Everyone getting income passively is not going to work for society in general. Work still needs to happen. Until we live in a post-scarsity society, if nobody works then everything collapses.

That's not to say that passive income is impossible, its just not going to work if large swaths of the population are doing it.

> This is not what people mean by passive income.

This is literally the traditional definition of passive income - using your capital to generate more capital.

There is no free lunch, you need to provide something to get $$$. If you are providing labour it is by definition not really passive. That leaves land or capital.

The point is though, that no one pitches it this way. Everyone knows if you have millions of dollars you can generate passive income. That's simply not interesting to anyone.

If you have to grind out making millions over the course of a decade or three, that's simply called having a regular job. That's the status quo.

The passive income folk are all about finding some "hack" where you can be clever or smart or out-hustle the next guy and unlock some secret method to making passive income without capital. That's the entire "industry" in a nutshell. They are not going to folks with $1m in the bank telling them how to make 4% returns on it by tossing it into low cost ETFs. They are going to folks grinding out a living saying they have a shortcut to not needing that capital base to start off with.

tldr; If you already have capital, you don't need to think about passive income. It just happens.

‘everyone knows’ is doing a lot of work here. you still need to spend time, and make a lot of good judgement calls (not easy!) to earn a useful amount of passive income on investments without losing your principal.

being a professional investor (what you’re referring to) is especially terrifying in a low interest rate environment.

I live in canada with free health care. People are always complaining about how we are much less entrepreneurial than our southern neighbours.

Maybe free health care would help, but i think its kind of minor compared to other factors.

I think its pretty obvious that "sit on a beach" is a metaphor for being able to do whatever you want not literally sitting on a beach for the rest of your life.

At the same time, you guys really can't imagine relaxing on a beach for more than a few hours? Like i'm not really a beach person but back when i lived near the ocean i spent the odd saturday just unwinding on the beach with a book. Certainly wouldn't want that every day, but y'all acting like it would be impossible to enjoy say abeach vacation for a few days seems crazy to me.

yes, but that didn't prevent the passage from being funny :) it's a rant, being literal about stuff like that is part of its schtick.

(also I could happily relax anywhere for a few hours, but ideally not on a beach because that's uncomfortable)

Or more generally, just doing whatever you want. I dont think anyone literally wanted to sit on a beach 24/7 365 days a year. However plenty of people would want the ability to just wake up one day and on a whim fly to a hawaii until they get bored then fly somewhere else.

> Housing costs have outpaced inflation

In fairness though, given inflation is the average, housing costs outpacing means something else underpaced.

Sure, things like phones are much more feature packed and only slightly more expensive, so they get to be inflation adjusted as being significantly below inflation.

Imported goods.

You are right about "house prices", but not all housing costs. Home loan interest repayments are not included in official inflation calculations.

> I've met dozens of smart, capable people who had actual energy, and who spent their entire twenties bouncing between passive income schemes instead of building real skills // real businesses // real careers.

The author is acting like it hasn't always been this way. But it always has.

There have always been people who felt the allure of the get rich quick scheme. Its always been true that if they just spent the same effort on doing things properly they would probably make it but instead they bounce from one stupid scheme to the next.

Often its combined with some ideology about how the normal world is full of suckers and they are going to escape by not playing the game. Fraudsters love to target people who want to pull one over on the world. They are easy to manipulate so they usually fall for it when presented with an opportunity too good to be true.

The article, with a couple details about the specific examples changed could have probably been written in victorian times.

I don't think there was ever a time where a solo-entrepenur could make real money without putting in lots of effort and taking lots of risks.

We remember the success stories, we don't remember the bankruptcies.

Well yes, you get what you pay for and if you are on the free plan don't expect much.

I dont think this is limited to big tech.

So its just embeding some files in a satalite tv broadcast stream?

I dont think that helps that much. If you have satalite tv going in, you already have video coming in, are arbitrary files really that much more useful?

The thing people really want internet communication for is 2 way coms. Getting info on the situation on the ground out and allowing different groups inside Iran to coordinate. I fail to see how this helps with that.

> So its just embeding some files in a satalite tv broadcast stream?

Which is neither new nor novel.

PlayCable was doing this to download console games over analog cable systems <checks notes> 46 years ago.

TeleText says hello.

> I dont think that helps that much.

Teletext [1] was extremely popular in Europe before the Internet was widely available for private households. Also piggybacked on TV.

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