Comment by gryBrd1987 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gryBrd1987 | Hacker News Reader

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Race wars have been used to obfuscate a class war.

Historically minorities were prevented from being capital owners and as that changed aristocrats appealed to skin color while also routinely sweeping the legs out from under poor whites as they still do today, after enraging them stupid shit like tan suits and public protests.

Thanks to inflation, moving one or two income brackets is closer to staying in the same place. $100-200k year in the 80s is equivalent to $600-700k now. If parents made $50-60k then and junior makes $150k, the number tripled but the buying power is worse.

I don’t really understand why we cling to the hallucinations of elders who, given their ages, when they were educated, are “behind us” when it comes to scientific knowledge and intuition, and are gripped by paranoia and anxieties from Cold War and the world at war in their prime years.

They operate on economic models from a period of heavy demand due to war. Afflicted by sunk cost fallacy, evolved the behavior to disposable consumerism.

The last 80 years of economic growth are entirely due to the rest of the world needing to rebuild and the US having functional infra. There’s no way it was sustainable, as the correctness of such activity is merely one generations memory, not some immutable law of reality.

Any sufficiently numerate person can intuit the game being played. Bigger number! Oo! But prices on the market have gradually been inflated to prevent new workers being able to afford real assets, and as a result of other nations catching up and making the same demands.

> Historically minorities were prevented from being capital owners [...]

That overlooks the elephant in the room: land ownership.

Capital is used here as a euphemism for land ownership. Net worth being mathematical inference of how well land owner “capitalizes” on the possession of land.

Other asset classes came along because, well, useful land is finite, and to create new wealth holders to act as missionaries for the US dollar. “Yeah even this trash is worth money in the US!”

Valuations are arbitrary numerical assessments based upon the whims of the assessors (assignment of currency value to stuff is a social tradition; there is no science that suggests the universe values any bit of itself what with entropy ripping the universes stuff apart), and routinely inflated to validate investors past decision to “buy into” Murica.

Biology being largely unchanged in centuries (in a meaningful way given the context here), the issues in our culture can easily be assigned to political corruption as usual. All the high talk about separation of powers is laughable as DC pols rub elbows at private social events, discussing not systemic change for the public benefit but how to veil graft as justifiable given their intimate connection to our political norms.

Simple really. Most white collar crime is still the same old “deflect, project, until we can change the rules” as policing is conveniently unfunded.

The mathematical gap between classes must be maintained! Or Sauron himself will emerge from the lava of Mt Doom or some shit.

I say we post up at home, stop going to work except to maintain our communities locally, make Jamie Dimon and co knock on every door in the US looking for rent. But I’m weird that way. Except for 2A, I really lean into progressive doctrine, which often aligns with conservative doctrine but media intentionally stokes this stupid culture war to obfuscate it.

Land meets the definition of capital

Depends on your definition of capital.

Of course, you can make any system work with any definitions. It's just more cumbersome to eg state your theorems in cryptography, if your definition of prime numbers includes 1.

When talking about factors of production, it is useful to differentiate between labour, capital and land.

The main distinguishing factor between capital and land is that land is in fixed supply, but you can produce more capital.

i was going to reply land could be 'fixed capital' but doing some quick wiki shows as you say, land itself may not constitute as "capital" [0]... interesting

  Land itself is not included in the statistical concept of fixed capital, even though it is a fixed asset. The main reason is that land is not regarded as a product (a reproducible good). But the value of land improvements is included in the statistical concept of fixed capital, is regarded as the creation of value-added through production.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_capital

Thanks for looking things up!

Depending on your analysis, it can sometimes make sense to include land under fixed assets. Eg when you are running a company your accounting can perhaps treat durable assets and land the same?

If you are looking at whole economies, it's often useful to treat land separately. Even if that's not always done.

But I'm some kind of Georgist at heart, as you might be able to guess.

$100k in 1985 is equivalent to $275k in 2022 dollars[0]

[0]: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

If you use house price index instead of consumer price index, it’s in line with that OP said: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USSTHPI

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