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Comment by jongjong | Hacker News Reader

Kind of crazy to think that there are almost half as many buildings as people and yet me and my wife can't even afford the deposit to buy a single one on a mortgage after 10 years of saving, hustling hard, taught myself to code, got a university degree, worked in the tech sector, near the forefront of all the hot tech tends... Meanwhile, all this time, I'm told I'm privileged. I must be the victim of some kind of massive PsyOp conspiracy.

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You can buy a small house in rural America for $25,000

Rural Russia as well. But you will probably have to get your water from a well and poop into a latrine.

In my country (Australia), the cheapest I can get is like $250k USD equivalent... But that's a shack in the middle of the desert in some tiny ghost town. Even in a normal small town, houses are like $350k USD minimum. In capital cities, it's like $500k USD minimum for a tiny apartment... Top salaries for top senior software devs are like $130k USD before tax, taxed at about 40%... So take home pay is like $78k USD net income. Rent is like $22k per year minimum. Impossible to get fixed-rate mortgages; banks only only do variable rate... 20% minimum deposit. This is in a country with a LOT of spare land which is scarcely populated.

Your country exports timber to China and has a lot of empty land.

Who benefits from this situation ?

Queensland exports about 25% of timber production, but changes are now in progress to ensure local housing demands are met, as the current material costs are exobitant:

https://www.dpi.qld.gov.au/business-priorities/forestry/qld-...

Most of those buildings are so poor you probably wouldn’t even consider one outside the top 10% of the world for free assuming you want a first world kind of accommodation. Source: I’ve seen the world.

Many buildings will be commercial, industrial, military etc. That said one building can house 1000 people.

Oh, poor poor jongjong... my sympathies!

Chatting with ChatGPT:

Humans are in oversupply currently - for what needs doing.

And as we all know, products in oversupply lose their value.

The algorithms that drive the world are optimised for money and capital, humans are just one product in that structure.

Enjoy the ride.

IMO the real problem is that the monetary system creates asymmetries which create monopolies, which force everyone to participate in 'the economy' through rigid, inefficient, bureaucratic structures. People are literally not allowed to service each other, even through they have the time and capacity to so; simply because they do not have access to a specific currency which they are forced to use... That same currency is not universally scarce though; it's basically handed out to their biggest corporate competitors in large quantities via government contracts and from banks in the form of low interest loans. It creates a kind of fictitious planned economy which becomes increasingly inefficient and bureaucratic by the day; the money is the only quantity which is increasing (and only for some people), almost every other economic metric is decreasing. The real economy is hollowing out.

The financial system has become a giant game of Monopoly, but unlike Monopoly, when all the capital has accumulated with one player, this financial system isn't restarted and the wealth redistributed.

Instead it feels like playing Monopoly, round for round, and all the money goes to the one player with all the hotels and train stations and there is no opportunity for other players to obtain any property or wealth.

If you are lucky enough to be in the circle of that one player with all the wealth, good for you. For the rest of us, it's just rolling the dice and going in circles - round for round.

Yep pretty much. It's just absurd. I wonder if billionaires notice any difference at all going from a net worth of $100 billion to $200 billion. I doubt they feel any difference at all in their lifestyles or happiness levels. Maybe they just get a tiny amount of satisfaction knowing that they're a couple of billions above the next richest person... Well it's basically the same for everyone in this society. The monetary amounts go up but nothing else does.

For most people, it feels like opportunities evaporate and disappear into the void. Nobody gains anything meaningful from the monopolization of opportunities. One regular person's "opportunity of a lifetime" turns into a billionaire's "spam in the inbox".

It's lose-lose but the billionaire may think of this as neutral or "not a problem" from their end. Easily solved by a spam filter, an assistant and a personal security team.

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