[ilovepitchdecks]

There's no such thing as passive income; there's only delayed income. You're not getting paid for nothing; you're getting paid for putting in the work ahead of time. What's wrong with that?

I never claimed everyone has the same hourly income. Nor should they. Some people work hard (on their career - not necessarily at their current job!), others take it easy. Both are valid options, but there will be consequences for the respective groups (both good and bad).

If you're against inherited wealth, I expect you to leave none to your own children. Respect if you actually go through with this.

[MereInterest]

Again, incorrect in every way.

> There's no such thing as passive income; there's only delayed income.

Wrong. If you have $500k in assets, that yields an average of $35k/year, market average over interest. You get paid money for already having money. This is not additional work. This is additional money as a result of having money.

> Some people work hard (on their career - not necessarily at their current job!), others take it easy. Both are valid options, but there will be consequences for the respective groups (both good and bad).

The difficulty of work is absolutely unrelated to the amount paid. Many low wage jobs, such as customer service, landscaping, or meat packing are absolutely ruinous on one's physical and mental health. They are high effort, and low pay. Other jobs are low effort and high income.

Edit: For comparison, Jeff Bezos is 57 years old, and has $192.5 billion. If he were working 24/7 throughout his entire life, that comes out to $107/second. That is 53,140 times the minimum wage. There is no humanly possible amount of effort that is 50 thousand times harder than a minimum wage job.

> If you're against inherited wealth, I expect you to leave none to your own children.

Complete non sequitur. Inherited wealth is an example of how money, time, and effort are absolutely uncorrelated.

Following up on that non sequitur, though, there must be limitations to inherited wealth such that society doesn't separate into a landed gentry. You are also ignoring the middle ground between being against a generational aristocracy and forbidding inherited wealth altogether, such as an estate tax. Even if somebody is morally against inherited wealth, it is not inconsistent to still give wealth to their children, such that they can use it to lobby against inherited wealth. It's the same reason why I donate money to groups pushing for economic and tax reform, rather than deliberately paying more than the current tax rate. I still spend what I consider to be my fair share supporting society that way, and it goes toward making sure that others do as well.

[ilovepitchdecks]

It's interesting that you always preface your arguments with a conclusion. I wonder if that's how your thought process works as well.

You get paid for already owning money... that you had to earn previously. There are many other examples of something similar. If you do a really good job on a particular month, you might still get the same wage at the end of the month. But you might get a bonus at the end of the year. Or you might be promoted next year when a position becomes available. However, you will not get a bonus and will not get promoted if you quit your job/get fired in the meanwhile. Do you also consider this unfair?

I never talked about the difficulty of doing a particular job, be it meat-packing or customer service; I meant the emotional difficulty of leaving a bad job and the mental difficulty of making the right choices and being excellent in what you do. Working not for others, but for yourself.

If there are indeed 'low-effort, high-income' jobs, why isn't everybody doing them? Why don't you personally those low-income workers that investing in the stock market (to give an example) is 'easy' and 'guaranteed' to yield high returns?

In fact, many manual jobs are already being replaced by robots/AI. Yet people are complaining about losing their jobs. If you took my high-effort, low-income job away, I'd be eternally grateful.

In the case of billionaires, they don't get to spend all their money, so the comparison between them and a minimum-wage earner is not apt. Jeff Bezos is surely holding lots of paper, but until he spends it, it has no value. Do you have proof his spending is out of line? Besides, when you're rich you overpay for everything, which means higher income (with arguably the same amount of effort) for those who provide goods and services to you.

And I've never heard of children using their inherited wealth to... lobby against inherited wealth. If anything, they'd be more in favor of it. But I see the point you're trying to make. You're not part of the 'aristocracy' (whatever you mean by that word), which you means you hold a grudge against them. Little do you know that people poorer than you hold a grudge against you too (you're considered relatively well off) and would use the first opportunity do redistribute your wealth amongst themselves.

[eecc]

Dude, you're the personification of the bad-faith meme: Mister Gotcha.

While I entertained the idea of arguing with you, there is simply no point and I've come to the conclusion there are better uses for my time.

I'll just burn some points to point out how disagreeable I find your position.

[MereInterest]

Thank you for posting this, both for the support against his disagreeable position and for the reminder that engaging with people isn't always the best option. Sometimes I start by wanting to make sure that an abhorrent viewpoint has at least a visible reply, so that any readers don't see the comment as evidence of a community consensus. But that leads to me getting emotionally invested in an argument, trying to address whatever tangential non-arguments get pulled back in.

Partly, the interface of Hacker News or any vote-based commenting system makes it hard to track comments overall. I can look up comment trees relative to my own posts, but that doesn't show me that the user "ilovepitchdecks" has been arguing along the same lines with multiple other people in sibling comments. Their viewpoint isn't in any way a community consensus, and is being soundly addressed by the community, but that wasn't readily visible just from one thread.

All in all, a bit of a ramble, but I wanted to say thank you for posting this and that sometimes I need to just downvote and move on.

[ilovepitchdecks]

Well, your motivation is my motivation too, we just happen to have a different idea of what is 'abhorrent'. I'm just tired of seeing these kinds of political comments go unchallenged. It was my interest in tech that made me come on HN (I don't know about you) and I didn't expect to see so much one-sided political rhetoric here.

Who exactly is part of this 'community' you speak of? This site is on the public internet and open for anyone to join. I don't remember being asked to accept some political ideology when registering.

And this is exactly the problem with consensus: There never is one. Just because nobody speaks up, doesn't mean everyone agrees with you. Nor should they. I have been to those kinds of meetings where the majority of people don't voice a dissenting opinion or, in fact, any opinion at all. To interpret silence as agreement is just bad faith.

In fact, your narrow definition of 'community' is elitist and closely mirrors its use in the mainstream press (such as in 'international community', which just means 'the West').

[MereInterest]

So, this is against my better judgment, but I'll try to give a bit more description. You sound earnest here, and heck, you remind me a bit of myself from 15 years ago. That said, I want to focus entirely on the meta argument. I don't think there's any use in going further on the argument itself. To caricature our positions, at the end of this conversation, you can still think of me as a liberal communist who wants to tax away all of John Galt's hard-earned money, and I can still think of you as an idealist libertarian who thinks their lottery ticket into capitalism will pay off. But hopefully we'll be able to have better conversations in the future.

Many of your arguments are insufficiently defined. You make a statement, and then force others to assume what you meant from it in order to have any further conversation. When people do, you instead say that there was a different intended interpretation. For example, in the thread between you and me, the ambiguity of what you meant by time and effort earning money. Or, in your thread with "teddyh", your ambiguity about what you would like done to government.

In other cases, you ask questions that have obvious follow-ups or obvious follow-ups. They don't function as rhetorical questions, because the obvious follow-up works against the point you are making. Instead, they come across with the impression that you are deliberately wasting somebody's time by requiring somebody else to give the bare background information on a topic. For example, when you ask "If there are indeed 'low-effort, high-income' jobs, why isn't everybody doing them?". To me, the obvious follow-up is that there are structural imbalances that allow access to those jobs only to subsets of the population. We can talk about what those structural imbalances are and how they manifest, but needing to first establish that different people have different opportunities available to them is one step removed. That is what makes people feel that you are arguing in bad faith, because it makes the argument be on something that had been taken as given when entering the conversation.

Another part is that it is just so damn hard to tell the difference between earnest people and trolls. I know people personally who have your views. Heck, I had pretty close to your views for a while after reading Terry Goodkind's "Faith of the Fallen". But this is also the internet, where I don't know people other than by the few words in an individual comment, or a single comment thread. And depending on how far off somebody's views are from the Overton window of any particular forum, they can easily be the troll positions taken in order to rile up a crowd for their own amusement. Some people become desensitized to these attempts, and then assume that anybody with those views is automatically a troll. (See also, Brandolini's Law.)

I do honestly hope that you are sincere, and that this helps you to better express and examine your views in the future. It's hard to have conversation in a text-only medium, both because it is asynchronous communication, and because it doesn't have the side channel information of tone or facial expressions. Hopefully in the future, we can have more productive conversations and both come away the better for them.

[eecc]

You're welcome. I chose to earmark my dissent precisely for the same reason you ch engaged. I'm pretty done with the "silent majority" argument, but otoh I cannot drown myself in every quicksand :)

have a good one...

[ilovepitchdecks]

I didn't know that meme; it's actually funny. What's wrong with asking people to put their money where their mouth is? I thought engineers are not like these managers/salesmen/'talkers' that say one thing on the TED stage, then go do something completely different IRL and find that A-OK.

Don't argue with me then - but you should at least explain how anything I've said was in bad faith if you accuse me of that.

[randalluk]

Nobody in this discussion has said they're against inherited wealth. Just that its existence is one reason to favour "one person, one vote" over "one dollar, one vote"