Billionaires Build • Hacker News Board

Re: Billionaires Build

#121

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:11 PM UTC

cactus2093 wrote: post #118

season2episode3 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe Uber et al outspending their opponents on political advertising by hundreds of millions of dollars had something to do with it? Not to mention constant advertising for free in their apps. They had the “no on prop 22” people hopelessly outgunned. Even the idea that Uber drivers themselves wanted to keep their contractor status is questionable given that they collected those statistics via polls in the driver…

The biggest thing you're ignoring is that Prop 22 brings real, tangible benefits to workers compared to what they have today. It has companies pay I believe 41% of their healthcare costs, whereas previously this was 0%. And it includes the 120% of minimum wage provision, on top of vehicle maintenance costs. This is real money that real drivers and couriers will be "topped up" in certain cases, that they simply weren'…

> the AB5 world where the vast majority of them can't work at all anymore but the ones that remain are full-time employee

Why do people keep lying that AB5 had a requirement for people to be full-time employees? I know in many office-based work environments, there is a strong preference for all regular (non-contract) employees to be full-time employees, but that’s not true in lots of industries, and there is nothing in AB5 that requires people working in conditions which it defines as employees rather than contractors to be full-time.

Re: Billionaires Build

#122

Post by Swizec » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

jariel wrote: post #115

Swizec wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started coding in 1995 so yes I know the difference was huge. Reading Hackers reveals that back in 1960 tech was even nerdier still . Professionalization marches on. Exponentially.

I think the inflection point was when tech, the valley and the internet itself became mainstream, circa 2000. It came along with millenium hype. Even then only maybe 1/3 of Americans had consistent Internet access, but everyone was talking about it. 'The Matrix' films remember are about hackers. Then the metastasizing with mobile, which really took root post 2010 when even poor people around the globe became connecte…

Well I’m from Eastern-ish Europe so we were a little behind maybe. We got internet at home in 2001. Before that I’d go to the library to try it out.

Re: Billionaires Build

#123

Post by waterhouse » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:22 PM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #112

waterhouse wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contribute to keeping it the same? What does that mean? If the system has unfair policies, and you never personally enforce them or advocate for them and occasionally advocate against them, have you contributed to keeping it the same, and are you at fault?

You don't exist outside of the world, do you? If the most you ever do is "occasionally advocate against unfair policies," you certainly don't get to pat yourself on the back much for helping anything or anybody. If you replace the word fault with "responsibility" or even a more neutral "influence" it's much more obvious, I think. You would clearly have less responsibility than the person advocating for said policies,…

Not getting to pat yourself on the back much for helping is one thing. Being at fault is fundamentally different.

We punish people who do bad things. We don't punish people who have neither helped nor done anything bad. We might we wish they had done better, but wishing and enforcing are very distinct mechanisms.

Re: Billionaires Build

#124

Post by dustingetz » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

Emphere wrote: post #102

dustingetz wrote: post #29

Billionaire can also be framed as succeeding at creating a power differential at scale. The trick is that you can't achieve scale without using power differentials, and iphones are the fruit of scale. Idea: what you kind of want is for the power difference to decay at scale, so that way you don't have amazon workers pissing in water bottles. Remember: "Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys A…

Very good, something I have been thinking about as well. Inequality is bad because of the massive power differentials. How do you propose we "solve" that while still being able to reap the benefits of scale? Any pointers or books to read about this topic? Admittedly I haven't looked too hard.

Idea for the solution is to get everyone together to opt-in to a value system that demonizes excess accumulation. That sounds crazy/impossible today, but on lets say, a 2000 year timespan could we get there? 2000 years ago, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" was a seminal idea, eventually resulting in the world today where killing is demonized and this is existence proof of a solution. We can then abstract to the general class of game theory coordination dilemmas stuck at backstab/backstab, of which both covid and climate change are instances. The will/power of billions of people outweighs the power of a few (regardless of how concentrated the wealth is as wealth is an abstraction), and the internet offers a means for billions of people to coordinate. I conclude that the needed points of leverage are available today/ right now and simply awaiting a great leader to recognize the opportunity, figure out the play and execute it. And the way ideas spread online, I bet the world can reconfigure itself in not 2000 years, but 20 - a single business cycle.

Re: Billionaires Build

#125

Post by treis » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

postingpals wrote: post #74

troughway wrote: post #45

Can someone pin point what is objectively wrong or out of touch with this article? Genuinely asking because the past three+ posts from pg have been met with negativity saying pg is a wealthy Londoner who doesn’t understand the prole struggle.

He starts his entire essay with a faulty premise, that in order to be a billionaire you have to be exploitative, and then goes on to argue why Y Combinator doesn't look for exploitative people so therefore this must not be true. Look, not even 'prole defenders' agree with this. You don't have to be exploitative to be a billionaire, it's simply a byproduct. There are only several thousand billionaires on earth and you…

>why Y Combinator doesn't look for exploitative people so therefore this must not be true.

I have a dim recollection of an article many years ago that Y Combinator asked applicants a time when they gamed the system and the answer to that was on of the most correlated to success. Like saying you knew some technology that you didn't on a resume or selling some product that you hadn't built yet. They framed it as a positive. Finding opportunities and using them to your advantage. But a negative framing would be that they were looking for people that exploited whatever advantage they oculd find.

Re: Billionaires Build

#126

Post by 11thEarlOfMar » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

One great question to ask and be prepared to answer: What is the most important aspect of this idea that you don't know?

It's as important to have thought about where you need to focus and and the consequences of not addressing it, as knowing what the potential upside is for the idea.

Re: Billionaires Build

#127

Post by tk75x » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:32 PM UTC

season2episode3 wrote: post #96

staunch wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon didn't kill small businesses. We killed them by using Amazon. And I'm glad to have participated. I much prefer Amazon passing the savings of time and money to me rather than some small business owner. The small businesses I was forced to use previously were inefficient, slow, overcharging, had terrible customer service, exploited employees, etc. As an example: we killed tons of movie rental businesses by switc…

Small businesses are important for a whole host of intangible reasons. They provide dignified employment (as opposed to invisible work in a warehouse), they encourage entrepreneurship, they increase the tax base of a locality (by ensuring money stays within a local economy), and they contribute to local culture, community and character. Amazon killing small businesses has sucked even more of the life force out of sma…

For every small business that treats their employees well, there is another hiring and abusing people with limited options such as undocumented immigrants and felons.

I would also claim that keeping taxes in the local economy, while a very worthy goal, does not require the presence of small business. Big business can be made to support local community and culture. Just because the Walmart headquarters are outside of my small town, doesn't mean they don't have to pay a percentage of their earnings from the local warehouse to that community.

Also, minor grammar nit, you may have meant to use "shell-shocked" instead of "shellacked", but shell-shocked wouldn't fit the context you're going for either.

Re: Billionaires Build

#128

Post by applecore » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:36 PM UTC

nverno wrote: post #42

AlwaysRock wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that true though? A millionaire? Sure there are a lot of ways to get there. A Billionaire? There are only 2000~. Are there any notable ones who got there without exploiting people or building/aided in building a business that does?

I don't think someone like Warren Buffet 'exploits' anyone in particular. Of course you might have a very loose definition of exploitation.

A lot of Berkshire Hathaway's businesses sell overpriced sugar or cheap junk.

Re: Billionaires Build

#129

Post by cercatrova » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:36 PM UTC

daedalus6174 wrote: post #7

One mistake pg makes here is assuming that to be an exploitative billionaire you have to be good at exploiting people or have personal manipulative qualities. You don’t. Owning a large company in a capitalist system is inherently exploitative. Simply owning a large company and taking surplus value from a large number of people is exploitation.

That is the labor theory of value, those more rightward of that position would say that the buyer and seller come to a mutual agreement.

Re: Billionaires Build

#130

Post by 11thEarlOfMar » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

Traster wrote: post #28

For a clearly smart guy it's so frustrating to see PG bring in a topic like the Billionaires being exploitative, and then taking such a thoroughly blinkered view. It's a massive blind spot that PG fails to address is that it's the exact same sense of mission that he sees in start ups that creates the permission structure to exploit people. It's not that people set out to exploit people and as a result they become bil…

A more or less capitalist system is more or less self correcting. Yes, billionaires gain their wealth, and yes, workers, businesses and even governments can have a poor experience with it in the process of the billionaire's company succeeding. The exploitation is real and should be discussed and appropriately addressed.

A couple of thoughts...

New, billion-dollar business are, many times, transformational. Amazon, Uber, AirBnb, DropBox and Stripe all transformed the market they profit from. For sure, it is difficult if not impossible to foresee how the business activities will impact the general population et al. Without foreseeing that impact, it's also difficult to mitigate the impact that the billionaire may genuinely have a moral reaction to. Is it not the nature of the beast to grow as fast as possible, damn all torpedoes, while investors and boards of directors push the business leadership forward? Running at an all out sprint means you have no opportunity to identify these moral slights, let alone address them. Perhaps the boards of directors needs a 'Moral Consequence Committee' to keep an eye on it on behalf of the CEO. I am not asking that rhetorically, by the way. Give it some thought.

The second thought is that in order for the business to prevail, it must provide real value to many, many customers and make their world a better place. Uber transformed the taxi experience and yes, may have wound up in the 'vehicular maintenance arbitrage' business for a while, but anyone with faith in market capitalism should believe that this will eventually balance out and Uber and its drivers will reach a mutually acceptable compensation level.