alt Hacker News>while the poor people are essentially just as poor they were hundreds of years ago.
How can people say false things like this with a straight face?
Thanks to industrialisation, automation and mass production, the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom, let alone poor people back then: abundant cheap food that poor people can now be fat instead of starve to death, cars, planes, MRI machines, helicopter ambulances, vaccines, personal heating and air conditioning, OZEMPIC, etc
Kings back then would eat hard bread, shit down a vertical shaft that emitted the scent through the whole castle, and their sleeping chambers had ice on the walls in winter and lice in the clothes and bet sheets, plus they had parasites in their gut and any small disease could kill you.
Meanwhile the cool homeless guy outside my building has 3 hot meals a day and a daily shower in the homeless shelter nearby, warm clean sleeping bag for winter, shades for summer, a bicycle for moving around town, a smartphone which he uses to watch youtube all day in his sleeping bag, plus access to medical care that kings of kings never had. All this with no job, and no care in the world.
Replies
Mainly all due to what is the spiritual successor to slave labor, not industrialization.
You can thank people dying in Chinese and African mines to extract the resources to build your planes and MRI machines.
You can thank the people working tirelessly until their hands are crippled in bengladesh to make the cheap clothes that make it seem to your western eyes that a poor person here can live a life of luxury. Those people are constantly invisibilised even as tragedies such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rana_Plaza_collapse
hit them and kills a thousand under your total westoid apathy.
You can thank the Chinese slave labor making iPhones and Macbooks at foxconn for your luxurious electronics being cheap enough for a western wallet. They have suicide prevention nets so that their precious slave labor doesn't die from jumping from their buildings. How amazing.
>the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom
Indeed, the wealth that kings couldn't dream of hundreds of years ago, because kings back then didn't have the power a billionaire can wield today to pollute, enslave and ruin millions of lives at a scale that makes things like the Napoleon wars look like a footnote to history.
>All this with no job, and no care in the world.
This can only happen because the extreme wealth inequality of the world has divided entire countries into classes of people. You are blind to the reality of the humans you are exploiting.
> All this with no job, and no care in the world.
Have you ever been without a job and/or homeless to say shit like this?
> Thanks to industrialisation, automation and mass production, the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom
Thanks to colonialism, also in more modern form called globalism.
> Kings back then would eat hard bread, shit down a vertical shaft that emitted the scent through the whole castle, and their sleeping chambers had ice on the walls in winter and lice in the clothes and bet sheets, plus they had parasites in their gut and any small disease could kill you.
Wealth has no intrinsic value, only relative one. You are only wealthy relatively to other members of the society. Doesn't matter if pharaohs had less comfortable lives than me. What matters is that a gap between pharaoh and a worker working on pyramids was way smaller than between Jeff Bezos and person working at the Amazon distribution center.
Also, most sweet fruits of progress that its prophets like to enumerate are not direct consequences of technological changes, but they came only after political struggle that has arisen exactly because the direct consequences were very dire for most people. If people pushing today for AI could decide on these things, they would be very happy to take away these hot meals from homeless people and let them starve to death.
Because most of the poor people in the world (majority of the population of the planet actually) have no access to clean water, food or medical care or education and that is the same as it was hundreds of years ago.