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This philosophy of praising exploitation is actually one of the things I liked least about America and one of the things I found most refreshing when I emigrate
by munk-a 4y ago
This philosophy of praising exploitation is actually one of the things I liked least about America and one of the things I found most refreshing when I emigrated. It's pervasive through American society that pulling the wool over the eyes of shadowy entities (large corporations, the government etc...) is a virtue but every time it's done it pulls a lot of money out of the hands of people that could use it more and further concentrates wealth. It's also part of the virtue package that allowed a recent presidential candidate to proudly proclaim that they'd not share their tax returns while talking about how much money they'd fleeced the government for and they were openly praised for these actions while running for the highest office.
Yes coinbase is a pretty shifty entity and probably didn't deserve so much funding in the first place but this individual managing to walk away with such an insane amount of money while making no contribution even approaching this level of value doesn't deserve praise - they're a prime example of the rot that is deeply set in America and causing wealth inequality to spiral out of control.
- sushzbdbehsh 4y ago[flagged]
- anamexis 4y agoFor what it's worth, I think GP was being sarcastic.
- logicallee 4y agoEDIT: apparently I was wrong and the poster was not sarcastic. (I thought it was Poe's law.)
- jahsome 4y agoThey replied the statement was not sarcastic and doubled down.
- morelisp 4y agoNobody would ever double-down on sarcasm.
- jonathankoren 4y agoAlways double down.:) Also, let’s be honest here. It’s stock valuation. That’s basically good vibes and rich VC money. It’s not like the money came from real people.
- burnished 4y agoNo, I think its a genuine case of two people with different values.
- phillipcarter 4y agoOh I'm not being sarcastic. The lemmings at the top of most tech companies are highly overpaid and continually fuck up Their One Job. The rare person who manages to trick them into paying a lot for little-to-no services has figured out the game and deserves some praise.
- hutzlibu 4y agoIn my idiotic idealistic opinion, people who build useful things, deserve praise.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- akudha 4y agoThis philosophy of praising exploitation I read that comment as sarcastic. I don't think your parent comment is praising him
- arcticbull 4y agoGenerally I agree but this is crypto. Crypto is 100% zero-sum or negative-sum. The whole space is predicated on trying to take money from other participants rather than actually creating value. Creating at best the illusion of value is the goal. This guy nailed it. It's not like he took $100M from an orphanage or something.
- logicallee 4y agoI agree that crypto is 100% negative-sum in my experience. (Especially the ones that are proof of work which literally destroys our one biosphere through wasting electricity.) Most recently, I got a "legitimate" (doxxed, "real") job offer via HN, got hired and scammed, wasted hours of my time. Crypto is scamsville.
- lelanthran 4y agoI'd like to hear more about this.
- logicallee 4y agoSomeone reached out via my Hacker News "who wants to be hired" comment offering a job. We did interviews, I got hired, onboarded and introduced to the team. They missed meetings and then disappeared before the first discussed paydate, ghosting me. They were set up in every way to do this. It seemed to be their standard M.O.
- lelanthran 4y agoHow do they profit from this?
- logicallee 4y agoI don't know if "profit" is the right word as it implies customers, but I guess they rip off devs and crypto investors they enter into contracts with then run away from, misappropriating investors' money and not delivering any value. The devs just help make it seem legitimate. There is no actual value creation involved.
- RC_ITR 4y agoThere's two ways to succeed (oversimplification): being conniving and being smart. In an environment like the USA (where many of the world's smartest tend to flock and extreme wealth is relatively achievable), being conniving is rarer than being smart, so that's what people value.
- newswasboring 4y agoI hope rarity is not your only marker for value. Otherwise I do have a rag to sell you which I've been using for 5 years now. Totally unique, nothing else like that.
- RC_ITR 4y agoI'm not sure how to respond. I don't think being conniving is better than being smart, just sharing an observation. Do you disagree with the premise?
- newswasboring 4y agoYup. Because the way I read it you are saying one thing has value because it's rarer than the other. Maybe I read it wrong?
- RC_ITR 4y ago>so that's what people value. It's not what I value, it's an observation of what others value. I know people couch their own opinions in the views of others a lot, but nowhere did I express personal feelings. It was just trying to dig one layer deeper to contextualize the situation OP was talking about (Americans valorizing confidence games).
- newswasboring 4y agoGotcha. I misread and wrote the comment addressing you.
- 4y ago
- rcme 4y agoI agree. And often, people don't draw the line at corporations. So many people in America are willing to screw over others if it means another dollar in their pocket.
- craig_s_bell 4y agoThe base elements of human nature do not care about national borders. I think you'll find such people, in similar proportion, in most places around the world.
- mrguyorama 4y ago"Fucking over others for personal gain" is actually not a "base element of human nature"! Plenty of other cultures are more altruistic, more about raising everyone up.
- beisner 4y agoI think it's more of a sarcastic / cynical take - kind of a "you reap what you sow" sentiment. This IS what capitalism is, with a weak social safety net and without controls on the accumulation of stupid levels of capital. If you don't believe that the people who invested in Coinbase should have had the ability to fling around billions of dollars on a whim, then it's difficult to feel bad when they spend it poorly.
- spamizbad 4y agoIt's because he exploited wealthy people.
- loeg 4y agoNah, it's because he exploited crypto people.
- shuckles 4y agoAlways surprising to me how many peoples’ moral framework is essentially the Code of Hammurabi with a few layers of indirection.
- CoastalCoder 4y agoWhy does that surprise you? AFAICT, peoples' moral leanings seem pretty consistent over history. (I could be wrong; I'm haven't studied that much history.)
- shuckles 4y agoThere's lots of very popular religions which have different expectations of moral behavior (in theory). It's also not a particularly pro-social moral framework.
- paisawalla 4y agoIn the 90s, my relatives first came to the US. In those days, there were newspaper dispensing machines on the sidewalk, which worked like this: 1. It was a box on the sidewalk with a locked swing-out door facing forward. 2. You put coins into the machine and the door unlocks. 3. Inside are all the newspapers. You put your hand in and take only one. 4. You close the door and it locks. The first thing my relatives asked after seeing this was "why do you only take one?" If you model society as a Nash equilibrium, the impulse to veer towards social betrayal is present in all people and societies. It's an obvious instinct and the fact that people are so open about indulging it only indicates that we're returning to the historic mean for humans, that the trust required to have a society based on mutual cooperation is vanishing. The only galling thing here is that the people to whom the most social benefits flow -- software engineers, product managers, executives -- are so brazen about betraying it, or cheering the betrayal of others. I don't know where you emigrated to, but unless it's Saudi Arabia or Singapore, I would doubt your observation. Americans and Euros have a tendency to view everyone else as Rousseau's "noble savage", i.e. a romanticized alien.
- ghaff 4y agoOn the one hand, I guess you need a certain level of social trust for newspaper dispensing machines to work. On the other hand, there's very little value to be gained by taking 10 newspapers. I suppose you can hawk them on the street for a discount but the benefit is pretty small.
- paisawalla 4y agoOn the third hand, the idea to ask "is more actually better than less" can only occur to people after they've become accustomed to a certain level of prosperity.
- munk-a 4y agoI emigrated up to Canada and it certainly is still present here but it isn't nearly as praised. In Vancouver a "starter" home is valued in the millions so wealth inequality is very much present here as well - but there is much more of a social rejection of wealth acquisition through under handed means. Trudeau got into a lot of political trouble over SNC-Lavlin and Doug Ford is currently getting a lot of crap over handouts of park lands to developer buddies. I don't want it to sound like everything is perfect but when people acquire power or wealth through exploitation they actually suffer for it up here instead of it being viewed as a virtue.
- jonahbenton 4y agoWould say in all seriousness while nodding at your comment that America was founded on exploitation, not just of natives and Africans but of future waves of immigrants as well, etc, and of the idea of the supremacy of the owner class (within which there was some relative, legally enshrined equality). The history of America is literally one of enabling experimentation and innovation in exploitation, of the framing that there are suckers and subordinates born every minute. This is the case in every single business domain, and is as or more true today as it ever has been. The true equality in America is that anyone and everyone can be cheated and dominated (of course some more easily/painfully than others). This unbroken lineage of inherent danger leads to the rise of (in some cases famous/legendary/mythologized) collectives and movements that attempt to enshrine rights and protections. One does not exist without the other.
- mixmastamyk 4y agoThis is why the comment resonates—the "owner class" got swindled. Fatcats, not the littleguys.
- cccybernetic 4y agoAs a first-generation immigrant I completely disagree with your framing here and it makes me sad that you view the United States in such an incredibly dismal way. There are many problems here, to be sure, but the US is undoubtedly one of the best places in the world to live, and, like very few other countries, tries to improve on its past, generation after generation.
- jonahbenton 4y agoForgive me, the intent was not to communicate a dismal attitude. Agree completely that it is one of the best places to live and all the rest. I personally find the mental model that includes the dynamics of dominance and subjugation along with the responses of solidarity and resistance extremely helpful in understanding the world as a whole. Why are things a certain way etc? Because of X. It is a physics, and is more completely predictive and reliable than a mental model that sees only oppression and anxiety (as many people are limited to) or one that sees only ambition and advantage (as many peoples' blinders dictate). Going further, I would argue that the existence of exploitation in a system is in fact essential, as is providing tools to resist and join and brace against it. But eliminating it is impossible and a non-goal.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- namdnay 4y agoWhich countries have you lived in? Fleecing large orgs (corporations, the government etc) is seen as a Robin Hood virtue in many if not most countries in the world.
- jb1991 4y ago> This philosophy of praising exploitation FWIW the parent you are replying to was clearly jesting with some sarcasm and not actually praising it in the way you seem to think. EDIT: apparently not, according to the other replies by that parent. But looks like several of us read sarcasm into the comment.
- wasjosh 4y agoIt’s not pervasive. Pound yourself in the face with sand everyday and you’ll think there’s sand everywhere. There are 100s of millions of people in the US.
- munk-a 4y agoThe largest financial crime in the US pretty much every year is wage theft. Wage theft isn't the grand larceny of millions - it's small business owners shaving tens or hundreds of dollars off the paychecks of people who are too powerless to object and accept the mistreatment because it keeps them out of poverty. This is an issue from the top to the bottom. We romanticize it when it's punching up (like at a crypto company that's probably been responsible for bankrupting a whole lot of suckers) but accepting it as a virtue also lets all those terrible bosses bask in the glory of how "keen" they're being by shaving off a bit extra for the retirement fund but punching down.
- jrochkind1 4y agoI agree with you. I thought GP was sarcasm... but these days who can even tell. Including the people writing/saying... I don't know if this is a USA thing or a more global thing, but I think a lot of people literally don't know if they are being sarcastic or not, sarcasm is so pervasive.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoi'm pretty sure the comment, to which you responded, is a joke. i mean, the second sentence is overtly sarcastic. if not intended as sarcastic, it works as sarcasm quite well!
- gumby 4y ago> This philosophy of praising exploitation I assumed the poster was being ironic.
- Stratoscope 4y agoI am almost certain that GP was being sarcastic.