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277 points cebert | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.254s | source
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PostOnce ◴[] No.44361768[source]
Theoretically, credit should be used for one thing: to make more money. (not less)

However, instead of using it to buy or construct a machine to triple what you can produce in an hour, the average person is using it to delay having to work that hour at all, in exchange for having to work an hour and six minutes sometime later.

At some point, you run out of hours available and the house of cards collapses.

i.e., credit can buy time in the nearly literal sense, you can do an hour's work in half an hour because the money facilitates it, meaning you can now make more money. If instead of investing in work you're spending on play, then you end up with a time deficit.

or, e.g. you can buy 3 franchises in 3 months instead of 3 years (i.e. income from the 1 franchise), trading credit for time to make more money, instead of burning it. It'd have been nice had they taught me this in school.

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lm28469 ◴[] No.44364104[source]
> the average person is using

The "average person" is told from birth to consume as many things and experiences as possible as it if was the only thing that could give their life a meaning. The entire system is based on growth and consumption, I have a hard time blaming "the average person"

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rayiner ◴[] No.44365086[source]
There is no “system.” It’s all just people making choices. My wife puts straws in the dishwasher to reuse them. She grew up in America the same as everyone else.
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LinXitoW ◴[] No.44365614[source]
There's no system the same way there's no Facebook, just some databases and servers. Or there's no Java language, it's all just UTF-8 characters. Or there's no government, there's just people voting for other people. Or there's no society, it's all just fancy apes existing and making decisions.

It's quite frankly ludicrous to be a software engineer and pretend systems don't arise from "individual" "independent" elements.

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1. rayiner ◴[] No.44369711[source]
As a former engineer, I would say a “system” is designed as a whole, like all of the things you mentioned (but unlike society). If we are talking about the interactions between separately designed things—e.g. various autonomous vehicles designed by different companies—then we’d talk about “emergent behaviors,” not “systems.”