> The P/E Ratio of the S&P 500 is at a historic high level. Interpreted another way, there rarely is a better time to create a profitable business -- You can get paid $30ish dollars per annual dollar of profit you create.
While in reality, where you take into account the statistics of business success vs failures, this is one of the riskiest things a person can do if you don't have any access to a safety net in the very likely scenario your business will fail.
A business can fail for many reasons completely out of control from an individual's agency, a person who needs to provide for a family might not have the risk appetite for plunging their families' lives into that, it's impossible for everyone in a society to become a successful business owner. You are advocating for an impossible situation, and by negating that a majority of society won't have the means to access the successful-business-owner class while gatekeeping the fruits a society collectively built to only that class you are being inherently unjust.
No successful business can exist in a vacuum, the better educated a society is the better chances a business owner can find skilled people to build successful products, the better chances there are for these workers to innovate, and create a disproportionate return to investments.
You completely left out that these business are only possible because of the society that supports them, it's an extremely extractivist mindset which I deeply challenge you to think deeper about...
SNAP, medicaid, foodbanks... plus don't risk what you cant afford to lose, beyond your own time.
I'm not saying go take $100K loan and buy a warehouse of t-shirts hoping they sell.
I'm saying use your time to create products and services which you sell and keep 100% of your delivered value (assuming you price well), rather than sharing the profit margin with your bosses hierarchy. From there you can begin to employ others, potentially simultaneously funding others' escape from the rat race too.
Sure, what kind of business should a person who has US$ 5k in total liquid savings can start that they can keep 100% of the delivered value?
This person is a father of two, works two jobs at odd shifts but has to refuse some shifts because his wife also works part-time, 1-2 days a week he has to take care of the kids. Childcare is expensive and they can't afford it, they get some help from friends and family sometimes but can't rely on it.
Give me your best business idea that is worth the risk of time and money invested for this family.
> A value could be that we do not support ill gotten gains, to the extent that the majority votes for free things paid for by the minority it could "benefit the majority" and still violate the value
You are entering into a circular argument:
> My whole point is that to the extent accumulated wealth is happening by playing by the rules, there is no injustice in accumulating wealth, nor in accumulating more than those who did not do the actions which relate to wealth building
Ill gotten gains would need to be defined as "not playing by the rules" but you already prescribed that the rules supersede that so there's no way to potentially redefine that such accumulation was ill gotten. Your argumentation makes us stuck in the status quo which is visibly not working for the benefit of the majority, which is objectively true by inspecting the discrepancies between the increase of productivity vs increase of wealth between different cohorts of society.
Isn't an ill gotten gain to extract a disproportionate amount from the gains of productivity? One can still be filthy rich in a society that distributed it more evenly, not equally but at least more evenly. In Western societies this distribution has been severely skewed to the top in the past 40 years, why is that the people labouring with increased productivity do not see the fruits from it? Isn't that an injustice, unfairness, etc.?
I share your view, it's a discussion I commonly have with friends who are too blinded by individuals' actions instead of the systems that these individuals are part of, and from which those actions come from a series of rational but misplaced intermediary steps.
No single individual is controlling what their peer group does but by being a part of it those actions compound. Like you said, not even the most brutal dictatorships take actions single-handedly decided by someone, it's all part and parcel of the system they decided to (or ended up at) participate.
I think Byung-Chul Han hit the right spot when talking about "shitstorms" on "In The Swarm". Societies after the digital age got too narrowly focused on explosive bursts of outrage against individuals, instead of discussing more in-depth the issues that create systems these individuals live and navigate, and eventually take actions that are immoral, unjust, evil, etc. from the incentives of their environment, we only discuss things in binary terms (acceptable/transgressive), focused on the performative act of a monologue of outrage, without solidarity but with solitude, in our screens.
I've had this feeling for more than a decade, reading Byung-Chul Han so eloquently describe many observations and feelings I've had was refreshing for my own psyche. It's just extremely hard to try to instill some of these concepts unto others...
We may have to guide others to derive these concepts themselves in the same way we did rather than instilling the conclusion. I don't know how to do that yet, so for the time being, I just describe the problem.
Wealth is power, you're too narrowly focusing on specific applications of this power (like your mention of Citizens United) but if that wasn't a thing there'd be innumerous other ways for wealth to be leveraged as power.
Power accumulation is inherently unjust and immoral, it corrupts, the utopic benevolent benefactor is extremely rare in real life because power accumulation begets power, those who have it do not want to lose it.
Also wealth accumulation is inherently unjust even in your framework of meritocracy, its accumulation and compounding nature is not meritocratic.
That's the usual trope used as an escape for the question: where are your sources?
Provide them or stop being so defensive about it, being defensive just shows you got not substance to your claim. Show, don't tell, if you can't show then you might have to do some more thinking by yourself to figure out why you ended up that way.
Yes, just like these [1] German border guards. Next time they should bring a sign like the one shown in the article.
For those who don't read Dutch and can't be bothered to translate the article: Germany has restarted border checks which at the time of writing of this article had caused 171 accidents, some of which lethal.
I don't get this thing where "X killed people. Oh, just like Y killed people" when X and Y are entirely unrelated.
If you say "Ukraine kills people in the war? Well Russia also kills people in the war" at least they are quite related and an argument can be made from that starting point. But what's with "Some people died in a space shuttle explosion. Well, sharks also kill people"
I tried to but I keep on getting voted down. The topic here was 'farmers mostly just protest by blocking traffic' upon which someone said 'yes and they are responsible for the deaths of two people by doing so' to which I reacted by showing that traffic accidents are part and parcel of anything which obstructs traffic, in my example's case it is German border guards causing traffic jams by stopping cars. There are far more examples in the Netherlands where traffic jams are common as are accidents caused by people driving into them.
Ah, the magic of being a rightwing populist, which gives you a free pass to do illegal things (drive a tractor on the motorway) even if that results in fatalities.
> I wish there was a line of brands and even better shops that focused on quality fabrics and sewing processes for clothing that lasts for ages as it used to.
They still exist, at least here in Europe.
I quit buying cheap clothing a decade ago, getting quality items is much more expensive but at the same time I've had basic t-shirts that I wear most days last me 5-8 years; trousers that are almost 10 years old and the only blemish is a bit of faded colours; underwear lasting 5+ years, etc.
The issue is very few people have the disposable income and are willing to pay 40-80€ on a good quality t-shirt with heavy premium quality cotton (280-300gsm) sewn in Portugal, Spain, or Italy, or 45€ on a 3-pack of underwear made in Scandinavia, or 20-30€ on a pair of great quality woolen socks.
I do it because I have experienced how much longer they can last, and also had the experience of overpaying on what seemed to be a good quality item and didn't last, it's really hard to find a good signal for what's quality since price alone doesn't do it, you need to buy the stuff and hope it will be good quality and if it's not you learn to not buy it again, it can get expensive if you are unlucky or didn't do proper research.
In the end it can be exhausting for a normal person just looking for good quality to find those items, it took me years to settle on the brands I buy from.
Haha, yeah, completely understandable, I have a few linen pieces (shorts, shirts, a couple of t-shirts) for the occasions I go to a hot place during summers but I live in Scandinavia where summers are, to me, the perfect level of warmth. I generally avoid the peak summer in southern Europe (both due to the heat but also overcrowding), and when I visit my family in Brazil it's also usually off-peak summer.
I really cannot handle very hot weather, it's nice for a day or two but a week of constant 30+C is definitely not my happy place.
That's the trap I described, it's really hard to tell since price is not a good signal.
To me it was trial and error, recommendations, and shopping at physical stores, and like I mentioned as well: it's time-consuming, frustrating, and I wouldn't expect a person not interested in this quest to be able to find good quality items consistently.
Yeah its great when you find quality things but you don't always know, price isn't a great indicator of quality. There is also the buyitforlife subreddit, would like something like it but more structured.
I think this reflects how companies are run in US and Europe, they don't seem to believe how different companies can be here, its not only about turbo maxing the owners profit.
I don't think anyone is capable to sit in a 90-100C sauna for a whole hour without breaks, otherwise with breaks I surely have been in a sauna for more than an hour.
Just this summer I was at a cottage by Vänern (the largest lake in Sweden), the sauna was built right at the lake with a pier setup for jumping into it, we had a party going late into the night where you constantly moved from the sauna into the lake, out of the lake, have chats, a beer, into the sauna again, rinse and repeat for some 8-10 hours. I have no idea exactly how long I was in the sauna but it was definitely more than a couple of hours in the whole affair :)
>I don't think anyone is capable to sit in a 90-100C sauna for a whole hour without breaks, otherwise with breaks I surely have been in a sauna for more than an hour.
Yes, I definitely do agree with that. I too love what you're describing - we have some of that in Poland too :)
However, I was not sure if we're talking about it - or some American version I know only from various memes - where people are coming in with phones and in shoes.
I think one of my most repeated tropes on HN is bringing up that scale and degree matter. A problem of a kind is of a completely different kind when the scale is another order of magnitude.
A simple example: with picture editing software people have been able to create believable fake content for a long time, it did require skill which limited the scale, with genAI creating in seconds, by anyone, a much more plausible fake image than most people were able to before creates a whole other kind of problem that didn't exist before.
It's a tired argument to reduce issues to analogous which existed before and discard how the scale and degree of it changes the class of problem...
Seems like exactly the kind of distinction that would be a common refrain on HN, yet somehow on this topic it's gone out the window.
> A simple example: with picture editing software
Actually reminds me of a story a professor in a comsci ethics class once told about how the police in South Africa (during the apartheid years) would take photos of everyone protesting the regime at the university campus. Back then (this was the 80s) nobody really cared - what were they going to do, go through all the photos by hand?
He said "imagine how much more concerned people would be today". That was in 2011 or so.
> The regular anti: Musk, Ellison and Zuckerberg crowd out with their drums and masks again.
You understand that if you left this sentence out of your comment it'd read as absolutely reasonable, right? With that addition it verges on inflammatory for no added purpose whatsoever to the message.
I was not aware of that. Nothing inflammatory here. Its the general counter to sediment of here. If it was solar city it wouldn't even have 2 points. What makes this so different then any other product cancellation? One word, "Musk". Its a trigger word for a small majority of the population.
Your reading too deep. A small majority is a group of individuals that attempt to speak for masses when in fact their statements or beliefs are non-reflective of the majority. Its like that experiment they do with a group of children where they tell 9 out of 10 children to say 2+2=5 and the 10th child just goes along with it by answer 5 too. Either because they want to fit in or they are just angry and want to belong. Forced conformency for being the odd person out when surrounded by the "small majority".
Five years ago I'd agree with you, but in the current climate "minority" has negative connotations associated with it. E.g. a deminished value of opinion and lack of representation. Thus "small majority" has become more palatable and socially acceptable.
I'd say the same with you using the term neologism. Seems pretentious. First time I've ever heard the term or yet had anyone ever use it during a conversation. We all learn new things everyday and travel in different social circles. The fact is everything is hip and new at one time or not, but "small majority", has been around for at least 5+ years.
Neologism is a somewhat common word in my native language (neologismo), it's a term I learnt in middle school during language classes, sorry if it sounds "pretentious" to you but it's a perfectly apt word to describe what I wanted.
"Small majority" is of a different kind, much more akin to weasel words. Hence: say what you mean, don't hide behind a neologism that tries to masquerade as something else.
I have no clue what "weasel words" mean. None of this is common in my native language or socio economic up bringing. One of things I've learned in life is to know your audience. Speak words that anyone can understand. I have very clearly articulated the definition of what "small majority" means to the point that anyone can comprehend it. Instead of circling the drink why don't you psychoanalyze "what i really mean". Or more like what think the deep rooted issue is here? What am i not saying?
While in reality, where you take into account the statistics of business success vs failures, this is one of the riskiest things a person can do if you don't have any access to a safety net in the very likely scenario your business will fail.
A business can fail for many reasons completely out of control from an individual's agency, a person who needs to provide for a family might not have the risk appetite for plunging their families' lives into that, it's impossible for everyone in a society to become a successful business owner. You are advocating for an impossible situation, and by negating that a majority of society won't have the means to access the successful-business-owner class while gatekeeping the fruits a society collectively built to only that class you are being inherently unjust.
No successful business can exist in a vacuum, the better educated a society is the better chances a business owner can find skilled people to build successful products, the better chances there are for these workers to innovate, and create a disproportionate return to investments.
You completely left out that these business are only possible because of the society that supports them, it's an extremely extractivist mindset which I deeply challenge you to think deeper about...
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