spoiled, then why not quit that job and let the migrant improve their living situation, while you live in the luxury you already have?

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#213

Post by paprikanotfound »

GardenLetter27 wrote: post #39

I couldn't disagree more. Throughout history, higher productivity leads to a higher quality of life for everyone. Yes, the transition can be painful and some people will lose out and face hard career changes. But overall, the multiplicative power of investment only increases, helping to make everything cheaper, and everyone richer. People focus too much on their own small part of experience - like Claude Code replaci…

i think is possible to have those things without big tech

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#214

Post by _DeadFred_ »

teiferer wrote: post #77
HotGarbage wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: social media, advertising, surveillance. By working for them you are enabling this.

> Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided. I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily wo…

2005 you could do these things. Heck by 2005 I had moved to the remote mountains and still had high speed internet. 30 years ago these things weren't coming from big tech, they were coming from small scrapy startups that were going to replace evil entrenched institutions with something better.

Today, these things are actually LESS accessible due to enshitification from entrenched big tech companies.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#215

Post by _DeadFred_ »

mmaunder wrote: post #19

The premise is economically incoherent because labor is not a single task category that technology can delete. It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or…

Ah the magic 'jobs always come' thinking.

The post industrial revolution jobs market from 1880-1940s was pretty crappy for labor, and we have no idea how things turned out for the average displaced workers. We do know that there were whole sections of towns called skid rows, we know that there were flop houses. We know huge sections of men lived in boarding homes, and women stayed living with their parents. We've read things like Steinbeck and get a glimpse of the life of desperation at the time.

Don't let people fool you that the labor market will look like post WW2 America. It will look like 1880-1940s, during which there were huge labor fights and things were so bad there were 2 world wars.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#216

Post by teiferer »

hnlmorg wrote: post #98
teiferer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided. I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily wo…

> None of the above was possible just 20 years ago. Most of those things were actually possible. In many cases they weren’t as convenient, but as a child of the 80s I can tell you that life wasn’t like the dark ages before we all got smart phones. In any case, I don’t think anyone here is arguing against technological progress. What we’re saying is that big tech has been too powerful, and too unregulated, for far too…

I agree that big tech is and has been too powerful and too unregulated. But it's not "making everybody miserable". The world is not just black and white and HN is too much of an intellectually honest forum to just throw around such blanket statements. Which is why I called it out.

I also didn't say the 80s were dark ages. I was also around back then and life was fun. But none of what I wrote was easy or possible 20 years ago. You can try to nitpick but the point stands.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#217

Post by johnnyanmac »

>But why do you think having more money will fix that insecurity?

Because it'd be nice for rent to not cost 80% of my part time income and spending hours just looking for full time work.

>Have you considered not participating?

Sure, but tech is too full of hyoerindividualist egos to collectively bargain. We'll burn the world down before we come to that point.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#218

Post by 1dom »

onesociety2022 wrote: post #203
1dom wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived the original post and left working in tech a years ago for essentially the reasons in the post. I agree the article stops short of offering solutions, but you also acknowledge there's a legitimate problem but then don't engage or offer alternatives. From my experience, the problem I saw, and why I really respect OPs post, is that many good and smart people were lying to themselves in those environments. They'…

This is such a weird take - why do you have to personally use something for that to be useful? I could be at AWS working on their metering/billing system. I’d never use a billing system of that scale in personal life but that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful thing to build. And I think AWS as a whole is a very useful product for the world. Working to make your home more efficient is not going to suddenly make anyone re…

> This is such a weird take - why do you have to personally use something for that to be useful?

> Working to make your home more efficient is not going to suddenly make anyone retire early. That’s the stupidest take I have heard.

I don't feel like you're engaging with entirely positive intent here. I also don't understand how you can know the concept of FIRE and come to the conclusion that reducing your outgoings is the stupidest take on how to retire earlier. It may not be obvious, or the best, but if it's genuinely the stupidest you've heard, then I don't think you've heard much.

> You sound like a FatFIRE person that has quit professional life and is now trying to justify why sitting at home and helping your family members is a virtuous thing to do as opposed to working for some BigTech.

That is what I'm saying, for me, and it's probably an option for you and many people here if they consider it. Not really Fat or necessarily RE. But my generalisation is: doing things that more directly help your household or family members or local community is far more virtuous thing to do than what the majority of engineers at BigTech spend/spent their time doing - including us both probably. I feel like you're a bit perplexed by that.

The whole point of a job IMO is ideally to: 1. improve the world so you can 2. earn some money to 3. do what you want, ideally improve your life and those around you.

The longer I was in BigTech, the more I noticed me and a lot of people around me were overestimating 1 because of 2 and not doing the best job of 3.

> A lot of the danger with BigTech is just the fact they are very big and so have accrued a lot of power. A simple solution is to use the anti-trust laws to break them up into smaller entities. I don’t think the problem is the products/services they build.

I agree entirely, breaking them up is also a good contribution. I'm not sure I remember it being suggested that the only issue was the products/services they build though - there are lots of issues with BigTech, that's the big issue.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#219

Post by johnnyanmac »

roenxi wrote: post #158
lurk2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass market handcrafts are no longer a viable means of subsistence anywhere in the West. You can still produce things like handwoven cloth, bespoke rocking chairs, and novelty birdhouses, but you market them primarily to an upscale clientele. It’s next to impossible to compete on price when the average consumer is basing their idea of what a thing is worth on products being assembled by machinery in countries where l…

> Mass market handcrafts are no longer a viable means of subsistence anywhere in the West. Mass market handicrafts have never been a viable means of subsistence anywhere, ever, if we benchmark against what I think a reasonable lifestyle looks like. That is why we stopped doing things that way. Nevertheless mass market handicrafts are still a theoretical option. It hasn't become a worse option over time, it is in fact…

>Mass market handicrafts have never been a viable means of subsistence anywhere, ever, if we benchmark against what I think a reasonable lifestyle looks like.

When your community was a village of a few hundred collectively sharing resources as a tribe, being a Weaver was extremely valuable and viable. Becsuse a Weaver wasn't worried about weaving 200 baskets to afford a home. We're in a very different model now. So saying it was "never" viable is myopic to history.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#220

Post by johnnyanmac »

roenxi wrote: post #128
DiscourseFan wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a luxury good like Art, which is an elevated form of labor that is only possible on account of the development of technology like the automated loom, which provides clothes for most people at almost no cost, affording some lucky individuals the leisure time to do things like hand weave cloth or argue about capitalism on Hacker News.

Sure, I don't know why anyone would want to hand-weave cloth in this era of miracles where a machine can do it for you faster and better. It looks like hard work and it is technically a waste of time. But, hypothetically, if there was a portion of society that for some mad reason can't get access to machine-made cloth they can still weave their own. And the fact is, for those souls who are motivated to do so, they ca…

At this point it really seems like your taking bread too literally here.

To put it more simply, you won't keep a roof over your head by only selling baskets to your local village these days. You can scale it up, but by that point you need much more than a craftman to maintain a business and keep up with a minimum wage lifestyle.

Post reply on HN