5 ms·
In the case of Microsoft, I'm not seeing it. Being born into a 1% household and understanding the asymmetric upside that having the money and the time to specu
by areweai 4mo ago
In the case of Microsoft, I'm not seeing it.
Being born into a 1% household and understanding the asymmetric upside that having the money and the time to speculate is far more significant than the civil and criminal legal violations on the way.
The most common way to go from one-percenter rich to .001% rich is to already have enough wealthy people generating capital in your personal network that you can raise capital on sweetheart terms to buy the labor of people who don't.
Then you sell it at a massive premium and repeat.
I think it's empirically dubious to identify the UW mainframes as the secret sauce instead of "being able to ask your mom for a meeting with the chairman of IBM followed by asking her for 80,000 dollars ASAP."
If the original creators of DOS were born into a wealthy family and on a first name basis with the chairman of IBM, do you think they would've sold it to Gates?
Trying to attribute the tech business "founding crime" feels like displacement for what is perfectly legal and accepted cultural practice.
- lostlogin 4mo agoWe need a better system. We tried communism and that was shit, so this is the least bad system we have.
- areweai 4mo agoBecause things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.
- r14c 4mo agoWe didn't try communism as far as I know. We hunted it down and murdered it in its cradle if I'm reading the CIA declassified archives correctly.
- 3240957042358 4mo agoCommunists having killed of 100 to 140 million people is sufficient reason to hunt them down. But unfortunately there are still plenty of useful idiots, the same kind that propped up Mao, Pol Pot and Stalin.
- r14c 4mo agoWe kill people all the time, what's the difference? Isn't it a sovereign nation's prerogative to do whatever they want? That said, it is our prerogative to be nosy and violently mess with other people's affairs too so..
- lostlogin 4mo ago> Communists having killed of 100 to 140 million people is sufficient reason to hunt them down. How many have democracies killed? It’s not like-for-like but how do we compare?
- r14c 4mo agoI would read that meta study. Especially if they verify and compare methods.
- Scroll_Swe 4mo agoWhy is every HN thread glazing communism now? Are people that broken nowadays? boo hoo I dont have the new iphone the moment it release. Bish I was on PS1 until 2004. Ask East Germans, Poland, Lithuania, Lativa, Estonia etc if communism or capitalism is better. I'll wait. :)
- r14c 4mo agoGlazing? I stated an historical fact. What doesn't math for me is why we care so much what kind of economy other people decide to have. Eastern Europe isn't soviet anymore obviously. They can make their own choices.
- bluecheese452 4mo agoThe Russian empire tried communism. It was better than what they had before or since. The Chinese tried communism. It worked far better for them than what they had before.
- cyberax 4mo ago> The Russian empire tried communism. It was better than what they had before or since. No, it was not better. Quite objectively.
- bluecheese452 4mo agoBy what metrics? Life expectancy rose during communism and fell afterwords. Are you seriously going to try and argue it was better during the Czarist times?
- cyberax 4mo agoRussia lost nearly 2 decades of development post-WWI. And had a widespread hunger in 1930-s with 4-8 million people dead (we _still_ don't know the accurate number). Even just looking at the industrial growth rates, the socialistic economy of the USSR was inferior to many capitalistic economies starting from the same base. E.g. South Korea or Japan. Your data about life expectancy is also plainly wrong: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.MA.IN?locations=RU https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.MA.IN?locat...
- bluecheese452 4mo agoYou are willfully missing the point. You can’t compare Russia to South Korea to claim communism bad. Russia has and will screw up every system it tries. You need to compare communist Russia to capitalist Russia. There the comparison looks much less favorable. Also your graph proves my point. The giant drop in life expectancy is when it transitioned from communism to capitalism.
- 4mo ago
- 999900000999 4mo agoAutomation makes full employment detrimental if not outright impossible. Say before tractors it took 100 men to farm enough for 1000 people. With tractors 20 men can farm for 1000. With automation 1 man can farm for 1000 if not significantly more. Open Source Robo Communism is the way to go imo. Sure a handful of engineers have to maintain the robots, and build new ones. And a few jobs will remain human only. But we could easily get to 80% of the population being free to make art and dance
- JJOKOCHAA 4mo agoIt would be difficult for us as humans to get a better system. we are too chaotic
- azinman2 4mo agoI think you overstate the power of money. Of course it helps. But it’s far from everything. Just look at the number of rich kid fuckups or CEOs with poor backgrounds. It’s just one component that smooths risk and occasionally provides a starter network, but it’s not everything.
- p_j_w 4mo ago>CEOs with poor backgrounds. What's the percentage here?
- 0x20cowboy 4mo ago.
- JJOKOCHAA 4mo agoroughly 50% i guess
- areweai 4mo agoWell of course. To be a CEO from a poor background, you need to work your ass off making wealthy friends early. That's why going to an elite school is such a lifeline for people from bottom quartile backgrounds. Getting the opportunity socialize with people born at the top and be treated as a peer in an institutional environment is invaluable. That alone is worth the price of admission. It doesn't have to be your parents, but it has to be someone with money who already knows you, trusts you, and feels like you identify with them and their interests. Of course, you could also work your way up slowly and prove your mettle through decades of dedicated service to your employer. But I'm not sure how you'd be able to build that long track record of likability and trust to be able to raise millions based on work history when that entire history is a 3 month internship. One can't even blame the VCs. If you're investing in things that are often partially fraudulent by design... ...do you want the getaway driver for the pump-and-dump to be a family friend you've known a long time, or a stranger that might not be a good "culture fit" for what the valuation game often becomes?
- 4mo ago
- derangedHorse 4mo ago> followed by asking her for 80,000 dollars ASAP What real life example is this from?
- areweai 4mo agohttps://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-3/ https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-3/ None actually, because I didn't recall the original amount correctly and I failed to correct for inflation, and Microsoft was already doing pretty well at that point. That was inaccurate to say. It does make you think, though. If you too are able to work hard and build an operating system or save up six figures corrected for inflation, that still doesn't get you anything. What you really need is for your mother to be a good friend and socio-economic equal of chair of IBM.