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Reading these things makes me angry. There are people in the world who uphold economic wealth and ownership over life itself. Money is supposed to serve life,

Reading these things makes me angry. There are people in the world who uphold economic wealth and ownership over life itself. Money is supposed to serve life, not the other way around. Ownership at its best is a way to uphold responsibility and caretaking. It shouldn't be a way of domineering or exploiting peoples' very culture and spirituality. Who gets to play the song? Who gets to retell the story? Only those sanctioned by those with money, the owners. This is wrong. Creation and recreation are a forms of communion, not some contrived, egoistic world domination ritual. Excuse my colorful language, this is a religious issue to me.

ccvannorman 11y ago
You (and many others on HN) have highlighted what will be the dominant issue in global civ, "incumbent wealth owns everything (IP) and fuck the poor". Human greed knows no bounds, I wonder what will happen in 10, 50 years. Global trends suggest everyone will get wealthier but the super wealthy will control a larger fraction.
- bigmanwalter 11y ago
  It's okay. The richest 85 people own the same amount of wealth as the bottom 50% of the global population (1). I'm sure after we spend 8 hours of our day helping them towards owning even more of it, they'll do us a biggie by paying for our food and tiny apartments. 1: http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2014/01/23/the-85-richest-people-in-the-world-have-as-much-wealth-as-the-3-5-billion-poorest http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2014/01/23/the-85-rich...
  - Outdoorsman 11y ago
    Up-vote--I'm reminded of a line from Pear Buck's The Good Earth... >"The common people had to move, then, and they moved complaining and cursing because a rich man could do as he would and they packed their tattered possessions and went away swelling with anger and muttering that one day they would come back even as the poor do come back when the rich are too rich."< In 1911 the Xinhai Revolution in China, which the quote alludes to, demonstrates what is possible when income disparities reach a tipping point... Leaves me wondering what's truly possible if the "global economy" ever truly begins a move in the direction of a global stasis...
    - PythonicAlpha 11y ago
      > In 1911 the Xinhai Revolution in China, which the quote alludes to, demonstrates what is possible when income disparities reach a tipping point... That is just the reason, many countries and many people of a specific fraction already arm themselves against revolutions. What fantastic innovations are robots and drones!
      - dawnbreez 11y ago
        Fun fact: Drones can be disabled by blinding them with excess visual or IR noise, jamming their control signals, or applying a fast-moving chunk of metal of appropriate size. Further, drones are still limited to mostly open spaces. You can't clear a room with a quadcopter (yet), and a Predator missile strike is just as likely to kill loyal citizens as it is to kill the target. Tanks are easily outmaneuvered by humans on foot. Planes cannot take a building and leave it intact. Drones have electronic weaknesses in addition to the usual flaws. And nukes are practically a joke--the fallout, physical and political, would ruin any nation. TL;DR: Drones make terrible soldiers. Why do you think ISIS is still live and kicking?
        kwhitefoot 11y ago
        The mere fact that a military tactic is stupid is no guarantee that it won't be employed.
        dawnbreez 11y ago
        But a stupid tactic is one that may result in defeat. Sun Tzu's slightly-less-famous quote--"If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight"--has two meanings, like a lot of Asian philosophy does. The obvious part is, as the saying goes, sieze the day. The less obvious part is that you should only sieze the day if you know you can hang onto it. In the case of nukes, only a damn fool would nuke his own food supply or factories, or perhaps a spiteful loser.
  - peyton 11y ago
    Honest question: isn't wealth distribution thought to be fractal? So economic inequality should grow as an economy expands, but that alone doesn't imply there must be less for an arbitrary participant. I don't know much about economics, so sorry if I'm off base. It's just the statistic "XX people have more than YY% of people" gets thrown around in discussions, and I'm curious if it's cause for concern or just an economic fact.
    - sounds 11y ago
      Please cite a source.
    - cgio 11y ago
      The main model I am aware of is the Pareto distribution, which would have constant inequality.
      - PythonicAlpha 11y ago
        The point of wealth inequality is, that it is rapidly increasing -- particularly in the last 20 years. The parent poster implied, that by increasing the wealth of some, all will benefit. In my country, this was not the case in the last 20 years. The middle class that was rather broad and healthy, is loosing particularly in the less wealthy part -- many of those people fall down the ladder and are poor and will be even poorer when they are in old age. My country once was one of the wealthiest of the world, because many people where wealthy and earned good money. It was unthinkable once, that big parts of the society might be poor or have to live from "soup kitchens" -- today it is reality and all projections show, that it will become even worse! To be complete: My country is still one of the wealthiest of the world -- but with a much much smaller fraction of people owning the biggest part of this wealth.
  - jdminhbg 11y ago
    Again, this is a stupid statistic that inaccurately counts currently indebted but huge earning potential people (say, for example, a recent graduate of Harvard Business School) as "poorer" than a sub-Saharan subsistence farmer. Longer explanation here: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/04/stop-adding-up-the-wealth-of-the-poor/ http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/04/stop-adding...
    - crishoj 11y ago
      The statistic might be stupid, but it does a marvellous job of illustrating immense inequality in wealth distribution, something which is both factual and important. Would you not agree?
      - mattlutze 11y ago
        If the statistic is inaccurate then it does a bad job at illustrating the inequality, because it's falsity discredits the conversation. In fact, it would be detrimental to the goal of telling the inequality story.
        richmarr 11y ago
        How would you sum up the message to be both 'accurate' and consumable?
      - Ntrails 11y ago
        Generally the reason statistics are so dangerous when used to support an argument is that the argument quickly becomes about the validity of the number rather than the underlying issue. At a very basic level comparing wealth between economies requires all sorts of subjective normalisation which is pretty open to challenge, and accounting for things like student debt is obviously going to be contentious. Frankly I consider it surprising that you can even find the calculation methodology for something like that.
      - dawnbreez 11y ago
        The trouble is that a burger flipper will not make as much money as an inventor, programmer, or doctor, no matter how much time you spend demanding minimum wage increases. The former's job is far less effort-intensive than the others; even if you created a fascist state and ordered that all burger-flippers be paid as CEOs, you would immediately lose your CEOs as they all quit to become burger-flippers.
- dota_fanatic 11y ago
  Well, that's one aspect. Another aspect is that there's no rule saying that everyone's efforts are worth getting paid, no matter how hard that person worked. Well-engineered, objectively better products & services get out-maneuvered or preemptively made impossible all the time, and ludicrous amounts of money are spent on advertising to, y'know, help people figure out what they need. Population and automation proliferation both make humans less and less relevant, and non-altruistic behavior by rich and powerful is hardly ever punished because they have all the advantages. We sure do crack down hard on non-altruistic behavior committed by those in poverty, though. Even if we could all magically decide to cooperate and work together to eg end poverty & war, the modern human way of life (infinite growth) is at odds with the reality of planetary ecology. We don't do moderation well, as a group.
xlayn 11y ago
I have thought about this and my conclusion is that we have power over those companies, the power is on your decision not to buy any products from them. -Take for chance apple, Imagine people not buying a single iPhone until they start paying taxes as they should on US, you still can buy any rival brand right? You can imagine how stock prices would fall under the pressure of 0 iphones sold. -Software, go with a rival, support open source. -Get to the street and complain. -Do not play any music from vendorx, do not go to your artists concerts, do not play youtube music from them. Is all about us and doing some small sacrifices, in my case the reason behind my switch totally and never go back from windows to linux was the ftdi driver "update" bricking my olimexino 328. Edit: I have to say laws it's a very difficult area, maybe one of the easiest ways you can have of making a change could be supporting organizations like the EFF. Edit: clarity
- helicon 11y ago
  "the power is on your decision not to buy any products from them" The problem is our power is diluted.
  - visarga 11y ago
    It is diluted, indeed. We are poor and many, they are rich an few. It is much easier to maintain coherence between them than between us. They can use mass media and other channels to incite even more conflict and division between the poor to keep them from mounting a meaningful resistance. I don't think a social change will happen on its own or by revolution, but rather there will be improvements in life quality for the poor as new technology such as the internet and smart phones are made available for the masses at low prices. The standard of living has improved in the last 100 years a lot for everyone, and this trend is going to continue in the future.
- darpa_escapee 11y ago
  Or we could enact legislation such that there are sane tax brackets and sufficient public services are made available.
- dghughes 11y ago
GigabyteCoin 11y ago
>There are people in the world who uphold economic wealth and ownership over life itself. They weren't born that way. They grew up as wide-eyed children in the same world we all did. They loved to sing songs and share things at one time, too. Their only fault is that they were perhaps more efficient or "luckier" than the rest of us in acquiring their wealth. Which in turn forced the rich person persona onto them. It's pretty much downhill from there on out. Save for a few astonishing outliers like Bill Gates, thankfully. Money is the new God. It cures our blind and heals our lepers. It puts food on our tables for which we give thanks. If even withers our fig trees. It performs real miracles every day in a way that a book never could. In short, I'm not surprised that those who have acquired massive amounts of money are now suffering from delusions of grandeur. Is it possible to restrict the power that money has while still retaining most of it's core values? I don't know... But I'd bet money on it that we're going to find out pretty soon.
- zlatan_todoric 11y ago
  Bill Gates? Really? His company is one of the biggest proprietary companies in the world that to this day are still venturing into people's privacy as standard. Also: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371608/Bill-Gates-tried-cut-Paul-Allen-Microsoft-fell-ill-cancer.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371608/Bill-Gates-t... http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/03/04/clueless-fabrication-on-gmo.aspx# http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/03/0...! http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/the-ambitions-of-bill-and-melinda-gates-controlling-population-and-public-education http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/the-ambitions-of-bill-and... ...
  - dawnbreez 11y ago
    And Gates donated everything he had and left Microsoft.
    - elevenfist 11y ago
      No, he did and has not. He does charity as a public benefactor through his foundation. And he still controls M$, he fired Balmer early.
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
>Reading these things makes me angry. There are people in the world who uphold economic wealth and ownership over life itself. And the name for those people is: Everybody. Every time I buy some nicety, something I want but do not need, I am spending money on myself that could have gone to some better purpose. It could've gone to pay for some man's surgery, to go feed some starving child in a third world country, or even to just help out the local domestic abuse shelter. My donations are less than the maximum I could give, and that is true for almost everyone out there. While some definitely engage in worse behavior, it is important to remember that it is a difference of degrees and not a difference of kinds.

ccvannorman 11y ago

You (and many others on HN) have highlighted what will be the dominant issue in global civ, "incumbent wealth owns everything (IP) and fuck the poor". Human greed knows no bounds, I wonder what will happen in 10, 50 years. Global trends suggest everyone will get wealthier but the super wealthy will control a larger fraction.

bigmanwalter 11y ago
It's okay. The richest 85 people own the same amount of wealth as the bottom 50% of the global population (1). I'm sure after we spend 8 hours of our day helping them towards owning even more of it, they'll do us a biggie by paying for our food and tiny apartments. 1: http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2014/01/23/the-85-richest-people-in-the-world-have-as-much-wealth-as-the-3-5-billion-poorest http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2014/01/23/the-85-rich...
- Outdoorsman 11y ago
  Up-vote--I'm reminded of a line from Pear Buck's The Good Earth... >"The common people had to move, then, and they moved complaining and cursing because a rich man could do as he would and they packed their tattered possessions and went away swelling with anger and muttering that one day they would come back even as the poor do come back when the rich are too rich."< In 1911 the Xinhai Revolution in China, which the quote alludes to, demonstrates what is possible when income disparities reach a tipping point... Leaves me wondering what's truly possible if the "global economy" ever truly begins a move in the direction of a global stasis...
  - PythonicAlpha 11y ago
    > In 1911 the Xinhai Revolution in China, which the quote alludes to, demonstrates what is possible when income disparities reach a tipping point... That is just the reason, many countries and many people of a specific fraction already arm themselves against revolutions. What fantastic innovations are robots and drones!
    - dawnbreez 11y ago
      Fun fact: Drones can be disabled by blinding them with excess visual or IR noise, jamming their control signals, or applying a fast-moving chunk of metal of appropriate size. Further, drones are still limited to mostly open spaces. You can't clear a room with a quadcopter (yet), and a Predator missile strike is just as likely to kill loyal citizens as it is to kill the target. Tanks are easily outmaneuvered by humans on foot. Planes cannot take a building and leave it intact. Drones have electronic weaknesses in addition to the usual flaws. And nukes are practically a joke--the fallout, physical and political, would ruin any nation. TL;DR: Drones make terrible soldiers. Why do you think ISIS is still live and kicking?
      - kwhitefoot 11y ago
        The mere fact that a military tactic is stupid is no guarantee that it won't be employed.
        dawnbreez 11y ago
        But a stupid tactic is one that may result in defeat. Sun Tzu's slightly-less-famous quote--"If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight"--has two meanings, like a lot of Asian philosophy does. The obvious part is, as the saying goes, sieze the day. The less obvious part is that you should only sieze the day if you know you can hang onto it. In the case of nukes, only a damn fool would nuke his own food supply or factories, or perhaps a spiteful loser.
- peyton 11y ago
  Honest question: isn't wealth distribution thought to be fractal? So economic inequality should grow as an economy expands, but that alone doesn't imply there must be less for an arbitrary participant. I don't know much about economics, so sorry if I'm off base. It's just the statistic "XX people have more than YY% of people" gets thrown around in discussions, and I'm curious if it's cause for concern or just an economic fact.
  - sounds 11y ago
    Please cite a source.
  - cgio 11y ago
    The main model I am aware of is the Pareto distribution, which would have constant inequality.
    - PythonicAlpha 11y ago
      The point of wealth inequality is, that it is rapidly increasing -- particularly in the last 20 years. The parent poster implied, that by increasing the wealth of some, all will benefit. In my country, this was not the case in the last 20 years. The middle class that was rather broad and healthy, is loosing particularly in the less wealthy part -- many of those people fall down the ladder and are poor and will be even poorer when they are in old age. My country once was one of the wealthiest of the world, because many people where wealthy and earned good money. It was unthinkable once, that big parts of the society might be poor or have to live from "soup kitchens" -- today it is reality and all projections show, that it will become even worse! To be complete: My country is still one of the wealthiest of the world -- but with a much much smaller fraction of people owning the biggest part of this wealth.
- jdminhbg 11y ago
  Again, this is a stupid statistic that inaccurately counts currently indebted but huge earning potential people (say, for example, a recent graduate of Harvard Business School) as "poorer" than a sub-Saharan subsistence farmer. Longer explanation here: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/04/stop-adding-up-the-wealth-of-the-poor/ http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/04/stop-adding...
  - crishoj 11y ago
    The statistic might be stupid, but it does a marvellous job of illustrating immense inequality in wealth distribution, something which is both factual and important. Would you not agree?
    - mattlutze 11y ago
      If the statistic is inaccurate then it does a bad job at illustrating the inequality, because it's falsity discredits the conversation. In fact, it would be detrimental to the goal of telling the inequality story.
      - richmarr 11y ago
        How would you sum up the message to be both 'accurate' and consumable?
    - Ntrails 11y ago
      Generally the reason statistics are so dangerous when used to support an argument is that the argument quickly becomes about the validity of the number rather than the underlying issue. At a very basic level comparing wealth between economies requires all sorts of subjective normalisation which is pretty open to challenge, and accounting for things like student debt is obviously going to be contentious. Frankly I consider it surprising that you can even find the calculation methodology for something like that.
    - dawnbreez 11y ago
      The trouble is that a burger flipper will not make as much money as an inventor, programmer, or doctor, no matter how much time you spend demanding minimum wage increases. The former's job is far less effort-intensive than the others; even if you created a fascist state and ordered that all burger-flippers be paid as CEOs, you would immediately lose your CEOs as they all quit to become burger-flippers.
dota_fanatic 11y ago
Well, that's one aspect. Another aspect is that there's no rule saying that everyone's efforts are worth getting paid, no matter how hard that person worked. Well-engineered, objectively better products & services get out-maneuvered or preemptively made impossible all the time, and ludicrous amounts of money are spent on advertising to, y'know, help people figure out what they need. Population and automation proliferation both make humans less and less relevant, and non-altruistic behavior by rich and powerful is hardly ever punished because they have all the advantages. We sure do crack down hard on non-altruistic behavior committed by those in poverty, though. Even if we could all magically decide to cooperate and work together to eg end poverty & war, the modern human way of life (infinite growth) is at odds with the reality of planetary ecology. We don't do moderation well, as a group.

xlayn 11y ago

I have thought about this and my conclusion is that we have power over those companies, the power is on your decision not to buy any products from them. -Take for chance apple, Imagine people not buying a single iPhone until they start paying taxes as they should on US, you still can buy any rival brand right? You can imagine how stock prices would fall under the pressure of 0 iphones sold. -Software, go with a rival, support open source. -Get to the street and complain. -Do not play any music from vendorx, do not go to your artists concerts, do not play youtube music from them. Is all about us and doing some small sacrifices, in my case the reason behind my switch totally and never go back from windows to linux was the ftdi driver "update" bricking my olimexino 328. Edit: I have to say laws it's a very difficult area, maybe one of the easiest ways you can have of making a change could be supporting organizations like the EFF. Edit: clarity

helicon 11y ago
"the power is on your decision not to buy any products from them" The problem is our power is diluted.
- visarga 11y ago
  It is diluted, indeed. We are poor and many, they are rich an few. It is much easier to maintain coherence between them than between us. They can use mass media and other channels to incite even more conflict and division between the poor to keep them from mounting a meaningful resistance. I don't think a social change will happen on its own or by revolution, but rather there will be improvements in life quality for the poor as new technology such as the internet and smart phones are made available for the masses at low prices. The standard of living has improved in the last 100 years a lot for everyone, and this trend is going to continue in the future.
darpa_escapee 11y ago
Or we could enact legislation such that there are sane tax brackets and sufficient public services are made available.
dghughes 11y ago

GigabyteCoin 11y ago

>There are people in the world who uphold economic wealth and ownership over life itself. They weren't born that way. They grew up as wide-eyed children in the same world we all did. They loved to sing songs and share things at one time, too. Their only fault is that they were perhaps more efficient or "luckier" than the rest of us in acquiring their wealth. Which in turn forced the rich person persona onto them. It's pretty much downhill from there on out. Save for a few astonishing outliers like Bill Gates, thankfully. Money is the new God. It cures our blind and heals our lepers. It puts food on our tables for which we give thanks. If even withers our fig trees. It performs real miracles every day in a way that a book never could. In short, I'm not surprised that those who have acquired massive amounts of money are now suffering from delusions of grandeur. Is it possible to restrict the power that money has while still retaining most of it's core values? I don't know... But I'd bet money on it that we're going to find out pretty soon.

zlatan_todoric 11y ago
Bill Gates? Really? His company is one of the biggest proprietary companies in the world that to this day are still venturing into people's privacy as standard. Also: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371608/Bill-Gates-tried-cut-Paul-Allen-Microsoft-fell-ill-cancer.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371608/Bill-Gates-t... http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/03/04/clueless-fabrication-on-gmo.aspx# http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/03/0...! http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/the-ambitions-of-bill-and-melinda-gates-controlling-population-and-public-education http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/the-ambitions-of-bill-and... ...
- dawnbreez 11y ago
  And Gates donated everything he had and left Microsoft.
  - elevenfist 11y ago
    No, he did and has not. He does charity as a public benefactor through his foundation. And he still controls M$, he fired Balmer early.

Lawtonfogle 11y ago

>Reading these things makes me angry. There are people in the world who uphold economic wealth and ownership over life itself. And the name for those people is: Everybody. Every time I buy some nicety, something I want but do not need, I am spending money on myself that could have gone to some better purpose. It could've gone to pay for some man's surgery, to go feed some starving child in a third world country, or even to just help out the local domestic abuse shelter. My donations are less than the maximum I could give, and that is true for almost everyone out there. While some definitely engage in worse behavior, it is important to remember that it is a difference of degrees and not a difference of kinds.