4 ms·
I don't find your point coherent. Why should anyone be paid well for anything if their revenue generation is due more to circumstance than anything else? How f
by dsacco 10y ago
I don't find your point coherent. Why should anyone be paid well for anything if their revenue generation is due more to circumstance than anything else?
How far down the rabbit hole would we be going to go with this? Who gets to decide what the capital cutoff point is for "too massive" and the contribution cutoff point is for "due to circumstance"?
If I don't believe in free will, and thereby claim you make too much money because you technically weren't responsible for any of your actions and never chose the outcome that happened, can I incite a communist revolution and seize your assets? If I feel someone won the lottery because they were lucky, do I get to take all their money because they didn't contribute value or "earn" it in a way that I find agreeable?
Can you give me an example of someone who is wealthy who earned their money in a manner that isn't arguably due to circumstance? As it stands, I can't think of an example that is materially different from a tech CEO who happened to be in the right place and right time. Go far enough back and every idea and execution on that idea is due to chance. But that applies to everyone, not just tech CEOs, or whoever the robber baron of the week is.
- danmaz74 10y agoPlaying devil's advocate: because the chance of winning the lottery is a big motivation...
- dsacco 10y agoI don't follow - wealth itself is motivating to people who want it. Why single out the lottery?
- grogenaut 10y agoGP is likely referring to the startup lottery. Why did amazon win and pets.com fail? Why Facebook and not Myspace or orkut? Right place, right time + skill to make it + lucky = lottery.
- papabrown 10y agoYou really believe that the different between MySpace and Facebook is total lottery? Circumstances? MySpace sucked. It was an idea that was executed very poorly. Letting users turn their profile pages into CPU sucking machines was one of many poor choices made by the company. The reason Facebook succeeded and MySpace failed was because Facebook made different decisions than MySpace did. This whole concept is like saying, well, one guy decided to do the things he loved, go to baseball games, get drunk with his buddies, and watch copious amounts of TV. But this other guy spent 8 years educating himself and working his butt off accomplishing many things. Let's reward them equally because they both grew up in the same town thus should have equal outcomes.
- Frondo 10y agoWho gets to decide? How about all of us voters, taxpayers, and citizens, collectively, in a democratic fashion? I'd be fine having a discussion about what's "too massive" for a company and trying to figure out how to balance the interests of society and any given company (and its constituent individuals). But I'd like to start from a position of, what do we want society to look like? rather than a position of, how do we preserve the status quo?
- papabrown 10y agoYou do get to decide. You either reward them by being a consumer of their products/services or you don't. Sorry, looks like you got outvoted. Now you want to sit on some panel of judgement to overrule the public. I love it when people say stuff like this. Society has spoken. You simply don't like their decision so your answer to is to create some super-powerful organization that can veto the public and instill its own version of what society should look like.
- Frondo 10y agoWhat? Those companies exist because society has granted them permission. That "super-powerful organization" is the government. Always has been, always will be. Fortunately, now, for the most part, in the west, we all get a say in that super-powerful organization. It, and everything it spawns, like mega-corporations, exists to serve us, not the other way around.