[quacked]

Do you mean "make the kind of money", or "live the kind of lifestyle"?

In order to provide you with the lifestyle you take for granted, several million actions must be undertaken by people around the globe (drill for oil, watch hospital patients, build N95 masks, etc). My question is- how many of those actions could be undertaken by people who consider themselves "brainy", the completion of which would guarantee a similar lifestyle to those same brainy people?

I know this is a little utopian- I don't have a full stack solution made up- but when your street gets a pothole, some man comes out and fixes it in the hot sun. Why don't you fix it? Well, you don't have the tools, or the expertise, or the legal right to do it. Furthermore, you don't have the time to do it, because you work 40-60 hours per week yourself at a white collar job (I'm assuming, given you're on HN during the workday). Many people think that someone's full-time "job" should be fixing potholes, and so people think "well I'd never fix potholes, I don't want that as my career". But wouldn't you learn how to fix potholes if you only had to fix potholes when they showed up near you, instead of for 40-60 hours per week every week?

[nradov]

Fixing potholes properly so that they stay fixed requires some specialized equipment. It's not the kind of stuff that everyone can keep in the corner of their garage. I certainly don't want random neighbors doing it because they'll end up making the situation worse for everyone.

[quacked]

Jesus Christ, this is like trying to convince the blind men that the elephant exists. What, do you think it takes a lifetime of practice to operate specialized equipment? They send a crew of high school dropouts and semi-fluent immigrants to do the potholes in my street and the potholes are fixed just fine.

You can walk on to a pothole crew and be considered a functional crew member inside a single season. Sure, I don't want you fixing my potholes because you don't know how to do it, but if I happened to live next to those pothole guys, I'd be happy with my neighbors fixing my potholes. Now, let's assess the difference between them and you: they have at least a few hundred hours of pothole repair practice, and you don't. It's too bad that you're incapable of learning how to do that.

I bet you think that good grades are important, don't you? Without grades, you never know what kind of unqualified whack job might start Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Whole Foods, Uber, Dell, Dropbox... that's why we need those pothole guys to only ever work on potholes- you never know what kind of whack job might start jackhammering your street and "making the situation worse for everyone else".

[zozbot234]

> They send a crew of high school dropouts and semi-fluent immigrants to do the potholes in my street and the potholes are fixed just fine.

That's not really fixing the potholes, they're basically putting a band-aid on it and calling it a day. "Fixing" a pot-holed street in a long-term sense may require literally rebuilding that piece of the street from the ground up.