[digging]

> It makes me feel like I'm just not worthy for life because hey, if they can make it, why can't I?

Honestly though, nobody should have to earn a decent living, regardless of level of ability. They're alive, and not by choice, so they should be able to enjoy it. Meritocracy is just cruelty when extended to the conditions of one's life - we want those with the fewest intrinsic resources be made to suffer? I don't.

[ryandrake]

"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." - Buckminster Fuller

[digging]

I've never liked that quote because without context the criticism of inspectors and their tools sounds foolish to me. Inspectors generally serve an extremely useful role, I think the friction is that they're people. I compare them to a linter. We should probably have more inspectors unless AI can do it more easily, because capitalists will cut corners, risking the health and lives of others, at basically any opportunity.

[ryandrake]

I don't think the quote was a specific dig against Inspection-related professions, but more a criticism of make-work (or so-called bullshit) jobs. Maybe a more modern version of the quote would replace "inspectors" with "administrators".

[Projectiboga]

This element of our society being so stingy with our bottom economic half hurts everyone as that half spend their money quickly and locally. The cutting taxes of the wealthy since "they'll invest more in 'creating jobs' and grow the economy" hasn't worked. That 'investment' went mostly to sweatshops in other countries. This is compounded with other draining tax breaks lije carried interest and the scam where corps by their own shares at a tax advantaged situation. The middle class has shrunk and standards of living have declined for I'd guess 2/3 or more of Americans.