In every HN comment section, there's always, 100% of the time, at least one person who only reads the title of the piece (in this case, a song lyric from The Verve) and still has the nerve to post a comment.

There must be a dozen or two "100% of the time" comments. Collect them all and make a mock/parody HN thread.

* Cryptocurrency

* Fiat currency

* Economics is not a real science

* I understand what the author is trying to say, but I don't like how he says it

* I didn't read the piece, but website that published it is problematic

* The title is clickbait, and I'm unaware of the concept of newspaper headlines

Well, yes, but to be honest - very often what they have to say is worthwhile even if you've read the piece. :-P

I tried skimming it and to me it wasn't too different from what POMO[1] might have come up with if it had been set up to generate a lot denser text.

[1]: http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/

So what? The headline is dumb. Nothing wrong with pointing that out and saying why.

The fact that you say you read the article and this attack was your best comment... well I’d say one of these comments is basically worthless and it’s not the guy who pointed out the problem with the title.

Furthermore, a lot of people go to the comments first for a variety of reasons. Nothing wrong with that either.

It’s also as old a story as Genesis 3:19.

“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."

Gensis is talking about farmers working the land for food. Modern work is an invention of man built on top of it, it's a degenerate replica in terms of satisifcation, necessity, meaning etc.

It's not the same story.

Edit: I'd like to see the downvoters argue against the notion that some work is more essential than other work. Hasn't the COVID-19 crisis opened your eyes to this reality?

That is not true. It is a metaphor for generic work.

"By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground"?

It was talking about honest, real work.

The cool thing about language is that it applies to more than just farming. Working any job for a paycheck just so you can buy groceries is also honest, real work.

Not all work is honest, and not all jobs that make money should be called work. Those are the ones that I'm discounting.

Did you interview the author? I'd like to read that.

That particular priest of the priestly class seeking to justify their predation of their bronze-age neighbors is probably dead. So, unfortunately, we are only left with their hagiographal and/or mythical prose.

You must be fun at parties.

Personal attacks will get you banned here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

Is it expected that I compose a tangential lengthy rebuttal to what amounts to a wildly ignorant hypothesis on the emergence of the Abrahamic faith's idea of an eternal God as a civilizing power in world history? I'd rather be pithy and insinuate anti-social behavior, because a proper socializing actually leads to a more mature appreciation of the facilitation of history between generations than something baselessly contrived, i.e. an argument from silence. Also, I don't have the power to downvote vacuous comments yet.

No, but it's expected that you do better than "You must be fun at parties." We're trying to avoid the classic downward spiral of internet forums here, or at least stave it off a little longer.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I'll aim higher next time, sorry for being lazy.

Appreciated!

A blast, yes. Thank you for your personality assessment on a scant sub-tweet sized comment.

Please don't respond to one bad comment with another. We just get a downward spiral that way. Instead, flag it and move on.

That's in the site guidelines too: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You literally judged it by its title alone, but congratz on knowing how to say ad reductio.

True but for a lot of people that's pretty much it. It would not be absurd to say: "For my 4 year old soccer is just pushing a ball".

except I remember being 4 and I pretty much never touched that thing slippery bastard

Agreed.

We might as well say, you're a slave to oxygen and water, then you die.

By saying this, you are confirming the author's argument about how (recent) cultures interpret the role of markets in all of life

Would you prefer to hunter-gather?

Not really. It's not like you are workibg all your life to "earn" oxygen and water. Fortunately(for most of us) we are living in an utopia as far as oxygen and water is concerned. You get them for "free"/with minimal effort.

First time I’ve read that providing clean water on demand to everyone at a sufficient pressure is “minimal effort”.

To me, the infrastructure and experimentation and science that leads to all homes having reliable, potable water is miraculous.

There’s very large swaths of the planet where you are supposed to drink only bottled water, from a bottle unsealed in front of you.

> First time I’ve read that providing clean water on demand to everyone at a sufficient pressure is “minimal effort”.

Let's look at it from this perspective: what percentage of your country's workforce is actively involved in providing clean water?

If it were such a huge effort to provide for relatively basic human needs, then I'd imagine we'd have more people working on that and less people working on advertising, entertainment, rent-seeking, making & marketing disposable novelty products, etc.

The gist of the argument is that while oxygen is available at no effort, clean, potable water without pathogens and contaminants is certainly not and is a modern miracle. It’s only been a little over 100 years since the discovery of chlorine killing bacteria and whatnot in water.

As for what portion of the population is needed to provide clean water, I don’t see how that is a useful or measurable metric. Certainly the discovery process of cleaning the water, the materials science in creating the pipes, learning about lead poisoning and changing that, and so on and so forth is a huge effort in my books.

Also, going forward, access to clean water is looking like it will be a source of conflict. It’s not in the timescale of the next 5 to 10 years, so people take it for granted, but certainly the grandchildren of today will have to deal with procuring this “effortless” resources.

One might even say the same for oxygen in developing countries where poor people have to live next to factories under a permanent cloud of pollution. They literally can’t go for a run because of a lack of clean air!

> There’s very large swaths of the planet where you are supposed to drink only bottled water

Is that the "natural" order of things? Certainly it isn't, at least no more than markets or money represent a "natural order." In fact, we can make a convincing case that the tainting of fresh water is the direct consequence of this kind of market-oriented thought.

People trading 'things' like favours is pretty natural in that it happens easily. And it's not like the waters of the world are pure and safe to drink by default. There's plenty of parasites and diseases out there. How many hunter-gatherers do you think didn't have worms?

> People trading 'things' like favours is pretty natural in that it happens easily

The author seems less concerned with what "happens easily" than with what is taken as a kind of natural law. The dominant ideology of the present (for which he is presenting an intellectual history) supposes that market forces are this natural law. It is this supposition that cannot stand up to long term history. We are better off reading anthropology and sociology when trying to understand the origins of money and exchange than we are economists, who simply invent facile notions of their origins seemingly out of thin air

Oldest anthropological sites in the world appear to have been used for religious ceremony (community building) and trade (economics). The economists aren't terribly off the mark.

This article seems to want to return to a pseudo-Rousseau view of the world where the wilds are religious.

You could make that argument, but there appears to be a positive correlation between robust markets and clean drinking water for everyone.

> there appears to be a positive correlation between robust markets and clean drinking water for everyone

Given the context of this article, it's then worth asking: were the "markets" of the Magdalenian also "robust"?

Water isn’t the problem, it’s sanitation, as in having flushing toilets and sewers.

More people have mobile phones than have access to improved sanitation.

Without it, you die early of disease.

Humanity really didn’t even control their poop all that well until a couple of hundred years ago with the invention of the modern toilet and the S-trap.