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Nope. That’s too simplistic. There’s no "effective altruism", just people trying to buy a good conscience. You can’t become a billionaire without f* lot of peo

by ploum 4y ago

Nope. That’s too simplistic. There’s no "effective altruism", just people trying to buy a good conscience. You can’t become a billionaire without f* lot of people and exploiting the system’s loopholes. There’s no way to be a moral billionaire. In fact, by definition, every billionaire is a dangerous psychopat (normal people would stop focusing on earning money pass a given amount. You can’t be intellectually sane and a billionnaire). Every billioniare is a policy failure. So now, we have those dangerous psychopats who f* the system for money who try to justify their action by using the money in a way that they find morally good according to their own f** up moral values. Which means that they get even more power than just money: they start to define what is good and what is bad. The only sane way to give money is to let the community decide how to spend money. That’s called taxes. Strangely enough, every single billionaire is against paying taxes. Because they consider themselves morally superior. I agree that government are corrupts. I agree that democracy has lot of failures. But between a system which is not perfect and a dangerous psychopat who consider himself superior to any democratically elected government, I know which one is the worst for our future.

mrep 4y ago
How did J. K. Rowling, Michael Jordan, or Jerry Seinfeld f* a lot of people and exploit the system's loopholes?
- lvass 4y ago
  They gave people what they wanted badly enough to pay for, but not for free, like all evil capitalists.
  - machina_ex_deus 4y ago
    "evil capitalists". This is ridiculous. It's envy rationalization at this point. There are plenty of truly evil capitalists if you want to look for them, but many just aren't. Economy isn't zero sum game, like the truly evil communists would have you believe. Capitalism let's people vote continuously with their wallets. J.K. rowing might have gotten a big paycheck from everything, but much of the economic value dispersed to everyone else. And people wanted those resources in the hands of people making the movies. Nothing is free. There's always a price, and many times the margins of profits are just the margins required for stability anyway. And stability always comes with a price for risk, and it's always the investors paying the risk. What turned out as positive outcome could come from a negative expectation value distribution. There's nothing morally wrong from making a profit especially if you took a risk with negative expectation outcome. You expect these people to give you for free, but if they gave you for free on success they have negative expected outcome and they will never do it. That's like expecting people to give you money, and that's rude.
- kstenerud 4y ago
  They acquired far more resources than they could ever need, while others around them lacked even the most basic resources necessary to life. This is a systemic failure to be sure, but a failure nonetheless. The end result is these people ending up with massive surpluses of resources and power that others desperately need, simply because they have accumulated a larger amount of "money" from the luck of their circumstances. In the old days, these failures were mediated by debt jubilees, potlatches and such. More recently, we've moved on to wealth taxes, although these are a poor shadow of what we had before to ensure a minimum level of equality in a society.
  - Joeboy 4y ago
    So, why are so many people against them giving away that money in pursuit of a fairer world? Is it just frustrating to see the rich (aka evil) give away money consensually rather than it being taken by force? I totally get it if the donations aren't actually doing anything good, but most EA donations go to global health initiatives that save lives, in quite large numbers (I think SBFs did not, however). Edit: I would also get it if donations were being used as an anti-tax argument, but I don't see that being the case? I've never seen any billionaire say their donations should make them exempt from taxes. I believe eg. Gates and Buffet both favour higher taxes for the rich (publicly, at least). Sure there are anti-tax billionaires, and billionaires who make large charitable donations, but I'd guess the correlation between the two things was actually negative.
    - kstenerud 4y ago
      It's not a problem of giving away to charity; It's a problem of people reaching this level of wealth in the first place. In the early days, people who became too wealthy were killed by the rest of the villagers. Potlatches were a natural response to this because equalizing society reduced the resentment and also raised the prestige of the givers. Charity giving is the modern equivalent of this, but in a severely watered down form (they still get to spend their entire lives in unfathomable wealth). With 2 million USD in personal wealth, you can dump it into safe, passive investment vehicles and life comfortably off the proceeds for the rest of your life in a first world country. Tens of millions or more is simply avarice, and needs to be discouraged in order to mitigate the steady slide into extreme inequality that comes as a natural consequence of unequal luck or opportunity over time.
- oh_sigh 4y ago
  Jerry famously hosed over the other primary cast members on residuals. Didn't matter much for elaine, but George and Kramer didn't come from a family of billionaires. Michael Jordan thought selling shoes was more important than making a statement denouncing a racist man running for office in his home state. JK used her money to stifle fans free speech and fair use with lawsuits galore if she disagreed that they were "true fans". Those are the worst things I can think of for those 3. I don't think it rises to the level of psychopathy but it certainly is questionable behavior.
  - boxed 4y ago
    Except for Jerry, those are random stuff done WITH the money they earned. Not something they did to get the money in the first place. So you're just off topic.
terryf 4y ago
Curious. How do you see the system actually working - how do you stop at a billion? So, let's say you start a company. Then raise some VC money. You start getting users and things are going really well, but you aren't quite profitable. You see a path to that but need to make investments to get there. So you raise another round of money. However, as you are doing well, the valuation of the company is set to three billion. As the founder, you still own 50% of the shares. You are technically now a billionaire. Of course, just on paper but Forbes will still put you on the "overnight billionaire" list. What are you supposed to do in this case ? When exactly did you go from "not psychopath" to "psychopath"?
- igorkraw 4y ago
  On the system level:tax the billionaire? 1. Found a unicorn. Congratulations! 2. Get a tax bill 3. Either loan against your shares (good luck) or(and probably even if you do get a loan) 4. Go public early, selling your shares and let others partake in the companies growth Alternatively, give your shares to employees, donate, whatever. It's not really rocket science, just tax wealth (radical markets proposes a nice way to get honest self assessments...) and as a side benefit, you benefit employees by creating much more incentive against staying private forever
  - terryf 4y ago
    So you should be forced to IPO when a company valuation is 1b? Okay, fine. So if you IPO at 1b ( probably the valuation will drop after ipoing early but ok ) you are not considered a "psychopath" ? I'm sure all the employees with stock options will be thrilled as well after they drop in value.
joenot443 4y ago
How do you think someone like Mark Zuckerberg fits into that model? From what I observe, his personal motivation really does seem to be “build the most powerful social media company” and not “accumulate as much personal wealth as possible”. I think the VR bet is a good example of that - any sane CEO trying to maximize shareholder value would have scrapped it long ago. I’m not saying Mark is a great person, far from it, but I think it’s worth scrutinizing how billionaires got in their positions. There’s a lot amount of difference, in my mind, between Bill Gates and John Bogle.
- igorkraw 4y ago
  Wealth=non democratic power. Fully compatible with OPs characterisation
easygenes 4y ago
Say what you will about Notch since he's become a billionaire, but he became a billionaire just by creating a game that people really really liked and being willing to sell when Microsoft came knocking. He wasn't wealthy before that and didn't seem to have ambitions as such. So, it seems there are avenues to such vast wealth that aren't so clearly, "you must f many people over and have sociopathic ambitions". That is to say, in many ways I agree with your assessment, but let's be careful not to over-generalize.
- ploum 4y ago
  There are of course exceptions who became billionaire nearly by accident. Such is notch and, if I remember correctly, it was really hard for him to become so rich. Also, now that he has enough cash, you never heard him "trying to change the world with his cash". So, yeah, he might be one of the exceptions.
sweetheart 4y ago
There is a lot in here that seems like unsubstantiated opinion, like the only sane way to give money being donations to a community, but I do agree that billionaires are policy failures. I just don’t see how all that relates to an individuals obligation to contribute to good.

by ploum 4y ago

mrep 4y ago

How did J. K. Rowling, Michael Jordan, or Jerry Seinfeld f* a lot of people and exploit the system's loopholes?

lvass 4y ago
They gave people what they wanted badly enough to pay for, but not for free, like all evil capitalists.
- machina_ex_deus 4y ago
  "evil capitalists". This is ridiculous. It's envy rationalization at this point. There are plenty of truly evil capitalists if you want to look for them, but many just aren't. Economy isn't zero sum game, like the truly evil communists would have you believe. Capitalism let's people vote continuously with their wallets. J.K. rowing might have gotten a big paycheck from everything, but much of the economic value dispersed to everyone else. And people wanted those resources in the hands of people making the movies. Nothing is free. There's always a price, and many times the margins of profits are just the margins required for stability anyway. And stability always comes with a price for risk, and it's always the investors paying the risk. What turned out as positive outcome could come from a negative expectation value distribution. There's nothing morally wrong from making a profit especially if you took a risk with negative expectation outcome. You expect these people to give you for free, but if they gave you for free on success they have negative expected outcome and they will never do it. That's like expecting people to give you money, and that's rude.
kstenerud 4y ago
They acquired far more resources than they could ever need, while others around them lacked even the most basic resources necessary to life. This is a systemic failure to be sure, but a failure nonetheless. The end result is these people ending up with massive surpluses of resources and power that others desperately need, simply because they have accumulated a larger amount of "money" from the luck of their circumstances. In the old days, these failures were mediated by debt jubilees, potlatches and such. More recently, we've moved on to wealth taxes, although these are a poor shadow of what we had before to ensure a minimum level of equality in a society.
- Joeboy 4y ago
  So, why are so many people against them giving away that money in pursuit of a fairer world? Is it just frustrating to see the rich (aka evil) give away money consensually rather than it being taken by force? I totally get it if the donations aren't actually doing anything good, but most EA donations go to global health initiatives that save lives, in quite large numbers (I think SBFs did not, however). Edit: I would also get it if donations were being used as an anti-tax argument, but I don't see that being the case? I've never seen any billionaire say their donations should make them exempt from taxes. I believe eg. Gates and Buffet both favour higher taxes for the rich (publicly, at least). Sure there are anti-tax billionaires, and billionaires who make large charitable donations, but I'd guess the correlation between the two things was actually negative.
  - kstenerud 4y ago
    It's not a problem of giving away to charity; It's a problem of people reaching this level of wealth in the first place. In the early days, people who became too wealthy were killed by the rest of the villagers. Potlatches were a natural response to this because equalizing society reduced the resentment and also raised the prestige of the givers. Charity giving is the modern equivalent of this, but in a severely watered down form (they still get to spend their entire lives in unfathomable wealth). With 2 million USD in personal wealth, you can dump it into safe, passive investment vehicles and life comfortably off the proceeds for the rest of your life in a first world country. Tens of millions or more is simply avarice, and needs to be discouraged in order to mitigate the steady slide into extreme inequality that comes as a natural consequence of unequal luck or opportunity over time.
oh_sigh 4y ago
Jerry famously hosed over the other primary cast members on residuals. Didn't matter much for elaine, but George and Kramer didn't come from a family of billionaires. Michael Jordan thought selling shoes was more important than making a statement denouncing a racist man running for office in his home state. JK used her money to stifle fans free speech and fair use with lawsuits galore if she disagreed that they were "true fans". Those are the worst things I can think of for those 3. I don't think it rises to the level of psychopathy but it certainly is questionable behavior.
- boxed 4y ago
  Except for Jerry, those are random stuff done WITH the money they earned. Not something they did to get the money in the first place. So you're just off topic.

terryf 4y ago

Curious. How do you see the system actually working - how do you stop at a billion? So, let's say you start a company. Then raise some VC money. You start getting users and things are going really well, but you aren't quite profitable. You see a path to that but need to make investments to get there. So you raise another round of money. However, as you are doing well, the valuation of the company is set to three billion. As the founder, you still own 50% of the shares. You are technically now a billionaire. Of course, just on paper but Forbes will still put you on the "overnight billionaire" list. What are you supposed to do in this case ? When exactly did you go from "not psychopath" to "psychopath"?

igorkraw 4y ago
On the system level:tax the billionaire? 1. Found a unicorn. Congratulations! 2. Get a tax bill 3. Either loan against your shares (good luck) or(and probably even if you do get a loan) 4. Go public early, selling your shares and let others partake in the companies growth Alternatively, give your shares to employees, donate, whatever. It's not really rocket science, just tax wealth (radical markets proposes a nice way to get honest self assessments...) and as a side benefit, you benefit employees by creating much more incentive against staying private forever
- terryf 4y ago
  So you should be forced to IPO when a company valuation is 1b? Okay, fine. So if you IPO at 1b ( probably the valuation will drop after ipoing early but ok ) you are not considered a "psychopath" ? I'm sure all the employees with stock options will be thrilled as well after they drop in value.

joenot443 4y ago

How do you think someone like Mark Zuckerberg fits into that model? From what I observe, his personal motivation really does seem to be “build the most powerful social media company” and not “accumulate as much personal wealth as possible”. I think the VR bet is a good example of that - any sane CEO trying to maximize shareholder value would have scrapped it long ago. I’m not saying Mark is a great person, far from it, but I think it’s worth scrutinizing how billionaires got in their positions. There’s a lot amount of difference, in my mind, between Bill Gates and John Bogle.

igorkraw 4y ago
Wealth=non democratic power. Fully compatible with OPs characterisation

easygenes 4y ago

Say what you will about Notch since he's become a billionaire, but he became a billionaire just by creating a game that people really really liked and being willing to sell when Microsoft came knocking. He wasn't wealthy before that and didn't seem to have ambitions as such. So, it seems there are avenues to such vast wealth that aren't so clearly, "you must f many people over and have sociopathic ambitions". That is to say, in many ways I agree with your assessment, but let's be careful not to over-generalize.

ploum 4y ago
There are of course exceptions who became billionaire nearly by accident. Such is notch and, if I remember correctly, it was really hard for him to become so rich. Also, now that he has enough cash, you never heard him "trying to change the world with his cash". So, yeah, he might be one of the exceptions.

sweetheart 4y ago

There is a lot in here that seems like unsubstantiated opinion, like the only sane way to give money being donations to a community, but I do agree that billionaires are policy failures. I just don’t see how all that relates to an individuals obligation to contribute to good.