I think the problem is that the best and brightest (of which HN’s readership is a plausible sample) dislikes this observation: a great many people who rarely use anything but hard rationality still believe that not only will they be the one to join the tiny elite (can’t be all of them, most are wrong by construction), but that this is acceptable.
Of secondary importance is what a depressing commentary this is on the ethical caliber of our intellectual elite.
Of primary importance is that only a tennis court and a guillotine will stop them, something one hopes we’d all like to avoid.
We've faced a similar version of this problem before, in the 1910s and 1920s. What happened in that case was a global depression, followed by reforms (in some places) and communist/fascist takeovers in others. Then we had a world war.
Hopefully this disproportionately influential community would like to see more of the reform side of things and less of the war side of things?
People are always talking about a “post-scarcity” world, but isn’t that in some sense globally true while locally false today? The US (which I appreciate is not the whole world but a signal example of having just passed the knee in the hockey-stick on Gini) burns something like 30-40% of key agricultural outputs as ethanol representing a net disaster on emissions.
At what point do we acknowledge that we actively choose a governing/managing/ruling class that has no upper bound on conspicuous consumption? Yachts don’t cut it anymore, now you’re not a player until you’ve got a fucking private space program.
I did very well in my career once and might again, and I remember feeling outright guilty when I had a house with “his and hers” sinks in the bathroom, that felt really opulent (because it is).
Bezos has “his and hers” custom private jets that fly more often than many people drive or train (this is public record), a huge airplane carrying one passenger sometimes daily.
I hear a lot of hot air about universal basic income and stuff, but what’s stopping our leaders? Corporate profits shatter record after record, rank and file workers are choosing between basic necessity A or necessity B, you could have lower margins and pay people Universal Basic Income in the form of a living wage. Then it’s not even big government or “welfare” or some other boogeyman.
They’re just dark triad liars, it’s just nonsense, the elite are not trying to change the world for the better: they’re trying to dig deeper moats and build higher walls around consumption that’s gone from conspicuous to fucking genocidal.
Of secondary importance is what a depressing commentary this is on the ethical caliber of our intellectual elite.
Of primary importance is that only a tennis court and a guillotine will stop them, something one hopes we’d all like to avoid.