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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

No it doesn't. It works better for 1% of the population. Everyone else is a health crisis away from bankruptcy.

Literally. That's all it takes in the US for everyone who doesn't have an eight-figure-or-more net worth to be staring ruin in the face.

Your comment is exactly the mythology that perpetuates the problem. Exploitation is sold as participation. "Well we're paid fairly well so I guess we must be privileged and upper class."

If you can't stop working tomorrow without ever having to worry about money again - including health crises - you are not privileged or upper class.

Please stop telling yourself you are.

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If anything it's the other way around - the 1% are going to be OK pretty much no matter what, it's everyone else that this matters for. Right now the US and most of the developed world does not have workers to spare for weird and potentially pointless speculative work of questionable value to society as a whole - they're struggling to find the workforce needed to supply the things ordinary people need and want, including stuff like healthcare. Just pointing at "supply and demand" and calling for pay rises, as I've seen so many do, does not solve this issue unless it causes a shift in workers from doing useless work to more useful work.

Because people are good judges of what is and isn't useful work?

Just like it's useless work to build a search engine when directories work well enough? Or useless to build an email service when ISPs already offered them?

I feel it’s important to properly look at the context of the layoffs.

The original article leads with mentioning the recent layoffs at Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. These are people who were making great money, and now have those companies on their resumes. I know they’re currently going through a rough situation, which should not be minimized.

It’s hard to take your argument seriously though, as there’s so much space between FAANG execs with 8 figure savings, FAANG workers making 200k+, and poverty. Being realistic about this helps your argument that those companies could have done better, not the exaggeration.

Everyone is one health crisis away from death, no matter how much wealth they have.

Whatever your complaints here are, start with having people working at a job where there is literally no-one willing to stand up and pay them their salary. That isn't going to be a society that can comfortably sustain people being unable to work. To have the level of surplus where a healthcare crisis is easily dismissed requires extreme economic efficiency.

If you want someone to be unable to work and just sitting around dealing with a personal crisis, then we really need the people around them to be working on things that get a "wow, yeah, that is important!" type reaction.

> Everyone is one health crisis away from death, no matter how much wealth they have.

Weirdly though, the number of health crisis that will lead to death are fewer the more wealth you have.

> Everyone else is a health crisis away from bankruptcy

But that's exactly why we have bankruptcy. You know the word doesn't mean "losing everything you have", it means "discharging debts you're never going to be able to pay", right? You can do it once, and it ruins your credit for a long time (7 years IIRC), but it saves you from dying of starvation trying to pay off debts you don't have money to pay.

might be a better idea to have a system where you don't need to go into debt to stay alive

Just like if you ask an alcoholic what is too many drinks they’ll say “one more than I drink”, it’s hilarious reading comments from tech people who are arguably some of the highest paid people in the US say “the upper class are people who make more than I do”.

It’s incredibly tone deaf.

It’s more nuanced than that:

1. Someone making $200k is definitely doing well compared to almost anyone in the US (94th percentile, 98th at $300k) but those salaries are heavily clustered in very expensive areas where that might not even be the top 10%. Someone making that much working at Apple or Google is living in a normal house - a nice one, sure, but not a mansion - and still feeling things like childcare costs.

2. That tech worker has to go to work every day. If they get sick, their income will end just like someone making coffee or pulling packages in a warehouse - to be clear, not as quickly and there are more conditions they can keep working with, but their income is derived by selling their time. Contrast that with the truly rich, who have passive income and enough assets that things rearrange around their needs. Someone with $10M in the bank isn’t homeless if they get a chronic illness, and if they own the company (or are related to the owner) they get as much time off as they need to deal with it.

Nobody should feel sorry for tech workers but it’s important to look at how people’s lives differ, especially in the United States where things like healthcare and retirement are linked to their ability to work.

Im not not sure what point #1 means. They own a house in a HCOL area - the very definition of being upper class and privileged!

A billionaire might “feel” the cost of his private jet fleet but that doesn’t mean he’s not rich.

It means that their income is linked to unavoidably higher burn rate, making it seem like their life is more elite than it actually is. For example, how nice is a $1M house in Silicon Valley compared to a $1M house in Podunk? The latter is a rich person’s lifestyle choice, the former is wanting to have room for kids and less than an hour commute. Unlike that hypothetical private jet, these are not optional expenses if the job doesn’t allow 100% remote – you need somewhere to live, if you aren’t wealthy but still want kids you need childcare until they go to school, etc.

And, again, I’m not saying that this is a pity-worthy situation – only that it’s a lot closer to the average worker than the average rich person in terms of having to go to work every day, think about finances, etc.

But it doesn’t work that way. The expense is the location itself not the house.

Your average middle class American could never afford to own anything in a HCOL city.

That’s the privilege.

Another argument you might appreciate - there is some practical limit to the number of people who can live in a HCOL area (from the available housing stock). Say that is N people. The market will organise itself so that the price is just high enough that person N+1 can't afford to live there.

Of course a lot of the people who live in a HCOL of living area feel like they can only just afford to live there. If they thought it was cheap, more of their class would move there - it is a desirable area. You have to be so rich that everyone in your wealth/income class can afford to live in an area before housing costs will be low enough to ignore. So the top 100 billionaires don't feel the housing costs of living in a HCOL area because all the billionaires in the world could probably move there and not fill up the available housing stock. But if all the millionaires in the world want to move somewhere then the price will be high enough that a millionaire feels like they can't afford to be in the area. And that is really just a subtle market hint that a lot of millionaires think it is a nice area. Doesn't make the people involved less rich.

That's pretty much it.

It doesn't matter the wealth or income someone has, there is always something they can't afford. So clearly the existence of "limited resources" is not a good indication of whether someone is wealthy or not.

But ignoring the type of house and it's location - if someone can afford the down payment and mortgage payments on a $2M homes (typical single family home in the Bay Area), the are objectively very well off.

The American people have repeatedly voted against universal healthcare. Since the 1950s actually.

Microsoft shouldn't be in the business of providing dental care for it's employees. Blaming corporations for the dismal state of the healthcare system is unfair.

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