7/28/2026 at 12:53:13 PM
> If your worth is not determined by your productivity, then what remains of you underneath it all?Everything else. You are worth so much more than your productivity.
I'm glad I never got sucked into the protestant work ethic, since defining yourself based on your labour and the value you generate from that sounds woefully narrow-minded (this doesn't feel like quite the right word, but close enough).
It's probably helpful to at least expand 'productivity' to something beyond just what is useful for your work. Reading the classics is productive because it's enjoyable, even though it doesn't help with your work. Ditto spending time with friends and whatever else that doesn't have anything to do with work.
I hope we figure out what to do about disabilities, since the current status quo is inhumane in large parts of the world (and even in places with good benefits systems, getting that support isn't trivial).
by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 12:55:22 PM
Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you airily define ‘productivity’ as reading the classics and spending time with friends?by avalys
7/28/2026 at 12:58:02 PM
We have enough excess in society that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves.by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 10:45:43 PM
You are failing to analyze the system corectly."Have enough" is a static steady state. "Produce enough" now and in the future is a dynamic constraint.
The mechanism is economic surplus, to have the producers (productive people who produce needed goods and inputs to such) create more than they need. This generally requires increasing and maintaining productivity to have surplus.
Once you have a surplus the absolute maximum priority is to maintain it. Plant, machinery, systems, irrigation, fertilizer production etc etc.
The system is dynamic, surplus today is not surplus tommorow.
In my country we have a means to ditribute this excess, and it may even go to those in need, but the cost of distributing it has been increasing at a far higher rate than the rate of increasing surplus.
what i fail to understand is why people come to a technologist forum without a basic understanding of system dynamics. this is entry level material for engineering, mathematics and physics. are they not teaching it in CS?
by hogehoge51
7/28/2026 at 10:54:54 PM
We are producing enough excess that we can spare enough of those things to those who are unable to take care of themselves, and we have for a number of years.by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 11:10:23 PM
No, we're not. It just seems like there's excess because the costs of running social programs are being paid with runaway debt. Those bills will eventually require settling, and it will become obvious how much excess there really is.by nate_meurer
7/28/2026 at 11:43:25 PM
There are truckloads of perfectly good food and clothes being incinerated every day since that's somehow cheaper for the owners of capital. The excess is there. It's just not ending up in the pockets of those who need it.by Telaneo
7/29/2026 at 12:24:14 AM
Food and clothing are actually an argument against you here. Sure we waste a lot of both, and yet food insecurity is rare in the First World, and lack of clothing is pretty much the least significant part of poverty. Plus, government-forced redistribution reliably increases prices overall due to the increased costs of logistics and administration. There is no free lunch.If you want to argue your point, you have to address the real fiscal burdens on modern societies, and the real drivers of debt across the West. The biggest components of government debt are medical care and pensions (including Social Security in the US). These are the things that are bankrupting us, not food and clothing.
by nate_meurer
7/29/2026 at 12:44:06 AM
Pensions probably ought to be reduced/readjusted in accordance with life time expectancy, or some other maths that actually ends up in the green somehow while still allowing those who cannot take care of themselves to live a decent life. I've seen enough rich pensioners (my own grandmother among them...) to come to that conclusion.The US spends an inordinate amount on healthcare since the system is covered in leeches (17~% of GDP compared to 10~ in Europe).[1] If a significant part of US debt is caused by healthcare costs, then that sounds like a political own-goal. That's not to say the costs in Europe are insignificant. We can probably do better here too.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26746...
by Telaneo
7/29/2026 at 1:16:36 AM
The US healthcare system is incredible compared to socialized systems if you can afford it. That's at least part of the reason it represents 17% of GDP. The same procedure I needed had a 2 day wait time in the US and a 10 month wait time in Canada.by aianus
7/29/2026 at 9:45:35 AM
“If you can afford it” is not efficient. It’s merely priority queue vs FIFO wherein it is decided that some folks get to skip lines based on some arbitrary merit.If it were efficient it would clear the queue with max throughput. This is not so.
by sharts
7/29/2026 at 5:37:58 PM
The whole point of the article was that disabled people cannot afford it. That's why we need to socialize medicine.by smcg
7/29/2026 at 11:36:57 AM
If you have the money, you can get excellent healthcare in almost any civilized country. You're free to pay for your treatment in Canada, too.by juvvel
7/29/2026 at 2:47:25 PM
The US has (without much debate) the absolute best healthcare on Earth if money isn't an issue. There are so many more experts in so many more fields with access to so much more cutting edge technology that...well rich people travel to the US to get care.by WarmWash
7/29/2026 at 11:07:24 AM
Are you getting faster or better outcomes in America than when taking _private_ treatment in Canada, or do you need the treatment in Canada to he public for your claim to hold?I imagine that you can pony up to be seen in two days in Canada too, and also that the single-payer system keeps those private practice honest, so you'd pay less for your fast turnaround than in Freedonia. I may be wrong, of course.
by psd1
7/29/2026 at 3:16:48 PM
you are a funny man. i live in the one of the wealthiest areas of the US, c with good healthcare: specialists are very hard to get. service rationing is everywhere. we are losing doctors.your argument is ideological, not rooted in reality.
by arbitrary_name
7/29/2026 at 6:55:08 PM
no, it's not.by equake
7/29/2026 at 11:51:44 AM
I'm trying to take your comment seriously, but it's very difficult. My partner is a physician in the US. People are ending up in ERs because it takes a year for them to see the specialist who could have prevented the same problem."If you can afford it" is true everywhere. You can also see a specialist in just about any country in a couple days if you've got the money to fly there; often cheaper and faster to travel outside the US to get care, depending on what you need.
"Public" healthcare in the US is a joke. Insurance costs more and covers less every year.
by FiddlyPack
7/29/2026 at 1:36:01 AM
Oh, and you think everyone will continue prpducing all the things you need for you to use them forever withiut contributing anything back to anyone?Then get ready to be a slave, bc noone, absolutely noone gives things for free, which is, in my view, reasonable.
by germandiago
7/29/2026 at 9:21:35 AM
> Oh, and you think everyone will continue prpducing all the things you need for you to use them forever withiut contributing anything back to anyone?What happens when labour-based production is fully replaced by automated factories? Then ?
by lenkite
7/29/2026 at 11:36:04 AM
[dead]by germandiago
7/29/2026 at 2:04:30 AM
> Oh, and you think everyone will continue prpducing all the things you need for you to use them forever withiut contributing anything back to anyone?Why would I believe this?
by Telaneo
7/29/2026 at 2:19:07 AM
You don't have to believe it. It is a risk, you simply have to mitigate it.by hogehoge51
7/29/2026 at 2:36:32 AM
I think historic records of production have a lot of wisdom. For whoever it is interested.by germandiago
7/29/2026 at 12:52:57 AM
Debt is just accounting, and has nothing to do with whether or not a surplus exists and who gets to consume it. The surplus exists, it doesn't magically appear because of your accounting system.by amanaplanacanal
7/29/2026 at 1:26:08 AM
My point is not that economic surpluses don't ever exist, but that the perceived surpluses that people invoke in order to defend the present welfare state are unsustainable, and that the system will inevitably collapse without a miraculous increase in economic productivity. Debt (both private and sovereign) is literally the thing that tells us whether a society is able to pay for the things it demands. That's not an accounting trick any more than plain arithmetic is.by nate_meurer
7/29/2026 at 2:51:41 PM
You appear to only be looking at the debt, and not that those debts are held by other people as assets. Do you think it's still a net negative if you add that in too?by amanaplanacanal
7/29/2026 at 8:39:26 PM
Well yeah, it's still debt. It's still the unpaid balance of the cost of goods and services.The essential purpose of a market for IOUs is to allow us to issue a lot more IOUs. This is critical to the industrial and technological development that has allowed us to stop living in the dirt. But liquid debt markets can also be weapons of mass destruction by allowing misallocation to compound into ruinous financial crises. Sort of like, oh I don't know, bloated, inefficient government entitlement programs funded by massive debt that can only be dealt with by a.) confiscating the labor and assets of the population by force, or b.) monetizing the debt and inflating it away, which is itself a backdoor tax on the same population.
by nate_meurer
7/29/2026 at 2:16:23 AM
The accounting system is what ensures that we can ACCOUNT for if such a statement is true or not.It also allows us to characterize and understand how the capability to generate surplus has been distributed etc etc.
There is no single lump of goods and services, or a single lump of surplus. There is an economic problem of ensuring such are created in surplus and distributed to those who need them. A surplus of lawn mowing and shopping services (such as disability welfare has created in my country) could easily be accompanied by a shortage in housing. In fact one could be caused by the other.
The economy has capacity today and surplus from yesterday. Beyond that takes vigilance and accountability to maintain the system.
The fundamental question is why exactly you think a system can have some fundamental governing and observation mechanism such as debt (or equity accounting) removed and it would still maintain the same system characteristics that produce said surplus?
This is basic engineering and system architecture 101 and I would expect technologists to have more than a surface level expectation that systems do not operate magically nor label components as redundant without detailed reasoning.
by hogehoge51
7/29/2026 at 9:17:20 AM
The debt amount is very roughly proportional to the size of the economy.It's also a system that is unstable in non-booming economies, drifts over time and needs periodic resets (through revolution, debt cancelling or inflation for example).
When dealing with material well-being, it makes much more sense to focus on goods and services and frame things more in the line of "would you trade a bit of wealth (smaller car or home, less Uber Eat, etc) to ensure a few unlucky people have food and roof".
Most western economies, specially one as wasteful as the US, have the luxury to make this choice. Not sharing it is a political & ideological decision, not a materially constrained one.
by kakwa_
7/29/2026 at 8:54:19 PM
[dead]by nate_meurer
7/29/2026 at 2:04:40 AM
We have runaway debt because since the 1980s Republicans have had a fiscal policy called 'starve the beast' whose intention is to make government funding so fucked government can't function.Republicans just passed huge tax cuts, it is Republicans that have zero care about debt, again because they choose agenda over strong/healthy federal government so that people like you can make posts like this (and ignore such facts as Republicans are the drivers of debt in order to intentionally undermine/weaken our country/government).
by _DeadFred_
7/29/2026 at 2:50:06 PM
Starving the beast and gorging the beast both accomplish the same thing.by WarmWash
7/28/2026 at 11:15:48 PM
> the cost of distributing it has been increasing at a far higher rate than the rate of increasing surplus.Is it? Or is it that an increasing proportion of total income ends up going to the people who find ways of hiding it such that it does not get distributed.
by mvc
7/29/2026 at 2:21:13 AM
How do you hide something in a closed loop system such as an economy?by hogehoge51
7/29/2026 at 3:18:03 PM
offshore Swiss accounts. opaque and complex corporate ownership structures. land.by arbitrary_name
7/28/2026 at 11:29:54 PM
[dead]by jumpinjack710
7/29/2026 at 12:13:32 AM
> why people come to a technologist forum without a basic understanding of system dynamics.Cognitive dissonance, they understand but refuse to admit it because it conflicts with their world view.
by dmitrygr
7/28/2026 at 1:07:43 PM
It almost seems as if you are trolling. Surely we can, at least, agree that the excesses you mention exist only because of those who produce.by theflyingelvis
7/28/2026 at 1:19:59 PM
They are not trolling. They are stating the simple, undeniable fact that there is more than enough to go around and if we had a more equitable distribution of resources, we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.by daishi55
7/28/2026 at 9:25:37 PM
I don't think people realize how much evening out society will impact them. This is a very US (and probably EU) way of thinking. Everyone thinks they are middle class but when it comes down to it there are far more people in poverty and that evening things out will bring down the quality of life for the people advocating for evening out things.by chung8123
7/29/2026 at 11:43:13 AM
No. This is what capitalists want you to believe. The truth is that we are all subsiziding the capital gains of the wealthiest 2%. You could easily pay for generous social security programs by taxing property and capital more (as opposed to labor). But the ultra-wealthy point at the weakest and poorest and tell the average worker "look, they're coming for your house and your humble savings!". This is a very deliberate distraction.by juvvel
7/29/2026 at 2:55:16 PM
Have you looked at wealth distribution or do you just read social media headlines and comments all day?https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
See that 50-90% and 90-99%?
That's where all the money is. Moreover, the top 1% have tons of assets, but not much actual money.
Any "evening out" will come mostly from the 50-99% class.
If you want to see a crack in the echochamber, ask yourself why no publication has ever published this chart?
by WarmWash
7/29/2026 at 4:53:30 PM
That data is published quite often, no conspiracy here.The point is that the top 1% can be taxed more heavily, not that they own the majority of wealth.
by gilbetron
7/29/2026 at 5:57:59 PM
I'm not sure taxing them more heavily will actually result in significantly more tax revenue in the long run.Think about it: to pay for this tax, the rich will need to sell their assets. Who is going to buy those assets? What impact would that have on the asset price?
by welshwelsh
7/28/2026 at 11:13:54 PM
If that's true, it's odd that so many social welfare programs across the western world are consuming an ever-growing share of GDP, incurring massive debt, and grinding toward insolvency and collapse. Exactly how much more of our money and labor do you want to take from us in order to continue this madness?by nate_meurer
7/29/2026 at 1:41:16 AM
European here. I left Europe 14 years ago. I tried to come back. My decision was to run away bc it is impossible to build a reasonable life in a stable way where you do not get smashed mercilessly...It is just too much.
by germandiago
7/29/2026 at 11:38:22 AM
Where did you end up? Do you have a way to PM you?by wuschel
7/28/2026 at 8:34:16 PM
The problem is that when you get more for less, it kills the incentive to do more. This is a really glaring problem, and people go to really great lengths to either sweep it under the rug or hand wave it away.by WarmWash
7/28/2026 at 9:16:17 PM
Incentives don't disappear at some arbitrary level of taxation. I think you can have both sufficient incentives and more equitable distribution. The frankly obscene levels of wealth concentration we are witnessing suggest that there is a lot of room for refinement.I do find it interesting that a lot of people (not trying to imply that you are one) bang on about incentives while also fighting tooth and nail in favour of weighting taxes toward earned income (derived from doing useful/productive things) instead of unearned income (derived from simply owning things).
I get that some people view all forms of tax as theft and while I appreciate their honesty, I simply can't take them seriously.
by tmnvix
7/28/2026 at 11:16:21 PM
Your tax dollars just go into a cesspool of fraud, corruption, waste, incompetence, distribution to cronies. Money taken and spent badly feels like theft.by jbritton
7/29/2026 at 12:55:04 AM
If you are saying we should do a better job of keeping track of that, I don't think many would disagree with you.by amanaplanacanal
7/29/2026 at 2:15:29 PM
Reminder that in the USA the Republicans have had an intentional policy of introducing these sorts of issues into the system. They call it 'starve the beast' and the goal is to delegitimize government/undermine it's financial stability completely so that they can push their agendas.For 40 years, half the government (the Republicans) have been trying to break things/damage things/induce huge debt loads/underfund programs so they can't succeed.
Look at what Republicans has done to governance/oversite Inspectors General offices this current term. They have removed their ability to be neutral observers/oversite. Republicans do not care about fighting any of the things you listed, and in fact have been encouraging them for 40 years hoping by making things worse they can finally win on their argument 'government doesn't work' leaving out 'because we've have actively worked to break it for 40 years'.
by _DeadFred_
7/28/2026 at 9:04:37 PM
> it kills the incentive to do moreI'm an employee. I don't really benefit from doing more. When I do more, someone else makes money. In my experience that someone else is just as likely to lay me off for a cheaper worker as they are to give me a raise
The incentives our system produces are already really skewed, and it would be nice to see them skew the other way for once
by bluefirebrand
7/28/2026 at 9:36:43 PM
It seems your complaint is a lack of recognition, and maybe redistribution would provide vengeance for this injustice. But that is different than "we ought to start giving raises to people who do less work, not more" which is what "skewing the other way" seems to imply.by WarmWash
7/28/2026 at 10:52:14 PM
Maybe we should start requiring companies to pay a percent of wages in equity. That would at least allow workers to share in a company’s success.by yoyohello13
7/29/2026 at 1:30:44 AM
I'll always liked this idea until trying to map it out myself, and always running aground, preferring performance bonuses instead.You can't pay bills with equity, you will get paid a smaller salary, you need to be a mature adult to understand what "value can go to zero, and that is the game" entails, you likely will get diluted, your ownership stake isn't large enough to materially change the company, you cannot cash out whenever you want, having equity definitely doesn't make you rich automatically.
Besides, if you are savvy enough to be genuinely motivated by the idea of having equity, just go buy stocks in solid companies.
by WarmWash
7/29/2026 at 12:39:36 AM
Take a few moments to think about how companies would (easily) shift their behavior to avoid thisIt wouldn't be too hard I don't think. Avoid having employees by making everything a short term contract / gig style work
by bluefirebrand
7/29/2026 at 12:56:34 AM
So make it apply to those people too. Make them legally employees for this purpose.by amanaplanacanal
7/28/2026 at 10:05:56 PM
My observation is that if we leave our recognition up to people with power, they will choose to keep it for themselves or give it to their friends a majority of the time and that seems fucked up to continue to allow in a just society> "we ought to start giving raises to people who do less work, not more"
This is completely beside the point, honestly
We should not use the most productive members of society as a measuring stick as though they were the average.
The average person does "way less work" than your very productive workaholic outliers, but that doesn't mean those people deserve way less.
Somehow we've all wound up being measured against the most exceptional people, instead of being measured against the average.
Keep in mind we're talking about a society where the median person only makes like $45k per year and exceptional people make many many times more than that
I'm not sitting here saying that some random shmuck should have Elon Musks income or anything, we could probably do better than 45k a year though
by bluefirebrand
7/29/2026 at 1:43:56 AM
You do not get equity from your comoany?by germandiago
7/29/2026 at 2:29:10 AM
Pff, what? No.You're in a super small bubble if you think earning equity in your employer's company is standard.
by bluefirebrand
7/29/2026 at 12:29:18 AM
Why do we need an incentive to do more?by joquarky
7/29/2026 at 1:36:29 AM
There are still human societies on Earth that still live the same way they did 2,000 years ago. Most people would not want to live that way, and therefore they need to rely on people who did/do more. The best way to rely on them is to make then rely on you too."Valuable work leads to good outcomes for everyone" is probably one of the slipperiest slopes there is.
by WarmWash
7/29/2026 at 12:38:21 AM
The only reason there's more than enough to go around is people work for the betterment of their own life. If you disconnect the link between work and material comfort that simple, undeniable fact will no longer be fact.by laughing_man
7/29/2026 at 6:27:17 AM
Tou've said it perfectly.Last time when link between work and material comfort was disconnected was communism.
It looked good on paper from 1920's perspective, but was a downward spiral.
If we are to be functioning society, people need motivation to do their best ... and then, there's some spare wealth for the unfortunate.
by shuwix
7/29/2026 at 10:10:42 AM
> > If you disconnect the link between work and material comfort that simple, undeniable fact will no longer be fact.The disconnect is already there, any 5 year old already understands that stealing a comic book at the comic book store is better than paying for it. And more and more people are resorting to it at every level of society
by JumpinJack_Cash
7/29/2026 at 1:38:56 AM
Yes, remove the human incentive to produce, which is that the rest can consume in a way that is profitable enough for the producer and you will see the wxcess disappear in front of your eyes for killing the incentive to produce.Infinitely redistributing does not yield products for all, but scarcity for all.
by germandiago
7/29/2026 at 1:42:49 AM
This is why we pass laws making it illegal to not produce excess.Take that capitalist pig!
by WarmWash
7/29/2026 at 1:48:31 AM
I see, so you are suggesting making black markets appear. Good, I see you studied economic history a lot...There is no way around this, believe me.
Not sure why you call pigs to people producing actually. That is how things end up working.
Not waiting for people to produce fornyou while you insult them amd try to set infinite restrictions until they do what you want... which by the way looks to me like modern slavery.
by germandiago
7/29/2026 at 3:32:39 AM
Just as an aside, I suspect the last line had an implied "/s". If so, I think they really should have included it.by encrypted_bird
7/29/2026 at 5:15:28 PM
True, as I read back it seems it was sarcasm...very short sighted on my side...by germandiago
7/29/2026 at 1:15:36 PM
You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.by hackeraccount
7/28/2026 at 10:12:38 PM
People say this, but I'm not sure I understand how it could be true. For example, taxing billionaires is often cited as the solution to this problem. But if we took Elon Musk's $730 billion fortune and divided it evenly among the US population, people would receive a one-time payment of about $2000, and then that fortune would be gone, and any opportunities or advancements it was creating. So I'm genuinely curious where you see this incredible excess coming from.by xedrac
7/29/2026 at 1:23:01 PM
It also misunderstands that nature of Musk's fortune. He's not Scrooge McDuck and they pretend he is. Sell SpaceX at a fire sale. What's it worth? A lot less then it is now. Who would buy it? Poor people? Somehow I don't think so.Musk is a golden goose and there are people who think the best move is to cut him in half and get at all the gold inside.
by hackeraccount
7/28/2026 at 9:28:05 PM
I'm so sick and tired of hearing about this mythical "excess". I can't afford housing. Millions like me can't. There is no excess. Unless it's being hoarded by the capital class.by techteach00
7/28/2026 at 9:31:12 PM
I mean, it is very obviously being hoarded by the capital class! there has been tons of writing on the subject, no one can credibly deny that that's what's happening right now.by zem
7/28/2026 at 10:37:30 PM
The wealth of the capital class is, unsurprisingly, capital - the facilities, equipment, organizational structures, etc. used to make stuff. What does it mean for capital to be hoarded?by closeparen
7/28/2026 at 11:04:30 PM
The wealth of the "capital class", whatever that means, is dwarfed by the debt being run up by governments.My favorite example: if you confiscated all of the wealth from all of the billionaires in the USA, it would fund the federal government for around six months. If you add state and local governments, those funds would last just weeks.
The rich don't have your money. Your government does, and they're flushing it down the toilet (and bombing Iran).
by nate_meurer
7/29/2026 at 2:19:46 PM
Reminder it has been the intentional policy of the Republican party since the 1980s to 'starve the beast'. That policy includes pushing tax cut after tax cut in order to run up debt to weaking the government/it's ability to fund programs, and then make claims just as OP has.The rich have our money. The money given to them via irresponsible tax cuts for the last 40 years in an intentional policy to fiscally damage the government so much it fails.
by _DeadFred_
7/29/2026 at 12:37:59 AM
Certainly, and notably the 'capital class' that's 'hoarding' the housing he's talking about are what look like normal people. You'd make more money taxing half of the value of those who own SFHs in Santa Clara alone than you would Elon Musk - and hurt productive capacity and jobs far less. The disconnect between the desire to extract what people describe as a fair share from the 'capital class' comes up rapidly against the wall of realizing they themselves are the 'capital class' in question. Everything else then becomes a war of definition as they try to narrowly constrain the scope of this such that they can send their kids to Monta Vista while simultaneously having everyone else pay much higher taxes.by arjie
7/29/2026 at 10:35:55 AM
> > and hurt productive capacity and jobs far lessThis is so BS, the productivity of a company is given by cash flow and Discounted Cash Flow (output>input) , not stock market value , taxing Musk would force him to sell stock and dilute the ownership of Tesla and SpaceX down among the population proportionally and according to the brackets of taxation applied.
The fear that you are describing is exactly what's wrong with society, the virus of the mind that attributes to CEOs and especially tech CEOs demigod properties and if their ownership and decision making control were to be diluted the company would collapse and die.
If anything it's the opposite, the oldest companies in America have their ownership much more diluted than they once were . JPMorgan is not controlled by John Pierpont Morgan, same for all the companies which make up what once was Standard Oil
If anything history is showing that for the survival of a company it is almost a condition non negotiable that its ownership and decision making has to be diluted among millions of people with a low inequality factor, or at least lower than the one necessary in the first years of the company
by JumpinJack_Cash
7/28/2026 at 11:32:01 PM
[flagged]by cutterl6
7/29/2026 at 1:00:59 AM
Yes we all know we need more housing supply.by amanaplanacanal
7/29/2026 at 5:46:36 AM
[flagged]by cutterl6
7/29/2026 at 9:36:43 AM
No I actually agree with you.by techteach00
7/28/2026 at 2:09:53 PM
> we could take care of everyone with disabilities 10x over with plenty to spare.Yes, like the 40%[1] of Stanford undergrads who have disabilities. The greatest long term impediment to what you're suggesting is folks who don't need the help taking advantage of the resource distribution. It both massively increases the costs and sours those who have to pay into the system on the whole thing leading to a backlash.
If we could just solve this quirk of human nature, we'd be all set.
[1] https://fortune.com/article/rise-in-elite-students-seeking-a...
by AlexandrB
7/29/2026 at 11:39:13 AM
You've just arrived back at capitalism: it's the least bad resource allocation optimization algorithm assuming everyone is an amoral asshole and willing to take every advantage they can.Superior systems exist, but they require relaxing the adversarial asshole constraint.
by ethbr1
7/29/2026 at 8:56:06 AM
Yeah, disability accommodation like having single dorm room and being allowed to cook for themselves rather then using cantine. Maybe the question is why the cantine is obligatory anyway.by watwut
7/28/2026 at 8:39:02 PM
This is an issue, but billionaires are a greater issue.by NuclearPM
7/28/2026 at 10:02:54 PM
You could take away 100% of billionaires capital to redistribute and end up in the exact same place in 4 years.by mrkstu
7/28/2026 at 10:31:39 PM
You would not end up in the same place because then you'd be in a world without billionaires, so you would not have people who can too easily just buy every politician and law they wish for their own perpetuation.That alone would be a massive win.
by jjav
7/28/2026 at 11:55:33 PM
It's not the ~50 billionares I'm worried about. They are human. You can appeal to Bill Gate's desire to leave a legacy he's proud of. You can appeal to Elon Musk's desire for technological progress.What worries me are the god knows how many "billionaire equivelent" entities and institutions that swing their dicks around in the same manner but do so with the sociopathic ruthlessness of corporations and governments.
Peter Thiel may be evil but he'll almost certainly never knowingly instigate genocidal war in a foreign land for marginal benefit to his interests whereas that's exactly the kind of thing that nonhuman entities do because no person is singularly responsible.
by cucumber3732842
7/29/2026 at 11:45:06 AM
> Peter Thiel may be evil but he'll almost certainly never knowingly instigate genocidal war in a foreign land for marginal benefit to his interests"Thiel's Palantir, Israel agree strategic partnership for battle tech" [2024] https://www.palantir.com/assets/xrfr7uokpv1b/3MuEeA8MLbLDAyx...
Ironically, that's the saved copy hosted by Palantir itself...
by ethbr1
7/29/2026 at 10:44:48 AM
50???by NuclearPM
7/28/2026 at 1:13:10 PM
Have I said anything to the contrary?by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 1:11:15 PM
A society where just stating this is called trolling is such a sad society. I pity you and you brainwashed siblings.by bestouff
7/28/2026 at 1:16:39 PM
it's a very common trolling tactic to imply a controversial thing while overtly saying a less controversial thingby inigyou
7/28/2026 at 7:43:00 PM
Anyone who thinks that it's "controversial" to discuss where the benefits from productivity gains go isn't worth talking to: they are either ideologues set in their ways, or underinformed on recent economic history.by overfeed
7/29/2026 at 12:07:27 AM
> implyby inigyou
7/28/2026 at 4:44:24 PM
I think the key part of the parent was talking about disabled individuals.I don’t think anyone is advocating to provide a free ride for capable individuals
Of course someone has to produce/work harder — and the parent is arguing that there is already more than enough extra
by shepherdjerred
7/28/2026 at 7:47:51 PM
> I don’t think anyone is advocating to provide a free ride for capable individualsUnless the capable individuals control a lot of capital - then free-riding is expected via the "Job-creator exception clause"
by overfeed
7/28/2026 at 1:25:27 PM
You’re missing the point of the article and of the post. Why do you assume that someone who reads and takes breaks is unproductive? Should we get a second job instead? I spend 8 hours sleeping. Would you like me to work those hours as well? I spend some of my day cooking and cleaning and raising my son. Would you rather I keep working instead?Maybe it’s time that we worked together to gain that time back for you instead of you fighting for us to lose our free time.
by throwaway173738
7/28/2026 at 8:04:53 PM
More than half of employment is “bullshit jobs” needed only for capitalism. There’s artificial scarcity but artificial scarcity in minds of people is much worse problem.by dostick
7/28/2026 at 9:59:21 PM
If you think capitalism is bad then wait until you see how many more "bullshit jobs" are needed for socialism.by nradov
7/29/2026 at 1:42:44 AM
I think that’s what they call a ‘false dilemma’.Recently, I had a conversation with a bunch of people who have worked in the tech industry since the 90s. Someone asked which technologies have greatly improved our lives. Outside of some specific medical innovations, we struggled to agree on more than three.
by afpx
7/29/2026 at 1:32:34 AM
What you are saying here, and I am not a protestant, is that some people will work for you while you do what you feel like.That mindset, taken to the extreme, hides a kind of sibylline slavery, Idk if you get why.
It also makes for far less responsible and comfortable individuals.
Trying to be useful and auronomous is our obligation. Thinking others will do it and that it is automatically ok is not the best we can do to contribute.
by germandiago
7/29/2026 at 2:07:13 AM
I have no idea how you've come to the conclusions about what I've written that you have.by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 1:00:44 PM
“We have enough excess in society”How are you measuring this? Hopefully something better than stock prices.
by pj_mukh
7/28/2026 at 1:12:33 PM
The other commentor mentioned food and clothes to you. I'll add that I can get food for free locally (soup kitchen style, although I don't think they actually serve soup) if I really need it.Around 10% of houses in the US are vacant, although I'm sure a fair amount are that for good reasons (shitty locations, old and worn to high hell). This to me sounds like a resource allocation problem and not a lack-of-resources problem.
Energy could be free close to free if we made the right choices. The sun's right there. Unfortunately, we've been stuck in a political rut for a long while, making long term projects like 'do something about global warming' and 'transition away from fossil fuels' uninteresting.
Many medicines are only expensive due to patents and making up for research costs. Actual production is usually cheap as hell.
I don't have all the answers. People smarter than me might have them. But I do know that we can do better.
by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 1:17:35 PM
Yes to all of this, and want to double stress the Housing theory of everything [1]. Most of the "scarcity" people feel today in the North American context is driven by housing. And there simply isn't enough of it. And citing badly measured vacancy stats does a huge disservice to the effort to fix this.I agree we can do a lot better. And I have no moral qualms about giving the excess away to everyone who needs it. But I need people to admit that it will require a lot of work till we can sufficiently claim we have a real realizable "excess".
And that work requires the current system to work more "efficiently" and with "higher productivity", in the economic definition of the word, not as a personal valuation as OP defines.
[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
by pj_mukh
7/28/2026 at 1:29:47 PM
Housing is clearly the biggest problem, yes, and I doubt you'll find anyone who'll disagree that it's not a big problem. But it's a big problem for political reasons. If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes', I'm sure it could happen. It's just not in the short-term (and long-term?) interests of the economy as it is now. Maybe we should do something about that?Or maybe, just maybe, we should do it because it's a thing that raises people's quality of life? I only care about the economy insofar as it helps actual people on the ground, so I'll be happy to ignore it for things like this, assuming that doesn't put us in an even worse rut than we are in now.
by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 1:40:29 PM
>If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homesThe cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1]. So, I don't think this is true :(.
We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.
[1]: https://medium.com/@dtxtransitposts/how-much-does-it-actuall...
by pj_mukh
7/28/2026 at 1:57:28 PM
What if we let people build their own homes and gave them courses on how to do that?Also 1 trillion dollars sounds like a single year of national debt interest, the total amount spent and destroyed by the Iran war, or the Pentagon's black budget. I'm sure we can give up one of those for a year to fix every economic problem plaguing the country.
by inigyou
7/28/2026 at 4:48:00 PM
Yes, make education free, including how to build a home.by timbit42
7/28/2026 at 1:46:22 PM
> The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1].That sounds worth it to me.
> We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.
Sounds like something we need to fix then.
by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 11:22:22 PM
Housing is a problem and not surprisingly a very big problem in all the English speaking countries the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia, the scarcity of starter homes, high cost, low pay, and a epidemic of those so-called luxury apartments being built everywhere.Most young people will be going back to the good old days, staying home and not leaving until they are married, which is what happens in most of the world today.
by Danox
7/28/2026 at 8:55:00 PM
> and I doubt you'll find anyone who'll disagree that it's not a big problem.As far as I know, people vote against housing developments, among other things to prop up their own house values. They might not disagree it's a problem, but they also don't care to do anything about it. I don't think the housing issue is strictly economics and logistics.
by yunnpp
7/29/2026 at 12:41:41 AM
Sure, if one ignores constraints then we can do everything. It's like saying that you could find an element in an unsorted array in O(1) if you just pick the right index. Obviously. The part that makes it hard is that you can't pick the right index. Coordination and resource allocation is everything. It's not free. It costs effort just like searching an unsorted array is O(n) worst case. There's no way to not pay the price. Energy has to be expended.You'll see this if you're ever at sea. You have an infinite amount of fresh water around you. All you have to do is avoid the salt in it.
by arjie
7/29/2026 at 12:57:43 AM
I didn't mean to imply there aren't any constraints.by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 1:03:05 PM
The world produces so much excess food we pay farmers not to grow it and fast fashion brands burn unsold merchandise in the desert.by XorNot
7/28/2026 at 1:13:31 PM
...and the food part, it's been this way for almost a hundred years now - with agricultural productivity skyrocketing in between. But 100 years ago, chronic food overproduction bankrupting farmers, was already a persistent problem. Since then, lots of bright minds spent their lifetimes to invent new ways to bribe or coerce farmers into growing as little as possible for their own safety.by anovikov
7/28/2026 at 1:20:31 PM
By the fact medicine has an expiration date on the bottle. You can have so much of it you don't have the chance to use it all before it expires.by butlike
7/28/2026 at 1:05:18 PM
In the US, it can be measured by the overstocked food that gets discarded everyday, and by the houses that are vacant nine months a year.by pharrington
7/28/2026 at 1:10:07 PM
Just a note those "vacancies" include dilapidated buildings and housing that is between leases (literally all the housing on craigslist is included in that number).Vacancies in most major cities is near-zero. As a market-rate renter, when someone says "we have so much excess", I have no idea what you're talking about.
by pj_mukh
7/28/2026 at 1:10:12 PM
This assumes production of food is the bottleneck rather than distribution. If distribution is actually the bottleneck, overstocked food is not a measure of excess in society.by Zababa
7/28/2026 at 1:18:43 PM
But individual grocery stores throw out a lot of food each day. So the problem isn't distribution, it's that nobody bought it.by AnimalMuppet
7/28/2026 at 1:15:45 PM
Don't expect much sympathy here, as per many comments folks are mostly on purely capitalistic camps to the extreme. Its distillation of US approach to work and society, something I've grown to detest by mere fact of living in much more humane, while vastly more financially efficient system that doesn't use my tax money to kill civilians all over the world (none other than Swiss system and yes it could easily work elsewhere if people reduced their egos significantly, which they won't).Its everybody for themselves in US, fuck the rest, the more the better. Some 'society' it is. The more miserable and poor others are, the better you can exploit them right. How horrible the world would be if those folks stocking shelves in shops or trimming your hair would also have a shot for a decent life.
Middle class is for mediocre suckers, either your are a star (at least from financial perspective, usually the rest of life is very opposite of it) or a loser. Can't say I can respect that system, but as long as I am not part of it nor bombed by its military industrial complex to death I simply don't care. Folks can stay and be part of that system or leave, that part of freedom is still sorta there.
by kakacik
7/28/2026 at 2:31:37 PM
Switzerland got its wealth predominantly by shielding money stolen from around the entire world. I'm glad US ended that carnival of happiness to a large degree in 2009.by lostmsu
7/28/2026 at 3:50:51 PM
Whatever the US did in 2009 doesn't seem to have had any long term effect on Swiss GDP. It dipped in 2009, like everyone else, from the "global financial crisis" but recovered the next year.https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/national-eco...
by hackingonempty
7/28/2026 at 7:56:11 PM
Switzerland was already the second richest country in Europe in 1913 despite not having a colonial empire to exploit, ample raw resources or the best geographic location.by qwytw
7/28/2026 at 10:36:25 PM
Norway is kind of the same, but they made a decision to set up the Norwegian sovereign fund to save and invest that North Sea oil money their counterparts however on the other side of the North Sea, Great Britain decided to spend like a drunken sailors most of the money ended up mostly in the hands of the upper crust of the country. if a country is wealthy and unselfish enough, they can make provisions for society in general.What is terrible is the fact that our leaders who should think ahead long-term don’t whether it’s Covid or current measles outbreak there are going be a large number of people that will potentially be disabled by the effects of catching either one, and sadly the policy makers who are charged with the responsibility of solving problems, can’t think ahead. Those are just two recent examples, but there are many things in the course of life which can happen to anyone.
by Danox
7/28/2026 at 11:16:24 PM
Norway's fiscal discipline is certainly the exception that proves the rule. Britain's failure to steward the wealth of its half of the North Sea's bounty provides a good example of that rule.by nate_meurer
7/28/2026 at 1:18:35 PM
Do you know how tone deaf this is? Some people literally can’t afford their medication and you are saying “meh, we have too much already”by reactordev
7/28/2026 at 1:35:55 PM
We have enough medication. People not being able to afford it has little to do with whether or not we have (or could easily make) an excess.Insulin costs ~3 USD to make per vial. People not being able to afford ~30 USD insulin is not because we have too little medication. It's because there are leeches all over the healthcare system.
And if you genuinely cannot afford it, you should get it for free, as part of a proper healthcare system, which the US famously lacks.
by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 2:44:35 PM
By that logic someone working in a care home is worth less than someone building a gambling app. There's little relationship between salary and what people deserve, it's mostly just luck to have skills that happen to be in short supply.by RobinL
7/28/2026 at 1:58:33 PM
Does it matter? In the US, we send a sizable portion of our paychecks to the government's Social Security program so it can provide for us in this exact scenario. The government dictated the terms and we upheld our end of the contract on pain of incarceration. Now it's time for the government to uphold their end.by Suzuran
7/28/2026 at 3:30:29 PM
Technically, SS provides for the next generation. We pay into it to the next generation can use that, not the current one. It's a pyramid scheme meant to pay out early and then die. The math doesn't work if the individual expects to retire on it. It's a great scam.by chneu
7/28/2026 at 3:51:54 PM
It's not my problem if the math doesn't work, or if my money doesn't pay for me. The contract as presented to me by the government is "You will pay into this system, it provides Social Security to the aged and disabled. If you do not pay into this system, you will be judged guilty of a criminal offense and sentenced accordingly." The specifics of who pays and for what are the government's problem, not mine. Whether or not the government is guilty of fraud or misrepresentation does not affect the terms. I fail to see why I should consider the government free of the obligations they themselves have mandated.by Suzuran
7/28/2026 at 9:14:33 PM
Social security taxes explicitly pay for the current generation of retirees. it's not a pyramid scheme (how would that even make any sense?). The "trust fund" is running out of money but that could easily be solved if we were willing to tax the rich, corporate profits, and capital gains, at higher rates or more aggressively (that is not allowing corporations to escape tax so easily). Or we could continue to fund it at a deficit. But, again, it's not a pyramid scheme. That doesn't make any sense.by efficax
7/28/2026 at 10:45:55 PM
I think the person you were responding to meant ponzi scheme, not pyramid scheme. The first sentence from Wikipedia sounds quite similar to SS> A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒnzi/, Italian: [ˈpontsi]) is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors
Just replace investors with tax payers.
by ImJamal
7/29/2026 at 8:06:43 PM
it's not a ponzi scheme either. in a ponzi scheme the top of the funnel gets rich off the funds of new investors who are expecting a return. my taxes are not an investment secretly used to make some people rich by fooling newcomers, they're explicitly directly funding the current beneficiaries.by efficax
7/28/2026 at 11:01:54 PM
What a great collection of incorrect right wing talking points!Look up when benefits began to be paid. The current payments very much and by design pay for the current retirees. The idea that this is some kind of elaborate “scam” when it is one of those things that every other civilized country has figured out is hilarious. Go travel. Go talk to some retirees there. Turn off the Fox News.
by 4fterd4rk
7/28/2026 at 1:24:49 PM
> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc.The able do. The disabled would love to work hard and earn a nice paycheck. It's a privilege to be able to work and be in good health. Hopefully you don't have to learn that the hard way.
by astral_drama
7/28/2026 at 1:43:58 PM
A privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege?I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled.
That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.
by avalys
7/28/2026 at 2:46:51 PM
> A privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege?You do
> I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled.
Agreed, and it can be uncomfortable to sort through what's genuine or not. One of my favorite scenes is in the big Lebowski where Walter confronts the other Lebowski claiming he's not a cripple and lifts him out of his wheelchair...Funny and sad all at once.
> That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.
Not asking for anyone to lie to themselves about what they feel is productive, rather giving another perspective to hopefully help people appreciate being able to work.
by astral_drama
7/29/2026 at 7:30:28 AM
And yet, the lifestyles of some of the greatest minds were basically taking leisurely walks and reading / writing letters (Einstein). The other day there was Ian Fleming's daily routine - have a walk, sit on the beach, have a drink / dinner, oh and do some writing in between.People can contribute value AND have a comfortable life. That's the ideal. We (in the west) fought hard to limit how much employers can exploit us, else we'd still be doing 12 hours / 6 days work weeks. And the economy / society didn't collapse.
by Cthulhu_
7/29/2026 at 6:56:17 AM
There is more than enough excess labor that farmers, seamstresses, power plant workers, and everybody else could have more time to have their own self-defined productivity too. The idea that people need to be working nonstop to survive in organized society is nonsense. Labor has been growing in excess since atleast the bronze age, and likely significantly earlier, and in just the last 50 years we have increased productivity 2 orders of magnitude further. Even if we assumed people 20,000 years ago worked 16 hours a day 365 days a year to survive, and that the needs of the people grew 1000x over, we still would have plenty of spare man hours to spread among everybody. The fact that many people now live entirely off capital holdings and others struggle to find work is proof that people should be having far more free time for themselves across the board.by AngryData
7/29/2026 at 12:31:28 PM
You could only really do that if you walled your country off from the rest of the world. Otherwise there will always be someone willing to outcompete you.The trouble is that would make your own industries lazy and uncompetitive. Are you willing to accept the decrease in material wealth?
by tonyedgecombe
7/28/2026 at 1:12:41 PM
> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etcYou could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.
by jplrssn
7/28/2026 at 1:45:19 PM
When I was young, to buy a tee shirts for the kids you have to walk like 10 block to visit like 5 shops and compare prices. Let's say 1 or 2 hour and the choices were quite limited and you must keep a mental list of the location and quality of each shop. [The cheap ones may open only at the same time you have to be in the office.]Now you can go to Mercado Libre (the local version of Amazon) compare prices and see the reviews and buy them in 15 minutes. There are a lot of more choices and the prices are lower (or higher if you like fancy stuff). It arrives home at the afternoon.
Some software engineer has to program it. Does s/he deserve a few bucks for the time s/he saved all of us?
by gus_massa
7/28/2026 at 1:27:04 PM
If they are JS frameworks that enable other engineers to build applications that support farms, and banks, and taxi services and insurance companies and mines and factories, etc. then obviously that is productive.If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange.
When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.
by avalys
7/28/2026 at 3:26:15 PM
My point is that, unless you think that the purpose of human existence is to maximise insurance profitability and mining throughput, lifetime earnings potential is not a good proxy for someone’s value to society.I think it is sad that many of the people that have the largest positive impact on society — teachers, care assistants and the like — are also some of worst paid.
by jplrssn
7/28/2026 at 8:01:18 PM
Cost of labor is based on supply and demand not the value created. If there were more engineers capable of creating those JS frameworks than there was demand for they'd get paid way less and whoever was paying them would pocket the difference.While a "Javascript Framework engineer" is a very neutral example how do you feel about the engineers working on ads, making exploitive predatory video games, gambling apps etc. etc. they can get paid even more yet the net value they create for the society is negative.
by qwytw
7/29/2026 at 4:26:37 AM
You’re assuming supply and demand is logical or efficient but like the stock market it’s often irrational and driven by some C Suite who doesn’t know what he’s doing. FAANG blew billions over hiring software engineers in 2021-2022 and often paid engineers to do effectively nothing for months or years. Despite their very high salaries, these individuals contributed nothing to society in exchange.by gymbeaux
7/28/2026 at 8:58:32 PM
Do you really believe that nonsense? By that logic, we should legalize all drugs and optimize that LSD supply chain.by yunnpp
7/28/2026 at 5:32:40 PM
Meh. Those are just Making meaningless things that tracks users, hogs computer resourses, showing nonsense social media posts, brainrot contents, changing things constantly to put in their resume at the expense of users. Would prefer if these people did not exists in first place.by birksherty
7/28/2026 at 1:53:20 PM
I mean, if someone is willing to pay them, why not?Even hundreds and thousands of years ago, people would put semi transparent rocks onto shiny metal shapes and sell those useless gadgets for a lot of money.
If customers are willing to pay for that, it means that those people made something worth that money.
by ajsnigrutin
7/28/2026 at 3:00:00 PM
Stephen Hawking wouldn't exist in our society if we didn't care for people like him.by bjertoref
7/29/2026 at 4:28:44 AM
He was an established prodigy before he needed in-home nursing care. I suspect he’d have been taken care of regardless of access to socialized healthcare.by gymbeaux
7/28/2026 at 11:35:37 PM
I hate being a contrarian for my first comment, but not everyone is lucky enough or afforded parents and opportunity like Hawking.by byutifu
7/28/2026 at 1:02:50 PM
Increasingly, the answer is a “what”, not a “who”.by germinalphrase
7/28/2026 at 1:10:10 PM
This has been happening for more than a hundred years now... 90%+ of the people have been farming not that long ago, and mechanized farming equipment has replaced 95%+ of those workers.This doesn't mean 4 hour workweeks or majority of people not needing to work, but it means that some of you can be social media managers, others can integrate AI chatbots in apps that don't need an AI chatbot, some can rewrite existing software in whatever the language of the week is, etc. Without offloading all that farming to machines, we'd never have what we now consider for "normal" and "must have".
Those few farmers left (2-3% of the workforce, depeding on the country) want to earn money too, so they can buy smartphones, watch netflix and have that smart toilet seats that open automatically and wash your butthole. If all those replaced-by-machines workers don't produce all that, where's the point in farming food for them?
by ajsnigrutin
7/28/2026 at 2:16:57 PM
Let’s assume that all human labor goes through the same transition as agriculture: within a single human lifetime, 98% of all the human work is replaced by highly efficient machines and a small minority of highly productive people. If only 2% of the population have the required skills/talents/ownership to remain productive, on what basis does the remaining 98% participate in the economy? The answer has always been: people will invent new ways to be economically productive, but if the agriculture ladder of labor generalizes across the economy - what is left for the average, unexceptional, run-of-the-mill man on the street?by germinalphrase
7/28/2026 at 3:52:35 PM
At least for food, we went from 80% 500 years ago to about 1-5% now. Maybe less, soon, when fruit picking robots come online. Work is not destiny.by GeoAtreides
7/28/2026 at 7:54:34 PM
I know who some of them are. I'm sure as hell that you weren't one of them.by onraglanroad
7/28/2026 at 11:31:17 PM
The $20k gig worker, the $100k salaried worker, and the billionaire owner work roughly equally hard. Productivity gains mostly come from better tools, techniques, and leverage, not people working proportionally harder. The question is where those gains go.If we valued time with friends, helping each other, and making sure everyone can live a vibrant life, we'd spend them on that. If we don't, they go toward status and class distinction.
by didibus
7/28/2026 at 8:19:40 PM
Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you post this comment?by trial3
7/28/2026 at 8:30:52 PM
The people getting paid by the other time I spend productively.by WarmWash
7/28/2026 at 1:11:48 PM
Is the majority of jobs that are related to this space and most people do here productive, by this definition? I would say it is destructive even.At least what OP says produces no harm at worst.
by freehorse
7/29/2026 at 3:30:32 PM
Exactly. And later the person just insists that even the best of rely on the care of others-- while omitting the fact that the "care" is really the labor of others.Yes, we must recognize that we're more than the sum total of our job, but it's also important to celebrate the people who work hard to develop a talent and deliver the fruits of this talent.
by xhkkffbf
7/28/2026 at 1:10:01 PM
People who the current system fully agrees should be paid like dirt while others party, that's who.by smallmancontrov
7/28/2026 at 2:59:11 PM
Billionaires, evidently. Why else would they deserve a million times what you make in your entire lifetime, weren't for the fact they're a million times more productive than you? In fact, if one were to die tomorrow that'd be like the loss to the world of a million of you, whereas were you to do the same, that'd be a loss of only one of you. This is also why you can be downsized without that impacting anything important, while downsizing a single billionaire would be a global tragedy.Or at least, that's the logical consequence of that line of reasoning. If that's incorrect, where's the error in the reasoning?
by alexgieg
7/28/2026 at 10:28:08 PM
A billionaire makes more like a thousand times what a normal working stiff makes in a lifetime, not a million times.by kbelder
7/29/2026 at 7:27:32 PM
Depends on what's being compared.Being a billionaire is understood as having a net worth of $1 bi, so we ought to compare the net worth of the median someone at retirement. If that someone are Americans, that's $200k, so 5k times. If it's the world at large, that's roughly $10k,so 100k times. If we consider the billionaires at the top of the ladder, it surpasses 1M times.
by alexgieg
7/28/2026 at 1:08:27 PM
Many places around the world, we work for what is needed, not for hitting it big.But since you ask, also many victims of late stage capitalism explored in modern forms of slavery without work rights, so that richer nations can enjoy cheap electronics and clothing.
by pjmlp
7/28/2026 at 1:16:22 PM
What a tone deaf comment.by ahoka
7/29/2026 at 10:31:11 AM
[dead]by george916a
7/28/2026 at 1:08:00 PM
[dead]by neom
7/28/2026 at 12:57:13 PM
[flagged]by beanjuiceII
7/28/2026 at 12:59:44 PM
I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 1:10:18 PM
Of course nobody sane wants something like this to happen. The problem isn't the people unable to make ends meets, it's the unwilling.by a-french-anon
7/28/2026 at 1:53:42 PM
Most people want to work. Most people want to provide value in some form. The author of the article is unable and willing, but is still treated as unwilling by the system. We're better of acting in good faith and treating everybody who says they are unable as that, and give them the support they need.by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 1:18:26 PM
How can you even tell the difference?Most people can't. They just assign everyone to the bucket of unwilling.
by inigyou
7/28/2026 at 2:03:46 PM
(Reasonable) Good faith at the individual level is a good thing, but when trying to scale it and build a working socialist system out of it, you're 100% set for failure.by a-french-anon
7/28/2026 at 1:03:36 PM
This smells a lot of "I'm miserable so everyone else must be as unhappy as I am"What if we make a better world for everyone, instead of a planetary crab bucket?
by CursedSilicon
7/28/2026 at 1:04:12 PM
Sometimes they are forbidden from making the things they’d like for themselves. You used to be able to get your own food, build your own home, etc. But enclosure put a stop to that. And besides, who made the land you live on?by CalRobert
7/28/2026 at 5:34:23 PM
3rd world sweatshop workers who are exploited by filthy rich.by birksherty
7/28/2026 at 1:32:43 PM
> Reading the classics is productive because it's enjoyable, even though it doesn't help with your workIt's productive in that it is hard and a sign of high intelligence. Don't believe me and swap it out with Candy Crush. Is playing Candy Crush productive?
This obsession about people with disabilities is weird. Yes, people with real disabilities exist. But focusing on pathologizing every day life is extremely harmful. This constant focus on "mental health" ironically worsens mental health. For instance, any mild discomfort is "anxiety". Most of these things are pretty normal range of emotions. Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015. This is obviously partly cheating the system, but it's also this harmful over-focus on "mental health"
Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/opinion/mental-health-exe...
by bko
7/28/2026 at 1:53:00 PM
> Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015.That seems to check out with the period people started getting more addicted to social media, pandemic side-effects and increased awareness of mental health issues
I believe the amount of people dealing with crippling anxiety these days is higher than that 20% figure, and we are still under-diagnosing it
> Hard work is a good in it of itself.
Hard disagree tbh but that's more of a personal values discussion
by Altern4tiveAcc
7/28/2026 at 2:01:35 PM
> Hard disagree tbh but that's more of a personal values discussionI'm curious about this. Do you have children? Do you look at someone who does nothing hard in his life with indifference? Someone chooses to spend their life playing video games in their parent's basement. Do you think that's an equally admirable life than someone that spends his life doing hard things?
by bko
7/28/2026 at 2:26:58 PM
> Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015.I think it's naive to assume that this phenomenon reflects an actual increase in disability rather than a cohort who has been raised to pathologize every human difference as a sign of some disability and then use those diagnoses to secure advantages in systems meant to help people with actual special needs.
There's clearly a lot of pretending going on. On the extreme end look at the numerous DID[1] "influencers". These folks are plainly pretending to have a debilitating mental disorder (which strangely never prevents them from going on podcasts and YouTube interviews) to curry fame.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder
by AlexandrB
7/28/2026 at 2:31:42 PM
Agree completely. Its hard to tease out what percent is a cheating response due to increasing accommodations and actual pathologizing.Some personal observations, I would say about 90%+ of "emotional support dogs" are fake. And I can't remember the last time I saw someone that was actually disabled use a disabled parking spot. They always have the proper license plate or mirror tag, but every time I've seen someone enter their vehicle it would appear that they do not need special accommodations afforded by the preferred parking spot.
by bko
7/28/2026 at 1:42:53 PM
> Is playing Candy Crush productive?If you enjoy it, then yes.
> Hard work is a good in it of itself. People pay lip service to the idea that we shouldn't be productive or measure our "worth" (whatever that is) by productivity but they don't live it. For instance, I don't know any parent that doesn't push or at least hope their children work hard at something. Anything. Do something hard. Play a sport. Learn an instrument. Study math. This is common sense.
Hard work is good insofar as you enjoy it or it leads you to things that you do enjoy. Do those things if you enjoy them. Hard things are enjoyable too. I stopped doing most of them because I didn't enjoy them.
by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 2:03:01 PM
If you consider Candy Crush as productive I guess words just don't have meaning anymore so there's no point arguing.I highly doubt you actually believe this, but I have been wrong before.
by bko
7/28/2026 at 2:14:45 PM
> If you consider Candy Crush as productive I guess words just don't have meaning anymore so there's no point arguing.I'm using the word differently to you. It's productive insofar as you enjoy doing it.
Just to make a point, have these two definitions from Wiktionary:
> Capable of producing something, especially in abundance; fertile.
Capable of producing enjoyment, yup. I'd call playing Candy Crush productive if enjoyment is your goal.
> Yielding good or useful results
The good result here is, again, the enjoyment of whatever. If you enjoy playing Candy Crush, then playing it gives you a good or useful result, namely the enjoyment of playing it.
> I highly doubt you actually believe this, but I have been wrong before.
If someone truly finds Candy Crush enjoyable to the point they do it everyday or whatever, and we're not talking addiction (so they're not actually enjoying it, but rather feel compelled to do it), then more power to them. I wish my desires were so simple.
by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 2:26:13 PM
Oh come on. Parent is right, at this point, words have no meaning. By this logic, everything produces something, therefore everything is productive.by senordevnyc
7/28/2026 at 2:41:55 PM
> By this logic, everything produces something, therefore everything is productive.Yes. That word is only useful insofar as you say or imply a goal. Candy Crush is not productive in gathering food.
Most people imply the goal to be money. I'd rather imply enjoyment. See my OP.
by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 3:52:32 PM
And yet, you seemed to have been using it the way the rest of us are in this discussion, right here:You are worth so much more than your productivity.
I think the issue here is that everyone else is having a discussion about economics, how we efficiently allocate scarce resources as a society, and the role that individual productivity plays in that allocation. You're having a discussion about enjoying your life. Which is great, if you want to play Candy Crush all day and call it "productive" because that makes you feel better, go for it.
But I'm not interested in paying your bills so you can.
by senordevnyc
7/28/2026 at 9:30:19 PM
Even if you're bad at productivity, even in the sense of producing enjoyment, you're still worth so much more.My OP was explicitly about not taking economic productivity as the be-all-end-all of someone.
by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 2:33:06 PM
YES I am vegan and YES I eat meat. We existby bko
7/28/2026 at 1:14:56 PM
The thing that sucks is it doesn’t matter if you don’t get sucked in. Society is and as a result even if you the individual feel valued society largely will not value you. Of course it’s better for your mental health to escape the trap of believing your value as a person _is_ you value to capitalism but that won’t put food on the table or get you the care you need.This is something that needs to change at the cultural level but is incredibly hard to change because in order to do so you need to convince most people that the foundational understanding of their worth as a person needs to come from somewhere else.
by trescenzi
7/28/2026 at 1:25:17 PM
"Your worth" is a bit of a vague and meaningless term (everyone is worth infinite in some sense). But if we want to talk about your general ability to secure more comfortable living conditions then your worth is very much linked to your productivity. The average living conditions are largely determined by how productive the average person is. There are some hard-to-escape balance equations at play there.Good vibes are nice and all, but affirming each other isn't going to actually make the world more comfortable. Looking after disabled people requires an enormous productive surplus from the rest of us and a recognition that the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more than the people who are on the receiving end of charity. Playing pretend on this topic is just going to lead to people being worse off.
by roenxi
7/28/2026 at 8:20:37 PM
> then your worth is very much linked to your productivityAlso coincidentally it’s highly correlated with who your parents happen to be. But its likely spurious…
The people who have lost the lottery by both by being not born into wealth and also being destined to suffer from physical or mental disabilities, well I guess tough luck..
> the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more
Wouldn’t phrase it exactly like that but yes you are right. However it’s very hard to figure out who those people are and to measure their contributions.
It so happens that being paid a lot for your labor doesn’t automatically means that you aren’t a net negative to the society . There are loads of people working in inherently parasitical or exploitative industries who make massive amounts of money but when you add it at all up they contribute significantly less than those people living from charity. Much of the economy is still effectively zero-sum.
by wasfgwp
7/28/2026 at 2:19:33 PM
> Looking after disabled people requires an enormous productive surplus from the rest of us and a recognition that the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more than the people who are on the receiving end of charity.We already don't do this with regards to normal people. Being a farmer isn't a particularly high-paying nor high-status job. I don't mind changing this around if we get a more humane world in return, but these issues seems orthogonal to each other.
by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 8:18:16 PM
Because one's value to society doesn't determine their wage (an economic matter) or status (a social matter). The parent comment is right. What you've pointed out is a separate "injustice" of a kind: that we generally under-appreciate others.by hallole
7/28/2026 at 7:11:15 PM
Interesting that you highlight classics, is the implication that it's more ... productive for your personal development to read classics than trashy thrillers?As someone who spent four years reading 'the' Classics at uni, I doubt it's very true
you comment wouldn't read quite so well if you swapped classics for posting cat tiktoks and hanging out with strangers you bump into in the street. But what makes that inferior?
by dubeye
7/28/2026 at 9:31:54 PM
> Interesting that you highlight classics, is the implication that it's more ... productive for your personal development to read classics than trashy thrillers?No. You can play Candy Crush for all I care if that's what gets you more enjoyment. The classic were just what were on my mind when I wrote that comment.
by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 10:31:07 PM
not every profession has excess, not sure I can get on board with the idea that candy crush is of equal value to any job. money is just a measure of goods and services.by dubeye
7/28/2026 at 8:08:15 PM
Yes, it is more productive. Becoming more familiar with the English language and skillfully written prose is good. The notion that modern prose is of lesser quality is widespread.This comment reads as snarky post-modernism.
by hallole
7/28/2026 at 10:28:39 PM
I think you missed my point. But you think the bounds of every field of research and technology has expanded, except language?To learn how to read and write well, then you would do just as well, if not better, to read modern authors at the top of their fields. I wouldn't exclude thrillers. Reading Chaucer in old English, to stretch the point to breaking, is not going to give you any kind of edge. Maybe it will teach you a bit of French, but again, you are better off reading modern French literature for that.
I suspect you were not forced to read the classics as I was. Much of it is stuffed with overly flowery prose and immature ideas. It's mostly tradition that keeps them alive.
There is much personal satisfaction in literature, but I would place it much closer to leisure than work.
by dubeye
7/28/2026 at 1:31:05 PM
Relevant:In Praise of Idleness
https://ia801002.us.archive.org/27/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.4...
by swed420
7/28/2026 at 6:59:19 PM
> the protestant work ethic,I can't speak for Protestants because the denominations vary (though I doubt they would differ greatly on this point) but for Catholics "works of mercy" is defined as caring for the vulnerable, the elderly and tending the sick. It's not meant to shame those people into guilt.
Additionally, there are many other facets such as the spiritual works of mercy such as comforting the sorrowful or counseling the doubtful.
I think you are perhaps better off putting the blame on the Capitalism hustle culture that forces people to work day and night to be "productive" than Christianity.
by swat535
7/28/2026 at 8:15:59 PM
Most Catholics also don’t believe in double predestination and think that (more or less but that’s the gist) god has pre-picked people who are destined to be successful and those which are destined to be lazy and worthless or even outright evil. That’s one of the core tenets of Calvinism and similar religions.by wasfgwp
7/28/2026 at 8:15:08 PM
I am not from the US, so this "protestant work ethics" sound foreign to me. And to be honest, very harmful.Measuring someone's worth by their productivity sounds incredibly misanthropic, to a cartoonish degree. It's part of the same societal illness that only considers something worthy when it has a monetary value. Looking at some responses to your post (that should be very uncontroversial) is an interesting experience in that regard.
Luckily I don't have any disabilities, but I pity those that do. I think that society has a duty to help the less fortunate. That should be an uncontroversial stance too, but oh well
by surgical_fire
7/28/2026 at 1:29:34 PM
could you please summarize in short what you meant here as keypoint?I'm not sure we are interpreting this right,based also on reactions and troll references in clear contrast to your other comment.
by giov4
7/28/2026 at 1:42:46 PM
also the comment"I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?"
was important and extremely insightful, wanted to ask what you meant with "was unable to nake ends meet" which type of ends?
by giov4
7/28/2026 at 2:06:25 PM
> could you please summarize in short what you meant here as keypoint?> I'm not sure we are interpreting this right,based also on reactions and troll references in clear contrast to your other comment.
I'm not sure what's unclear about my first comment, but I'll try to rephrase with new words.
People are people and deserve to be treated humanely as such. Productivity is but one aspect of people, and not the only one you can ascribe any value to. People are more than their productivity.
Productivity is often just used to mean 'how much money you earn', but I find it useful to expand its meaning to 'how well you're doing what you're enjoying'. If you spend time reading books because you enjoy it, that's productive. If you spend time at work earning money, that's also productive, since money is needed to, ya know, stay alive, and thus let you enjoy life, for what it's worth.
My point about disabilities is probably better expanded by the article in question, unless you have any pointed questions at that.
> also the comment
> "I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?"
> was important and extremely insightful, wanted to ask what you meant with "was unable to nake ends meet" which type of ends?
The instance I had in mind was one where I was in danger of not having food to eat at the end of a month. I wasn't in any danger for that matter. I can get free food locally if I'm desperate. I can call a friend and ask for a favour (and friends have asked me!). But getting to that point is well beyond the point where my mind goes 'oh ffs, just end it, it's not worth the bother'. If someone is at that point, they should get help, but ideally, they shouldn't get to that point in the first place. Prevention is better than a cure (although we should work on cures too!).
by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 2:28:17 PM
thanks a lot for the clarification and effort for it.Maybe the other reactions made it generally more unclear, but was unsure about the core message.
This is much more clear and direct, and yes I was believing you meant something in that direction.
Regarding the other comment, thanks also, I understand that feeling the moment of having to ask something like that, but I think that if fought with enough pragmacity I think I would try to overcome the psychological part because the need would overcome the shame, and that would overcome the situation. or that is not feasible in that case?
by giov4
7/28/2026 at 2:44:08 PM
I'm sure it's feasible, but it's treating the symptom rather than the disease. I'd rather people never get to the point of having to call a friend because they can't afford food today than them not feeling shame when it does happen.by Telaneo
7/28/2026 at 1:27:35 PM
Related: "Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." (Jesus, in Luke 12:15).Life is not about how much you make or how much you're worth. It's about being worth something to someone. It's about having meaningful relationships.
As a typical software nerd, it took me decades to get that.
by AnimalMuppet
7/28/2026 at 7:28:51 PM
The Protestant Work Ethic is just learned slavery by another nameby Henchman21
7/28/2026 at 11:27:38 PM
[dead]by jumpinjack710
7/29/2026 at 10:24:30 AM
[dead]by george916a