We’re already there. Your individual labor isn’t enough to make a living unless you subscribe to the altar of a feudal FAANG. This is preposterous.
> Collectively, the wealthiest 1% held about $55 trillion in assets in the third quarter of 2025 — roughly equal to the wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans combined.
The cost of living crisis is almost singularly caused by poor governance, not feudal tech lords.
NIMBYism prevents new houses from being built, driving up the cost of housing.
Healthcare is for-profit, yet not allowed to operate like a true competitive market, with heavy regulations restricting providers to a few that the government favors. Thus it's essentially an oligopoly, driving costs sky high.
The ‘cost of living crisis’ that most people refer to is about food, clothing, fuel, electricity, gas. Much of this is driven by feudal corporate lords, and their gouging business choices. Some is driven by geopolitics.
Issues with the affordability of for-profit healthcare is mostly an issue in the US, as far as first-world countries go. And the root cause there is decades of allowing money and big business to directly influence politics, rendering meaningful change close to impossible without a Bernie Sanders-esque president who’s strongly motivated to tear the whole system down.
The current pricing crises with food, fuel, electricity, and gas are currently being driven 100% by America's Caligula and his party of elected senatorial horses. And specifically his tariffs, but more generally his inability to comprehend anything beyond self-gratification.
There's been a 'cost of living crisis' discussed in many countries --not just the US-- since roughly the end of the pandemic. For obvious reasons, there are other factors responsible for this - not just Trump.
Trump's recent foray into Iran has indeed hit fuel/gas prices, the supply chain of some regional goods, and will have a knock-on impact on other goods subsequently due to rising fuel costs. The impact of tariffs on consumers is largely confined to the US.
Respectfully disagree. Food, clothing, fuel, electricity are too expensive, but they are comparatively much less of an issue compared to rent and healthcare costs.
Rent and healthcare are the 1A and 1B issues of our time.
As far as healthcare goes, the entire system is a mess. We already tried the Affordable Care Act to get more people covered, which only skyrocketed costs. The only way out is to increase the competition in the market, AKA supply side. Bernie Sanders is only familiar with demand-side solutions, which do not work. Sanders himself seems completely oblivious to the housing crisis in his own state of Vermont, which is being mitigated everywhere else through supply-side solutions.
I was mostly trying to make the point that the cost of living crisis is global, affecting many countries, and that your US-centric view doesn't scale. Healthcare costs hitting consumers directly isn't global as most countries have totally different systems.
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That said, your suggestion that the answer to rampant capitalism making healthcare unaffordable is more rampant capitalism (which you call competition) is... interesting.
And I wasn't advocating for Sanders personally or his policies specifically, just using him as an example of a conviction politician who might have had the chutzpah to take on and dismantle the business-lobbying-politics establishment.
Ah ok sorry missed that you were talking globally instead of just US.
In the US, our problems stem from a lack of "capitalism," or healthy markets, or whatever anyone wants to label it. Bottom line, it's very much a supply side problem.
In housing, for example, NIMBY laws have for decades restricted all kinds of new housing being built. In capitalism, developers would be allowed to build. So we've very much had the opposite of capitalism.
Cities that are waking up to this and allowing new houses to be built are seeing rents fall across the board.
> In the US, our problems stem from a lack of "capitalism," or healthy markets, or whatever anyone wants to label it. Bottom line, it's very much a supply side problem.
I'd challenge whether for complex topics like healthcare, there truly ever could/would be a market that would deliver the savings you envisage.
When someone is diagnosed with cancer, you'd expect them to do everything in their power to give the best outcome, right? Wrong. Most people just go to their local hospital, and sadly the quality of physicians, surgeons, treatments offered, and overall care varies tremendously. There are various data to suggest that joining a clinical trial may offer improved outcomes (and of course, in extremis, clinical trial participation is the only way to access experimental treatments) and yet a very small percentage of patients ever do. Anecdotal experience suggests that many patients can barely understand the details of their disease and treatments (which are becoming more technical with time).
My point? For reasons that require further exploration, healthcare "customers" typically aren't sufficiently informed, discerning, engaged, or mobile in the way that would be necessary for a genuine competitive market composed of for-profit providers to function effectively to drive down prices and improve outcomes.
Those used to be quite reasonable cost of living areas. We're not talking about owning a mansion in the Hamptons, but a decent-sized apartment in a downtown area or a nice single family home in a pleasant neighborhood.
For a lot of people on HN, they grew up in VHCOL places that used to be affordable and are trying to keep the lives they've had since birth.
I was forced to move, lost connection to my friends and half my family, all the places I knew and had memories/attachment to, habits/hobbies. I understand why they are fighting to keep their lives and not give up and in a way die and start a new, lonelier, much different life.
I don't understand how that is nepo/spoiled/rich behavior, it's just basic normal human behavior. Thinking it's totally cool to displace people is also normal human behavior, just to me the shittier less justifiable of the two.
I agree with all of that, but it's not representative of everybody that grew up in the VHCOL area. A slight majority of residents in the Bay Area (used as an example) own their own home. If you grew up there, and your parents owned their own home, your family has benefited enormously from the meteoric rise in house prices. Those people (long-time residents) are thrilled by the influx of tech cash and actively pursue NIMBY policies to restrict the housing supply to keep prices as high as possible. Most of the tech workers actually moving to the Bay Area and renting would much prefer a massive increase in the housing supply to bring prices down.
California is an especially egregious example because none of the inherited familial homes are taxed appropriately, which lowers liquidity and drives up market rates further. If you wanted to create a landed gentry, California Article XIII A is the gold standard for a policy to do that [1]
Of course, a lot of families never end up owning a home in an area that will experience that kind of appreciation. But the idea that it's "newcomers vs. life-long-residents" is wrong. It's actually more about the tension between the life-long-residents who own property and pursue NIMBYism vs. everyone else.
My example is representative of EVERY person I grew up with that didn't come from generational wealth. I guess if their parents died when they were young of a fluke you would consider them lucky, but what's the average lifespan for someone in the area? Everyone I knew would rather have had the option to live/raise a family in their home town than inherit a million dollar home in their 50s after they had to start a new life they didn't pick.
You can write paragraphs about how displacing people is fair, how kicking grannies out of their homes and auctioning them off because of tax debt (something that was happening) is the moral way. But you are still just talking around displacement of people to reach your desired end goal.
A functioning economy is full of these tensions between people with divergent "desired end goals". Everybody wants high home prices when they want to sell but low home prices when their kids want to buy. Everybody wants low prices for things but high wages for people, even though those things are inversely correlated. I'd bet many of the parents you're talking about voted for NIMBY policies and cheered the tech industry's rise. Of course they would. If I'd owned a house in the bay, I'd have been pretty jazzed about it too.
I'm not pro-displacement. I'm pro-housing, which we need much more of in SF.
A small company can use a PEO like Rippling (a YC company) where employees are “co employed” with the actual company and for taxes/HR/benefits with for Rippling. It’s not like contracting. Everyone from the CEO down is “co employed”
I’m never going to defend the American health care system as I sit in a country now for six weeks where I fully plan to become a resident of post retirement mainly because of the healthcare even if I don’t live here full time.
My guy, congress can't even remove valid bad actors who openly lie to and threaten them. They will never fix any problems except their "light" pocket book
I know how much the American health care system sucks. But I have looked into a high deductible health care plan on the exchange for myself and my wife - both over 50 to calculate how much we would need to survive a month of unemployment. It was around $1000/mo with no subsidies for a bronze plan.
In my experience the cost of a low deductible health plan is more expensive than a high deductible health plan + equivalent amount of a pre tax HSA.
I have never known a health care provider that you can’t negotiate a payment plan with. Even if your HSA isn’t funded, they could probably have a payment plan = HSA monthly contribution and then take it out of the HSA.
Yes I understand that a lot of people making $40K would be deftly afraid of doing that. But they would still statistically come out ahead
This is a family plan; the bronze plans are $2400 or so a month. But that means a huge deductible; for a high-needs family, it works out worse financially.
When I compared plans at work over the years, I’ve found that it is rarely cheaper to do low deductible/higher monthly costs than higher deductible /lower monthly cost + pay deductible out of pocket.
When I was 8 or so (early 80's), I read a news article that said something like "in the near future, robots will do all work and humans won't have to work at all". The news article made it sound like it would happen before I reached adulthood and even then I could see the problem there: "who decides who gets to live in the big house at the top of the hill and who decided who has to live where I live?"
Communism/socialism/wealth distribution/planned economies is one potential solution, but it's an awfully ham-fisted one and definitely not one to put into place until it's absolutely necessary. I kind of suspect that a lot of people, like OP, are kind of hoping that now is the time, but it definitely isn't, at least not yet.
Damn, I hope no one tells the hundreds of millions of global middle class and upper middle class households who don't work for FAANG that they don't exist!
He's right. It's not just FAANG, but if you're not within about 2 or 3 degrees of separation from FAANG or a subset (not even the whole thing) of SP500, you're hosed. Even then, it's not a panacea. McDonald's employees can confirm.
And it's because only those companies are big enough to cut deals to shield themselves and their subjects from the massive amounts of debt the world economy is being forced to service; everyone else is dumping a double-digit percentage of their labor into covering the bad bets of our banks.
Except for all the small business owners that are doing just fine, and many are more than fine. You just don't want to be a corpo who is competing with FAANG, or anywhere where you have to "share" any margins with them.
If money is trickling down to you from FAANG, you're benefiting from their largesse - or, rather, being exploited by the control they have over your source of income, as both an individual and an business owner. FAANG throwing their weight around to force-underpay suppliers becomes the problem of the retail worker whose wages are paid by underpaid consumers. And so on.
And that has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t need “FAANG money” to live a comfortable life in Idaho…
Besides cry me a river for the people in red states who keep voting for politicians who are voting for policies that hurt them as long as they can “own the libs” and see ICE mistreat brown people.
Idaho has an affordability crisis and it is partly caused by rich people from out of state using their FAANG (or equivalent rich work) to box them out of properties.
I am not defending rich people - that would be the people who defend the current President and his cronies like in Idaho who support him and voted for him 70%
It is just plain not true statement that you need “FAANG money” to afford to live in Idaho.
You illustrate the point perfectly. "Not living on the streets" is not exactly a measure of prosperity. With $55K, you cannot afford a decent place to live, a health event can and will bankrupt you, and retirement is out of the question.
If you go by the 30% of your budget guideline making $55K a year as a single person you can definitely find a place to rent for $1375 in a decent neighborhood.
What do they mean by "assets"? Is it securities in the form of stocks/bonds/etc?
If so they own a bunch of bits on a server somewhere that technically represent an amount of goods/services they could never use in 10,000 lifetimes.
If Elon had 10 billion eggs in a warehouse it would be real easy to fix the price of eggs. We could also reduce healthcare costs by making Bezos & Zuck stop going to the doctor 4,000,000 times a day.
The reason peoples labor isn't granting them the goods and services they want is way more complex than just: "the billionaires are taking them all". You could kill every billionaire tomorrow and distribute all their wealth and it would only make shit cost more.
You are so close. The rich don't buy all the doctor visits, they buy whole farms/doctor practices and place a tax paid to them on every transaction. We are switching to a society structured for maximum extraction everywhere because there is so much capital at the top looking for places to park, and why wealth disparity is so bad for a society. The feudal lords got paid on every transaction and with the current disparity the rich are buying their way back to that system.
Poor spend money to survive, circulating through the system.
Rich park excess money in PE buyouts of previously owner owned dental practices, HVAC, rental properties, etc and 'optimizing' for maximum extraction. Some capital is needed to fund new things, but excess turns EVERTHING into rent extraction with barons taking their cut above all else.
More and more of the services/things in life are owned not by the person that started the business, but by the rich whose money 'is just bits and has no impact on the poors'. Rich don't compete for doctor appointments, they just extract more and more $$$ by owning every doctors visit, every practice, every corporate farm. And the poors can't compete. Hence you end up with a feudal system because of the disparity. The rich should have enough to enjoy a good life and to have freed up investment capital in the system to start new things, but not enough to re-convert society back to feudalism where they own all and get paid a percentage on everything, always, just for existing.
> I suppose being your own boss is one of the few ways to stay passionate and care about something for a long enough period of time.
I run a business and the passion is still hard to maintain. On Friday one of my customers cussed me out for 20 mins because I took a few hours to respond. That was a tough way to start the weekend.
Once you’re acquired you have to do what the boss says. That means prioritizing your work to benefit the company. That is often not compatible with true open source.
How frequently do acquired projects seriously maintain their independence? That is rare. They may have more resources but they also have obligations.
And this doesn’t even touch on the whole commodification and box out strategy that so many tech giants have employed.
> Once you’re acquired you have to do what the boss says.
Or quit, and take the (Open Source) project and community with you. Companies sometimes discover this the hard way; see, for instance, the story of how Hudson became Jenkins.
If AI tools are as good as the CEOs claim, we should have no friction towards building multiple open source alternatives very quickly. Unless of course, they aren’t as good as they are being sold as, in which case, we have nothing to worry about.
> Swarmer’s revenue for the year to December fell to just under $310,000 from $330,000 a year before. Net losses widened to $8.5mn from $2.1mn over the same period.
> Collectively, the wealthiest 1% held about $55 trillion in assets in the third quarter of 2025 — roughly equal to the wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans combined.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-three-d...
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