> You can have a family, a house be sustainable but not earning enough to be able to pay for a year off of work.
I think we have different definitions of "sustainable", then.
What you're describing sounds one step up from living paycheck to paycheck. And the fact that "most people are in that position!" doesn't make it a good position to be in, or a necessary one.
I don't see this as much different from "sure, if you don't have a million dollar mortgage and 2 car payments to cover!"
Having a family is partially a financial decision. People should make the decision with eyes wide open, having planned for it. Achieving a financial position above sustenance before having the expensive family is generally a good idea. Same as buying the house and cars.
You're on a discussion board filled with software developers and tech employees generally. The vast majority of such workers make a lot of money. If you're working in tech and you can't bank enough to take 6m-1yr off, you're doing your finances wrong. It doesn't require a trust fund to avoid the hedonic treadmill and save up.
If you're frequently being paged for stuff you literally can't fix, then the process/monitoring/alerting has broken down somewhere and needs to be fixed. If it can't/won't be fixed, then the company needs to hire ops people whose specific job is to react to and triage system failures -- devs should not be treated as escalation machines. If the process can't be fixed and the company won't hire people to handle the process, then you quit.
> I don't understand why so many large companies use platform abstractions.
At a certain point you'd rather have your developers focusing on tackling domain complexity, not stack complexity. If I can normalize my developers' skillsets I can shuffle them around at will to address whatever problems the business/product needs to be addressing -- quickly. Can't do that as easily if you need to do a bunch of platform-specific stuff as well.
A big problem IME is people tend to define "simple" as "written in a style I prefer". For example you can extract a series of 10 obviously-related methods from some 2000-line God class into their own class, but have others who are used to a more procedural coding style complain that the indirection is "hard to read" because they need to open a new file. This despite the facts that others find the God class "harder to read" because it contains 2000 lines of
code doing everything under the sun, and that class is objectively harder to maintain/change for everyone because nobody knows what things are necessary to change to achieve some goal, because there are no logical boundaries between code functions so you can't tell what needs changing without reading everything.
Cue endless bikeshedding in the name of "simplicity", which nobody is using an objective metric to define.
Your summarization of Marxism as an appeal to jealousy is a reductionist joke. Marxist doctrine wouldn't even recognize the legitimacy of ownership in the way you are describing, so the notion of striving for equal individual ownership of goods as a spark to action is nonsense.
Your link to The Gulag Archipelago as an expository on Marxist doctrine also reveals a complete ignorance of what Marxism even is, on a very basic level. The Gulag system was a pure product of Stalinism, which was an implementation of communism that directly rejected Marxist doctrine. Explicitly and directly. Communism is not stalinism is not bolshevisim is not marxism.
The turn to marxist criticism in humanities academia really has nothing to do with anyone wanting to lead a revolution or thinking they will overthrow capitalism or whatever. It is a reaction to lived experience that expresses itself in a particular mode of analysis.
"In the world around me, the economy is imploding and everyone is anxious and on edge and complaining about inequality. I think I'll interpret this novel through the lens of Marxist cultural criticism as a reflection of how I experience the world right now" is all that is going on.
Can we not be intentionally dense for a second? Obviously Marx wasn't talking about you personally as in whatever identity you (delusionally) think constitutes you. He thought there was some fundamental characteristic common to all human beings, so speaking of you as a generality makes sense within the framework, since as a human you'd have that characteristic.
But I'm pretty sure you knew that, and were just being difficult.
I think we have different definitions of "sustainable", then.
What you're describing sounds one step up from living paycheck to paycheck. And the fact that "most people are in that position!" doesn't make it a good position to be in, or a necessary one.