Anyone remembers the faceless from "spirited away"? Its a daemon that lures people with an offer of gold, and when they get closer to take some, they get eaten. The protagonist breaks that daemon by refusing the offer with "I don't need it".
The daemon wasn't truly evil. Being in the bath house that the witch was running to extract money from the spirits is what brought out that side.
The aunt from Grave of the Fireflies who convinces the kid to sell his parents' stuff for food money and then complains he did nothing to deserve the food she made was a piece of work though.
Thanks for bringing this point up. When I watched the movie as a child I didn't understand the nuance behind No-Face, but this video was a very enjoyable dive into the character & background: https://youtu.be/EavUeCBDTPo
When my brother was getting married, the priest looked over the audience and singled me out, asking, "Do you love your watch?" I said no—it's a good watch but I don't _love_ it. He moved on to ask others about some objects in their possession and asked if they loved them. Each answered yes. He told the group that love should be reserved for people and living things, and that we do love a disservice when we profess our love for inanimate things.
interesting that we have Christians coming to America to rape and slave people and bring gold to fancy churches in Europe... Vatican is a also a quite fancy and rich place in 2025
what if you love your pro-social company or your gadget that allows you to do a more effective activism that helps people?
what if loving your gadget makes you not treat them as an ephemeral thing, thus making you stay with them longer and contributing to the enviroment with less e-waste?
I don't mean to single your comment out, but i feel like this is a line of argument i see frequently that I don't think has merit. Like, sure "love your pro-social company or your gadget that allows you to do a more effective activism that helps people" is maybe theoretically possible but come on.
in 99.99999999% of cases people loving a company or a gadget is bad and it's not particularly nuanced or complicated. Why must people (or just engineers?) fixate on some weird imaginary possibility edge case instead of just accepting the statement as "true".
Is it pedantry, cope or something else i'm missing?
People do this with every subject. Do you think X is bad because in every case you've seen it's caused harm to people? Well, he says smugly have you considered this imaginary case where X isn't actually bad? actively subtracts from any serious conversation about a topic
What i'm saying is my original comment was calling out a specific thing where people fixate on edge cases for no reason. "love" is not the issue here since it's general case we see even when that word isn't involved
I always likened those rebuttals to the “it’s just how we’ve always done things” refrain, spouted by people who believe they have more to lose by changing the status quo than to gain, but refuse to investigate why and adapt accordingly if true.
Because you’re right, fandom toward products and enterprise is objectively bad. It’s taking the same hooks actively exploited by religion and cults, but now towards iPhones and B-Corps. They are being exploited, and choose not to recognize it because their identity is tied to their fandom.
Yeah, life is a lot harder being the wet blanket in the conference room, asking pointed and specific questions about why we do things this way, could we do them better, etc, but it’s also liberating to see just how much of the world is blind momentum built on fear of literally any other alternative.
> fandom toward products and enterprise is objectively bad
fandom from the HN crowd is (usually) excessively bad but there's much more than the Silicon Valley Rainbow, AI and millionaire CEOs essays out there... and this group has better tech education than amazed ordinary people buying yearly new devices to call an API on a server or open Instagram/X with faster processors and higher pixel values on an ant's larvae sized camera sensor with fixed F-stop lens
Lewis Black had this golden reaction to his audience applauding a smartphone: "Don't you ever, ever applaud an inanimate object again. I believe that's why they have that section about the golden calf."
I wouldn't put religion as a good moral compass, it tends to point to itself and its elite. Even more, I think people applaud the achievement of making that smartphone available, not that specific smartphone.
That is one of the few question where pure secular philosophy could give practical answers; but even a simplistic precept like "don't harm others gratuitously" would be a better moral compass than organized religion, despite its potential for personal interpretation.
I have a feeling we, collectively, glance over the question, and over the author's stance on the subject, and almost dismissively say 'yeah, sure', without the amount of thought that they deserve.
Money is a fascinating technology. To me, the most fascinating. And like any technology it’s not evil, it’s just a tool that can be used for things, good or evil.
The problem is this modern (very American) idea that having money in someway is a sign of human value.
But saying money is evil is as problematic as saying having money is good. It makes it hard to use the technology to solve hard problems, that it’s good at solving, when the technology itself is attributed with those moral judgements.
a long while ago i was considering a centrally monitored physical security system for my home. that was long before you could easily host your own security cameras with convenient mobile alerts.
The salesman comes to my home. wife and kids are around. He sits at my dinner table and begins with asking me "is your family important to you?"
to which i replied "please leave now". needless to say i didn't buy anything from him.
I have no time with shady sales tactics and manipulation. i can totally relate to this article.
This is so completely reasonable, and yet so unexpected that the "please leave now" actually reads like a joke punchline. In the last few years ads have become remarkably dystopian and unapologetic about it.. I mean it was always "No one will love you if you don't buy our thing!" but they didn't quite come out and say it before. The "less likes, more love" campaign comes to mind as ironically appropriate.
I'm not in a position where I deal with actual human salespeople that often, but we're all products of the culture we're embedded in. So I assume that's gotten more masks-off crazy and feral too.. just very openly trying to find your anxieties and squeeze.
> I have no time with shady sales tactics and manipulation. i can totally relate to this article.
Sometimes I recommend people to go to high pressure sales meetings, such as the ones where they try to sell time-shares (is that still a thing?). They'll pick you up at the hotel on a limo, and offer you free tickets to some shows if you go. It is insanely annoying, but it's a great exercise on your ability to say no under psychological pressure. They will try to attack you at your most core values and the moment you realize it is an attempt to manipulate you, you develop some immunity to it - the said ability to say "leave now".
On the time-share, the poor third (!) salesperson who tried to convince me surrendered to the math - US$100K for a week, for a ~300K apartment was about US$ 5 million, which was the going price for apartments in the very fancy building next to it. At that point they relented, gave us the tickets (they were sold out at the venue) and drove us back to our hotel.
Maybe two years ago I got a youtube ad that was literally an infomercial telling me that my penis was too small to please my partner, and presumably trying to sell me something for that, though I could not watch long enough to see where it was going. I was only able to make it as far into the ad out of incredulousness that it was actually as brazen as it seemed. It was mostly just funny to me, but also sort of amazing that YouTube was showing me such bottom-of-the-barrel ad content.
Pretty gross and awful, but I guess not especially new. What feels like a new thing in the last ~5 years is when you're browsing some actually reputable news site, and literally reading high brow analysis about misinformation and vulnerable populations, and meanwhile also still getting hammered with ads around the borders about "one weird trick seniors should know". Now that's dystopian.
There was a Reeses commercial about "your devices are listening to you" for example, and other stuff that I probably should not boost by describing specifically. But basically there's a new form that's pretty openly self-aware about "yeah this is unpleasant to watch, but what are you going to do, actually turn off your TV? just give us your money." When this stuff first appeared I thought the writing was just subpar, or that maybe the idea was that the public just can't parse anything more subtle. But it's more that anxiety still sells even if you're being blatant about stuff, and if you can create anxiety that isn't actually present yet, then you might be making society sicker but you're still making your ads more effective
Every time I have to research and purchase a new U.S. health insurance plan, I'm reminded there's a spectrum with private equity on one end and me on the other. I'll sacrifice a life of luxury if it means I don't have to bow to the golden calf.
You need to find a job there first. Canada has a points system - my wife an I were going to Canada, she for a doctorate, I as the significant other working remotely for Canonical. The only reason we didn't went there was a nice job offer from Ireland.
Wishing people off the island like this is so foolish. There are a lot of scientists who will be leaving the US due to funding cuts, and the result for you is decidedly worse, not better.
The article is about money. The OP made a comment about giving up luxury for health security in a heartbeat. Both countries have a strong safety nets and multinationals have branch offices there. For many people it's as simple as asking for a transfer. For others making high tech salaries, it's just a matter of buying a citizenship. They are for sale and relative to high tech pay, don't cost that much. Less than $1M USD to buy a Canadian citizenship.
But they won't. Why? Because the pay is less. And that's the harsh truth. Migration patterns are driven by economics. It really is about money most of the time.
So there are zero people living in the bay area who work normal jobs and don't make tech salaries? Because the only reason people live somewhere is the money, so all those people must have moved away since their money would be worth more in a lower cost of living area?
Never thought 'love it or leave it' would be presented as a valid argument on HN.
I don’t understand this. Last time I bought insurance it was easy, just go online, pick one of the options and fill out a form. What does this have to do with “bowing” to anyone? It’s no different than many other transactions.
Personally, I like that I have options about what insurance to buy.
Not super related to your comment but that's not how it happened. This idea of barter -> coin money as natural progression is a fairy tale economists tell people but doesn't really have any bearing on real historical events
Barter is so bad for complex transactions that it couldn't go that way. Every transaction that needs to based on more than trust that you will get your gift back later needs some universal coinage. A trader can only take grain in your village, then in the city only pay in grain, but anything more complex needs money.
Yes this is what economists say, the truth of development is a lot more complicated. Suffice to say you're massively underestimating how complex debt/non-coinage based economies can be
This is actually apocryphal, I think from Adam Smith & before him Aristotle, pull quote from 1985 anthropology professor “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money"
Gift economies were the norm, but they were always smaller. They work well when you can expect to get your gift back in the future. However as the economy gets larger eventually you can't trust to get the value of your gift back, which is okay in small amounts, but if your gift is a signification percentage of your production when times are good you have to get it back when times are bad for you.
Money of some sort allows larger economies to become the norm. Sure there was always a little trade, but in a gift economy it wasn't significant to most people.
This article isn’t super convincing to me. It seems like the author had a preconceived goal and didn’t try hard to falsify it. For example, what about the “gimwali” exchange? That’s clearly a barter system. I believe Mesopotamia also had some barter-type systems (eg cuneiform tablets show exchanges of one good for another).
And realistically we just don’t have records going back to the time that we would expect most barter systems to have existed. It doesn’t really prove they didn’t.
Sure, gift economies were also prominent, perhaps more than barter. But it’s hard to believe that you would use them on outsiders.
TL;DR the concept of money and the concept of coinage are separate, with the former significantly predating the latter. Even after coins were a thing, most accounting was still done without them, especially for peasants:
> So let’s say you live in a small community – like a peasant village working beneath a large landholder’s manor – and you need to transact some things, but you don’t have any actual silver because coins are scarce and valuable (and being a subsistence farmer, you grow most of what you need yourself), how do you do it? Well, one way is to do it ‘on accounts’ – you need wool and so when the shepherds come down from the hills, you trade for some of their wool during the shearing with a family you know and both you and they make a mental note that you owe them for the wool. You might express that amount of debt in silver (as a unit weight – see how we get to coinage as a pre-measured weight of silver?) but there’s no reason to measure out silver (even if you had any) because you see these folks every year and next time they’ll ask you for some grain and so on.
> Note that this is not the same as the concept of ‘barter’ – there is, in fact, a notional ‘money’ intermediary, it’s just not a physical coin or bill, its expressed as an account, a purely notional unit of value.
If that were true, and I'm not saying it isn't, how is that any different than the money we're discussing? Do you think that I trudge down to the bank, withdraw cash (if only it were still silver!), and buy lunch with that? Do I put some in my pocket to pay the mortgage later in the week (even if it's not at the same bank)?
The money is just expressed as debt that we all keep track of (some of us worse than others), and if we express the amounts in modern monetary units that's only because there's little else we could agree on to quantify it.
> I imagine a peasant of old moving from bartering to coins would 'like' money - would that be allowed by this author or be too gauche?
The idea of there being a solely barter-based economy is not well supported in general, and the idea that they switched from that to coins is also not correct.
I also think it likely that pre-modern people were also dissatisfied with the concept of money, whether coinage or not, in the same way we are now, while also recognizing its utility as a means of exchanging goods fairly over time.
The author expresses my attitude toward money almost perfectly. I'll even go a step further: I hate money. It's a thing I have to deal with, but I hate every bit of it. I hate that I'm forced to devote so much of my life and mind to it. I hate that it rules every aspect of my life. I hate that its used as a weapon by those who want to subjugate me or harm me (for more money, even). I hate that it tends to ruin everything.
It's a huge downer all around and reduces my ability to enjoy life. But, such is life. I'm forced to deal with it, so I do. But I yearn for a better way.
Big picture, you're absolutely right and I do what I can to plant those seeds. However, while that could help future generations and so is worth doing, it doesn't actually help me in the here and now. There's nothing I can do that will positively change things on this count within my lifetime.
Perhaps there is just something small you can do that is passed down or acknowledged by others who will pass it on. A behavior, an action, or some other change.
There is probably a big change coming with AI. At the moment we need to pay people to work so stuff gets done but if AI can do it instead that goes away.
I'm trying. My daughter loves Star Trek and I have had over the years extensive discussions with my older sons about how poverty is designed into our society and how eradicating it could be easy with just a couple minor adjustments.
Unfortunately, the world has been turning in the wrong direction - basic human decency is considered "woke" and "leftism". Any attempt to make a just society is called "communism" and shouted down aggressively by the people who would most benefit from it.
We need to change these things.
Something Gorbachev said on the fall of the Soviet Union stuck with me for the past couple decades, that they "failed because they tried to make a better man".
Is poverty really 'designed into our society'? It seems to me that the underlying aspects of poverty - particularly resource scarcity and insecurity - are inherent aspects of the 'state of nature', which are only escapable via the cooperative mechanisms associated with the formation of society and governance. Sure, these things aren't 100% effective at eliminating poverty, but the proposition that poverty is somehow an intentionally baked-in objective seems hyperbolic.
Further, the notion that the USSR failed because "they tried to make a better man" is an absurd whitewashing of Soviet history.
>Further, the notion that the USSR failed because "they tried to make a better man" is an absurd whitewashing of Soviet history.
Isn't he referring specifically to the notion of the 'New Soviet Man' here, the idea that a communist economic model would produce fundamentally different humans as a result? I can see why he would describe that as a flawed approach, but you're right that it'd be an odd thing to blame for the fall of the Soviet Union over the other factors which contributed to it.
I don't think Gorbachev was trying to be precise on that moment. It is, however, a failure of the project that such "New Soviet Man" was not created, and it makes me ask myself what environment would be to create a person with these attitudes.
Yes, poverty really is 'designed into our society'. Huge parts of our economy are prerequisite on 'zero hour' jobs. Where you are guaranteed zero hours per week, and have to check your schedule at the start of every week. Those working these jobs often have to work multiple zero hour jobs just to survive and somehow juggle that neither job has a fixed, dependable schedule. These jobs then prevent them from being able to use their off time (because they can't schedule around their jobs) to improve their lot in life. It is designed to be chaotic and a trap paying not even enough for survival (hence needing multiple jobs) let alone get ahead.
Zero hours contracts are likely the unintended consequence of other (employment) regulation. People / Organisations (this includes private businesses and organisation, as well as state owned organisation) will try to circumvent any limits placed on it.
You seem to be of the belief that if you "tweak the nobs" just right, things will be magically be fixed, this is naive. The law of unintended consequences has been observed countless times throughout history when people have tried to do exactly that. This is extremely naive.
Even Star Trek itself that you appear to be a fan of. The Earth is post scarcity, they show that the Federation isn't the benevolent force that they pretend to be (This is hinted multiple times in TNG and shown outright in DS9) and that there are others that are negatively affected by the Federation and its policies e.g the Marquis.
They can always claim the consequences were unintentional, but that doesn’t make them less unbelievably convenient for the people who say they had no intention of causing them.
It really depends what you want to believe doesn't it. Purely asserting it is obvious because you believe it to be so, isn't proof that it was deliberate. As I previously said there has been a lot written about the law of unintended consequences and many cases where it wasn't obvious, it seems you haven't cared to read any of it, otherwise you wouldn't have this attitude.
I am of the belief that people in zero hour jobs are basically fucked, and that because a large portion of our businesses use zero hour jobs our society in fact has stagnation in poverty systemically built in/designed in.
Star Trek's a cool show. The bible's a cool book. They are guides on how to do better, not reality, not true events. That doesn't change that they can be used to reflect on ourselves/our society to improve them, nor does that condemn us to accept immorality/lower standards as inevitable.
> I am of the belief that people in zero hour jobs are basically fucked, and that because a large portion of our businesses use zero hour jobs our society in fact has stagnation in poverty systemically built in/designed in.
1) People take zero hour jobs for various reasons. I worked on minimum wage for 8 years, I wasn't condemned to a life of poverty.
2) You have no proof of it being "designed in" because zero hour contracts exist. Repeating the statement does not make it true. The fact is that the law of unintended consequences is a thing that has been observed repeatedly.
3) I don't view it as "our" society. I don't even really know what people mean by that. I don't see it like that at all. I live in a country (England) and I see the government/state as adversarial to my interests generally. Many of the people in England and the UK don't share many of the same values as I do.
> Star Trek's a cool show. The bible's a cool book. They are guides on how to do better, not reality, not true events.
The fact that you equate Star Trek with the Bible is very troubling. Star Trek is an entertainment show with a fanbase, it is not a guide to do better. The Bible on the hand is much more important (even if many here don't recognise its importance) and this is coming from someone that is an Atheist.
> That doesn't change that they can be used to reflect on ourselves/our society to improve them, nor does that condemn us to accept immorality/lower standards as inevitable.
The point I was making that many people don't agree on what the improvement should be. What you believe is an improvement / moral etc. maybe seen by others as regressions and/or immoral. The writers in DS9 understood there were those that had this different point of view.
I mean, I've read enough of the Bible to know it's pretty out there. It's packed with the writings of humans who lived in a time so different to now, with interpreted translations. Shakespeare's writings are a lot more relevant to us, although maybe inspirational rather than aspirational, and far better written. A modern take with updated aspirations that is understandable and approachable isn't a bad thing to equate it to, even if it's the basis for an entertainment.
1. Good for you. Did you have kids or was it just you?
2. It is baked in at this point. People with zero hour jobs are at an extreme disadvantage. It's not adversarial government, it's business choice. There are many countries with larger burdens placed on business that have businesses that aren't forced into the zero hour practice. There companies that chose not to adopt zero hour practices. Stating that the government forced business into it doesn't make it true, and the fact the above businesses exist observably shows it's not a direct law of unintended consequences but a choice by business.
3. This position is outside the norm.
Both Star Trek and the bible are moral parables used to shape people's ideas. I'm guessing you are younger and don't understand the 90s tech ethos around Trek. Where I worked Trek was always playing in some room during lunch. Zero people were reading the bible. But I'm from the 80s/90s bay area (ish, Santa Cruz). Trek was definitely a parable that gave people something to aspire to.
Yes, differing views exist. You are the one that seems hostile to them, writing off your entire society because of your personal interests ("I don't view it as "our" society""). Most people agree on what improvement should be (people should be able to afford to raise families and live in some level of dignity and freedom from scarcity, people should not have to fear crime, education should be encouraged) they just don't agree how to fund it nor make it happen.
> 1. Good for you. Did you have kids or was it just you?
It was just me. However it works for people who aren't single and do have kids e.g I know a woman who does deliveries and she can work as little or as much as she wants, while her husband has a full time job. You can't do that with mandated hours. She prefers it and thinks it is great.
You are making a bunch of assumptions about people's needs. People are individuals and they know what is best for them and not you.
> 2. It is baked in at this point. People with zero hour jobs are at an extreme disadvantage. It's not adversarial government, it's business choice. There are many countries with larger burdens placed on business that have businesses that aren't forced into the zero hour practice.
You keep on asserting this as a truism, I know plenty of people doing zero hour jobs and they do just ok. Most of these people are Students, Younger people or people who wish to work part time.
As for burdens. In the UK and Europe economic growth is dead because of these large burdens.
> There companies that chose not to adopt zero hour practices. Stating that the government forced business into it doesn't make it true, and the fact the above businesses exist observably shows it's not a direct law of unintended consequences but a choice by business.
I never claimed that governments forced business. I said government regulation could have created the incentive. I made no definitive statement. People constantly put words in your mouth in these discussions. Businesses will generally follow incentives. Not all will adopt the same practices if it doesn't fit in with it business model.
> 3. This position is outside the norm.
Yes I am aware. That doesn't mean that the norm is correct. I can explain exactly why I think this and give exhaustive examples to back up what I believe.
> Both Star Trek and the bible are moral parables used to shape people's ideas. I'm guessing you are younger and don't understand the 90s tech ethos around Trek. Where I worked Trek was always playing in some room during lunch. Zero people were reading the bible. But I'm from the 80s/90s bay area (ish, Santa Cruz). Trek was definitely a parable that gave people something to aspire to.
You make a lot of assumptions. I am in my early 40s. I understand the feeling at the time. I've moved on from the 90s, I didn't stop evolving my beliefs, they changed when I realised my previous beliefs about how the world operated was incorrect.
Just because people aren't reading the Bible in your break room doesn't mean it isn't important. Star Trek just isn't and will be all but a curiosity in a generation or two. The Bible I wager won't.
> Yes, differing views exist. You are the one that seems hostile to them, writing off your entire society because of your personal interests ("I don't view it as "our" society"").
No I am not hostile to the normal people. You have no idea what I think. Taking one phrase I said and then turning that into how I view everyone is disingenuous.
I had previously lived outside of the UK for many years and it isn't unusual for expats to have a bit of a culture shock when coming home. Travel tends to open your mind to new ideas and when you come back home you see everything with a new set of eyes.
> Most people agree on what improvement should be (people should be able to afford to raise families and live in some level of dignity and freedom from scarcity, people should not have to fear crime, education should be encouraged) they just don't agree how to fund it nor make it happen.
No they don't. That the entire divide in both the US, The UK and Europe. There also will never be freedom from scarcity.
Liking that fictional universal star trek, all you would have to do is eradicate pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttoney, envy, and sloth. Then we could all have nice things.
Or if you don't like that set - eradicate acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power.
Then with those easy changes, we could eradicate poverty
Not much. The rules have emerged, there's only small amounts of deliberate interference with that natural process.* Deliberate societal rules (statute laws, rulings) have to fit to what's politically viable, which is to say, what people in general like: and people in general are incoherent, only diffidently cooperative, and run on intuition, so mostly we get accidental rules instead of deliberately designed ones.
* Interesting instance of when the word "natural" applies to things created by humans.
Be careful though. It is very easy to change for what looks like better but is in fact worse. Most of history money was not something the typical person had or used. Adding money greatly increased freedom for everyone though - it became possible to trade things without complex 10 way barter situations.
>I hate that I'm forced to devote so much of my life and mind to it.
Your life would be better if you devoted so much time to food, clothing, and shelter? That's what money is. If you dislike money, a mere change in attitude such that you believe you're pursuing the essentials should suffice.
>I hate that its used as a weapon by those
This seems doubtful. Those in warzones have my sympathy, but I think that it's pretty likely that you live in a place where it's not used as a weapon at all. Your family remains unstarved, no one's burning your crops or confiscating famine relief off the UN trucks.
>But I yearn for a better way.
You live in an era of material abundance beyond the wildest imaginations of your ancestors. Even poor people are fat. Clothing is so cheap we throw it away if it gets a cheeseburger stain... your grandma didn't slave away for years to gift you that roughspun, sackcloth shirt. Etc etc.
> Your life would be better if you devoted so much time to food, clothing, and shelter? That's what money is.
That's a very serious oversimplification of the reality, in my opinion. Money, in our society, is much more than a means for survival.
> This seems doubtful.
I'm not sure how that seems doubtful. All you have to do is pay attention to the news, or (even though this is hardly a modern phenomenon) pay attention to what today's ultrawealthy are saying and doing to see the truth of it.
You don't even have to look at the ultrawealthy. For a more common, low-level, example, look at the spying that marketers engage in. They use money to engage in those attacks, and they do it in order to get more money.
> You live in an era of material abundance beyond the wildest imaginations of your ancestors.
Absolutely true, but irrelevant to my point.
> Even poor people are fat.
Not because of abundance, but because eating well is too expensive.
> Not because of abundance, but because eating well is too expensive.
No it isn't. Eating poorly is often (much) more expensive that eating properly. Non-processed food is actually reasonably priced for the most part. Fruit and Veg is reasonably cheap. Premium cuts of meat can be expensive.
Just looking at my recent trip to the supermarket:
* A 6 pack bag of apples (Pink Ladies) was less than £1.50
* A bag of easy peeler oranges was less than £1.50
* A bag of new potatoes £2
* Large Bunch of Bananas are about ~£2
* 12 Pack of Large Eggs - ~£2.50
* 12 Rashers of Bacon - ~£2.50-4
* 1kg packet of Chicken Thighs (Raw) are ~£3.50 (2 chicken thighs a day).
* Broccoli ~£1
* Spouts ~£1
* Beans ~£1
* Berry flavoured Tea Bags ~£2
* Bag of Italian Ground Coffee ~£3-4
* 240 Pack of Yorkshire Tea Bags (will last me a month or two) ~£6
* Store brand Olive oil based Margarine ~£2
* Premium Wholemeal Loaf of Bread ~£2-3
* 4 pints of Semi Skimmed Milk £2.50
* Various table Sauces ~£1-2
That is less than £50 and I don't need to buy some of those weekly. Each day I am eating about 1800-2000 calories (I've put myself on a calorie controlled diet to lose weight) and this will last me most of the week if not the entire week.
If I buy ready meals they are £3-6 each. Premade Pizza is £4-6. So much more expensive and objectively worse for your health than cooking yourself.
One takeaway meal from the local Chinese will cost me £22 (a main and a side), Noodles will cost £7-11 depending on the dish. A pizza from the local pizza shop is £8-10. This excludes delivery. The local deli will charge me £4-5 for a meal deal (Chicken Wrap, Snack and Drink).
McDonalds is about £7 for a Big Mac Meal. KFC is similar for one of their Box Meals.
He doesn't know how to cook though, and at this point it's generational... his grandparents quite possibly never really learned how to cook. Worse still, he doesn't want to spend 1-2 hours every day doing meal preperation... cue the "if I do that I won't have any time at all to watch anime without staying up til 4 am!" stuff.
Eating well and making someone else do the work is expensive. For the lazy, this means eating well really is expensive.
One thing to consider is that Many people simply do not have the time, energy, and/or equipment to cook food from raw ingredients. These factors are common in poorer households where people are working multiple jobs, etc.
I literally just puts the thighs in the air fryer (I have a cheapy one from Tesco) for 30 minutes. The steamer I have was £15 in Sainsburys (it was on offer).
Most kitchen equipment except for the white goods is dirt cheap and even the really cheap stuff can last for years. Most meals take me 30-40 minutes to cook maximum.
That isn't 30-40 minutes me standing in the kitchen cooking. That is how long it takes to cook in the air fryer (the thighs take about 30-35 minutes). I literally have a timer telling me when to put on the veg and the potatoes. I think prep time is max 10 minutes and then 10 minutes to wash up.
In any-event. It is objectively more expensive to buy junk food, that includes the cheaper junk. Once I cut out the trips to the takeaway and the deli, I was surprised at how much more money I had per month.
That's certainly an improvement, but still involves me planning to eat in half an hour instead of just snacking right now. But I shouldn't be presenting myself as representative of any demographic except maybe bedroom coders. I tend to agree that junk and expense correlate. I don't eat junk, I eat random crap, it's very different.
Instead of making up strawmen to tear down like "Other people refusing to give you money isn't 'weaponizing money'", you might consider rereading the site guidelines. Or, perhaps you would be more comfortable with the level of discourse if you moved to one of the more political subreddits?
> you live in a place where it's not used as a weapon at all.
The question is whether you'd continue to do what you do if you didn't have to. I love my work - I find it challenging and engaging, I have great colleagues, furiously creative and smart, who also love what they do, but how much of our work is only accounting for overhead? At which point keeping track of all money flowing through the economy becomes the objective of the economy?
Let's think about means-tested financial assistance: seems reasonable to make sure money doesn't go to people who actually don't need it, but we also need to be careful not to invest too much in fraud detection that we spend more on it than we would covering for fraud. Wouldn't the incentives to get money you don't need vanish if you had something like UBI covering the basics of food, clothing, and shelter?
> The question is whether you'd continue to do what you do if you didn't have to.
Most people wouldn't. People prefer leisure. While I like programming, most of the work I do is tedious. I would rather spend my time riding my mountain bike, working on my Land Rover, or programming a video game.
> Wouldn't the incentives to get money you don't need vanish if you had something like UBI covering the basics of food, clothing, and shelter?
No. The vast majority of people don't just want the bare basics in life. Thinking otherwise is simply naive.
>The question is whether you'd continue to do what you do if you didn't have to. I
It's a dumb question. Would I want to continue to eat, to be warm in the winter, and have the basic tools needed to live? Your question sounds like juvenile fantasy.
>I love my work - I find it challenging and engaging,
My work is a paycheck. I don't have to love it. I don't need it as a lifestyle, or a hobby, or a religion. It's mildly lucrative, long-term, and they seem to get something out of the deal too. If I wanted a family, I've got one at home and those are the people I love.
>Let's think about means-tested financial assistance: seems reasonable to make sure money doesn't go to people who actually don't need it,
Half the people in this thread don't even know what money is. It's been abstracted away beyond their monkey brained ability to understand it's nature. They think billionaires have billions.
>Wouldn't the incentives to get money you don't need vanish if you had something like UBI covering the basics of food, clothing, and shelter?
Never ceases to amaze me that those who grew up comfortably in middle class homes are in such a hurry to go on welfare. "Please, give me the Medicare for everyone". No, I have no great desire to ever be on welfare, and I say in all seriousness that I would prefer to starve to death, slowly and in great pain.
I don't need money for its own sake, but being fungible, it is virtually everything I do need. It is food, it is clothing, it is heat, fuel, tools, household furnishings, shelter, insurance against disaster, security, etc. To hear people talk about "money they don't need" sounds like mental illness. I suspect it actually is.
> You live in an era of material abundance beyond the wildest imaginations of your ancestors.
This does not appear to be making people any happier than they ever have been. Rather, the isolation implicit in an increasingly transactional society is creating a lot of loneliness, which generally has a greater impact on life satisfaction than material comfort.
This is life and always has been. It's money today, eons ago it was furs and food. Our hunter gatherer ancestors entire lives were centered around their next meal.
The only thing that has changed is the type of "currency".
> Our hunter gatherer ancestors entire lives were centered around their next meal.
No more so than today. How much time was devoted to survival varies a lot depending on where in the world we're talking about, but a surprisingly large portion of our hunter-gatherer ancestors spent less time devoted to these activities than we do today.
Such a weak response. There was a time I couldn't not crap in my own pants. But because of societies expectations, I learned not to.
You are making an excuse for poor behavior so that you can feel better or at least not look as bad to others. There is no reason society can't change. We no longer crap our pants, we no longer dump piss/crap in the streets, even though modern plumbing comes with a monthly expense.
I don't know many hunter gatherers but you can observe a lot of animals around and they uniformly do not have money and not really currency. They do devote quite a lot of time to their next meal, also quite often mating and fighting, although not always. Not to say it's better or worse but you can do life without currency.
I agree with you, but frame it slightly differently. Money is fine, even pretty useful. I'm a programmer, and my skill is programming. If I want to eat, I need to find a farmer that needs some programming done so I can trade my skills for his food. If the farmer needs some lumber to fix his fence, he needs to find a lumbermill that needs grain, so he can trade. Instead, with money, we have an intermediate thing we can trade our labor for, and then use it to obtain the other things we need.
Instead, I would suggest what you hate is Capitalism, which is different from money. A "market" is a concept that allows everyone to trade their products and services with each other. A Free Market is an academic ideal, that allows every actor in the market to participate with perfect information and without coercion.
Capitalism exploits the fact that there's no such thing as a free market, and perverts the market in favor those actors with lots of money and power to exploit and subjugate those who don't.
We could tax the wealthy enough that everyone could be given enough money to live on, and do whatever they wanted. Be an artist or a musician, or a programmer. They could work for themselves, or band together with others to produce things and sell them for a profit, and be better off than the minimum. But if they end up working for someone who tries to exploit, subjugate or harm them, then they can just leave without risk, since they'll always have enough money for housing, food and healthcare.
But of course, the billionaires would hate this, since it removes the source of their power. They're willing to spend billions of dollars corrupting politicians, generating propaganda, and convincing the rest of us that being exploited is what's best. We as a society could decide fix this, but we have to figure out how to organize with each other, and overcome the billions of dollars spent to prevent it.
Just wanted to say that I appreciate you calling out the distinction between capitalism and free markets. Too often I see them confounded, even though it's pretty trivial to see that they're not the same.
Sometimes I think the confounding is intentional, as well.
"The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard."
John Maynard Keynes 1930
Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
I don’t like or love money. Or capital. Or wealth. I enjoy the things money can acquire, sure. I enjoy my photography hobby, which isn’t cheap by any stretch. I enjoy my home theater, with games on a big OLED screen and my surround sound speakers filling my ears with crisp, clear audio. I enjoy building a gaming PC ($$$), I enjoy taking trips ($$$$), I enjoy eating out with friends ($$).
But money? No, I do not like it. In fact, I dislike it because it, as a concept, is so easily exploited. I understand that it’s the best system we have to store the value of labor within, but I’m also smart enough to realize that isn’t how it’s presently used. Those with the most money have not saved the most time, or created the most output, or labored harder and longer than those with less, and that irritates me. I am forced to engage in a society where money’s definition as a value of labor is highly duplicitous at best, and it’s nauseating.
And thus I circle back to the root question again: Do I like money?
No. I do not.
I tolerate money. I have a finite tolerance for money, where should I have any surplus amount above that threshold I would donate it to others, for my life - and the lives of my dozen or so family and friends - would be stable, in equilibrium with society and the environment until our inevitable deaths.
But no, I do not like money. I do not like having to spend time managing gambling - sorry, investment accounts - to ensure I can maybe retire or buy a home. I do not like having to learn rulesets to different games - sorry, payment cards - to ensure I’m not squandering my finite resources on fees or penalties. I do not like having to juggle multiple accounts across multiple institutions with different governance structures, rules, taxes, fees, and schedules. I do not like any of this because I know their core function is to more easily funnel my finite money to those with infinite sums.
But I tolerate money, because there is no alternative.
Do you like wealth, or the security and stability that wealth brings? Because I love the latter, but dislike the former. I hate seeing large numbers sitting in an account doing nothing but growing larger, and telling myself this is the “smart” thing to do to create security for myself and my loved ones. I should be able to acquire and maintain the latter without sitting on a growing pile of tickets masquerading as “wealth”.
By wealth I mean nice things, which may be more or less material according to taste. Numbers sitting in an account is not wealth, because wealth is stuff you palpably enjoy, or that otherwise does you some good. If you transform the numbers into something that you imagined, and make it real, now you've got wealth (and, even if indirectly, the wealth has a good chance of making you money through some kind of thriving).
This is like saying "You love mosquitoes. Try not having any." Not having any would be catastrophic to humanity because whole ecosystems would collapse and we'd have mass starvation.
But it doesn't change the fact that mosquitoes are personally, deeply offensive to my day-to-day experience living in a place where they exist.
(That being said, I have a lot of money and love it. But I'd give a ton of it away if it meant there were whole classes of problems I never had to think about again, like paying for my children's university, or making sure I can afford health care. I'd certainly give that amount away if it meant nobody needed to.)
Mosquitoes are near the bottom of the food chain, eaten by a bunch of other animals. There would be some amount of risk to our food supply if all mosquitos just vanished one day.
Even if someone does like money, the line of argument Ruben examines is trying to convince you that the ONLY thing you should like is money. One can 'like' money, and still recognize that other things are more important than money.
I like cake, but I don't want limitless cake to the exclusion of every other concern.
Money is more often than not an impediment to doing or achieving things (especially these days when the ultra rich are trying to hoover it all up themselves to enable power).
Imagine if money did not exist, and things were decided on actual merit? "Poor" people with good ideas might - dare I say it - do things that improved the world for everyone! ;)
There'd be many ways of achieving this, so I'll not bait people with C or S words.
Money is an good thing but leaves much to be desired. If we consider money's primary beneficial quality to be that it enables commerce and commerce rewards people who provide value then it is great. Money is pro-social, from this point of view.
The big problem is that money provides little recourse for the rest of us in the case that a person provides a lot of value, accumulates a lot of money, and then turns around and acts like a jerk. Having money allows one to destroy value indiscriminately, to a large degree. I can't think of a better system, really, however, besides a robust system allowing democratic regulation of commerce.
There was a good book I read (by either Cullen Roche or Morgan Housel) that observed the collecting money is not the important part, but rather using money is. Money is the ticket to the performance/show, and you generally don't get excited by the fact you have the ticket, but by the opportunity to go to the event.
Lately I've been thinking about how one of the main things that keeps a particular kind of money valuable is that it's what the landlord requires you to pay your rent in; the dollar has dropped almost to 1/10 of what it was worth when I was born in the seventies, and a much larger percentage of the supply of dollars is in the hands of rich idiots whose only goal in life seems to be to get even more despite the fact that they and their great-great-great-grandchildren will never need to work a single day in their life, with no regard for how much misery they cause as a side effect (and they cause a whole lot of that).
And then I go to the local farmer's market and while now pretty much everyone takes cards via an app on their phone that tithes a few percent of every transaction to a credit card company, ultimately making one of those rich idiots wealthier, there was a period where the best way to pay besides cash was to visit a little tent that would take a credit card transaction and give you a handful of wooden coins with various denominations screen-printed upon them; shoppers can't cash them out but vendors can; if you pay with food stamps then you get extra tokens in different colors that can only be used for certain classes of items; it's very pleasing to reach into my pocket and pull out a couple $5 tokens to pay for something, and get a few $1 tokens back, no fussing with the infinitestimal value of pennies, rounding everything off to $1 is really just fine even though I'm kinda broke.
And I keep on thinking about just... taking a bunch of those tokens, and seeing who around town I can persuade to accept these instead of US$.
But the thing is that US$ is also valuable for exchanges outside of my community, if I go to a coffee shop they're not going to be able to use these to pay the Brazillian farmers who grow those beans, I'm not going to want to accept payment for a private art commission in farmer's market tokens. And I know that if people start solving this problem with exchange policies for farmer's market tokens, then there will be problems with counterfeiting, and eventually the government will want to step in and enforce its monopoly on being the one who controls the medium of exchange.
And then I look at the amount of grinding poverty around me, and the immense inefficiencies of the attempts to fix that (sure, let's get all these homeless people out of downtown before the Superbowl and stick them in a warehouse that's rented out from a private owner for more money than it'd cost to pay all these folks's rent for a couple years) and I wonder if the whole idea of capitalism is just completely fucked from the bottom up.
They didn't have enough currency, so they improvised extra.
Thing is, it's hard to see what you're against - it's not really money, or capitalism: you just want your own money system and your own capitalism, and for it all to be grass roots and community and farmer's-market lovely. A cute money system instead of the threatening one we live with.
Money isn’t “necessary” or even “real” in a physical sense. Absolutely everything that happened today (*) could have happened exactly the same way if money didn’t exist. The only thing money does is affect what people decide to do. It’s the distributed control plane for society. And as yet, nobody has invented a better control plane that scales.
(*) Ignoring things that happened with money directly, of course, like the financial “industry”.
Most things could not happen without money. I have no use for the million dollar gadget I make. After 5-10 years on my job I would earn just one - but I need to eat every day not wait until I have earned one machine which then I have to find the person who needs it and trade for whatever they make with it (which they would have to give me all at once even though the gadget should work for years), and then trade those things around until finally I find someone who can give me some food...
Money is a necessary tool to make modern life possible. Other ways of life are possible, but not my current one.
What if you just went to the grocery store and got what you need, without paying money in return? What if everybody continued doing what they do, except that no payment took place? People would deliver groceries from the farm to the market, would write software for ensuring the right deliveries get where they are needed, and so on. Bank clerks would probably not have much to do, but, if they wanted, they could still go to the bank and play cards with their colleagues.
Wouldn't that be a better world?
> Money is a necessary tool to make modern life possible.
It's so because we seem to have, as a society, it is.
Only if your world is small enough that you can trust nobody is cheating. If everybody is doing their share to ensure there is always food in the store it works great. If only a few people are cheating it still works well enough. (I'm going to include the disabled in the cheating category for this discussion, because this is complex enough without trying to fit everything into the mold). As your world gets larger eventually more and more people start to realize that they can get by without working until there is no food in the store for anyone.
Note that getting food includes not just the easy stuff, but the gross stuff. If you can trust the store has what you need, you need some way to incentivize someone to get rid of the trash anyway. Money provides a good abstraction for some jobs being worth more - nearly anyone can haul trash to the dump, but because of the "gross factor" it pays more than other jobs that nearly anyone can do. Very few people can pass medical or engineering school - it is known as a hard study for good reason, so we incentivize people to go that route with more pay, if you can get everything you need, does your society have the right incentives to ensure it gets better?
History is full of societies that work similar to what you say. They all have their own ways of dealing with the above problems. One thing they all have in common is most people only contact a limited number of people and so they can crack down on cheaters because they learn who they are and so reputation matters. (the few travelers paid for their food via stories or barter, and often were looked down on anyway. Or often travelers were military and just took by force)
Again, money makes modern society possible and everyone who proposes otherwise normally just handwaves away real problems with their proposal. A few are willing to accept that downside, but when I look at those downsides I conclude I'm not and I think most will agree once they understand them.
Maybe. Global food production seems sufficient for everyone. Most humans are surviving, even if distribution is uneven, so, if we fix that, everything should work out.
"Need" and "want" are two very different things. Just a few years ago people were hoarding toilet paper, and that's with money as a factor limiting how much they could get at once. Sometimes there are no limits to "want".
But what if people, being sure they’d always get what they need, just didn’t engage in hoarding. And, those who still did, as many people do, got help to deal with their insecurities?
Things would not happen the same way without money. I’m saying there’s no reason they could not happen (again, ignoring operations on money itself).
The function of money is simply to help humans collectively decide what happens, of all the things that could happen.
And I’m not arguing against the existence of money at all — it’s an incredibly useful control mechanism. It’s not the only one, of course, we also have social norms (aka peer pressure), altruism, threats of violence, laws enforced by threats of violence, etc. etc. (Much evil and stupidity is perpetrated by people who seem to believe money is the only control mechanism that should matter.)
Exactly the same way? If you make plows and want milk from a dairy farmer with a limited supply of milk who does not need or want any more plows, how do you get milk the same way as today without the concept of money?
The physical processes of making plows and delivering milk do not involve money in any way. The only role money plays here is to influence the farmer to decide to give you milk.
So it facilitates exchange between people who would not otherwise trade.
Thus things would be different absent money and given the long complex supply chains required to make most things today, like say plows, it is hard to argue things wouldn't be significantly different.
Money is control. Without cash reserves, you have less opportunity to control your work and personal/family risk.
However, capital need not be binary: exclusively personal or otherwise. Sometimes capital can be community based: allocated via cooperative governance or democratic means via municipality.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadThe aunt from Grave of the Fireflies who convinces the kid to sell his parents' stuff for food money and then complains he did nothing to deserve the food she made was a piece of work though.
what if you love your pro-social company or your gadget that allows you to do a more effective activism that helps people? what if loving your gadget makes you not treat them as an ephemeral thing, thus making you stay with them longer and contributing to the enviroment with less e-waste?
in 99.99999999% of cases people loving a company or a gadget is bad and it's not particularly nuanced or complicated. Why must people (or just engineers?) fixate on some weird imaginary possibility edge case instead of just accepting the statement as "true".
Is it pedantry, cope or something else i'm missing?
When you “love” a company, it’s not the same as “loving” your wife.
And “loving” your wife is different, still, than “loving” your brother or best friend.
I don’t see the connection, sorry.
Because you’re right, fandom toward products and enterprise is objectively bad. It’s taking the same hooks actively exploited by religion and cults, but now towards iPhones and B-Corps. They are being exploited, and choose not to recognize it because their identity is tied to their fandom.
Yeah, life is a lot harder being the wet blanket in the conference room, asking pointed and specific questions about why we do things this way, could we do them better, etc, but it’s also liberating to see just how much of the world is blind momentum built on fear of literally any other alternative.
fandom from the HN crowd is (usually) excessively bad but there's much more than the Silicon Valley Rainbow, AI and millionaire CEOs essays out there... and this group has better tech education than amazed ordinary people buying yearly new devices to call an API on a server or open Instagram/X with faster processors and higher pixel values on an ant's larvae sized camera sensor with fixed F-stop lens
https://youtu.be/g0YKW0NLP64?feature=shared&t=565
The problem is this modern (very American) idea that having money in someway is a sign of human value.
But saying money is evil is as problematic as saying having money is good. It makes it hard to use the technology to solve hard problems, that it’s good at solving, when the technology itself is attributed with those moral judgements.
The salesman comes to my home. wife and kids are around. He sits at my dinner table and begins with asking me "is your family important to you?"
to which i replied "please leave now". needless to say i didn't buy anything from him.
I have no time with shady sales tactics and manipulation. i can totally relate to this article.
I'm not in a position where I deal with actual human salespeople that often, but we're all products of the culture we're embedded in. So I assume that's gotten more masks-off crazy and feral too.. just very openly trying to find your anxieties and squeeze.
Sometimes I recommend people to go to high pressure sales meetings, such as the ones where they try to sell time-shares (is that still a thing?). They'll pick you up at the hotel on a limo, and offer you free tickets to some shows if you go. It is insanely annoying, but it's a great exercise on your ability to say no under psychological pressure. They will try to attack you at your most core values and the moment you realize it is an attempt to manipulate you, you develop some immunity to it - the said ability to say "leave now".
On the time-share, the poor third (!) salesperson who tried to convince me surrendered to the math - US$100K for a week, for a ~300K apartment was about US$ 5 million, which was the going price for apartments in the very fancy building next to it. At that point they relented, gave us the tickets (they were sold out at the venue) and drove us back to our hotel.
There was a Reeses commercial about "your devices are listening to you" for example, and other stuff that I probably should not boost by describing specifically. But basically there's a new form that's pretty openly self-aware about "yeah this is unpleasant to watch, but what are you going to do, actually turn off your TV? just give us your money." When this stuff first appeared I thought the writing was just subpar, or that maybe the idea was that the public just can't parse anything more subtle. But it's more that anxiety still sells even if you're being blatant about stuff, and if you can create anxiety that isn't actually present yet, then you might be making society sicker but you're still making your ads more effective
Also less freezing than Toronto.
Oh… that kind of midge. Yes, but they don’t try to bleed me at least. And they are somewhat rare. I see them mostly by a nearby creek, in summer.
The article is about money. The OP made a comment about giving up luxury for health security in a heartbeat. Both countries have a strong safety nets and multinationals have branch offices there. For many people it's as simple as asking for a transfer. For others making high tech salaries, it's just a matter of buying a citizenship. They are for sale and relative to high tech pay, don't cost that much. Less than $1M USD to buy a Canadian citizenship.
But they won't. Why? Because the pay is less. And that's the harsh truth. Migration patterns are driven by economics. It really is about money most of the time.
Never thought 'love it or leave it' would be presented as a valid argument on HN.
Personally, I like that I have options about what insurance to buy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-...
Money of some sort allows larger economies to become the norm. Sure there was always a little trade, but in a gift economy it wasn't significant to most people.
And realistically we just don’t have records going back to the time that we would expect most barter systems to have existed. It doesn’t really prove they didn’t.
Sure, gift economies were also prominent, perhaps more than barter. But it’s hard to believe that you would use them on outsiders.
TL;DR the concept of money and the concept of coinage are separate, with the former significantly predating the latter. Even after coins were a thing, most accounting was still done without them, especially for peasants:
> So let’s say you live in a small community – like a peasant village working beneath a large landholder’s manor – and you need to transact some things, but you don’t have any actual silver because coins are scarce and valuable (and being a subsistence farmer, you grow most of what you need yourself), how do you do it? Well, one way is to do it ‘on accounts’ – you need wool and so when the shepherds come down from the hills, you trade for some of their wool during the shearing with a family you know and both you and they make a mental note that you owe them for the wool. You might express that amount of debt in silver (as a unit weight – see how we get to coinage as a pre-measured weight of silver?) but there’s no reason to measure out silver (even if you had any) because you see these folks every year and next time they’ll ask you for some grain and so on.
> Note that this is not the same as the concept of ‘barter’ – there is, in fact, a notional ‘money’ intermediary, it’s just not a physical coin or bill, its expressed as an account, a purely notional unit of value.
The money is just expressed as debt that we all keep track of (some of us worse than others), and if we express the amounts in modern monetary units that's only because there's little else we could agree on to quantify it.
Nothing's changed really.
> I imagine a peasant of old moving from bartering to coins would 'like' money - would that be allowed by this author or be too gauche?
The idea of there being a solely barter-based economy is not well supported in general, and the idea that they switched from that to coins is also not correct.
I also think it likely that pre-modern people were also dissatisfied with the concept of money, whether coinage or not, in the same way we are now, while also recognizing its utility as a means of exchanging goods fairly over time.
It's a huge downer all around and reduces my ability to enjoy life. But, such is life. I'm forced to deal with it, so I do. But I yearn for a better way.
It doesn't have to be this way, it can change. Maybe not in our lifetimes but we plant the seeds so future generations can live better lives.
I'll just say this... if you actually believe AI will make money obsolete, I'd be happy to take all your obsolete currency off your hands.
What we actually need is another luddite revolution.
Unfortunately, the world has been turning in the wrong direction - basic human decency is considered "woke" and "leftism". Any attempt to make a just society is called "communism" and shouted down aggressively by the people who would most benefit from it.
We need to change these things.
Something Gorbachev said on the fall of the Soviet Union stuck with me for the past couple decades, that they "failed because they tried to make a better man".
Are we that doomed?
Further, the notion that the USSR failed because "they tried to make a better man" is an absurd whitewashing of Soviet history.
Isn't he referring specifically to the notion of the 'New Soviet Man' here, the idea that a communist economic model would produce fundamentally different humans as a result? I can see why he would describe that as a flawed approach, but you're right that it'd be an odd thing to blame for the fall of the Soviet Union over the other factors which contributed to it.
You seem to be of the belief that if you "tweak the nobs" just right, things will be magically be fixed, this is naive. The law of unintended consequences has been observed countless times throughout history when people have tried to do exactly that. This is extremely naive.
Even Star Trek itself that you appear to be a fan of. The Earth is post scarcity, they show that the Federation isn't the benevolent force that they pretend to be (This is hinted multiple times in TNG and shown outright in DS9) and that there are others that are negatively affected by the Federation and its policies e.g the Marquis.
That's hard to believe. It's such an obvious outcome.
Star Trek's a cool show. The bible's a cool book. They are guides on how to do better, not reality, not true events. That doesn't change that they can be used to reflect on ourselves/our society to improve them, nor does that condemn us to accept immorality/lower standards as inevitable.
1) People take zero hour jobs for various reasons. I worked on minimum wage for 8 years, I wasn't condemned to a life of poverty.
2) You have no proof of it being "designed in" because zero hour contracts exist. Repeating the statement does not make it true. The fact is that the law of unintended consequences is a thing that has been observed repeatedly.
3) I don't view it as "our" society. I don't even really know what people mean by that. I don't see it like that at all. I live in a country (England) and I see the government/state as adversarial to my interests generally. Many of the people in England and the UK don't share many of the same values as I do.
> Star Trek's a cool show. The bible's a cool book. They are guides on how to do better, not reality, not true events.
The fact that you equate Star Trek with the Bible is very troubling. Star Trek is an entertainment show with a fanbase, it is not a guide to do better. The Bible on the hand is much more important (even if many here don't recognise its importance) and this is coming from someone that is an Atheist.
> That doesn't change that they can be used to reflect on ourselves/our society to improve them, nor does that condemn us to accept immorality/lower standards as inevitable.
The point I was making that many people don't agree on what the improvement should be. What you believe is an improvement / moral etc. maybe seen by others as regressions and/or immoral. The writers in DS9 understood there were those that had this different point of view.
2. It is baked in at this point. People with zero hour jobs are at an extreme disadvantage. It's not adversarial government, it's business choice. There are many countries with larger burdens placed on business that have businesses that aren't forced into the zero hour practice. There companies that chose not to adopt zero hour practices. Stating that the government forced business into it doesn't make it true, and the fact the above businesses exist observably shows it's not a direct law of unintended consequences but a choice by business.
3. This position is outside the norm.
Both Star Trek and the bible are moral parables used to shape people's ideas. I'm guessing you are younger and don't understand the 90s tech ethos around Trek. Where I worked Trek was always playing in some room during lunch. Zero people were reading the bible. But I'm from the 80s/90s bay area (ish, Santa Cruz). Trek was definitely a parable that gave people something to aspire to.
Yes, differing views exist. You are the one that seems hostile to them, writing off your entire society because of your personal interests ("I don't view it as "our" society""). Most people agree on what improvement should be (people should be able to afford to raise families and live in some level of dignity and freedom from scarcity, people should not have to fear crime, education should be encouraged) they just don't agree how to fund it nor make it happen.
It was just me. However it works for people who aren't single and do have kids e.g I know a woman who does deliveries and she can work as little or as much as she wants, while her husband has a full time job. You can't do that with mandated hours. She prefers it and thinks it is great.
You are making a bunch of assumptions about people's needs. People are individuals and they know what is best for them and not you.
> 2. It is baked in at this point. People with zero hour jobs are at an extreme disadvantage. It's not adversarial government, it's business choice. There are many countries with larger burdens placed on business that have businesses that aren't forced into the zero hour practice.
You keep on asserting this as a truism, I know plenty of people doing zero hour jobs and they do just ok. Most of these people are Students, Younger people or people who wish to work part time.
As for burdens. In the UK and Europe economic growth is dead because of these large burdens.
> There companies that chose not to adopt zero hour practices. Stating that the government forced business into it doesn't make it true, and the fact the above businesses exist observably shows it's not a direct law of unintended consequences but a choice by business.
I never claimed that governments forced business. I said government regulation could have created the incentive. I made no definitive statement. People constantly put words in your mouth in these discussions. Businesses will generally follow incentives. Not all will adopt the same practices if it doesn't fit in with it business model.
> 3. This position is outside the norm.
Yes I am aware. That doesn't mean that the norm is correct. I can explain exactly why I think this and give exhaustive examples to back up what I believe.
> Both Star Trek and the bible are moral parables used to shape people's ideas. I'm guessing you are younger and don't understand the 90s tech ethos around Trek. Where I worked Trek was always playing in some room during lunch. Zero people were reading the bible. But I'm from the 80s/90s bay area (ish, Santa Cruz). Trek was definitely a parable that gave people something to aspire to.
You make a lot of assumptions. I am in my early 40s. I understand the feeling at the time. I've moved on from the 90s, I didn't stop evolving my beliefs, they changed when I realised my previous beliefs about how the world operated was incorrect.
Just because people aren't reading the Bible in your break room doesn't mean it isn't important. Star Trek just isn't and will be all but a curiosity in a generation or two. The Bible I wager won't.
> Yes, differing views exist. You are the one that seems hostile to them, writing off your entire society because of your personal interests ("I don't view it as "our" society"").
No I am not hostile to the normal people. You have no idea what I think. Taking one phrase I said and then turning that into how I view everyone is disingenuous.
I had previously lived outside of the UK for many years and it isn't unusual for expats to have a bit of a culture shock when coming home. Travel tends to open your mind to new ideas and when you come back home you see everything with a new set of eyes.
> Most people agree on what improvement should be (people should be able to afford to raise families and live in some level of dignity and freedom from scarcity, people should not have to fear crime, education should be encouraged) they just don't agree how to fund it nor make it happen.
No they don't. That the entire divide in both the US, The UK and Europe. There also will never be freedom from scarcity.
Liking that fictional universal star trek, all you would have to do is eradicate pride, greed, lust, anger, gluttoney, envy, and sloth. Then we could all have nice things.
Or if you don't like that set - eradicate acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power.
Then with those easy changes, we could eradicate poverty
Total bs. But helps certain groups explain away/wave away that they are crappy human beings.
Not much. The rules have emerged, there's only small amounts of deliberate interference with that natural process.* Deliberate societal rules (statute laws, rulings) have to fit to what's politically viable, which is to say, what people in general like: and people in general are incoherent, only diffidently cooperative, and run on intuition, so mostly we get accidental rules instead of deliberately designed ones.
* Interesting instance of when the word "natural" applies to things created by humans.
I wouldn't want to make out with my neighbors to solve conflicts anyway.
You clearly need to move ;-)
Your life would be better if you devoted so much time to food, clothing, and shelter? That's what money is. If you dislike money, a mere change in attitude such that you believe you're pursuing the essentials should suffice.
>I hate that its used as a weapon by those
This seems doubtful. Those in warzones have my sympathy, but I think that it's pretty likely that you live in a place where it's not used as a weapon at all. Your family remains unstarved, no one's burning your crops or confiscating famine relief off the UN trucks.
>But I yearn for a better way.
You live in an era of material abundance beyond the wildest imaginations of your ancestors. Even poor people are fat. Clothing is so cheap we throw it away if it gets a cheeseburger stain... your grandma didn't slave away for years to gift you that roughspun, sackcloth shirt. Etc etc.
That's a very serious oversimplification of the reality, in my opinion. Money, in our society, is much more than a means for survival.
> This seems doubtful.
I'm not sure how that seems doubtful. All you have to do is pay attention to the news, or (even though this is hardly a modern phenomenon) pay attention to what today's ultrawealthy are saying and doing to see the truth of it.
You don't even have to look at the ultrawealthy. For a more common, low-level, example, look at the spying that marketers engage in. They use money to engage in those attacks, and they do it in order to get more money.
> You live in an era of material abundance beyond the wildest imaginations of your ancestors.
Absolutely true, but irrelevant to my point.
> Even poor people are fat.
Not because of abundance, but because eating well is too expensive.
No it isn't. Eating poorly is often (much) more expensive that eating properly. Non-processed food is actually reasonably priced for the most part. Fruit and Veg is reasonably cheap. Premium cuts of meat can be expensive.
Just looking at my recent trip to the supermarket:
* A 6 pack bag of apples (Pink Ladies) was less than £1.50
* A bag of easy peeler oranges was less than £1.50
* A bag of new potatoes £2
* Large Bunch of Bananas are about ~£2
* 12 Pack of Large Eggs - ~£2.50
* 12 Rashers of Bacon - ~£2.50-4
* 1kg packet of Chicken Thighs (Raw) are ~£3.50 (2 chicken thighs a day).
* Broccoli ~£1
* Spouts ~£1
* Beans ~£1
* Berry flavoured Tea Bags ~£2
* Bag of Italian Ground Coffee ~£3-4
* 240 Pack of Yorkshire Tea Bags (will last me a month or two) ~£6
* Store brand Olive oil based Margarine ~£2
* Premium Wholemeal Loaf of Bread ~£2-3
* 4 pints of Semi Skimmed Milk £2.50
* Various table Sauces ~£1-2
That is less than £50 and I don't need to buy some of those weekly. Each day I am eating about 1800-2000 calories (I've put myself on a calorie controlled diet to lose weight) and this will last me most of the week if not the entire week.
If I buy ready meals they are £3-6 each. Premade Pizza is £4-6. So much more expensive and objectively worse for your health than cooking yourself.
One takeaway meal from the local Chinese will cost me £22 (a main and a side), Noodles will cost £7-11 depending on the dish. A pizza from the local pizza shop is £8-10. This excludes delivery. The local deli will charge me £4-5 for a meal deal (Chicken Wrap, Snack and Drink).
McDonalds is about £7 for a Big Mac Meal. KFC is similar for one of their Box Meals.
Eating well and making someone else do the work is expensive. For the lazy, this means eating well really is expensive.
Most kitchen equipment except for the white goods is dirt cheap and even the really cheap stuff can last for years. Most meals take me 30-40 minutes to cook maximum.
In any-event. It is objectively more expensive to buy junk food, that includes the cheaper junk. Once I cut out the trips to the takeaway and the deli, I was surprised at how much more money I had per month.
The fact is that people tend to want to eat junk.
* Bananas, a fine inexpensive convenient snack.
* Buy bread and sandwich fillers, add sliced tomato, not awful for you and not time consuming.
* Tea is cheap, I like tea.
* Cereal can be good if you can find one that hits the sweet spot between a bowl of chocolate and a bowl of chaff. Some sort of granola maybe.
A weapon is just a tool that can be applied to give a person negative consequences by the wielder.
Most people experience money being used as a weapon, on a regular basis.
Sure, people can be histrionic and hyperbolic.
Other people refusing to give you money isn't "weaponizing money". It's called "sane boundaries".
>Most people experience money being used as a weapon, on a regular basis.
Few people in western nations ever experience that in their entire lives. You couldn't even come up with an anecdote that would pass the smell test.
The question is whether you'd continue to do what you do if you didn't have to. I love my work - I find it challenging and engaging, I have great colleagues, furiously creative and smart, who also love what they do, but how much of our work is only accounting for overhead? At which point keeping track of all money flowing through the economy becomes the objective of the economy?
Let's think about means-tested financial assistance: seems reasonable to make sure money doesn't go to people who actually don't need it, but we also need to be careful not to invest too much in fraud detection that we spend more on it than we would covering for fraud. Wouldn't the incentives to get money you don't need vanish if you had something like UBI covering the basics of food, clothing, and shelter?
Most people wouldn't. People prefer leisure. While I like programming, most of the work I do is tedious. I would rather spend my time riding my mountain bike, working on my Land Rover, or programming a video game.
> Wouldn't the incentives to get money you don't need vanish if you had something like UBI covering the basics of food, clothing, and shelter?
No. The vast majority of people don't just want the bare basics in life. Thinking otherwise is simply naive.
It's a dumb question. Would I want to continue to eat, to be warm in the winter, and have the basic tools needed to live? Your question sounds like juvenile fantasy.
>I love my work - I find it challenging and engaging,
My work is a paycheck. I don't have to love it. I don't need it as a lifestyle, or a hobby, or a religion. It's mildly lucrative, long-term, and they seem to get something out of the deal too. If I wanted a family, I've got one at home and those are the people I love.
>Let's think about means-tested financial assistance: seems reasonable to make sure money doesn't go to people who actually don't need it,
Half the people in this thread don't even know what money is. It's been abstracted away beyond their monkey brained ability to understand it's nature. They think billionaires have billions.
>Wouldn't the incentives to get money you don't need vanish if you had something like UBI covering the basics of food, clothing, and shelter?
Never ceases to amaze me that those who grew up comfortably in middle class homes are in such a hurry to go on welfare. "Please, give me the Medicare for everyone". No, I have no great desire to ever be on welfare, and I say in all seriousness that I would prefer to starve to death, slowly and in great pain.
I don't need money for its own sake, but being fungible, it is virtually everything I do need. It is food, it is clothing, it is heat, fuel, tools, household furnishings, shelter, insurance against disaster, security, etc. To hear people talk about "money they don't need" sounds like mental illness. I suspect it actually is.
This does not appear to be making people any happier than they ever have been. Rather, the isolation implicit in an increasingly transactional society is creating a lot of loneliness, which generally has a greater impact on life satisfaction than material comfort.
The only thing that has changed is the type of "currency".
No more so than today. How much time was devoted to survival varies a lot depending on where in the world we're talking about, but a surprisingly large portion of our hunter-gatherer ancestors spent less time devoted to these activities than we do today.
You are making an excuse for poor behavior so that you can feel better or at least not look as bad to others. There is no reason society can't change. We no longer crap our pants, we no longer dump piss/crap in the streets, even though modern plumbing comes with a monthly expense.
Instead, I would suggest what you hate is Capitalism, which is different from money. A "market" is a concept that allows everyone to trade their products and services with each other. A Free Market is an academic ideal, that allows every actor in the market to participate with perfect information and without coercion.
Capitalism exploits the fact that there's no such thing as a free market, and perverts the market in favor those actors with lots of money and power to exploit and subjugate those who don't.
We could tax the wealthy enough that everyone could be given enough money to live on, and do whatever they wanted. Be an artist or a musician, or a programmer. They could work for themselves, or band together with others to produce things and sell them for a profit, and be better off than the minimum. But if they end up working for someone who tries to exploit, subjugate or harm them, then they can just leave without risk, since they'll always have enough money for housing, food and healthcare.
But of course, the billionaires would hate this, since it removes the source of their power. They're willing to spend billions of dollars corrupting politicians, generating propaganda, and convincing the rest of us that being exploited is what's best. We as a society could decide fix this, but we have to figure out how to organize with each other, and overcome the billions of dollars spent to prevent it.
Sometimes I think the confounding is intentional, as well.
John Maynard Keynes 1930 Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
I don’t like or love money. Or capital. Or wealth. I enjoy the things money can acquire, sure. I enjoy my photography hobby, which isn’t cheap by any stretch. I enjoy my home theater, with games on a big OLED screen and my surround sound speakers filling my ears with crisp, clear audio. I enjoy building a gaming PC ($$$), I enjoy taking trips ($$$$), I enjoy eating out with friends ($$).
But money? No, I do not like it. In fact, I dislike it because it, as a concept, is so easily exploited. I understand that it’s the best system we have to store the value of labor within, but I’m also smart enough to realize that isn’t how it’s presently used. Those with the most money have not saved the most time, or created the most output, or labored harder and longer than those with less, and that irritates me. I am forced to engage in a society where money’s definition as a value of labor is highly duplicitous at best, and it’s nauseating.
And thus I circle back to the root question again: Do I like money?
No. I do not.
I tolerate money. I have a finite tolerance for money, where should I have any surplus amount above that threshold I would donate it to others, for my life - and the lives of my dozen or so family and friends - would be stable, in equilibrium with society and the environment until our inevitable deaths.
But no, I do not like money. I do not like having to spend time managing gambling - sorry, investment accounts - to ensure I can maybe retire or buy a home. I do not like having to learn rulesets to different games - sorry, payment cards - to ensure I’m not squandering my finite resources on fees or penalties. I do not like having to juggle multiple accounts across multiple institutions with different governance structures, rules, taxes, fees, and schedules. I do not like any of this because I know their core function is to more easily funnel my finite money to those with infinite sums.
But I tolerate money, because there is no alternative.
https://upgrader.gapminder.org/q/32/
But it doesn't change the fact that mosquitoes are personally, deeply offensive to my day-to-day experience living in a place where they exist.
(That being said, I have a lot of money and love it. But I'd give a ton of it away if it meant there were whole classes of problems I never had to think about again, like paying for my children's university, or making sure I can afford health care. I'd certainly give that amount away if it meant nobody needed to.)
I used to believe so too but after reading this I'm no longer so sure: https://meltingasphalt.com/wealth-the-toxic-byproduct/
I like cake, but I don't want limitless cake to the exclusion of every other concern.
.
You know who else liked money? King Midas.
Imagine if money did not exist, and things were decided on actual merit? "Poor" people with good ideas might - dare I say it - do things that improved the world for everyone! ;)
There'd be many ways of achieving this, so I'll not bait people with C or S words.
The big problem is that money provides little recourse for the rest of us in the case that a person provides a lot of value, accumulates a lot of money, and then turns around and acts like a jerk. Having money allows one to destroy value indiscriminately, to a large degree. I can't think of a better system, really, however, besides a robust system allowing democratic regulation of commerce.
And then I go to the local farmer's market and while now pretty much everyone takes cards via an app on their phone that tithes a few percent of every transaction to a credit card company, ultimately making one of those rich idiots wealthier, there was a period where the best way to pay besides cash was to visit a little tent that would take a credit card transaction and give you a handful of wooden coins with various denominations screen-printed upon them; shoppers can't cash them out but vendors can; if you pay with food stamps then you get extra tokens in different colors that can only be used for certain classes of items; it's very pleasing to reach into my pocket and pull out a couple $5 tokens to pay for something, and get a few $1 tokens back, no fussing with the infinitestimal value of pennies, rounding everything off to $1 is really just fine even though I'm kinda broke.
And I keep on thinking about just... taking a bunch of those tokens, and seeing who around town I can persuade to accept these instead of US$.
But the thing is that US$ is also valuable for exchanges outside of my community, if I go to a coffee shop they're not going to be able to use these to pay the Brazillian farmers who grow those beans, I'm not going to want to accept payment for a private art commission in farmer's market tokens. And I know that if people start solving this problem with exchange policies for farmer's market tokens, then there will be problems with counterfeiting, and eventually the government will want to step in and enforce its monopoly on being the one who controls the medium of exchange.
And then I look at the amount of grinding poverty around me, and the immense inefficiencies of the attempts to fix that (sure, let's get all these homeless people out of downtown before the Superbowl and stick them in a warehouse that's rented out from a private owner for more money than it'd cost to pay all these folks's rent for a couple years) and I wonder if the whole idea of capitalism is just completely fucked from the bottom up.
So no. I don't really like money either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettone
They didn't have enough currency, so they improvised extra.
Thing is, it's hard to see what you're against - it's not really money, or capitalism: you just want your own money system and your own capitalism, and for it all to be grass roots and community and farmer's-market lovely. A cute money system instead of the threatening one we live with.
(*) Ignoring things that happened with money directly, of course, like the financial “industry”.
Money is a necessary tool to make modern life possible. Other ways of life are possible, but not my current one.
What if you just went to the grocery store and got what you need, without paying money in return? What if everybody continued doing what they do, except that no payment took place? People would deliver groceries from the farm to the market, would write software for ensuring the right deliveries get where they are needed, and so on. Bank clerks would probably not have much to do, but, if they wanted, they could still go to the bank and play cards with their colleagues.
Wouldn't that be a better world?
> Money is a necessary tool to make modern life possible.
It's so because we seem to have, as a society, it is.
Only if your world is small enough that you can trust nobody is cheating. If everybody is doing their share to ensure there is always food in the store it works great. If only a few people are cheating it still works well enough. (I'm going to include the disabled in the cheating category for this discussion, because this is complex enough without trying to fit everything into the mold). As your world gets larger eventually more and more people start to realize that they can get by without working until there is no food in the store for anyone.
Note that getting food includes not just the easy stuff, but the gross stuff. If you can trust the store has what you need, you need some way to incentivize someone to get rid of the trash anyway. Money provides a good abstraction for some jobs being worth more - nearly anyone can haul trash to the dump, but because of the "gross factor" it pays more than other jobs that nearly anyone can do. Very few people can pass medical or engineering school - it is known as a hard study for good reason, so we incentivize people to go that route with more pay, if you can get everything you need, does your society have the right incentives to ensure it gets better?
History is full of societies that work similar to what you say. They all have their own ways of dealing with the above problems. One thing they all have in common is most people only contact a limited number of people and so they can crack down on cheaters because they learn who they are and so reputation matters. (the few travelers paid for their food via stories or barter, and often were looked down on anyway. Or often travelers were military and just took by force)
Again, money makes modern society possible and everyone who proposes otherwise normally just handwaves away real problems with their proposal. A few are willing to accept that downside, but when I look at those downsides I conclude I'm not and I think most will agree once they understand them.
If everyone has everything they need, is this a problem?
The function of money is simply to help humans collectively decide what happens, of all the things that could happen.
And I’m not arguing against the existence of money at all — it’s an incredibly useful control mechanism. It’s not the only one, of course, we also have social norms (aka peer pressure), altruism, threats of violence, laws enforced by threats of violence, etc. etc. (Much evil and stupidity is perpetrated by people who seem to believe money is the only control mechanism that should matter.)
Much evil and stupidity is perpetrated by people who believe the strawman idea that some think money is the only control mechanism that should matter.
Thus things would be different absent money and given the long complex supply chains required to make most things today, like say plows, it is hard to argue things wouldn't be significantly different.
However, capital need not be binary: exclusively personal or otherwise. Sometimes capital can be community based: allocated via cooperative governance or democratic means via municipality.