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What a load of crap. Capitalism rewards existing capital. These people have opportunities 99.999999% will never have and still they got lucky. It's not about co

What a load of crap. Capitalism rewards existing capital. These people have opportunities 99.999999% will never have and still they got lucky. It's not about competence. It never is. Our current society rewards people that can lie, cheat and backstab while punishing those who care about anything other than profits. Just take a look at SBF and all the startup snake oil culture and it's clear they're not competent at anything that helps society.

ben_w 3y ago
> What a load of crap. Capitalism rewards existing capital. These people have opportunities 99.999999% will never have and still they got lucky. It's not about competence. It never is. It's about both. Musk, Bezos, Gates, they sure did all get lucky, but they also had skill. Skill alone isn't enough, because there are plenty of people with more skill. Luck alone also isn't enough, because that would give a distribution like lottery winners rather than repeated year-on-year growth. > Our current society rewards people that can lie, cheat and backstab while punishing those who care about anything other than profits. Just take a look at SBF and all the startup snake oil culture and it's clear they're not competent at anything that helps society. That's a terrible argument. SBF was convicted and is awaiting sentencing, that's not rewarding his misbehaviour; "startup snake oil culture" is tautologically going to be the specific set of bad actors without telling you anything about the relative frequency compared to all startup culture; and the Effective Altruism movement, which has inspired many startups in many areas, is collectively quite embarrassed by the association with SBF. Also, to be competent at lying, cheating and backstabbing, necessarily means "knowing how to get away with it" rather than just "does it". Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a book about that 500 years ago, and Chanakya wrote a treatise also covering those things about 1800 years before Machiavelli.
- Draiken 3y ago
  >It's about both. I agree. But then why would we ever worship the few lucky ones and allow them to have basically unlimited power? We could even claim intelligence is mostly about genetic luck. But if we really wanted to reward people for hard work, then there wouldn't be billionaires, we'd have many, many more millionaires. Why do they deserve that disproportionate amount of power? I simply cannot believe a system that rewards like that is anything but unfair. If everyone also got much more, that would be fine, but it's always: 9999999 for me, 1 for you. >Skill alone isn't enough, because there are plenty of people with more skill. Luck alone also isn't enough, because that would give a distribution like lottery winners rather than repeated year-on-year growth. That would be true, if the fact that monopolies - which are the consequence of competition - didn't allow them to hold their positions indefinitely. This is late stage capitalism. The opportunities that existed back in those days simply aren't there anymore. The best you can hope for is to find someone to fund you (or bootstrap), then get bought by one of the mega corporations allowing them to keep their monopolies. >That's a terrible argument. SBF was convicted and is awaiting sentencing, that's not rewarding his misbehaviour; No? Come on mate, SBF was ONE guy that got arrested. What about all the other ones that are still out there? Did all the cryptobros that cheated people out of billions of dollars get arrested? 5 minutes of googling and you'll find thousands of scammers that got away with it. Not including the ones that won't even show up in searches. So, yes, that's rewarding misbehavior in my view. The easiest way to get rich in our system is to lower your scruples. That's exactly what the system was designed to do: reward exploitation. That's the whole premise! If I can cheat you out your salary, your labor, your working conditions, your naivety, your situation, your health or whatever else I can, capitalism will reward you for it. That's what profit is.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > I agree. But then why would we ever worship the few lucky ones and allow them to have basically unlimited power? Because hero worship is an evolved instinct that we're trying to confabulate a post-hoc justification for, rather than a coherent predictive framework. And because our monkey brains, being only numerate by evolutionary luck, have an emotional reaction to "a billion" approximately as if it was "two million" rather than "a thousand million". When kings ruled, some claimed it was by divine right. Those with power who didn't like the rise of money displacing the old forms of wealth use the term "nouveau riche" as a pejorative — this phrasing may be relatively modern French, but the idea goes back to at least Ancient Greece. > Why do they deserve that disproportionate amount of power? For most new-money billionaires — though ironically, not ones who got there "fairly" like JK Rowling or (after actually selling to Microsoft) Markus Persson, but I bet they invested their money in something like this after being paid — the money is predominantly in the form of shares granting the right to a say in the management of, and disbursal of the profits of, some corporation which gained its value through their leadership. As countries want tax revenue to get stuff done, their governments don't need any complex reasoning to place a high value on people who are competent at making high-value corporations. > That would be true, if the fact that monopolies - which are the consequence of competition - didn't allow them to hold their positions indefinitely. Their monopolies don't remain indefinitely. IBM used to be a monopoly, until it wasn't. Internet Explorer triggered a monopoly lawsuit, now even Microsoft doesn't support it. Games consoles was a Sega/Nintendo duopoly when I was a kid, Sega no longer makes hardware. Amazon wasn't allowed to buy up iRobot (nor Adobe, Figma) because governments are bigger than corporations and do actually step into prevent abusive behaviour. Bell Systems was, famously, forcibly broken up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System I won't be at all surprised if in the next decade half of Big Tech is split the same way Bell Systems was split — e.g. Amazon forced to split apart its main storefront, Audible, the Kindle book store, and all the web services. > Come on mate, SBF was ONE guy that got arrested. What about all the other ones that are still out there? Then don't use him as the example. Him being arrested is what makes him a bad example. If you want to say people don't get punished, give those other people as your example, not the very obvious example of someone who is getting punished. > 5 minutes of googling and you'll find thousands of scammers that got away with it. You clearly have different search results to me; the results I get are "until we arrested them". > Not including the ones that won't even show up in searches. Tautologically, but you have to show a reason why some invisible group is of some actual specific size in order to make any argument about them; and in your case you have to also show that the size of this invisible group is due to the economic choices of Capitalism rather than anything else. > The easiest way to get rich in our system is to lower your scruples. In any system. You don't get far in a feudal system without being willing to take freemen into debt bondage, or to bow before each of a series of monarchs that take turns flipping between "Catholicism is mandatory" and "Catholicism is forbidden" as the British ones did for a bit. > That's exactly what the system was designed to do: reward exploitation. That's the whole premise! No, the premise (which I would argue is flawed for due to "Prisoner's Dilemma"-type scenarios) is that everyone acting in their own self-interest will ultimately reward the collective. It assumes that any worker who is not treated fairly will switch jobs because someone else will want to out-bid their current employer. Etc. > If I can cheat you out your salary, your labor, your working conditions, your naivety, your situation, your health or whatever else I can, capitalism will reward you for it. That's what profit is. If. Under capitalism, a completely free market in a steady state and with perfect information will have no profit, because everyone will try to undercut everyone else until profits disappear. Temporary circumstances, such as floods or famines or whatever, drive up demand, creating a profit opportunity, attracting business to supply more stuff. Real markets don't have perfect information, and I'm told can't because that's apparently NP-hard. This is part of why I value government intervention, and also why I currently believe that it would be good for governments to directly control (either by owning or commissioning) parts of national production. Not all production in any sector, that would probably fail due to government monopolies having their own weird pathologies, but some production in several sectors.
WalterBright 3y ago
So everything you've bought you didn't actually want and were cheated on?

ben_w 3y ago

> What a load of crap. Capitalism rewards existing capital. These people have opportunities 99.999999% will never have and still they got lucky. It's not about competence. It never is. It's about both. Musk, Bezos, Gates, they sure did all get lucky, but they also had skill. Skill alone isn't enough, because there are plenty of people with more skill. Luck alone also isn't enough, because that would give a distribution like lottery winners rather than repeated year-on-year growth. > Our current society rewards people that can lie, cheat and backstab while punishing those who care about anything other than profits. Just take a look at SBF and all the startup snake oil culture and it's clear they're not competent at anything that helps society. That's a terrible argument. SBF was convicted and is awaiting sentencing, that's not rewarding his misbehaviour; "startup snake oil culture" is tautologically going to be the specific set of bad actors without telling you anything about the relative frequency compared to all startup culture; and the Effective Altruism movement, which has inspired many startups in many areas, is collectively quite embarrassed by the association with SBF. Also, to be competent at lying, cheating and backstabbing, necessarily means "knowing how to get away with it" rather than just "does it". Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a book about that 500 years ago, and Chanakya wrote a treatise also covering those things about 1800 years before Machiavelli.

Draiken 3y ago
>It's about both. I agree. But then why would we ever worship the few lucky ones and allow them to have basically unlimited power? We could even claim intelligence is mostly about genetic luck. But if we really wanted to reward people for hard work, then there wouldn't be billionaires, we'd have many, many more millionaires. Why do they deserve that disproportionate amount of power? I simply cannot believe a system that rewards like that is anything but unfair. If everyone also got much more, that would be fine, but it's always: 9999999 for me, 1 for you. >Skill alone isn't enough, because there are plenty of people with more skill. Luck alone also isn't enough, because that would give a distribution like lottery winners rather than repeated year-on-year growth. That would be true, if the fact that monopolies - which are the consequence of competition - didn't allow them to hold their positions indefinitely. This is late stage capitalism. The opportunities that existed back in those days simply aren't there anymore. The best you can hope for is to find someone to fund you (or bootstrap), then get bought by one of the mega corporations allowing them to keep their monopolies. >That's a terrible argument. SBF was convicted and is awaiting sentencing, that's not rewarding his misbehaviour; No? Come on mate, SBF was ONE guy that got arrested. What about all the other ones that are still out there? Did all the cryptobros that cheated people out of billions of dollars get arrested? 5 minutes of googling and you'll find thousands of scammers that got away with it. Not including the ones that won't even show up in searches. So, yes, that's rewarding misbehavior in my view. The easiest way to get rich in our system is to lower your scruples. That's exactly what the system was designed to do: reward exploitation. That's the whole premise! If I can cheat you out your salary, your labor, your working conditions, your naivety, your situation, your health or whatever else I can, capitalism will reward you for it. That's what profit is.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > I agree. But then why would we ever worship the few lucky ones and allow them to have basically unlimited power? Because hero worship is an evolved instinct that we're trying to confabulate a post-hoc justification for, rather than a coherent predictive framework. And because our monkey brains, being only numerate by evolutionary luck, have an emotional reaction to "a billion" approximately as if it was "two million" rather than "a thousand million". When kings ruled, some claimed it was by divine right. Those with power who didn't like the rise of money displacing the old forms of wealth use the term "nouveau riche" as a pejorative — this phrasing may be relatively modern French, but the idea goes back to at least Ancient Greece. > Why do they deserve that disproportionate amount of power? For most new-money billionaires — though ironically, not ones who got there "fairly" like JK Rowling or (after actually selling to Microsoft) Markus Persson, but I bet they invested their money in something like this after being paid — the money is predominantly in the form of shares granting the right to a say in the management of, and disbursal of the profits of, some corporation which gained its value through their leadership. As countries want tax revenue to get stuff done, their governments don't need any complex reasoning to place a high value on people who are competent at making high-value corporations. > That would be true, if the fact that monopolies - which are the consequence of competition - didn't allow them to hold their positions indefinitely. Their monopolies don't remain indefinitely. IBM used to be a monopoly, until it wasn't. Internet Explorer triggered a monopoly lawsuit, now even Microsoft doesn't support it. Games consoles was a Sega/Nintendo duopoly when I was a kid, Sega no longer makes hardware. Amazon wasn't allowed to buy up iRobot (nor Adobe, Figma) because governments are bigger than corporations and do actually step into prevent abusive behaviour. Bell Systems was, famously, forcibly broken up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System I won't be at all surprised if in the next decade half of Big Tech is split the same way Bell Systems was split — e.g. Amazon forced to split apart its main storefront, Audible, the Kindle book store, and all the web services. > Come on mate, SBF was ONE guy that got arrested. What about all the other ones that are still out there? Then don't use him as the example. Him being arrested is what makes him a bad example. If you want to say people don't get punished, give those other people as your example, not the very obvious example of someone who is getting punished. > 5 minutes of googling and you'll find thousands of scammers that got away with it. You clearly have different search results to me; the results I get are "until we arrested them". > Not including the ones that won't even show up in searches. Tautologically, but you have to show a reason why some invisible group is of some actual specific size in order to make any argument about them; and in your case you have to also show that the size of this invisible group is due to the economic choices of Capitalism rather than anything else. > The easiest way to get rich in our system is to lower your scruples. In any system. You don't get far in a feudal system without being willing to take freemen into debt bondage, or to bow before each of a series of monarchs that take turns flipping between "Catholicism is mandatory" and "Catholicism is forbidden" as the British ones did for a bit. > That's exactly what the system was designed to do: reward exploitation. That's the whole premise! No, the premise (which I would argue is flawed for due to "Prisoner's Dilemma"-type scenarios) is that everyone acting in their own self-interest will ultimately reward the collective. It assumes that any worker who is not treated fairly will switch jobs because someone else will want to out-bid their current employer. Etc. > If I can cheat you out your salary, your labor, your working conditions, your naivety, your situation, your health or whatever else I can, capitalism will reward you for it. That's what profit is. If. Under capitalism, a completely free market in a steady state and with perfect information will have no profit, because everyone will try to undercut everyone else until profits disappear. Temporary circumstances, such as floods or famines or whatever, drive up demand, creating a profit opportunity, attracting business to supply more stuff. Real markets don't have perfect information, and I'm told can't because that's apparently NP-hard. This is part of why I value government intervention, and also why I currently believe that it would be good for governments to directly control (either by owning or commissioning) parts of national production. Not all production in any sector, that would probably fail due to government monopolies having their own weird pathologies, but some production in several sectors.

WalterBright 3y ago

So everything you've bought you didn't actually want and were cheated on?