4 ms·

Lots of people will pick fights with people who have an audience (like pg) just so they can borrow that audience for a short while. I'm not convinced that most

• cryoshon 11y ago
  If you propose a radical idea like "income inequality isn't bad", you need to expect a debate because the idea is far from proven. It sounds lame, but PG's essay is a stanza in a larger societal conversation, and conversations involve more than one person. To weigh in on one side invites response, especially if you're influential.
  • mattmcknight 11y ago
    It certainly doesn't seem like a radical idea. Most of the responses started out with some variation of "well, we didn't mean literally all income inequality is bad. Obviously some income inequality is good. We just have too much. No one actually wants perfect income equality. pg is arguing against a strawman". In that sense, he successfully pointed out that the shorthand phrase "income inequality" causes equivocation when taken literally, where both sides of it are using to mean different things. Unfortunately, most of the responses never made it much past identifying this confusion between the literal meaning of income inequality and what they meant, by saying we have "too much" income inequality. This is a tautology, and most responses failed to address the important question of "how much is too much?". Most responses instead then focused on inventing or imagining a lot of things pg didn't say, things they thought he might be implying. pg responds by simplifying his essay, so that there is less stuff to read into it. People still try to read too much into it. pg gives up at responding to things he didn't say, no time for BS. I think he added to the conversation a good point, that many people are sloppy when they refer to income inequality, and that it is not all bad, and that we need to be more precise when we talk about what the real problems are. However, people mostly ignored that...despite actually agreeing with what he actually said, they wanted to disagree with what they thought he said...
  • Pyxl101 11y ago
    > If you propose a radical idea like "income inequality isn't bad", you need to expect a debate because the idea is far from proven. Let's say that Bob is a farmer, and (with the same land) can grow twice as many crops to sell in a year as his neighbor nearby. In this scenario, it seems entirely appropriate to me that Bob has greater income - that is, the income of Bob and his neighbor are unequal. Let's say that Alice is a video game designer. Alice creates an incredibly popular game called Clash of Clans that has 20 million users and earns $1.5m in revenue per day. Bob the farmer quits his job and creates a video game instead, which only sells 10 copies, since while he's great at farming he's a bad video game designer. Is it surprising or bad that the incomes of Alice and Bob are unequal? Do you work for a living? Let's say a coworker at your place of employment comes to work and does literally nothing, every day. Does he deserve the same income as you? No, it is not bad that people earn different amounts when they're differently productive. This incentive toward productivity drives society forward. It would be incredibly demotivating to most of the world if people were not made better off through their own efforts to become more productive, effective, and driven. I doubt anyone would argue that all income inequality is bad - instead, as a peer comment points out, the actual debate is about how much is bad, or for what reasons. The purpose of PG's essay was to point out that income inequality has multiple components and is a complex phenomenon. He observed that technology amplifies this difference in productivity (consider the example of Alice who can make a video game and sell 20 million copies with recurring revenue; being that much more productive as a video game designer is simply impossible as a farmer.)
• ionforce 11y ago
  Bubbling is when you cast a defensive spell on an ally to prevent them from incurring physical or magical damage.