Comment by delis-thumbs-7e | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delis-thumbs-7e | Hacker News Reader

delis-thumbs-7e

I skimmed three articles of this publication: one saying the more permittent zoning policies on historic urban areas would allow more growth and more environmentally sustainable buildings; other saying Europe is falling behind its auto-manufacturing and does not have its own Tesla, because they cannot kick out workers fast enough; third that Australia stopped asylum seeker by simply preventing boats coming in (and breaking international law?) and eu should do the same. So basically all of them are just lib news media feel-good “progressive yay!” style used to sell conservative capitalist ideas. Destroy historic urban centres so we can make money building dystopian hellholes, kick out the workers and smash the unions so we can pay ourselves bigger dividends and stop the asylum seekers escaping the horrid conditions of ex-colonial nations we created over centuries regardless of whether they deserve an asylum or not.

Here’s my pitch for an article: “Why You Not Using Your Democratic Power And Letting The Billionaires Decide On Everything Is Good, Actually”. How much do they pay per sentence?

The problem with that worldview is that it's always the same look from the same perspective that is, the economic machine is an extractive system (top <- bottom) and the colonial system is entirely responsible for the current state of the countries a lot of people are trying to leave.

Your perspective ignores the fact that some of "us, the people" are actually benefiting from this economic machine/collective organization. In industrialized societies, it's been decades that even the people at the bottom of the social ladder have "more to lose than their chains". And no matter how morally responsible ex-colonizing nations are, it is a fact that newcomers have to be somewhat integrated economically and culturally and that no society knows how to do that at the scale of arrivals. It turns out reality is not as simple as our moral world is and it takes time and thankless work to figure out what's happening. Morality is somewhat well-equipped at handling relationships and at maybe detecting the economic/political systems failure modes but it is not well-equipped at solving societal issues.

The truth is that it is easy to attribute merit and blame but har to actually trying to make relevant change. Our vision of History is somewhat biased because we remember people who were responsible for positive change as people with the "right" position but it is often forgotten how much strategy, technical issues they've had to solve fort those to prevail :

https://www.amazon.fr/-/en/Waging-Good-War-Thomas-Ricks/dp/1...?

You do not only misunderstand completely what I am saying, but contibute me a worldview that I do not have.

Yes, I am familiar with the economic rise of postwar Europe/US and how it contributed to wellbeing to not just workers in the west, but also final collapse of those old empires and liberation of those colonised nations from their European masters (what happened after that in many of them is another story). The improved living standards were not just some automatic by-product of economic growth, but series of political decisions made how to share that wealth. This was linked to not strong labour and democratic movements to force that wealth to be distributed more equally. After 70’s you look at purchasing power and living standards stagnating and both political and economical power becoming more and more concentrated on small elite to the point that now you can just bribe the US president to do an executive order you want.

My point is that this sort of pseudo-liberal “Well, Achsually” -technocratism presented by this publication is just a thin veil for business as usual rentier capitalism, that only benefits a very small elite. We have democratic ways to solve these problems, but that will mean some billionaires having to settle for being centimillionaires.

I have no doubt that you are I was in no way looking down on the role of organized labor and pro-labor movements into getting the majority decent living standard. On the other hand, labor was already well-organized, so what changed ? I'd say the ability to harness ever more so energy to a point where it was abundant. All of our standard of living is downstream of cheap energy. It feeds the machine and the machines work for us. Now we have a stake in the system because we rely on it much much more.

> After 70’s you look at purchasing power and living standards stagnating and both political and economical power becoming more and more concentrated on small elite

Is it the case though ? Probably it was more concentrated than in the decades before but I have a hard time to believe that it's more concentrated now than when we had political posters denouncing the "200 families" that ran the country. Anyways I am against the concentration of wealth and I am even against the existence of billionaires (I believe individual wealth should be capped so that it doesn't become political power) but I think your view of those articles is uncharitable. It is a binary worldview where people are either for labor or mouthpieces for capital and I just don't believe you get anywhere interesting with that approach, imputing motives has little value compared to actually try to respond to the arguments being made

> just a thin veil for business as usual rentier capitalism, that only benefits a very small elite

Trying to figure out how to best organize cities and develop them in the best interest of the public while trying to cap the negative externalities of development is a worthwhile endeavor

So I tried to check but at least in France the concentration of wealth was decreasing until 1980 when it started to raise again until now. We are now back at the 1935 level where 1% has 40% of the wealth

EDIT: For the U.S same tendancies but you started from lower concentration and you also sit at 40% now

> Destroy historic urban centres so we can make money building dystopian hellholes

I'm not sure I took that away from this article so much as "Architects and planners need to stop building ugly-ass monstrosities so people might actually celebrate urban renewal again".

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