521–530 of 957 posts
PG confuses 'bad people' with a bad system. I don't think Zuckerberg, or Bezos are necessarily bad people, but they are the beneficiaries of a bad system, which squeezes work and wealth from poorer people and sucks it to the top.
Some of Amazon's warehouse employees have to pee in bottles to save time. You dont think that is bad and Bezos should do something to stop that?
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So what should happen to your assets when the total of their market capitalization crosses the $1B line?
I also am not sure how you're supposed to tax something like stock. If Bezos sold all of his stock in Amazon, well, for one he'd certainly be worth a lot less fairly rapidly as the stock collapsed based on his massive sale of it. He's taxed on the sale of his stock as far as I understand it, although the capital gains tax should presumably be higher than the tax on earned wages. It seems sensible that when you're put…
You can't use the stock based wealth without asking it, unless you take out a loan with the stock as collateral.
This essay uses a weak straw-man: the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people I think the "principle of charity" or "steel-man" criticism of billionaires isn't that every single billionaire is directly exploiting people. It would be closer to something like this: The problem is that our society has feedback loops that make it hard to escape poverty, and feedback loops that let the wealthy amass more…
>> However he does pay less taxes than his secretary No, he does not. He claims he paid $1,850,000 in federal taxes in 2015, do you think his secretary earned that much, let alone paid that much in taxes? In addition: “In 2019, Berkshire sent $3.6 billion to the U.S. Treasury to pay its current income tax,” Buffett said in his annual letter to shareholders. “The U.S. government collected $243 billion from corporate i…
IME (including writing the actual SQL queries against a corporate billing system that calculated ideal writeoff amounts every year), corporations evade so many taxes that this amounts to an empty boast. 1.5% of bupkis is bupkis. Supporting the state through income taxes is inherently foolish, and moreover we do it in the most foolish way one could imagine.
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In good idle games they shift the goal once you hit more boring levels. Stealing partly from someone else I can't find a reference for: Ownership capped at 1 billion, you get a sticker saying "I won capitalism" and all further growth and income goes to the government for social programs. You get a new ticker that estimates lives saved and people homes/fed/educated - that becomes your new boasting figure. Not entirely…
Yes - this! Perhaps it should be "Ok yay you won, now did you win in cheat mode (by exploiting people and reasources) or real mode!" Since Forbes is the default scoreboard perhaps when it makes its Billionaires List, instead of a basic sort ranked by on net worth, Forbes should incorporate Environmental, Social and Governance like factors similar to those starting to be used for Equity investing [1] and do a final ra…
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The Chinese government is a horrible, authoritarian nightmare, but still somehow does better at managing the country's resources than the American ruling class. The pandemic, now over in China, while our nurses tape garbage bags to themselves as thousands die daily, has proven that definitively.
Australia and NZ are dont have an authoritarian govt but still managed to get the pandemic under control.
Two things that are very obviously wrong with the take, both I think having the same reason: Not all billionaires are self-made, and a majority of them aren't tech entrepreneurs of the sort PG talks about in this piece. Seems like a very obvious fact but somehow doesn't really come up. Secondly, in the same vein, the kind of (aspiring) billionaires YC meets are, by definition, builders, because they're self-sorted fl…
If Jeff Bezos were in front of a YC interview there is no chance they ask him whether his stock workers will get healthcare or if they'll get pushed so hard that they have to piss in bottles to keep their jobs.
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In good idle games they shift the goal once you hit more boring levels. Stealing partly from someone else I can't find a reference for: Ownership capped at 1 billion, you get a sticker saying "I won capitalism" and all further growth and income goes to the government for social programs. You get a new ticker that estimates lives saved and people homes/fed/educated - that becomes your new boasting figure. Not entirely…
Do you think billionaires would just stop and let the system collect their money? My first thought is they would just donate all ownership over the cap to family members. They could probably continue this forever before every family member gains $1B
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Seems perfectly fine to me. Gifts are taxed in the US. If it causes resulting problems, deal with it then. Don't let perfection be the enemy of good.
How is this considered "good" in this scenario? Income is taxed anyway. So how to rerouting money away from "taxed income" to "taxed gifts" help anything?
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You are right about the feedback loops that make it hard to escape poverty. The most uncomfortable one to talk about is basic social network effects. Two people meet at some prestigious college and get married - are we shocked they have children who are predisposed for success? Besides from having god-given IQ, they are likely some combination of ambitious, punctual, respectful of authority, long-term oriented, hard-…
In your explanation I see the feedback loop that makes it easier for you and your children to stay out of poverty if you're already successful. I don't see a feedback loop that makes it hard to escape poverty. Why did the high school dropouts drop out in the first place, and why does that make their kid more likely to drop out? Ideally their kid should still have access to public school education, with all the tools…
> just that even taking what you've said about fundamental human preferences at face value it is not inevitable that it stay this way
You're not wrong, but funding education is _expensive_, and education is only part of the puzzle, access is another large part of it, and so are the social norms you develop. My family and I grew up in "poverty-lite", and while I did manage to get into a great college, the adjustment was quite difficult. In high school I would show up to regional science fairs, and would often come in 2nd or 3rd place, and would lose to kids who used their high school's teacher's Masters thesis as a science project (for reference, in my school nobody even had a Masters degree.) Socially, I grew up very different from them. Where I grew up, you kept your head down and got in line. Disputes were aired out publicly, and often descended to fistfights if you were under 21. Textbooks were expensive, and my school often couldn't afford enough for everyone. I was constantly begging the librarian to borrow math books, but I never could because we didn't even have enough copies for the students in the actual class, let alone me, an interested kid.
For my college peers money was never an issue. I used my good grades to become a TA as soon as I could, and I worked as many hours as I could so I could pay rent and make expenses while my friends seemed to have endless amounts of time to go to social hangouts and parties, which certainly blocked the connections I could make.
Over the years I've made a handful of friends in tech who grew up in a similar income bracket as mine, and they remain comforting to me because even now, I have a hard time relating to the average Silicon Valley tech worker whose life started in upper-middle class gated suburbs.
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Australia and NZ are dont have an authoritarian govt but still managed to get the pandemic under control.
Yes? The U.S. did worse than them too.