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> One is new money, one is old money, but they both share a severe lack of idealism and social responsibility. Disagree strongly. Old money usually came throug

by strlen 16y ago

> One is new money, one is old money, but they both share a severe lack of idealism and social responsibility. Disagree strongly. Old money usually came through parasitic exploitation. New money was earned in fair and honest ways: by building something. We like to talk about how our society it's meritocratic, but extra ordinary wealth earned at a young age is still looked down upon in our society. Witness the hatred of Yuppies and (outside of the Silicon Valley) dislike of startups: you're supposed to join $big_corp and work your way up through the ladder; if you shortcut by getting a high paying job right out of college you're a hated yuppie; if you shortcut by leaving for a startup, you're a traitor and a job hopper. I barely use Facebook: I didn't enjoy high school (I have no desire to learn that the dude who slammed me into a locker just got engaged and is eating a sandwich) and I went to a small university where it's easy to keep in touch with classmates. I find other sites more interesting. Facebook is not just Zuckerberg. It's now a corporation. The only social responsibility of a corporation (thank you Dr. Friedman) is to generate profit for their shareholders: this profit will channel into mutual funds which individuals use to retire, to philanthropic endeavours. The engineering work that goes on at Facebook (they're now endowing research fellowships) will go towards better machine learning algorithms, more efficient data centres, etc... It's almost certain that the work Facebook has put into Hadoop, for example, is helping make protein sequencing an easier task (e.g., HDFS RAID-node means being able to use a smaller replication factor, which means being able to store more data on less physical hardware!). That's the beauty of capitalism. Capitalism is sometimes horribly unfair and inefficient, but it's far better than the other systems (an immigrant from a communist country speaking here...). Would the Winklevii had any interest in building our such a business? Their plan was to use hired help (what they think of you and I) to perhaps build it into a $100mm acquisition target that would rot at Yahoo, Microsoft or Newscorp; their plan wasn't to build a world class technology company.

michaelchisari 16y ago
The only social responsibility of a corporation Legally, yes. But that's an ethical black hole if we stop there. My expectations of an institution increase as their resources increase. The greater the resources, the greater my expectations on their social responsibility. I'd rather not simply acquiesce to power just because Milton Friedman (or anyone) considers it a good idea.
- strlen 16y ago
  > I'd rather not simply acquiesce to power just because Milton Friedman (or anyone) considers it a good idea. You're confusing is and ought here. It's not that they consider it a good idea, it's just it's empirically observable that the society is better off as a result. You can challenge Friedman and a propose a new economic theory. Indeed others have modified his theories to take account of externalities such as pollution: if you want to make such an argument here, I'm ready to listen. I don't mean it in a polemic way, I am curious about research into externalities of social networks and economics-conscious ways of dealing with them e.g., equivalent of pollution credits.
  - michaelchisari 16y ago
    Plenty of people have challenged Friedman's economic theories. In fact, the Austrian school of economics is in no way unchallenged, and in many circles is not considered empirically sound. I'd rather not get into a big political or economic debate, but the idea that Friedman's views are an objective truth is simply not true.
    - strlen 16y ago
      > In fact, the Austrian school of economics is in no way unchallenged, and in many circles is not considered empirically sound. Friedman isn't Austrian school (he was against the Gold standard and he suggested Income Tax withholding!). If you want a horrible analogy, think of Austrian school as Haskell, Chicago school as OCaml (Hayek being a link between the two, just as HM type inference is the link between ML and Haskell), Keynes as Smalltalk and more modern theories as something like Scala.
    - michaelchisari 16y ago
      My mistake, confused Friedman with Rothbard. However, the concept of eschewing social pressure requirements in favor of the machinations of the market is something I have no interest in. Generally, I agree with Krugman's critique of Friedman's economics (although I consider myself to the left of Krugman).
fingerprinter 16y ago
Disagree strongly on several points. 1. New money doesn't mean it is clean. Zuck might be the first honest billionaire, but I highly doubt it. Highly. And, even if he was above board on every business dealing, partner agreement or equity stake (we know this not to be the case already), there is still the little matter of Facebook privacy issues, which are well known. Again, not clean money. 2. Facebook today, doing what they are doing with the money the have, is great. But we don't know what the twins would have done with the money and facebook of today and it is silly to speculate (it only shows biases). Personally, I think nearly everyone involved in this fiasco is dirty to some degree. I don't wholesale reject the notion that ideas aren't worth that much (your earlier post), but I do reject that they have no value. What Zuck has reported to have done would qualify as intellectual property theft in any industry, why not ours? I don't care what the intentions of the twins were, zuck didn't need to do that (string them along..etc etc) if he was some quality human being. To your point that the twins wanted to ride on the back of Zuck while making a buck....I'm not sure your argument is as compelling as you think it is. Every corporation has an unjust equity structure at the core. Founder share vs VC share vs first engineer share etc etc. Typical first engineer/non-founder share would be .5%-1.5%. Did Zuck get this deal with the Twins? Is this even fair? Valid questions, but either way it is still valid that Zuck basically aligned himself with the twins and then bolted leaving them with nothing. Do I agree with them coming back for more money? I haven't thought about it too much nor do I think I will b/c frankly this whole thing bores me. Lastly, I barely use facebook. I do respect what they've become as a technology organization, but I do not like their semi-shady business practices. I think of Facebook like I do Oracle: I would trust them as far as I could throw them. Both may be the top in their industry, but neither are clean.
- strlen 16y ago
  > What Zuck has reported to have done would qualify as intellectual property theft in any industry, why not ours? First, let me preface this that I am not a big believer in IP to start with: I'm especially opposed to software and business method patents. When I worked at an EDA company as a contractor (doing random C++ hacking just to make things work, without really understanding them) I heard many interesting ideas on computational physics, computational geometry, graph theory and the like. I floated some of my own, just out of curiosity and idle thinking. However, as I don't have the qualifications to implement any of them (I may know Boost and STL, but my physics knowledge has been swapped out of the page cache), making those ideas worthless to me -- just as the idea of a social network is worthless to the Winklevoss twins as they can't code. If accidentally, someone else at the company went and implemented those ideas, I'd have no right to sue: I blindly spouted ideas that I had no insights into (in regards to feasibility and work involved) and if I'm right about them being viable, it's by accident. In other words, suppose you work at Intel: your boss says, "it'd be nice if we had a more power efficient chip" without giving any idea as to how. You leave and implement such a chip. I doubt there'd be case for IP theft. If, on the other hand, you took the actual layouts for the chip, it's a different matter.

by strlen 16y ago

michaelchisari 16y ago

The only social responsibility of a corporation Legally, yes. But that's an ethical black hole if we stop there. My expectations of an institution increase as their resources increase. The greater the resources, the greater my expectations on their social responsibility. I'd rather not simply acquiesce to power just because Milton Friedman (or anyone) considers it a good idea.

strlen 16y ago
> I'd rather not simply acquiesce to power just because Milton Friedman (or anyone) considers it a good idea. You're confusing is and ought here. It's not that they consider it a good idea, it's just it's empirically observable that the society is better off as a result. You can challenge Friedman and a propose a new economic theory. Indeed others have modified his theories to take account of externalities such as pollution: if you want to make such an argument here, I'm ready to listen. I don't mean it in a polemic way, I am curious about research into externalities of social networks and economics-conscious ways of dealing with them e.g., equivalent of pollution credits.
- michaelchisari 16y ago
  Plenty of people have challenged Friedman's economic theories. In fact, the Austrian school of economics is in no way unchallenged, and in many circles is not considered empirically sound. I'd rather not get into a big political or economic debate, but the idea that Friedman's views are an objective truth is simply not true.
  - strlen 16y ago
    > In fact, the Austrian school of economics is in no way unchallenged, and in many circles is not considered empirically sound. Friedman isn't Austrian school (he was against the Gold standard and he suggested Income Tax withholding!). If you want a horrible analogy, think of Austrian school as Haskell, Chicago school as OCaml (Hayek being a link between the two, just as HM type inference is the link between ML and Haskell), Keynes as Smalltalk and more modern theories as something like Scala.
  - michaelchisari 16y ago
    My mistake, confused Friedman with Rothbard. However, the concept of eschewing social pressure requirements in favor of the machinations of the market is something I have no interest in. Generally, I agree with Krugman's critique of Friedman's economics (although I consider myself to the left of Krugman).

fingerprinter 16y ago

Disagree strongly on several points. 1. New money doesn't mean it is clean. Zuck might be the first honest billionaire, but I highly doubt it. Highly. And, even if he was above board on every business dealing, partner agreement or equity stake (we know this not to be the case already), there is still the little matter of Facebook privacy issues, which are well known. Again, not clean money. 2. Facebook today, doing what they are doing with the money the have, is great. But we don't know what the twins would have done with the money and facebook of today and it is silly to speculate (it only shows biases). Personally, I think nearly everyone involved in this fiasco is dirty to some degree. I don't wholesale reject the notion that ideas aren't worth that much (your earlier post), but I do reject that they have no value. What Zuck has reported to have done would qualify as intellectual property theft in any industry, why not ours? I don't care what the intentions of the twins were, zuck didn't need to do that (string them along..etc etc) if he was some quality human being. To your point that the twins wanted to ride on the back of Zuck while making a buck....I'm not sure your argument is as compelling as you think it is. Every corporation has an unjust equity structure at the core. Founder share vs VC share vs first engineer share etc etc. Typical first engineer/non-founder share would be .5%-1.5%. Did Zuck get this deal with the Twins? Is this even fair? Valid questions, but either way it is still valid that Zuck basically aligned himself with the twins and then bolted leaving them with nothing. Do I agree with them coming back for more money? I haven't thought about it too much nor do I think I will b/c frankly this whole thing bores me. Lastly, I barely use facebook. I do respect what they've become as a technology organization, but I do not like their semi-shady business practices. I think of Facebook like I do Oracle: I would trust them as far as I could throw them. Both may be the top in their industry, but neither are clean.

strlen 16y ago
> What Zuck has reported to have done would qualify as intellectual property theft in any industry, why not ours? First, let me preface this that I am not a big believer in IP to start with: I'm especially opposed to software and business method patents. When I worked at an EDA company as a contractor (doing random C++ hacking just to make things work, without really understanding them) I heard many interesting ideas on computational physics, computational geometry, graph theory and the like. I floated some of my own, just out of curiosity and idle thinking. However, as I don't have the qualifications to implement any of them (I may know Boost and STL, but my physics knowledge has been swapped out of the page cache), making those ideas worthless to me -- just as the idea of a social network is worthless to the Winklevoss twins as they can't code. If accidentally, someone else at the company went and implemented those ideas, I'd have no right to sue: I blindly spouted ideas that I had no insights into (in regards to feasibility and work involved) and if I'm right about them being viable, it's by accident. In other words, suppose you work at Intel: your boss says, "it'd be nice if we had a more power efficient chip" without giving any idea as to how. You leave and implement such a chip. I doubt there'd be case for IP theft. If, on the other hand, you took the actual layouts for the chip, it's a different matter.