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Comment by m1ndeater | Hacker News Reader

One thing I find frustrating is when people associate passive income with non-value producing shortcuts, scams, and poor ethics. Passive versus active income and scams versus providing real value are independent characteristics of a business; it's perfectly reasonable to create a "good" business that creates real value and earns passive income.

Passive income is one of my primary goals, so maybe that's why I feel like defending the term. Maybe the phrase just has bad connotations these days, but I don't think the idea of making money without having to actively work should come with immediate thoughts of shady affiliate programs and scummy endeavors.

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Precisely. Bonds, dividends, and investment or collected loan interest are all passive income. Rents and royalties are characterized as such. Done correctly, these are the traditional low-risk rewards of accumulating capital.

Ironically here in the beacon-of-capitalism USA, these were the first areas squeezed as an extremely nasty side effect of "stimulus."

I've only ever seen "passive income" get a bad connotation in the past few weeks here on HN. People should keep in mind too that these stories are entirely survivorship-biased, so perhaps the average affiliate effort loses money, I don't know, but it's certainly more complicated than "it goes away."

"Passive income" was once the province of people who accumulated wealth and now were reaping the benefits of good long-term strategies. That is honest enough.

Being a marketing middleman can be an honest enough niche, too.

That these particular marketing middlemen, with an intrinsically ephemeral revenue stream, would try to steal the term "passive income" to glamorize their take tells us a lot about the nature of the business, right? Fraud. Lots of fraud.

Those associations are there for a reason. Passive income means either you had enough initial capital to live off the risk-free rate on that long-term, or you're doing what amounts to arbitrage. And while arbitrageurs fulfil a valuable market function, they've been publicly hated since time immemorial.

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