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I don’t agree that this is always the case, and I don’t even agree that Elon’s accumulation of wealth was particularly exploitative (in the pejorative sense).

by epgui 4y ago

I don’t agree that this is always the case, and I don’t even agree that Elon’s accumulation of wealth was particularly exploitative (in the pejorative sense). I do agree that it often is the case with very wealthy people, and probably with most executives, who add little value relative to the wealth they are able to accumulate.

d0liver 4y ago
No billionaire is contributing anything close to what they're receiving in return. They should be compensated with an amount that's commensurate to the role they fill within an organization. Elon, for example, is a glorified manager and should be paid a manager's salary and nothing more. Can you give an example of a billionaire bringing tens of thousands times as much value as an average employee at a company? Imagine that they are not already a billionaire.
- junofan 4y ago
  > Can you give an example of a billionaire bringing tens of thousands times as much value as an average employee at a company? Imagine that they are not already a billionaire. Yeah, Jeff Bezos took his idea for an online bookstore from working as an employee at DE Shaw and delivered way more value by systematically derisking the business over decades. There was a market worth many trillions: online retail. When Bezos created Amazon, owning part of that company was very risky and therefore Amazon was nearly worthless. Now anybody can buy a share of Amazon. Bezos was compensated for the value he created by derisking.
  - d0liver 4y ago
    What you're talking about is using other people to leverage the value of your judgement, right? This is similar to what a manager does when they manage a team - they make sure that things flow well in the team or the whole project fails. In that case, at the end of the project, is it fair for the manager to get up and say, "I personally created all of this value because without me it wouldn't exist"? No, of course not. Because without literally everyone on the team who made a contribution it wouldn't exist. Imagine Jeff Bezos trying to create Amazon literally _on his own_. It just doesn't math; it can't. The good judgement required to grow a company is definitely worth something, but it isn't worth like twenty thousand times more than everyone else involved.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      Why can’t ‘good judgement’ at the right time be worth 20000x more than a mediocre judgement at the right time? (Or good judgement at a mediocore time?) In the most extreme case, say some military general’s correct judgement to avoid launching a nuclear missile during a false alert, may be worth more than everyone else’s combined. i.e their ‘good judgement’ during a critical few seconds would be worth 8 billion times more than the average.
      - d0liver 4y ago
        This only works if you're leveraging your judgement through other people. The people who put you in a position to make the meaningful judgement are just as important. For example, if the person who made the monitoring system that you're using to inform your decision didn't mess it up, then they're just as responsible for the good outcome. Same with the people who made the parts that they used to build the system and on and on. It's still the same thing: Taking credit for other people's work and claiming it as your own. It's also probably a good reason to democratize decision making when there's a lot on the line. Because, ultimately, everyone suffers from the bad decisions that people in power make.
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
        Leveraging other people’s work doesn’t invalidate your own work… Even if assuming the ‘leverage’ is of overriding importance, Isn’t it fairly obvious that in this example the general could also make the wrong decision which will also leverage the work of millions, missile builders and so on, to a very negative outcome? If that occurs, do the millions of folks who worked directly on some aspect bear collective responsibility? And the general’s decision then becomes inconsequential in the mass of millions of other decisions? Your line of reasoning leads to an absurd conclusion in which no one’s decisions can have a disproportionate impact.
deltathreetwo 4y ago
It is always the case. Another fallacy that can only be the result of your flawed intuition. All human capability has limits. You have limited strength and limited intelligence. There is no amount of intelligence or physical strength in a single human that can allow one man to build a feat of technology such as a Boeing 747. It can't even be done by one human in 10 lifetimes. This fundamental impossibility in your words is "always the case." Yet there are individuals that exist in the world with enough wealth to buy several 747s. You will see that anyone with this amount of wealth could not have achieved this wealth through the sheer power of their individual IQ or physical strength. They had to have worked with many others in order to achieve such wealth. The existence of said individuals completely verifies the existence of how wealth is distributed unfairly. There is no fair barter that can allow one man to gain a 747 unless that man extracted work off the backs of others. It is logically impossible if this was not the case. The only thing you can argue here is that wealth inequality is required for society to progress; but there is no argument on whether or not the resources are distributed fairly.
- epgui 4y ago
  Even if everything you just said was true, it completely misses the point and is irrelevant to my comment.
  - deltathreetwo 4y ago
    Doesn't matter. It's true and what you said how it's "always the case" is categorically false. The falsehood of your comment is the only thing that is relevant here.
    - epgui 4y ago
      PS.: I don’t know what I said to trigger you, but you don’t need to continue posting arguments to other comments I make across various threads. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
      - formulatwothree 4y ago

by epgui 4y ago

d0liver 4y ago

No billionaire is contributing anything close to what they're receiving in return. They should be compensated with an amount that's commensurate to the role they fill within an organization. Elon, for example, is a glorified manager and should be paid a manager's salary and nothing more. Can you give an example of a billionaire bringing tens of thousands times as much value as an average employee at a company? Imagine that they are not already a billionaire.

junofan 4y ago
> Can you give an example of a billionaire bringing tens of thousands times as much value as an average employee at a company? Imagine that they are not already a billionaire. Yeah, Jeff Bezos took his idea for an online bookstore from working as an employee at DE Shaw and delivered way more value by systematically derisking the business over decades. There was a market worth many trillions: online retail. When Bezos created Amazon, owning part of that company was very risky and therefore Amazon was nearly worthless. Now anybody can buy a share of Amazon. Bezos was compensated for the value he created by derisking.
- d0liver 4y ago
  What you're talking about is using other people to leverage the value of your judgement, right? This is similar to what a manager does when they manage a team - they make sure that things flow well in the team or the whole project fails. In that case, at the end of the project, is it fair for the manager to get up and say, "I personally created all of this value because without me it wouldn't exist"? No, of course not. Because without literally everyone on the team who made a contribution it wouldn't exist. Imagine Jeff Bezos trying to create Amazon literally _on his own_. It just doesn't math; it can't. The good judgement required to grow a company is definitely worth something, but it isn't worth like twenty thousand times more than everyone else involved.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    Why can’t ‘good judgement’ at the right time be worth 20000x more than a mediocre judgement at the right time? (Or good judgement at a mediocore time?) In the most extreme case, say some military general’s correct judgement to avoid launching a nuclear missile during a false alert, may be worth more than everyone else’s combined. i.e their ‘good judgement’ during a critical few seconds would be worth 8 billion times more than the average.
    - d0liver 4y ago
      This only works if you're leveraging your judgement through other people. The people who put you in a position to make the meaningful judgement are just as important. For example, if the person who made the monitoring system that you're using to inform your decision didn't mess it up, then they're just as responsible for the good outcome. Same with the people who made the parts that they used to build the system and on and on. It's still the same thing: Taking credit for other people's work and claiming it as your own. It's also probably a good reason to democratize decision making when there's a lot on the line. Because, ultimately, everyone suffers from the bad decisions that people in power make.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        Leveraging other people’s work doesn’t invalidate your own work… Even if assuming the ‘leverage’ is of overriding importance, Isn’t it fairly obvious that in this example the general could also make the wrong decision which will also leverage the work of millions, missile builders and so on, to a very negative outcome? If that occurs, do the millions of folks who worked directly on some aspect bear collective responsibility? And the general’s decision then becomes inconsequential in the mass of millions of other decisions? Your line of reasoning leads to an absurd conclusion in which no one’s decisions can have a disproportionate impact.

deltathreetwo 4y ago

It is always the case. Another fallacy that can only be the result of your flawed intuition. All human capability has limits. You have limited strength and limited intelligence. There is no amount of intelligence or physical strength in a single human that can allow one man to build a feat of technology such as a Boeing 747. It can't even be done by one human in 10 lifetimes. This fundamental impossibility in your words is "always the case." Yet there are individuals that exist in the world with enough wealth to buy several 747s. You will see that anyone with this amount of wealth could not have achieved this wealth through the sheer power of their individual IQ or physical strength. They had to have worked with many others in order to achieve such wealth. The existence of said individuals completely verifies the existence of how wealth is distributed unfairly. There is no fair barter that can allow one man to gain a 747 unless that man extracted work off the backs of others. It is logically impossible if this was not the case. The only thing you can argue here is that wealth inequality is required for society to progress; but there is no argument on whether or not the resources are distributed fairly.

epgui 4y ago
Even if everything you just said was true, it completely misses the point and is irrelevant to my comment.
- deltathreetwo 4y ago
  Doesn't matter. It's true and what you said how it's "always the case" is categorically false. The falsehood of your comment is the only thing that is relevant here.
  - epgui 4y ago
    PS.: I don’t know what I said to trigger you, but you don’t need to continue posting arguments to other comments I make across various threads. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
    - formulatwothree 4y ago