> > However, this requires a level of initiative and agency that most employees never exhibit

Even if some aspects of that might be true on the individual level, this take is the classic "blame the individual, but don't question the system."

Nothing about the concentration of capital by mega-corporations (enabled by tax policies they pushed). Nothing about the unfolding multigenerational disruptions by AI on the white collar job market. Just the old well laundered "bootstraps" argument.

Filing frivolous lawsuits is also a right but we don't withhold our criticism of that practice. What Atherton did seems like the wealthy person's equivalent of that, down to it being dismissed. Legal? yes. Cynical and amoral, also yes.

Did the article provide a direct answer to this? I see the $20M delay payments to contractors and the rise of labor costs cited, but is that all?

Who is "we all"? To me, it sounds like the relative few who happen to have those jobs that have the 10x productivity boost but also receive the monetary upside (via ownership).

The rest of the hard-to-automate jobs will likely see their wages crater as the workers whose jobs got automated flood those labor markets - i.e. office worker turned skilled physical laborer.

This will further enrich the previous small group relative to the masses, as they will pay lower prices and receive higher quality goods and services due to competition between everyone else. Prices will fall not by miraculous AI robots but by squeezing labor.

This is the scenario - neofeudalism - that may await us absent strong mechanisms to replace the broad productivity redistribution the social technology known as "jobs" provided. Hardly a good thing.

Flush with the rest of the roof seems like a mistake. What if you need/want to replace them with a different sized panel?

California is like 5% of the land mass of the contiguous 48 states.

Just because it is out of a drought doesn't negate the article.

For those who aren't aware, A123 made the batteries for the GM EV1, which GM famously killed after killing the CA clean air regulation that gave rise to it.

It's hard to expect people to sacrifice a comfortable non-extravagant lifestyle for principles.

Are there some purely money-centric lambo loving single sociopaths at companies like Meta? Sure.

However,there are probably many more employees who are not thrilled about the company's business model but dependent on the pay, while living in a system concentrates wealth and access to both capital and doesn't guarantee or make affordable the aforementioned basics of modern life.

Hopefully many of them wake up to the folly the system that makes u like Meta (or Apple, Google, etc) effectively gatekeepers of a good standard of living, but until then it's hard to question their motivation for working at these companies "for the money".

Tangential, but by being that, it's also refreshingly human writing, vs the both-sidesy bullet listed AI pablum that's all around us these days.

I have zero take on the subject matter, but I like that the article had a detectably human flair.

And if it was AI written, god help us.

Are the businesses from who they buy ag inputs in the red states not compensated at market rates for the raw materials they provide?

Do the red states also not receive massive taxpayer funded farm subsidies for the corn and wheat they grow from the federal government?

Minnesota's GDP is higher because it has a larger population and a more diverse and greater value-added economy than it's its ag focused neighbors.

It's GDP per capita is actually lower than its very sparsely populated neighbor, North Dakota, but the economic power of a jurisdiction ultimately comes from its population*productivity.

"Criminality" is too broad a characterization. It covers both assault and petty theft. I never said the poor are more criminal as a group than any other group.

People in poverty are more likely to commit petty theft out of need. Similarly, people who are very wealthy are more likely to commit large scale tax evasion out of greed. Both are financial crimes, but they are not committed equally by both groups.

> Punishing crime and preventing it (like shoplifting) helps poor people, too.

Yes, and so does giving people in poverty a step up out of life circumstances that make them more likely to commit petty crimes (like shoplifting).

Similarly, punishing large scale financial crimes by the wealthy (something that has basically stopped of late) would benefit everyone, from the poor to the wealthy. In fact, punishment may be the only disincentive for financial crimes by the wealthy, since they don't want for anything else.

There is not such a strong distinction. Organized crime groups often use poor people who have few alternatives as the pawns of their theft and fencing operations. People with other better options don't usually take up petty crime as a vocation.

Yes. Also a klepotocracy

They have struck a really good balance between traditional interfaces and the benefits of screens.

I'd like to believe this, but the proof is in the pudding, the pudding being how they vote. Apart from a few well known politicians, most of them aren't running on a platform of countering oligarchs.

A HNer might ask themselves: do I vote for the future where preserve low taxes in case I become massively wealthy, or do I vote for the future where I work for my income?

Let me clarify: Few in the mainstream of current politics and media want to discuss higher taxes on the uber wealthy (1B and up) - much less the very wealthy (100M and up).

It's only happening in a few places at the state and local level, but that's challenging because of the ability of the wealthy to move residence between states (something the pied a terre tax cleverly works around).

It also seems to have a lot more purchase these days in forums like this. My comment above about raising taxes would likely have received much more opposition 10 years ago. It seems like the consciousness here has shifted, probably because many here have a front row seat to the emergence of the tech oligarchy.

Spending is only one part. The part that almost nobody wants to touch is raising taxes to support the spending.

> Haha, no, it inspires motivation for finding a new job. Interview prep takes time

Everyone's circumstances are different. Many people - especially those with dependents - would reasonably be afraid. Whether that would inspire lasting productivity is questionable. It could also inspire less productive ways of getting ahead.

Unless your parallel universe has a more (not perfectly) equal distribution of capital and resources, it would have ended up here in some other form.