8 ms·

Rules for thee, but not for me, as always. All big established companies want to ensure that nobody coming after them has a fair chance.

polotics 4y ago
Peter Thiel's infamous "competition is for losers" indeed comes to mind.
- dbuder 4y ago
  Be the biggest hypocrite possible seems to be his motto
  - scotty79 4y ago
    "competition is for losers" is really honest and true. Nothing hypocritical about it.
    - rdedev 4y ago
      In that framing, everything else outside the company, like society, govt, are just losers. That's just a sad state to be in
      - scotty79 4y ago
        And yet that's exactly the state we are really in regardless of all declaration stating otherwise.
        ngetchell 4y ago
        This is such a disgusting world-view. "Yes, the govt worker that helps run SNAP, so people can eat, is just a loser." Maybe they aren't looking to maximize the same things you are? You know, a different perspectives?
    - creshal 4y ago
      If companies own it up, sure. But Meta pretends to want "honest" competition, it's just that somehow any competitors who do exactly what Meta is doing are "cheating".
      - godzillabrennus 4y ago
        Congress might do something if they went full Martin Shkreli on what they are doing in Big Tech.
    - toss1 4y ago
      "Honest and true" IFF your sole interest is your monetary/political gain without regard to ethics or fairness — IOW, you are an abuser/exploiter of the system and of people. It is the same kind of "truth" as "Might Makes Right" and "He who has the gold makes the rules". While these phrases accurately describe the matter in some situations, they do not create a society that is sustainable, desirable, or any value of ethical (even for the abuser/autocrat, who must always watch their back). So, yes, to the extent that it is an open admission of being an abusive exploiter of the system and people, it is not hypocritical. But if that same person makes any statement or pretense that they are an ethical or good person, it is hypocritical in the extreme.
      - scotty79 4y ago
        > While these phrases accurately describe the matter in some situations, they do not create a society that is sustainable, desirable, or any value of ethical (even for the abuser/autocrat, who must always watch their back). It accurately describes our society that is not sustainable, desirable or ethical. Pretending that it is doesn't help us with evolving it towards some noble goals. To evolve the system you need to understand it. For example you can't progress society untill you understand that the one we got after thousands of years of societal evolution is the one entirely based on the concept of monopoly for violence. Some people feel very offended about this. I have exactly zero hopes for their revolutionary attempts at transformation working out.
        toss1 4y ago
        >>It accurately describes our society that is not sustainable, desirable or ethical. Spot on! However it is not all black & white, but a gradient of high trust to almost zero trust. For example, the US is definitely degrading in the last decade, but is still nowhere near the levels of endemic and systematic paranoia of Russia or North Korea. It all comes down to this: if you want to live a self-determined life in a society with a self-determined government, you must personally and as a nation be better armed, prepared, and allied than the abusers and autocrats who want to steal from you and rule you. Giving the equivalent of nukes to the abusers/autocrats is not a smart move.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      Honest? Sure. True? No.
    - dgb23 4y ago
      In isolation maybe? I heard him claim that he is a "libertarian" once.
themitigating 4y ago
That's what businesses do. They are created to make money. They only way to keep them in check is with regulations. The unfortunate thing is so many people hold libertarian views while others are anti-big government.
- m0llusk 4y ago
  They may call themselves Libertarians but there is this competing idea that the path to liberty necessarily involves strong checks on both government and commercial organizations. But to work with these ideas it would be necessary to look beyond Peter Thiel's entertaining antics and that is difficult because there is such delight in giving him a pedestal and spotlight. What is liberty? Talk to Peter Thiel. He must really know all about that.
  - hdhcuvyvt 4y ago
    That's not a competing idea. It is the idea. The difficulty is knowing which checks are necessary and which are "big government". Which is why we vote. Being anti big government is not the same thing as being anti all government. Characterising it that way is either lazy or ignorant, take your pick.
  - VieEnCode 4y ago
    Libertarians of that stripe are essentially pro plutocracy, which would end up being massively anti liberty in practice. But just as the winners write the history books, the richest libertarians like Thiel and Koch seem able to define what the ideology looks like in the popular imagination, because they can afford to shape the debate via think tanks, media ownership, campus outreach, lobbying, etc.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  It's even what individuals do when they believe they can justify it. Many accident lawyers would be out of business if people refused to fake a "soft-tissue" injury out of principle. If the incentive is there, people will usually take it, if they don't have to feel badly about it.
comte7092 4y ago
Basic economic theory predicts that a in a market with perfect competition, all firms will have zero profits (the economic definition, wherein opportunity costs are taken into consideration, nominal profits aren’t zero). It’s interesting to observe the number of people who will post about capitalism and competition and not consider the fact that for any rational actor, competition is existentially horrible and should be avoided by all means necessary. Perfect competition exists purely as a mathematical model and not as an actually observed outcome of a “natural” system for a reason.
- nordsieck 4y ago
  > Basic economic theory predicts that a in a market with perfect competition, all firms will have zero profits (the economic definition, wherein opportunity costs are taken into consideration, nominal profits aren’t zero). In your simplified economic world, I'm not convinced that profits would be pushed below the cost of capital.
  - comte7092 4y ago
    My simplified economic world is literally just paraphrasing established theory: >Economic profit does not occur in perfect competition in long run equilibrium; if it did, there would be an incentive for new firms to enter the industry, aided by a lack of barriers to entry until there was no longer any economic profit.[0] Your issue isn’t with me, it’s with what’s taught in every economics department in every country around the world. (I also never said “profits would be pushed below the cost of capital”, my comment does not imply that at all. See: “nominal profits aren’t zero”) [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition
- kibwen 4y ago
  Perfect competition is one end of a spectrum, where the other end is monopoly. Monopoly is a stable equilibrium, whereas perfect competition is not. On a long enough timeline, a perfectly competitive system will decay into a monopoly and stay there unless acted upon by an outside force designed to break up the monopoly.

polotics 4y ago

Peter Thiel's infamous "competition is for losers" indeed comes to mind.

dbuder 4y ago
Be the biggest hypocrite possible seems to be his motto
- scotty79 4y ago
  "competition is for losers" is really honest and true. Nothing hypocritical about it.
  - rdedev 4y ago
    In that framing, everything else outside the company, like society, govt, are just losers. That's just a sad state to be in
    - scotty79 4y ago
      And yet that's exactly the state we are really in regardless of all declaration stating otherwise.
      - ngetchell 4y ago
        This is such a disgusting world-view. "Yes, the govt worker that helps run SNAP, so people can eat, is just a loser." Maybe they aren't looking to maximize the same things you are? You know, a different perspectives?
  - creshal 4y ago
    If companies own it up, sure. But Meta pretends to want "honest" competition, it's just that somehow any competitors who do exactly what Meta is doing are "cheating".
    - godzillabrennus 4y ago
      Congress might do something if they went full Martin Shkreli on what they are doing in Big Tech.
  - toss1 4y ago
    "Honest and true" IFF your sole interest is your monetary/political gain without regard to ethics or fairness — IOW, you are an abuser/exploiter of the system and of people. It is the same kind of "truth" as "Might Makes Right" and "He who has the gold makes the rules". While these phrases accurately describe the matter in some situations, they do not create a society that is sustainable, desirable, or any value of ethical (even for the abuser/autocrat, who must always watch their back). So, yes, to the extent that it is an open admission of being an abusive exploiter of the system and people, it is not hypocritical. But if that same person makes any statement or pretense that they are an ethical or good person, it is hypocritical in the extreme.
    - scotty79 4y ago
      > While these phrases accurately describe the matter in some situations, they do not create a society that is sustainable, desirable, or any value of ethical (even for the abuser/autocrat, who must always watch their back). It accurately describes our society that is not sustainable, desirable or ethical. Pretending that it is doesn't help us with evolving it towards some noble goals. To evolve the system you need to understand it. For example you can't progress society untill you understand that the one we got after thousands of years of societal evolution is the one entirely based on the concept of monopoly for violence. Some people feel very offended about this. I have exactly zero hopes for their revolutionary attempts at transformation working out.
      - toss1 4y ago
        >>It accurately describes our society that is not sustainable, desirable or ethical. Spot on! However it is not all black & white, but a gradient of high trust to almost zero trust. For example, the US is definitely degrading in the last decade, but is still nowhere near the levels of endemic and systematic paranoia of Russia or North Korea. It all comes down to this: if you want to live a self-determined life in a society with a self-determined government, you must personally and as a nation be better armed, prepared, and allied than the abusers and autocrats who want to steal from you and rule you. Giving the equivalent of nukes to the abusers/autocrats is not a smart move.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Honest? Sure. True? No.
  - dgb23 4y ago
    In isolation maybe? I heard him claim that he is a "libertarian" once.

themitigating 4y ago

That's what businesses do. They are created to make money. They only way to keep them in check is with regulations. The unfortunate thing is so many people hold libertarian views while others are anti-big government.

m0llusk 4y ago
They may call themselves Libertarians but there is this competing idea that the path to liberty necessarily involves strong checks on both government and commercial organizations. But to work with these ideas it would be necessary to look beyond Peter Thiel's entertaining antics and that is difficult because there is such delight in giving him a pedestal and spotlight. What is liberty? Talk to Peter Thiel. He must really know all about that.
- hdhcuvyvt 4y ago
  That's not a competing idea. It is the idea. The difficulty is knowing which checks are necessary and which are "big government". Which is why we vote. Being anti big government is not the same thing as being anti all government. Characterising it that way is either lazy or ignorant, take your pick.
- VieEnCode 4y ago
  Libertarians of that stripe are essentially pro plutocracy, which would end up being massively anti liberty in practice. But just as the winners write the history books, the richest libertarians like Thiel and Koch seem able to define what the ideology looks like in the popular imagination, because they can afford to shape the debate via think tanks, media ownership, campus outreach, lobbying, etc.
ravenstine 4y ago
It's even what individuals do when they believe they can justify it. Many accident lawyers would be out of business if people refused to fake a "soft-tissue" injury out of principle. If the incentive is there, people will usually take it, if they don't have to feel badly about it.

comte7092 4y ago

Basic economic theory predicts that a in a market with perfect competition, all firms will have zero profits (the economic definition, wherein opportunity costs are taken into consideration, nominal profits aren’t zero). It’s interesting to observe the number of people who will post about capitalism and competition and not consider the fact that for any rational actor, competition is existentially horrible and should be avoided by all means necessary. Perfect competition exists purely as a mathematical model and not as an actually observed outcome of a “natural” system for a reason.

nordsieck 4y ago
> Basic economic theory predicts that a in a market with perfect competition, all firms will have zero profits (the economic definition, wherein opportunity costs are taken into consideration, nominal profits aren’t zero). In your simplified economic world, I'm not convinced that profits would be pushed below the cost of capital.
- comte7092 4y ago
  My simplified economic world is literally just paraphrasing established theory: >Economic profit does not occur in perfect competition in long run equilibrium; if it did, there would be an incentive for new firms to enter the industry, aided by a lack of barriers to entry until there was no longer any economic profit.[0] Your issue isn’t with me, it’s with what’s taught in every economics department in every country around the world. (I also never said “profits would be pushed below the cost of capital”, my comment does not imply that at all. See: “nominal profits aren’t zero”) [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition
kibwen 4y ago
Perfect competition is one end of a spectrum, where the other end is monopoly. Monopoly is a stable equilibrium, whereas perfect competition is not. On a long enough timeline, a perfectly competitive system will decay into a monopoly and stay there unless acted upon by an outside force designed to break up the monopoly.