Working hard but doing so for someone else can often not lead to significant gains. Many services like Uber or InstaCart or even McDonalds or Amazon Warehouse or Walmart or Retail Sales or call center, you can work hard but there is no where to progress to. Your rewards are capped.
You need to find a way to work hard such that your rewards are not capped artificially. Startups were you get equity. Large companies where you can progress to high salaries if you are able to rise. Starting your own business and being competent at it. Working on commissions in an area where the commissions can be large -- true sales, or real estate. Being a professional, e.g. doctor, accountant, lawyer, has traditionally had high wages and you often run your own business.
You need to work hard in a way that has unlimited rewards, or at least high rewards possible, and that aligns with your aptitudes.
You need to not work hard at a minimum wage job if you can get something better.
And if you are stuck in a minimum wage job, maybe you can organize with your fellow employees to demand better wages and benefits? This is also another way of working hard in order to get more for yourself.
IMHO, this misses the point. How the fuck can Elon/Tesla buy bitcoin, do a pump and dump, and walk away with enough money to cover 300 lifetimes of me working. Or some kid in a basement that bought GME options gets to retire and not work a day in their life. Also the guy that VC gifted 6 figures (multiple years of me working) of equity just because he wanted more money from the acquisition.
Watching people get a bunch of money over and over for no work starts to make you question things. All these people get a bunch of money by gaming the system so why not try that instead of working? It does make me a bit salty and that's someone who in the grand scheme of things gets a lot of money for not much work. I can only imagine how a wage-slave busting their hump feels.
It's not gaming the system, it's having money. That's the system. People with money can get more of it. Start with it, and you can get more of it. Lots more of it if you know what you're doing. If you don't, you'll die with about the same millions you started with.
Elon can pump and dump because he has a massive following and can manipulate the market. Some kid in a basement can buy GME options, but for every one of those you see on Reddit, you'll not see 10 or 50 people who lost money on the bet, or it'll be a large corporation who lost out on the meme stocks, but they just use the tax system to write off the losses.
It seems that mass media and culture is revealing some truths, that there are extremely wealthy people at the top 0.01%, far above even surgeons or lawyers or engineers, who work very hard and are just as smart as the ultra-rich (if not more smart/hardworking). The difference is those professionals optimized for interesting, impactful work that also pays nicely, and the ultra-rich are optimizing for maximal wealth creation, or they're simply inheriting it or getting lucky on risky bets.
In any case, I think lower-wage workers will slowly get a better lot, since our employment rate is increasing and people after the pandemic are realizing how exploitative many jobs are.
> far above even surgeons or lawyers or engineers, who work very hard and are just as smart as the ultra-rich
I've been seeing this assumption float around quite a bit around HN. Where is this coming from? Where is this belief that "ultra-rich" or "having interest in money" implies intelligence?
Not saying one way or the other. Just genuinely curious.
Oh I was going to question the other two assumptions, that surgeons, lawyers, and engineers work very hard, and that they (as an averaged group) are just as smart as the ultra-rich (as an averaged group)
People who are highly skilled in one area run the same range as anyone else in other areas. Sometimes it even seems like people who focus hard in one area are the least balanced in depth and accuracy of general knowledge. I want to see the experiments testing the wisdom of the crowd done on experts in one field.
> Watching people get a bunch of money over and over for no work starts to make you question things.
You're ignoring risk. Do you feel the same way when people win lotteries? Because everybody has access to Robinhood, so nothing is stopping you from gambling on penny stocks or random crypto and you just might get retirement money or lose it all.
I see where you're coming from, but people earn without risk, when I go to work from 9 to 5, I'm getting my paycheck, I know exactly how much it's going to be, I know exactly what time it's going to be deposited into my account, etc.
When I put my capital to work, I might earn, but I might also lose a lot (ask anyone who bought Bitcoin at 63k$ for example). Obviously, in a capitalist society, capital is the most important thing (I'm not saying that's right or wrong).
Also, if you have millions of people "investing" in the stock market, even in penny stocks, a few of them are bound to get right, you just don't hear too much about people that lost it all.
Yes, except there has been a concerted effort by monied interests in the upper strata of society to convince those below that organizing to demand better wages is useless at best or un-American at worst. It's an uphill battle.
> Startups were you get equity. Large companies where you can progress to high salaries if you are able to rise. Starting your own business and being competent at it. Working on commissions in an area where the commissions can be large -- true sales, or real estate. Being a professional, e.g. doctor, accountant, lawyer, has traditionally had high wages and you often run your own business.
This is all great if you have an aptitude for participation in the knowledge economy. That's not everyone. There used to be much more high-wage blue-collar work available to those who didn't fit that mold, but that has been ebbing away over time as America's manufacturing economy has been hollowed out.
Stronger unions and collective bargaining in the dwindling blue collar work that still exists is my only idea for how to improve things, but I'm not an expert.
> Yes, except there has been a concerted effort by monied interests in the upper strata of society to convince those below that organizing to demand better wages is useless at best or un-American at worst. It's an uphill battle.
Then you have to fight against this by organizing better and more widespread. Sometimes I do worry that all this information on Fox News and others about bogeymen distractions us from trying to better the things we actually can.
It may be that we are too easily distracted / disorganized / disheartened to better our position. And then we will not better our position.
But if you believe you can not change your fate, then you definitely can not. So I do suggest being like Obama and starting with community organizing and solidifying ones position locally and taking that larger. There are effective strategies to engage in. But they are not watching TikTok or YouTube all day.
I'd argue that moving from a capped track to an uncapped track requires much more than hard work. It requires at the very least an expensive investment, sometimes expensive credentials. Worst case, you need to be of a certain class to do it, and not even money can buy you the uncapped track.
If you're flipping burgers at McDonalds, you can't just "hard-work" your way to owning that store. Even if you pull 3 shifts and are the best burger flipper in the state, your boss is never going to say "thanks for the hard work! you now you own the store." This track switch is gate-kept by requiring a capital investment.
If you're 3rd junior engineer from the left at your tech company, you can hard-work your way up to senior, maybe even principal engineer, but you will statistically never be able to hard-work your way to CEO, where the rewards are truly uncapped. Nobody hard-works their way to CEO anymore--that track is reserved for a separate non-employee CEO class, gate-kept by credentials, and the good ol' boy network.
If you're working as a start-up employee, you're never going to hard-work you way to founder, where the rewards are uncapped. You think you're going to be the best developer on the team, and then the board is going to say "congratulations! we now deem you a founder with founder equity!" No way. The company already has founders. If you want to be a founder, you need to make a capital outlay and risk your own business.
If you're a nurse, you're never going to hard-work your way to being a doctor. They don't promote nurses to doctors after years of hard work. You need to, again, spend money on education and pass the credential gatekeepers in order to switch to that track. And even when you're a doctor, you're working for the hospital, and are not uncapped. You can't hard-work your way to owning the hospital. You need to spend capital to own your own practice.
You contradicted yourself. Many companies like McDonald's and Walmart promote from within. You can be successful at those companies by working hard and getting promotions.
Theoretically possible yes. But the pyramid is very very bottom heavy at McDonalds and Walmart where 90% of all employees make close to minimum wage. It would be better to start in corporate at Walmart and work your way up there, rather than to start as a restocker or cashier or warehouse worker -- all of which are at risk of being further automated.
There will never be post-scarcity, because we'll never have enough. Using cutting-edge technology always requires people to work hard to build said technology. If it didn't require work and just wishful thinking we'd already have it. The builders and engineers will always want _something_ in exchange or they won't make said tech accessible to you. The curiosity of nerds only gets you so far (see open source UX).
Maybe you won't have to work/pay for food if accounting for it becomes more work than producing it (if sufficiently automated and not resource-constrained). But if you want to live in a hip neighborhood (by definition there is limited availability), have your own flying car, go on vacation on the moon once a year where real people service you etc. you'll have to work for that. Because the ingenuity and work necessary to make this all happen will still be enormous.
Maybe you think you'd be happy with your today's lifestyle, which might be attainable for ~free. But I think the reality for most is that they'd grow jealous of their friends posting selfies from the moon and resent "the evil rich" again.
The small amount of work necessary to _survive_ today would sound marvelous to someone from even 100 years ago (clothes, food, shelter outside major cities). Mowing one lawn for 1-2h every day would probably be enough for that. But surviving isn't the point of being human, it's about stretching the limits of what is possible and that will always take as much work as we are willing to put into it.
The greatest kings of history had a worse standard of living than much of humanity has today. Certainly the average American has a vastly superior standard of living.
Think of things the ancients could only dream of that are available to most people in developed nations:
- Fast transportation
- Antibiotics
- Instant global communications
- All of human knowledge in your pocket
- Climate controlled buildings
- Access to the global supply chain for goods
Yet scarcity persists, and people want more because wants are relative.
A thousand years from now, people will be jealous of others who have an annual off-world holiday, a family jet, life-extension therapy... And even then, lots of people will work hard because they want to improve their standard of living.
As long an human minds remain bound to human bodies, then we are limited by the finite resources of the physical world.
It never actually seems to come though. I wouldn't count on it.
I believe that getting something for nothing is usually not sustainable. Just because you serve no purpose to those giving the things away for free. Something will give (some type of resource constraint will arise, even if it is just competitive/alternatives) and it will fail if you are not providing value.
If you think in terms of money, then yes. But people can certainly provide value that cannot be measured in money and profits. And for me that's the whole idea of have a post scarcity society where you don't have to work.. I'm fairly sure that most people would actually start providing value on their own and for the good of society if they weren't forced to think about money.
It's only been, what a few hundred years since the industrial revolution began? We haven't given it enough time for the innovators to figure out how to manufacture the needs of society in an overflowing plentiful way that's also automated & low effort. Some things never will be of course.
On the other hand, here in the US we throw out something like 60% of the food we produce and have an obesity problem. One could argue that we've kinda already reached post-scarcity for feeding people, yet people still go hungry.
Post-scarcity is a pipe dream. Even amoeba understand that life is a competition for resources. Stand still and you die.
Even if the whole world lived in a post-scarce global society, there would be wars fought over who controls the supply chains, who lives downtown and who lives uptown, who eats veal and who eats chicken, etc. And there would be entrepreneurial types who are willing to trade food for lumber, or land for sex.
I don't like what I'm going to say, but post scarcity can't come without either a worldwide culture change or an exploding population that would lead back to scarcity.
We are still animals, and evolution is still a thing. We're clearly a k-selected species, but in post scarcity, what's to stop a portion of us from becoming r-selected?
What’s malicious about only being able to cut 50 heads of hair per day or being government mandated to only watch 5 kids per adult?
Nothing. The reality of cutting hair curtails the first mans ability to be a billionaire and the needs of the tiny humans out way the desire of their watchers to maximize their income (which would still be far below billionaire status because the ability to watch a kid is limited by nature as well).
Capture the signup cost of a new onboard to your software? Capture the profit of selling toilet paper to the west coast? Grab a percentage of sales from everyone sales man hired after you?
Those things can scale by their nature and so the people in control of them will scale their capital accordingly.
I would argue the very existence of the tech giants prices there is no malicious entity out there holding down the little people. Just the facts of life. There are only so many scaling jobs (millions of singers, only a few hundred like Beyoncee) and competing against an entrenched interest means you bear the full cost of switching me from my chic fil a tea addiction to your bucket-o-chicken branded one. Good luck with that, I’m headed to chic fil a right now because just thinking about it was enough to remind me of all the good memories and want another one right now. It’s not the tea, I’ll drive past 20 people selling sweet tea to get there, it’s the chic fil a sweet tea.
Your haircuts are a strawman response, but a fine point independant of my own I suppose if you like to tell coal miners to "Just Learn to Code". I guess I'd like to see the hair dresser demanding they become a billionaire from cutting hair.
Here's the quotation's context:
> You need to find a way to work hard such that your rewards are not capped artificially. Startups were you get equity. Large companies where you can progress to high salaries if you are able to rise. Starting your own business and being competent at it. Working on commissions in an area where the commissions can be large -- true sales, or real estate. Being a professional, e.g. doctor, accountant, lawyer, has traditionally had high wages and you often run your own business.
I read the artificiality being the fact that CEO salaries are XXX% in excess of workers' pay, or workers getting unlivable wages requiring multiple jobs while Csuites getting bonuses in excess of an entire division's wage budget, or the fact that HN recommends quitting your tech job every 2 years because your yearly bonus will pale in comparison to the % increase over your salary a new hire in your divisioin will get, or the many documented effects of systemic racism, or unjust tax laws, or any miriad of heinous shit that goes on in our current economic system.
> I would argue the very existence of the tech giants prices there is no malicious entity out there holding down the little people. Just the facts of life.
Bozos 'committing' 1B$/y to a space pissing contest with some dude he worked with a lifetime ago while the people who enable that wealth are peeing in bottles and lying dead and unnoticed for 20 minutes are 'facts of life' to you?
Makes me wonder if your chicken tea addiction is actually politically motivated.
>Many services like Uber or InstaCart or even McDonalds or Amazon Warehouse or Walmart or Retail Sales or call center, you can work hard but there is no where to progress to. Your rewards are capped.
Having worked at Walmart/Retail/Call center/Franchised food service earlier on in my life and I would have to say "there is no where to progress to" is not exactly true.
Excluding food service where I worked directly for the owner, management team, at least at the store/region level, all came through the ranks. Don't get me wrong it's likely very competitive and not trivial to become a store/regional manager, and presumably some hard work/luck were needed in all cases. However, that's no different from any other careers.
This is a naive set of statements, even the ones without tone-deaf conditionals like "if you are able to rise" and "if you can get something better".
Here's a run-on reality of your statements.
"Startups were you get equity." ... that gets watered down and most of which goes to investors and founders, who will force a sale after 5-7 years when they get into a pinch and all you get is a $75k retention bonus that doesn't offset the opportunity cost of not having gone to work for an established company, if you're not let go after being acquired.
"Large companies where you can progress to high salaries if you are able to rise." ... based upon your ability to play politics and join the right factions, if you're the right skin color and social class and age group, and ignore that fact that by sticking around "to rise" you're limiting your salary increases that would come from jumping ship every 2-3 years, if you're in an area where there's a dense concentration of businesses that require your skillset.
"Starting your own business and being competent at it." ... which requires capital that a bank usually grants you in the form of a loan because your parents aren't rich, but if you're the wrong skin color or social class, you don't get that loan and your business ends up being mostly an expensive hobby because you're still working a 9-to-5 (or 2 part-time jobs) so that you don't starve and become homeless.
"Working on commissions in an area where the commissions can be large -- true sales, or real estate." ... where you discover that you simply can't pick up any high priced asset and sell it, because someone is doling out the leads while also taking a sizable cut of your commission despite you "working hard" to obtain it, especially if you're not the same skin color as and part of the in-group of the persons giving you the sales leads.
"Being a professional, e.g. doctor, accountant, lawyer, has traditionally had high wages and you often run your own business." ... that require years of specialized schooling during which you aren't earning much money and are likely going into massive 6-figure debt, because your parents aren't rich and are also in debt and then you hope and pray that you can overcome the various artificial hurdles that professional associations put in place to enforce scarcity and exclusivity and then after all the "hard work" you get to either join a company of professionals and play out one of the previously stated scenarios or try to start your own business, which require various forms of legally required insurance (malpractice, etc), acceptance into various trade networks, leasing an office.
But I do agree you are correct that switching jobs every couple of years is an effective way of raising your salary often faster than if you stayed in the same place.
I don't feel that way, but as someone who has personally been through most of these scenarios your statements come off as blithe and without nuance. Becoming successful really isn't as easy and hand-wavey as you make it out to be.
You need to find a way to work hard such that your rewards are not capped artificially. Startups were you get equity. Large companies where you can progress to high salaries if you are able to rise. Starting your own business and being competent at it. Working on commissions in an area where the commissions can be large -- true sales, or real estate. Being a professional, e.g. doctor, accountant, lawyer, has traditionally had high wages and you often run your own business.
You need to work hard in a way that has unlimited rewards, or at least high rewards possible, and that aligns with your aptitudes.
You need to not work hard at a minimum wage job if you can get something better.
And if you are stuck in a minimum wage job, maybe you can organize with your fellow employees to demand better wages and benefits? This is also another way of working hard in order to get more for yourself.