Some people have nothing interesting or valuable to say, they just always talk about race. Somehow everything becomes about race, even things which have nothing to do with race.
A few years ago I read an upsetting news story about a girl who was sexually abused for three years by her stepfather, up until the age of eleven or so. She was so traumatised by it that a lasting symptom was a fearful, hysterical reaction to sausage.
It was an upsetting, almost cartoonish detail in the story, but it might be helpful to you here. On a rational level she should not be afraid of sausage. But years of abuse meant that she was. It's sad, but understandable. It's just how trauma and conditioning work.
One doesn't need to be a victim of racism to empathise with the fact that it has a profound and traumatising impact on people. Maybe you know something about OP that I don't, but if you are right, and there's no reason for them to be talking about race in this instance, it's unlikely you'll persuade them with incredulity that they hold the point of view they do.
You can definitely do bad things to earn money. But a doctor, an engineer, etc, would've already contributed to the common good even if they buy a tenth car that sits in their garage. So simply buying a tenth car that sits in your garage (and employs the people building the car) isn't in itself a bad thing or an indication that you're not contributing to the common good.
In a free society, someone can spend their money on an extra toy if they want. Nothing wrong with that. It's a strange expectation to impose on others this notion of "spending only on the common good." It's not black and white what the common good is, and that is why an educated free market is a good proxy or mechanism for figuring that out.
The laissez-faire line is that the common good happens spontaneously if you allow some people to buy ten cars. Because that's "freedom".
No matter that homelessness is rising, life expectancy is falling, debt is increasing to catastrophic levels, the planet's ecology is becoming increasingly hostile to life (ask the Australians...) - and counter-evidence is piling up on all sides.
The suggestion that aggressively acquisitive small-minded personal selfishness ought to be the one true motivator of a healthy economy should be obvious laugh-out-loud nonsense to anyone capable of rational thought.
And yet, mysteriously, it's not just taken seriously, it's elevated to a near-mystical principle of omniscient collective market wisdom. (With the caveat here that markets need to be "educated" - an interesting thing to define.)
"educated" is pretty vague. For instance, some people think that a 75% tax rate on high income is reasonable. The "market" doesn't have the right answer on what the right tax rate should be, and how everyone should contribute to the common good. This (and many parameters that already restrict the mythical free market) should be decided by the society.
Besides, someone can earn money only if they live in a country that gave them the opportunity to do so. If the hypothetical doctor was born in the jungle somewhere, it's unlikely that he or she would have been able to make any money. In that sense, it's hard to argue that a high-tax rate is confiscatory, and I don't find it outrageous if they can only afford 5 cars instead of 10, if that can give more people access to health care.
That isn't the argument though. The original comment was saying that buying a tenth car is somehow inherently immoral, which it isn't.
If I've earned the money I have honestly, it isn't anyone else's business what I do with it. Buy an 100th car or light it on fire. Anyone who wants to tell me what to do with my money (that I've earned and paid all the taxes on) can take a long walk off a short pier.
It is when you buy your 10th million car and the environment is devastated. Whether that or a million people with ten extra cars each the outcome is negative for all. So society does have some say in wealth inequality and spending of those with a much larger impact on everyone.
>But a doctor, an engineer, etc, would've already contributed to the common good even if they buy a tenth car that sits in their garage.
Not so sure. For one, doctors can't usually afford a "tenth car".
But assuming they could, or going for the medical industry at large, they are probably a net monetary loss to society, adding the costs of BS needless operations, being wined and dined by the big pharma to push BS drugs, the opioid overperscription-crisis, and of course, overcharging 3x-10x for the same treatment compared to Western Europe. Net monetary loss in the sense that you could get the same services for much much less, and not of course in the sense that you don't get better health compared to not having doctors.
Same for engineers. People making great contributions -- the transistor, new building techniques, cars, etc, sure. People making BS time-sucking social apps (who seem to get the most money) are also a net loss, if not for anything else, for the huge loss of productivity (e.g. employees slacking on social media) and personal development (people wasting hours on end on social media on dopamine feedback loops).
>In a free society, someone can spend their money on an extra toy if they want. Nothing wrong with that.
Beyond some degree there's "something" wrong with that.
Anyone that got that from my comment, I have a reading comprehension course to sell them. To quote myself:
"But assuming they could, or going for the medical industry at large, they are probably a net monetary loss to society, adding the costs of BS needless operations, being wined and dined by the big pharma to push BS drugs, the opioid overperscription-crisis, and of course, overcharging 3x-10x for the same treatment compared to Western Europe. Net monetary loss in the sense that you could get the same services for much much less, and not of course in the sense that you don't get better health compared to not having doctors"
With the insane property taxes the left wants to levy on personal dwellings, you never really own anything anyway. It's not a problem with just the elites - it's a problem with the leftists pretending to be on the side of the worker but then implementing 2% to 4% yearly property tax bills. See: Illinois.
The problem with reddit is that you get downvoted simply for going against the hivemind, even if you supply evidence that you are right. It's impossible to have a meaningful conversation on the more popular subreddits, especially on politics.
That totally depends on the subreddit. r/politics? You're absolutely right. But the more focused subs offer a wealth of information about obscure topics. For example, check out this recent thread on r/machinelearning where people have an in-depth discussion about hype versus reality: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/donbz7/d_i...
Good question! The lack of this feature was why I made TeamCal because Microsoft has it already a long time in Outlook. It doesn’t seem that Google invests a lot in Google Calendar improvements, especially for B2B use cases. Thats why I’m not overly worried.
Note that as savings pile up in banks and brokerages, they supply the world with more loans for starting new businesses or new ventures. The money in a bank doesn't just sit there. It is a basis for economic activity throughout the country and even the rest of the world.
A more appropriate example is not an island that constrains population, but a population where new people are born and make investments into new businesses and new ideas. You can certainly have people transition more towards savings over time as they enter their prime career earning potential, without it impacting the rest. This is because there will always be other people who are willing to start businesses.
I addressed that by saying the islanders could work on infrastructure and labour saving tools while young. That's investment, deferred consumption.
However, this has limits. A country with a 8:1 worker:retiree ratio is currently much more productive than a country with a 2:1 or a 1:2 ratio.
Maybe savings could change this for the future, by really making something that hardly needs labour. But presently we have a real labour barrier to this kind of saving.
I agree it would be better if we saved more though, as this does indeed translate to invest. I hadn't explicitly spelled this out, so thanks.
The islanders are indeed better off if they defer. But, they cannot make themselves so well off as when their society was young, and they still need some labour.
"In 1990, there were 1.9 billion people living in extreme poverty. With a reduction to 735 million in 2015, this means that on average, every day in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015, 128,00 fewer people were living in extreme poverty.17
On every day in the last 25 years there could have been a newspaper headline reading, “The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 128,000 since yesterday”. Unfortunately, the slow developments that entirely transform our world never make the news, and this is the very reason why we are working on this online publication.
Recently this decline got even faster and in the 7 years from 2008 to 2015 the headline could have been “Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 192,000 since yesterday”. In the recent past we saw the fastest reduction of the number of people in extreme poverty ever."
The fact that some things are getting better doesn't change that others are simultaneously bad, or that things could maybe be more better if resource allocation wasn't so drastically unbalanced.
I seem to have severely underestimated the ability of HN readers to see basic economic data that's both well known and easy to look up like the rate at which the wealth of different demographics is changing as uncontroversial, which is...well, it's a thing.
The argument you made is that "it's hard to solve poverty due to wealth hoarding" and the response I provided is to show you that clearly that is not the case, given the rate at which poverty is being solved across the entire planet.
So either you've overstated the difficulty of solving poverty or overestimated the amount of hoarding or overestimated the impact of hoarding on the rate of solving poverty. Perhaps the amount of wealth someone has isn't entirely relevant to the amount of poverty, since wealth is not a zero-sum game.
Resource allocation being equal is not a prerequisite for eliminating poverty. Kings used to have all the wealth but the poorest American today still has a much better standard of living than the wealthiest kings from just a 200 years ago.
But we should take into account there’s a market for used iPhones. When I last upgraded, I gave my old phone to someone who needed it and prevented them from buying another brand. If (theoretically) iPhones are better for the environment than competitors, that’s a net win.
