almost, but rent-seeking is an odd form of capitalism, because in its pure form it isn't providing value.
nothing in the real world is in its pure form, and some business are able to provide value which they cannot charge for because they can rent-seek on other areas, so there is always nuance.
but an economy where rent-seeking is the main path to wealth is an economy in really poor shape.
Rent seeking is the end result of capitalism as an economic system. The goal of a capitalist is to accumulate capital (wealth), and rent seeking allows you to do this without expending any effort. Any capitalist acting rationally within the system of capitalism will desire to seek rent.
> What is wrong with just wanting to work for money?
Imagine a society where your work was an opportunity for you to provide products/services for your community, where you could earn a reputation for craftsmanship and caring, and where the real value was in the social ties and sense of social worth-- your community cares for you just as you care for it, and selfish assholery has high costs leading to poverty.
Now imagine a society where the only measure of social worth is a fiat currency, and it doesn't matter how you get it, only matters how much you have. Selfish assholery is rewarded and actually caring leads to poverty.
Which society would you rather live in? Which society is more emotionally healthy?
So the question is, is our current society the one we want to live in? If not, how do we move it closer to what we want?
Our current society can and does have room for both, which is great since some people want to live to work, and some just want to work to live. I don't see a problem with either, as long as it makes one happy.
And there's another group, grifters, who are neither living to work nor working to live. They are the parasites, and our current society rewards grifters by not putting them in check. Probably because so many want a piece of the grifting pie, in the same way many people see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Don’t forget another group, permanently disenfranchised, who are working to barely live. They are the unsung heroes of our society, who for a brief year or two recently got celebrated as key workers, got claps and applause, and then forgotten again once normality resumed.
"Show HN: I drive a garbage truck" wouldn't make the front page, but the world would grind to a halt tomorrow if those people stopped showing up for work.
The NYC garbage truck people are more than content to be paid handsomely in dollars instead of claps and cheers. Their union has the city by the balls and they know it, and they abuse that power to block modern trash containerization improvements. I wouldn’t have any qualms about personally automating their job
maybe an age thing? When I was in high school I worked at a gas station where we would pump the gas for customers at the "full service" lane and also check their oil. The game was to upsell people an oil change. Point is, everyone saw people getting their oil checked every time they filled the tank.
My point was that this is not any sort of widespread normalized behavior in the US in the past few decades. I was responding to a comment preaching as if this was routine behavior, and that people not doing it are simply being "inattentive".
I do get that it used to be a thing in the past. But that was also when oil was rated for 3k miles (I think? maybe it was even lower) and engines would routinely burn oil (ie consume it without leaving a drip spot on the ground). Whereas in the modern day, 15k synthetic exists.
FWIW, I probably do more of my own maintenance than the median HNer. I'll admit I can let intervals slip more than I'd like and I'm working on that, but this idea that everyone is checking fluid levels all the time just seems wildly off base.
I don't see how killing a lot of fishermen and destroying their families alleviates this pain.
There might have been drugs on the boats, but maybe not. No one bothered to check first.
The fishermen might have been part-time drug smugglers, maybe not. How do we know? What investigation was done?
And if we really believe that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"
then taking away people's lives without due process is murder. Cold blooded, premeditated murder. That's a worse crime than selling someone a drug that might kill them.
Friend, don't let your pain blind you to causing more pain. Ethics is hard.
I mean it is noble to act like you are some being of infinite sympathy and forgiveness. The reality of being alive though is that many people will 100% hurt you for their personal gain.
> That's a worse crime than selling someone a drug that might kill them
I am pretty sure the 14 people who died weren't smuggling in 14 doses of fentanyl, is killing someone a worse crime than selling 100,000 people a drug that might kill them, and will guaranteed fuck up their lives, their families lives, and their community?
The USA (and many countries) decided long ago to allow the sale of alcohol, a drug that ends many lives and ruins many, many more. I hope that once these fentanyl smugglers are dealt with, we can do something about the drug sellers that are operating out in the open with impunity.
the way they smelled and the way the world smelled when the knowledge was shared.
smell, of course, being one of the oldest and strongest senses. And one which incorporates a vast amount of knowledge. True, most of this knowledge is non-verbalizable, but that's true for many many forms of knowledge.
I can think of a number of other things which would also be lost by video, but smell was an obvious choice.
As for practical, let's say I was teaching you to cook, or to hunt, or to practice medicine. Several areas where smell gives really rich information.
What I found weird in Lisp (and didn't even realize at first) is that
foo
and
(foo)
mean something different.
I now understand it similarly to the way in set theory x and {x} are different, but one is not used to the ordinary parenthesis symbol behaving in this way.
The ones who can't afford it (<200% federal poverty level) are covered in Texas. Friend who gave birth in Austin, TX talked to other mothers in the ward and one was having her second under that. There's lots of programs that cover this. Abortion should be legal, yes, but you won't be out that amount if you don't make enough.
System seems fine, though I think I'd prefer if we completely subsidized childbirth and 12 months after for all (because those are people who will keep us solvent in the future).
> Are you sure this isn't impression you've gotten from isolated reactions involving a small number of individuals, perhaps just a single individual?
Swedish here. The impression is common. Sweden is a small country and has long had a fairly cohesive culture. The culture has decided that digital payments are the way. Deviation from the collective way is always suspect.
Your impression is misguided. Maybe it's the norm in Stockholm, but 80% of the population live elsewhere. We do use cash and nobody thinks its suspicious to pay with cash, stop making stuff up.
nothing in the real world is in its pure form, and some business are able to provide value which they cannot charge for because they can rent-seek on other areas, so there is always nuance.
but an economy where rent-seeking is the main path to wealth is an economy in really poor shape.
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