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> Mark did not steal his money If theft is defined solely by law, then you are correct. > creating similar value Facebook does not create value, it merely ca

> Mark did not steal his money If theft is defined solely by law, then you are correct. > creating similar value Facebook does not create value, it merely captures it. I suspect you subscribe to a simplistic economic ideology that does not even recognize the existence of a create vs capture distinction.

gizi 11y ago
> Facebook does not create value, it merely captures it. That is not up to any of us to decide. In the meanwhile, the world population has voted with its feet on exactly that subject. Technology is a meritocracy. Seriously, nobody cares about the ideological manifest of the one or the other communist party. It is technology that runs the world and not any unproductive, imbecile political opinion. Furthermore, technology overrules politics. Time after time, with new technology we bring the political idiots to their knees, and we shall keep doing so.
- quadrangle 11y ago
  > Technology is a meritocracy. You can keep telling yourself that, or you can drop your naive ideology and look at how the world actually works.
davnicwil 11y ago
> Facebook does not create value, it merely captures it Do you really mean that literally? It is a service which some (not all) people do enjoy using, and which connects people in ways they weren't previously connected allowing for new opportunities, and therefore represents value to those people which did not exist before they had access to the service. It has therefore created value for humans in the aggregate, that is an undeniable and objective fact. One person or another's individual opinion of its value in their lives, or the value it ought to have or not have in others' lives, in no way changes this fact. I don't know what exactly what you mean by the create/capture distinction, and I'd be really interested to hear you elaborate on this point and define those terms. But at least according to my somewhat-plain-English interpretation of those words, Facebook pretty demonstrably does both. It creates value by providing a service, and captures value (a great deal more, probably, monetarily, if that's even measurable) from the information generated by people (always voluntarily, because they want to: the key fact to keep in mind) using that service. No?
- quadrangle 11y ago
  "create value" has to be weighed against the alternative if it weren't there. Very little of value that Facebook does would be missing from the world if Facebook didn't exist. Alternative ways of networking and sharing information would and do exist and Facebook's version isn't adding real value. 99% of the valuable things about Facebook are the user-generated content, not Facebook itself. Facebook's work is primarily curation via how they run their feed algorithm, and they do a generally shitty job at that in terms of value to the users.
- gizi 11y ago
  Ok. Why are political opinions useless and immaterial? One, because technology always overrules them. What are you going to do against executable technology? Some more political verbiage? Two, because almost nobody is willing to risk their lives and die for that kind of opinions. Ultimately, it will always be the few who do, who will end up running the show. Voting does not count, simply because voting is not valid proof-of-work.

gizi 11y ago

> Facebook does not create value, it merely captures it. That is not up to any of us to decide. In the meanwhile, the world population has voted with its feet on exactly that subject. Technology is a meritocracy. Seriously, nobody cares about the ideological manifest of the one or the other communist party. It is technology that runs the world and not any unproductive, imbecile political opinion. Furthermore, technology overrules politics. Time after time, with new technology we bring the political idiots to their knees, and we shall keep doing so.

quadrangle 11y ago
> Technology is a meritocracy. You can keep telling yourself that, or you can drop your naive ideology and look at how the world actually works.

davnicwil 11y ago

> Facebook does not create value, it merely captures it Do you really mean that literally? It is a service which some (not all) people do enjoy using, and which connects people in ways they weren't previously connected allowing for new opportunities, and therefore represents value to those people which did not exist before they had access to the service. It has therefore created value for humans in the aggregate, that is an undeniable and objective fact. One person or another's individual opinion of its value in their lives, or the value it ought to have or not have in others' lives, in no way changes this fact. I don't know what exactly what you mean by the create/capture distinction, and I'd be really interested to hear you elaborate on this point and define those terms. But at least according to my somewhat-plain-English interpretation of those words, Facebook pretty demonstrably does both. It creates value by providing a service, and captures value (a great deal more, probably, monetarily, if that's even measurable) from the information generated by people (always voluntarily, because they want to: the key fact to keep in mind) using that service. No?

quadrangle 11y ago
"create value" has to be weighed against the alternative if it weren't there. Very little of value that Facebook does would be missing from the world if Facebook didn't exist. Alternative ways of networking and sharing information would and do exist and Facebook's version isn't adding real value. 99% of the valuable things about Facebook are the user-generated content, not Facebook itself. Facebook's work is primarily curation via how they run their feed algorithm, and they do a generally shitty job at that in terms of value to the users.
gizi 11y ago
Ok. Why are political opinions useless and immaterial? One, because technology always overrules them. What are you going to do against executable technology? Some more political verbiage? Two, because almost nobody is willing to risk their lives and die for that kind of opinions. Ultimately, it will always be the few who do, who will end up running the show. Voting does not count, simply because voting is not valid proof-of-work.