Comment by jstarfish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jstarfish | Hacker News Reader

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> but when these people say they'd rather do this than toil in the fields for $2 I have to say, as disgusting as it is, it's their choice.

It's not that simple! This looks to be the case when you're the center of your own universe, but the effects cascade to everyone around them-- once landlords and merchants realize all these wage slaves now have money to burn, they raise prices of everything to capture as much of that as they can. You can no longer remain solvent as a $2 rice-picker; in order to compete with the prostitutes, you're forced to become one yourself. It's only the illusion of choice; if there were a way to make that much money through other means, you'd be doing it already.

This "hack" only works if you're among the first few people to do it. Once everybody is doing it, supply outpaces demand, and now you have to do something even more degrading to stand out from the others in competing to earn the privilege of sucking off some schlub. It's a race to the bottom...and beyond.

Lack of control for inflation is why UBI won't ever work, and why fraud and prostitution are problems. Much as we can't survive off of eating our own shit, you can't have a sustainable economy or civilized society built on rampant cannibalization.

How is this any different than Amazon workers being forced to piss into bottles and people becoming homeless due to medical debt?

That's why we'll never have UBI: because people are (apparently) fine with this.

It's the exact same thing and every bit as shitty.

As long as we- as a society, allow people to prey (read- profit) off other people it will remain this way.

I believe more and more of us are not OK with this, but it doesn't matter.

The problem is that the people with the money have the power to keep things as they are.

Voting doesn't work, they lobby and own our government.

We need a new way of doing things.

I wrote much, much longer comment that said basically this.

I am not okay with this, and I noticed that people just say "Well it's better than starving" like that's the obvious other choice.

I don't think it is - we could get rid of the system that causes this, or modify it somehow.

There are too many people who just can't see past the system at all. It's like Newspeak where they can't even form a thought that the system could be at fault.

It's because it's not the system that causes this. Life causes this.

There was a time not that long ago where every human born on this earth had to claw through the mud day in and day out to scrape together survival. A lot of people still live this way, as do all wild animals, and it was like this for all of time before, for every living creature on this earth. This is the nature of life. The system you talk about has created a world where a lot of humans, the majority of them and more humans than even existed 100 years ago, do not have to claw their way to survival until the fateful day they fail. That's not to say it still isn't hard to survive, but it is not as hard for most people as the natural state.

I'd like a world too where nobody has to suffer indignity to feed themselves, but that world requires more of what we have created, not less.

Doesn't price raising only work if there is either 1.an enormous wealth disparity between the lower and upper classes or 2. the upper classes have a monopoly on violence? The only way competition shouldn't be able to cancel out this price inflation is if the "wage slaves" can't say "maybe i should take this extra money and start my own landlord business, and undercut those assholes who just raised prices".

After all, in other first world counties, even those without strong regulations, landlords and merchants don't capture all of your profit.

Your second point about supply of this type of content outpacing demand is valid, though.

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