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I'm sure clothing and footwear profits from slavery and child labor and general exporting of poor working conditions and environmental standards as many other i

I'm sure clothing and footwear profits from slavery and child labor and general exporting of poor working conditions and environmental standards as many other industries have done with globalization, and however connected to the "fashion" industry that is I guess. Are there other problems with it? My mind would have gone to energy, war industry, tech, banking, news media, chemical, health and pharmaceutical, and probably a lot of others before I thought of fashion though if I was thinking of societal cost. How do you gauge what is a good and bad proportion of billionaires for an industry, and what kind of societal cost do you think the fashion industry might have?

scotty79 5y ago
Just take a look at what industry most billionaires got rich from. Those are the industries that extract most value from society and environment. And since there's no free lunch there probably is some associated cost no matter how well hidden and surprising. > My mind would have gone to energy, war industry, tech, banking, news media, chemical, health and pharmaceutical, and probably a lot of others before I thought of fashion though if I was thinking of societal cost. Sure, there are other heuristics that might point out to other industries worth regulating.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  This isn't really how things work. Let's say Belon Tusk is worth $100 million and invests that into starting a submarine company. Eventually they make a working product they can sell, and that puts the value of the company at $1 billion. Eventually the second design comes along and revolutionizes submarine industry and reduces the costs that governments (taxpayers) and private industry were paying for submarine voyages significantly. This puts the value of the company at $100 billion and makes Belon a hundred billionaire. This is not wealth that was "extracted" from anywhere. The company might be using cheap finance on its valuation, but it's also paying workers, buying goods and services, and selling services into the economy as well. It's most likely creating a net positive for society.
  - scotty79 5y ago
    That's details. Look at list of the top richest people and look how most of them got there. You can see trends that go beyond any single person and any accounting tricks. The real estate moguls don't create value for society. They capture finite resource with capital and extract the value from society to capture even more. It's literally called rent. Check out Bezos. Amazon is in large part worker-exploitation-as-a-service delivered to customers same day, washed squeeky clean of any moral qualms. Bezos just takes his cut. Fasion industry is in large part child-labor-as-a-service.
    - throwawaylinux 5y ago
      It's not details, it's the central tenet of your argument was that billionaires are rich because they extracted something and there's no free lunch. That's just now how it works. Most of the new tech billionaires got rich entirely on the value of companies they created or invested in. Tesla has been pushing the old automotive industry that's built around internal combustion into the EV era, and SpaceX has been lowering the cost of rocket launches so tax payers get more bang for their dollar spent for government launches, allowing companies to provide more connectivity and other satellite services to more people, and is taking monopoly money away from the old war profiteers who were milking their government-funded cold war technology. Absolute wins. So Musk became a billionaire by providing better and cheaper things to people and improving society. So billionaires=bad metric is pretty flimsy, in my opinion.
      - scotty79 5y ago
        > That's just now how it works. Most of the new tech billionaires got rich entirely on the value of companies they created or invested in. That value doesn't come from thin air. > Tesla has been pushing the old automotive industry that's built around internal combustion into the EV era Telsa routinely overpromises and underdeliveres. It sells best where governments use tax money to pay for it. As a company is insanely overvalued. And while it made some actual progress, which is hard to avoid with billions flowing around it had created nowhere close to the value Elon Musk is free to command. A lot of that money came from taxes, a lot from pockets of people (both customers and investors) that could use it way better but were duped by wonderful fairy tale. And Tesla working culture has plenty of worker exploitation vibes. And Tesla is just the best case scenario. Other stuff is way more obviously costly to the social and ecological environment. Let's take SpaceX. It's just a venture based on occupying different point on price/quality curve. His rockets are so cheap that they blow up routinely for reasons that are no mystery for people that were involved in rocketry on govenrment dime. And btw his rockets are still paid for mostly by tax money. > allowing companies to provide more connectivity and other satellite services to more people Have you heard about Starlink? It allows ordinary people to sponsor acceleration of progression of Kessler syndrome, through the use of crappy saltelite internet that will only get worse as more people use it. Not to mention screwing up scientific community of people who chose to look into the sky. None of what billionaires do are absolute wins. They are just absolute wins for them. They do some good by disseminating some useful technology and finding ways to automate making stuff making it cheaper. But that's just some of them and that's just part of what some of them do. What all of them do is democratize doing damage to our planet and to society. Thanks to billionaires, you too can exploit workers, you too can benefit from child labor, you too can generate irreverisible environmental damage, you too can accelerate the end of sattelite era.

scotty79 5y ago

Just take a look at what industry most billionaires got rich from. Those are the industries that extract most value from society and environment. And since there's no free lunch there probably is some associated cost no matter how well hidden and surprising. > My mind would have gone to energy, war industry, tech, banking, news media, chemical, health and pharmaceutical, and probably a lot of others before I thought of fashion though if I was thinking of societal cost. Sure, there are other heuristics that might point out to other industries worth regulating.

throwawaylinux 5y ago
This isn't really how things work. Let's say Belon Tusk is worth $100 million and invests that into starting a submarine company. Eventually they make a working product they can sell, and that puts the value of the company at $1 billion. Eventually the second design comes along and revolutionizes submarine industry and reduces the costs that governments (taxpayers) and private industry were paying for submarine voyages significantly. This puts the value of the company at $100 billion and makes Belon a hundred billionaire. This is not wealth that was "extracted" from anywhere. The company might be using cheap finance on its valuation, but it's also paying workers, buying goods and services, and selling services into the economy as well. It's most likely creating a net positive for society.
- scotty79 5y ago
  That's details. Look at list of the top richest people and look how most of them got there. You can see trends that go beyond any single person and any accounting tricks. The real estate moguls don't create value for society. They capture finite resource with capital and extract the value from society to capture even more. It's literally called rent. Check out Bezos. Amazon is in large part worker-exploitation-as-a-service delivered to customers same day, washed squeeky clean of any moral qualms. Bezos just takes his cut. Fasion industry is in large part child-labor-as-a-service.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    It's not details, it's the central tenet of your argument was that billionaires are rich because they extracted something and there's no free lunch. That's just now how it works. Most of the new tech billionaires got rich entirely on the value of companies they created or invested in. Tesla has been pushing the old automotive industry that's built around internal combustion into the EV era, and SpaceX has been lowering the cost of rocket launches so tax payers get more bang for their dollar spent for government launches, allowing companies to provide more connectivity and other satellite services to more people, and is taking monopoly money away from the old war profiteers who were milking their government-funded cold war technology. Absolute wins. So Musk became a billionaire by providing better and cheaper things to people and improving society. So billionaires=bad metric is pretty flimsy, in my opinion.
    - scotty79 5y ago
      > That's just now how it works. Most of the new tech billionaires got rich entirely on the value of companies they created or invested in. That value doesn't come from thin air. > Tesla has been pushing the old automotive industry that's built around internal combustion into the EV era Telsa routinely overpromises and underdeliveres. It sells best where governments use tax money to pay for it. As a company is insanely overvalued. And while it made some actual progress, which is hard to avoid with billions flowing around it had created nowhere close to the value Elon Musk is free to command. A lot of that money came from taxes, a lot from pockets of people (both customers and investors) that could use it way better but were duped by wonderful fairy tale. And Tesla working culture has plenty of worker exploitation vibes. And Tesla is just the best case scenario. Other stuff is way more obviously costly to the social and ecological environment. Let's take SpaceX. It's just a venture based on occupying different point on price/quality curve. His rockets are so cheap that they blow up routinely for reasons that are no mystery for people that were involved in rocketry on govenrment dime. And btw his rockets are still paid for mostly by tax money. > allowing companies to provide more connectivity and other satellite services to more people Have you heard about Starlink? It allows ordinary people to sponsor acceleration of progression of Kessler syndrome, through the use of crappy saltelite internet that will only get worse as more people use it. Not to mention screwing up scientific community of people who chose to look into the sky. None of what billionaires do are absolute wins. They are just absolute wins for them. They do some good by disseminating some useful technology and finding ways to automate making stuff making it cheaper. But that's just some of them and that's just part of what some of them do. What all of them do is democratize doing damage to our planet and to society. Thanks to billionaires, you too can exploit workers, you too can benefit from child labor, you too can generate irreverisible environmental damage, you too can accelerate the end of sattelite era.