keenboy
keenboy on Hacker News
You're not looking back far enough historically.
We've fallen prey to the philosophy that being at home with kids isn't adding value to society. You should be out making some big corporation wealthy!
I think the answer to this is to adopt Land Value Taxes. This would naturally incentivize property improvement and dis-incentivize people from owning large swaths of unproductive land. Communities would grow upward before they grow outward. Infrastructure costs would drop significantly and communities (over time) would become more walkable.
Isn’t it possible that incredibly advanced beings exist somewhere? And if so, what if they colonized earth long ago? Wouldn’t we call them “gods”?
It'd be fantastic if we could persuade some local governments to try this and work out the bugs. If it went well, it could be adopted by more and more locales.
Can I say what I hope/wish were on the horizon?
1. Approval voting becoming widely adopted. This would go a long way toward mitigating the hyper polarization in politics in America (and likely elsewhere as well). Electing politicians with broader approval means legislation would likely move more quickly.
2. Moving to a Land Value Tax system in America. This would organically help us transition to a culture that builds up instead of sprawling out. This could lead to tremendous reductions in things like municipal infrastructure costs, transportation pollution, reduced mortgage/rent prices, etc.
If you believe in the idea of wealth redistribution, there’s no better way than to come up with expensive products/services to sell to rich people who will gladly hand their money over voluntarily. There should be more of this.
Investors don’t make people wealthy. Investors want more back than they put in. Serving lots of customers makes people wealthy.
These are very legitimate points. In my uneducated opinion, allowing other app stores to compete with Apple's would reduce the power of incumbents and allow Apple to compete on a level playing field. If another app store is better at filtering out spammy apps, or takes a smaller fee, then I just might install from their app store. It pushes Apple to improve their services than gouge as deeply as possible.
We probably shouldn't take "for life" any more literally than we do the "four hour workweek". It represents an idea. You might not want your boots to last forever and may in fact decide to replace them after 6 years. But if they were sufficiently well made, then you'll get more for them when you sell them and they'll last longer for the next owner if you sell or donate them.
One other important consideration...
By stating that we're sick of experts the author implies that we don't trust them. It's important to recognize that there are two sides to trust.
1) are they competent
2) do they have integrity
Many of the examples in the article are failures of integrity, not failures of competence (Wall Street investors, Facebook, etc.).
This suggests that the core issue may be lack of ethics/morals rather than lack of expertise.
Is there anything like this available now in the US? I've wanted this for years! Right now I've cobbled together a version of this using direct deposit to several accounts, auto-transfers every week, etc. but I'd really like more control (e.g., I'd like to deposit a daily allowance to my "spending money" debit card).