Wow, I think I might just have a fundamentally and axiomatically different worldview from this guy. American society is oriented almost entirely towards productivity, to the detriment of all else. The owner class has made it their personal mission to squeeze the population for all the productivity they can. It required government intervention to end, for example, slavery and child labor. Billionaires, especially the "productive" ones, are actively hollowing out the country for their benefit. I think it is astronomically rare, if not impossible, to acquire One Billion dollars without unethical behavior.
I cannot comprehend the connection between productivity and democracy that he tries to draw here. So there is some nebulous productivity score, and if you have a negative number, then democracy is over? Nobody can vote? What happens? And being a good person is stapled exclusively to productivity? The only value a person brings to the world is whether they've been "net positive"? This is a remarkably narrowminded conception of personal virtue, discounting relationships, classical virtues, etc., and instead crunching it all down to whether you're in the black or the red when the accountant calls.
"The unproductive rich are in cahoots with the unproductive poor to take from you." is a genuinely bonkers thing to think. Cahoots? Are they communicating methods to steal your hard earned "productivity" from you, or what? The "unproductive poor" are a downstream effect of a society where productivity is tied to whether or not you can stay alive.
Additionally, (but not centrally) this whole piece has a call-to-action tone to it, implying that, now the author has weighed in, everyone has to get a grip and start acting right. "Private equity, market manipulators, real estate, sales, lawyers, lobbyists. This is no longer okay." Alright everyone, I'm putting my foot down! Annoying, but not a core problem.
The strange thing is that I agree with the end goal. Yes, there is a rent-seeking/email-job class of society that adds no value. Yes, manual/physical labor should be treated better. Yes, productivity is largely desirable, and society would benefit overall if we produced more. But he gets to these conclusions in such a strange and stilted way. Overall, I really dislike this blog post.
My experience with Haskell has been the same. The GHC provides stellar feedback, so the LLM is almost always able to bang the code into working order, but wow is that code bloated.
> The whole point is mainly one about being honest about WHY we have to work 40-60 hours a week so we can stretch to afford a million-dollar starter home, two luxury cars, designer clothes, and IG-worthy vacations.
I have never met a single person of my generation for which this holds true. If this is the perspective that the author is trying to refute, fine, but I cannot say that it is a common one.
> $200,000 in savings would give you $10k a year in interest income to live on at current rates, for instance.
Come on. Most Americans will never see $200K in their life. [1]
This opens an interesting possibility for a purely symbol-based legal code. This would probably improve clarity when it came to legal phrases that overlap common English, and you could avoid ambiguity when it came to language constructs, like in this case[1], where some drivers were losing overtime pay because of a comma in the overtime law.
Interesting. In what ways? I haven't heard anyone express this concern before.