It almost seems as if you are trolling. Surely we can, at least, agree that the excesses you mention exist only because of those who produce.

Don't expect much sympathy here, as per many comments folks are mostly on purely capitalistic camps to the extreme. Its distillation of US approach to work and society, something I've grown to detest by mere fact of living in much more humane, while vastly more financially efficient system that doesn't use my tax money to kill civilians all over the world (none other than Swiss system and yes it could easily work elsewhere if people reduced their egos significantly, which they won't).

Its everybody for themselves in US, fuck the rest, the more the better. Some 'society' it is. The more miserable and poor others are, the better you can exploit them right. How horrible the world would be if those folks stocking shelves in shops or trimming your hair would also have a shot for a decent life.

Middle class is for mediocre suckers, either your are a star (at least from financial perspective, usually the rest of life is very opposite of it) or a loser. Can't say I can respect that system, but as long as I am not part of it nor bombed by its military industrial complex to death I simply don't care. Folks can stay and be part of that system or leave, that part of freedom is still sorta there.

Do you know how tone deaf this is? Some people literally can’t afford their medication and you are saying “meh, we have too much already”

“We have enough excess in society”

How are you measuring this? Hopefully something better than stock prices.

A privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege?

I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled.

That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.

Technically, SS provides for the next generation. We pay into it to the next generation can use that, not the current one. It's a pyramid scheme meant to pay out early and then die. The math doesn't work if the individual expects to retire on it. It's a great scam.

If they are JS frameworks that enable other engineers to build applications that support farms, and banks, and taxi services and insurance companies and mines and factories, etc. then obviously that is productive.

If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange.

When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.

When I was young, to buy a tee shirts for the kids you have to walk like 10 block to visit like 5 shops and compare prices. Let's say 1 or 2 hour and the choices were quite limited and you must keep a mental list of the location and quality of each shop. [The cheap ones may open only at the same time you have to be in the office.]

Now you can go to Mercado Libre (the local version of Amazon) compare prices and see the reviews and buy them in 15 minutes. There are a lot of more choices and the prices are lower (or higher if you like fancy stuff). It arrives home at the afternoon.

Some software engineer has to program it. Does s/he deserve a few bucks for the time s/he saved all of us?

I mean, if someone is willing to pay them, why not?

Even hundreds and thousands of years ago, people would put semi transparent rocks onto shiny metal shapes and sell those useless gadgets for a lot of money.

If customers are willing to pay for that, it means that those people made something worth that money.

This has been happening for more than a hundred years now... 90%+ of the people have been farming not that long ago, and mechanized farming equipment has replaced 95%+ of those workers.

This doesn't mean 4 hour workweeks or majority of people not needing to work, but it means that some of you can be social media managers, others can integrate AI chatbots in apps that don't need an AI chatbot, some can rewrite existing software in whatever the language of the week is, etc. Without offloading all that farming to machines, we'd never have what we now consider for "normal" and "must have".

Those few farmers left (2-3% of the workforce, depeding on the country) want to earn money too, so they can buy smartphones, watch netflix and have that smart toilet seats that open automatically and wash your butthole. If all those replaced-by-machines workers don't produce all that, where's the point in farming food for them?

This smells a lot of "I'm miserable so everyone else must be as unhappy as I am"

What if we make a better world for everyone, instead of a planetary crab bucket?

I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?

Sometimes they are forbidden from making the things they’d like for themselves. You used to be able to get your own food, build your own home, etc. But enclosure put a stop to that. And besides, who made the land you live on?

> Hard disagree tbh but that's more of a personal values discussion

I'm curious about this. Do you have children? Do you look at someone who does nothing hard in his life with indifference? Someone chooses to spend their life playing video games in their parent's basement. Do you think that's an equally admirable life than someone that spends his life doing hard things?

> Roughly 20% of undergraduate students at Ivy Plus institutions (including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell) are registered as disabled and receive accommodations. This figure has surged dramatically over time, rising from fewer than 3% at Harvard and under 6% at Cornell in 2015.

I think it's naive to assume that this phenomenon reflects an actual increase in disability rather than a cohort who has been raised to pathologize every human difference as a sign of some disability and then use those diagnoses to secure advantages in systems meant to help people with actual special needs.

There's clearly a lot of pretending going on. On the extreme end look at the numerous DID[1] "influencers". These folks are plainly pretending to have a debilitating mental disorder (which strangely never prevents them from going on podcasts and YouTube interviews) to curry fame.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder

If you consider Candy Crush as productive I guess words just don't have meaning anymore so there's no point arguing.

I highly doubt you actually believe this, but I have been wrong before.

> could you please summarize in short what you meant here as keypoint?

> I'm not sure we are interpreting this right,based also on reactions and troll references in clear contrast to your other comment.

I'm not sure what's unclear about my first comment, but I'll try to rephrase with new words.

People are people and deserve to be treated humanely as such. Productivity is but one aspect of people, and not the only one you can ascribe any value to. People are more than their productivity.

Productivity is often just used to mean 'how much money you earn', but I find it useful to expand its meaning to 'how well you're doing what you're enjoying'. If you spend time reading books because you enjoy it, that's productive. If you spend time at work earning money, that's also productive, since money is needed to, ya know, stay alive, and thus let you enjoy life, for what it's worth.

My point about disabilities is probably better expanded by the article in question, unless you have any pointed questions at that.

> also the comment

> "I've considered suicide because I was unable to make ends meet. I don't want others to experience that. Is that too much to ask?"

> was important and extremely insightful, wanted to ask what you meant with "was unable to nake ends meet" which type of ends?

The instance I had in mind was one where I was in danger of not having food to eat at the end of a month. I wasn't in any danger for that matter. I can get free food locally if I'm desperate. I can call a friend and ask for a favour (and friends have asked me!). But getting to that point is well beyond the point where my mind goes 'oh ffs, just end it, it's not worth the bother'. If someone is at that point, they should get help, but ideally, they shouldn't get to that point in the first place. Prevention is better than a cure (although we should work on cures too!).