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Economic Inequality

paulgraham.com

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Re: Economic Inequality

#541

Post by wildmusings »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #512
icebraining wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like Uber either; I just dislike dishonest propaganda, even if targeted at a bad actor. > They don't give a flying fuck about the law, and they're too big for any single city to pressure them into anything. I think that's a little overblown. Uber has been forced to leave many cities (Paris, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Madrid, etc) and parts of cities (e.g. Calgary Airport). Uber may be willing to bend the law, but th…

Fair enough. I know about Germany, but I missed Paris and Madrid - thanks for the info. Though how much % of the total operations is that? But it's not bending it, it's disregarding and breaking it. Bending was what Uber-like services have been doing in Europe for past 10+ years, and in time they managed to integrate themselves with the infrastructure nicely. In my city the IRS tries to randomly call and then fine th…

Why would the IRS be fining Uber drivers? Uber is legal under federal law. And the IRS doesn't really care that much about how you got your money, as long as you pay taxes on it. Do you have a source for that or just anecdote? Maybe it was the state-level tax authority.

Re: Economic Inequality

#542

Post by nostrademons »

jondubois wrote: post #431

I don't agree with the point about the pie and the idea that startups 'create value'. I say this because I've been a 'victim' of YCombinator (and VCs in general) on two occasions. I don't mean to say that it's all VC's fault - I just want to make a point about how VCs can make a poor person's life difficult. About 6 years ago, before Weebly came out, I was working on an open source drag-and-drop (user-friendly) conte…

FWIW, Weebly came out in 2006, almost 10 years ago. They ran on angel & seed funding only, just funding the founders, for about 30 months, and at one point had https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOeyYAfKXLI#t=420

I think this is more an instance of discovering a competitor late with a large head-start than with VCs putting money into a company and picking a winner. Weebly had traction and profitability when Sequoia funded them; they had been working on the company for 5 years at that point.

Re: Economic Inequality

#543

Post by wildmusings »

jessaustin wrote: post #465
wildmusings wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. If you take the 3 billion poorest people in the world and properly account for their future earnings, it will certainly exceed the combined expected wealth of these 80 billionaires. You couldn't have anything close to this sensationalist statistic. Also, global poverty is not the fault of Western riches. It's not something we (Westerners) can do anything about either, except engage in mutually beneficial…

Now you're not talking about wealth, but rather some other measure that is apparently more interesting to you. If you're going to count future earning, you ought at least count future spending as well, which quantity may completely swamp the other. After all wealth includes past spending as well as past earning.

My point is that wealth is not a useful metric. To your point, having surplus wealth on the day of your death is not very useful, especially if your kids don't need it. That's why some people get reverse mortgages, to turn the value of their homes into spending cash during retirement.

Re: Economic Inequality

#544

Post by [deleted] »

jessaustin wrote: post #465
wildmusings wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. If you take the 3 billion poorest people in the world and properly account for their future earnings, it will certainly exceed the combined expected wealth of these 80 billionaires. You couldn't have anything close to this sensationalist statistic. Also, global poverty is not the fault of Western riches. It's not something we (Westerners) can do anything about either, except engage in mutually beneficial…

Now you're not talking about wealth, but rather some other measure that is apparently more interesting to you. If you're going to count future earning, you ought at least count future spending as well, which quantity may completely swamp the other. After all wealth includes past spending as well as past earning.

[deleted]

Re: Economic Inequality

#545

Post by zo1 »

throwupper247 wrote: post #507
zo1 wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>" Selling something that people want isn't equal to providing value. " This is the point I was addressing. >" Let me be pessimistic: coffee doesn't provide a positive value, because it's a drug that get's people addicted however little and subliminal. " Oh, so now it's "positive value". This is something you are imposing on the person based on your own personal opinion about value and coffee. >" Maybe that is a valu…

>My comment had nothing to do with advocating coffee My comment did. You can't just reply to the whole comment without considering that part.

No, your comment had to do with redefining value based on whether you think something is good for someone. Like coffee.

Re: Economic Inequality

#546

Post by zo1 »

funtimes32 wrote: post #531
zo1 wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing they would enforce some sort of standard valuation for things like that. Or only when it is possible. So a fledgling business, or shares that aren't publicly tradeable. Any who, the point is. They will find a way that they will claim is "fair" and consistent but probably has loop holes, and figure out a way to tax capital.

I'm still not sure how the subjective taxation of risk would work. Nor do I understand how it would be better than the objective taxation of success (i.e., income), especially when it comes to reducing corruption.

I have no idea, ask Piketty. I personally don't agree with any taxation at all, just giving you hypotheticals as to how they'd calculate it.

Re: Economic Inequality

#547

Post by malandrew »

Polyamory and open/alternative relationships gaining acceptance is yet another example of this fragmentation. The expectation up until now is that you need a single "vertically integrated" partner that satisfies most of the partner roles in your life. More and more people are starting to realize that this is a compromise between time and satisfaction. With a single partner, you get a lot more of their time, but the likelihood that they will be satisfactory for all of the roles partners typically assume is less likely. There are two reasons for this that I can see.

The first is that we are less and less likely to share extremely similar upbringing with others such that it is easy to find someone who is largely on the same page. When people were born, lived and died in a small town or city and the internet didn't exists, two people from the same place likely have a LOT in common. Now, everyone is shaped by the information they encounter and experiences they have, and at no time in history has there been as much variation between people than now.

The second is that our sexual and romantic tastes are fragmenting and we demanding greater satisfaction in both breadth of tastes and depth of tastes. People want to have the same level of satisfaction from the romance and sex parts of their lives well beyond the honeymoon period, and when a single partner doesn't or can't meet the variety of needs you start looking elsewhere to satisfy them. The difference is now that there is acknowledgement of this greater fragmentation in sexual and romantic needs, giving people the position to be more transparent with dialogue surrounding it. There is also a greater acknowledgement of enthusiastic consent between all partners involved in an act as being important. This focus on consent means that you don't try to make someone participate in something they don't desire to participate, thus you need to find other partners that reciprocate for those sexual or romantic needs.

Re: Economic Inequality

#548

Post by icebraining »

wildmusings wrote: post #541
TeMPOraL wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. I know about Germany, but I missed Paris and Madrid - thanks for the info. Though how much % of the total operations is that? But it's not bending it, it's disregarding and breaking it. Bending was what Uber-like services have been doing in Europe for past 10+ years, and in time they managed to integrate themselves with the infrastructure nicely. In my city the IRS tries to randomly call and then fine th…

Why would the IRS be fining Uber drivers? Uber is legal under federal law. And the IRS doesn't really care that much about how you got your money, as long as you pay taxes on it. Do you have a source for that or just anecdote? Maybe it was the state-level tax authority.

I don't think TeMPOraL lives in the US; for us foreigners when speaking in English, it's common to use the American term to refer to the local equivalent.

Re: Economic Inequality

#549

Post by twoodfin »

karlheinz wrote: post #495
twoodfin wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you ballpark for me how much more the government spent on the Internet than private industry? Because I'm pretty sure it's the reverse by at least two orders of magnitude.

Some classic examples: * TCP/IP (USDOD) * HTTP and HTML (CERN) * The initial research for the Google algorithm (NSF) * Compaq and Intel’s early stage funds (SBIR) * Tesla was launched with a $500m guaranteed government loan In fact, 77 out of the most important 88 innovations between 1971 and 2006 (rated by R&D Magazine’s annual awards) were fully dependent on US federal government support (1) (1) http://ser.oxfordjo…

That doesn't answer my question. After all, you can use the same argument to say all of computing depends on governments needing more accurate ballistic tables.

My question was: In building the Internet we use today, how much money was spent by governments, and how much by private industry?

Re: Economic Inequality

#550

Post by throwupper247 »

icebraining wrote: post #437
throwupper247 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hedonism is your ultimate phylosophical truth, is it? Strawberries are hardly as heavily industrialised as coffee, calling your relationship with a hot bevarage a romantic one is doubtful. I am as pessimistic as your logic is flawed. There are few things in live the brain is prewired to feel a need for. Coffee supplis the illusion of fullfilling two or three enssential ones of these, hunger and thirst and sleep, but…

Coffee supplis the illusion of fullfilling two or three enssential ones of these, hunger and thirst and sleep, but it doesn't actually provide the associated value. You know, for many, that's a completely irrelevant factor in their appreciation for coffee. And by the way, I'm pretty sure it does quench thirst, seeing as it's 99% water.

No, I don't know.

If 99% water solution just has to satisfy thirst, then a 1% zyankali solution doesn't kill, is it? It's a bad comparison, because I really don't know what else coffee brew consists of exactly, but you probably don't either, so ... that pretty much wraps it up.

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