Ryan Bednar likes to build things

Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.

This speaks to a larger problem: The world simply doesn’t need many of the people born into it. Parents in the US have children for recreational purposes - child birth rates do not fluctuate with the demand for labor. These kids grow up, and many of them wind up sleeping on the streets of their chosen city or more commonly just barely living paycheck-to-paycheck, because there is no societal need for them. This bears itself out in statistics: 25% of households have a net worth of zero or less (negative net worth). 22% of children in the US live in homes below the poverty line.

In our world, the needs of many can be met by the work of a few. Only those few will prosper, while the rest languish. The harsh reality is that prospective parents that don’t have anything to pass onto their children need to take a hard look at whether they should be having children, given that going forward there may very well be no way for those children to earn a living.

I think the biggest problem that Google can’t fix is that they treat links as a voting mechanism, and that voting mechanism has value. So, there is a big economic incentive to “buy votes” by buying links.
As long as there is a financial incentive to ranking well in google and that the mechanism to rank better is to get links, people with money will buy links in the same way they buy influence in the media, politics, etc.