341–350 of 1001 posts
The Accumulation of Waste, Kadri, https://brill.com/display/book/9789004548022/front-7.xml
Monopoly Capitalism, Baran and Sweezy
https://archive.org/details/monopolycapitale00bara
Labor and Monopoly Capital, Harry Braverman https://ia801604.us.archive.org/12/items/023978561/Braverman...
The whole discussion about exponential growth is idiotic and not worth responding to. But if you think of what he actually means - having a total addressable market of at least a billion dollars and being able to effectively capture it - it is obviously primarily due to factors outside of your control. The sort of company PG is talking about typically revolves around a good technology that has a network effect somewhere that leads to market concentration. People do not get good ideas by working hard, and markets are not made easily monopolizable by hard work. Execution of an idea requires hard work, but companies that are only good at execution do not win.
Obviously you can engage in hard work to improve your odds. But the returns are out of scale with the hard work. This is all people mean when they talk about "earning" money - if it's in proportion with your work, you earned it; if it isn't, you didn't.
She meant impossible in that one doesn't earn a billion dollars through work alone. The only way to get there is to set up a structure that extracts a billion dollars from a market (usually by building a structure that's more efficient but also generates externalities that are not borne by the person getting the billion dollars). pg's reading of it is so blunt and misrepresentative that I'm nervous about what kind of…
I never understood why Joel Spolsky stopped blogging. His reason was basically (paraphrasing) that his business grew too big and mature for him to keep writing. It sounded nonsense to me by the time. And now comparing PG's writing today and what he wrote 10~15 years ago, I finally get what Joel means.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
pg is or was the owner of a very influential venture capital fund, that created projects such as Uber and AirBNB. He knows all about setting up structures to extract value, and he also knows which framing makes people more sympathetic instead of angry.
>pg is or was the owner of a very influential venture capital fund, that created projects such as Uber Uber was not a YCombinator company. For some unexplained reason, many mistakenly think it was a YC startup but it's not correct. (The gp's comment is an example of how chatbots hallucinate because they train on the text of people unintentionally hallucinating.)
It’s as if the money comes right up out of thin air, isn’t it?
He inadvertently gets close when he talks about Facebook being about people doing stalking. PG, is stalking a good thing or a bad thing, hmmm?
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I think there are many arguments against AOC's comments, but I agree that PG here is misrepresenting her point. I don't think anyone reading PG's blog is clueless about the power of compounding or the difference between salary and wealth through asset growth. Her point is essentially whether the entire capital system is "fair." And to be fair to PG I don't think AOC articulated a particularly strong point either.
He very explicitly engaged with her claim that the system is unfair/unethical, and whether you agree with him or not, he argued against it: > What [AOC] meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way... The reason [my founder's] startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong [AOC]…
Impressed at the commentary here, which correctly points out Paul dodges the entire issue at hand. Three things can be true: 1. Growing at a rapid rate over long periods of time is hard , doable and rewarding 2. Incentivizing the discovery of these things is good for society. 3. Nonethless there is and should be a limit to wealth acquisition, given moral hazard. To make a similarly glib counterargument to Paul G: If…
and depends on factors outside your control.
This last is a critical caveat, and really the crux of the argument. It's not about cheating, but the limits of predictability in complex dynamic systems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there are many arguments against AOC's comments, but I agree that PG here is misrepresenting her point. I don't think anyone reading PG's blog is clueless about the power of compounding or the difference between salary and wealth through asset growth. Her point is essentially whether the entire capital system is "fair." And to be fair to PG I don't think AOC articulated a particularly strong point either.
He very explicitly engaged with her claim that the system is unfair/unethical, and whether you agree with him or not, he argued against it: > What [AOC] meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way... The reason [my founder's] startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong [AOC]…
Furthermore, the company motivated by profit that does not have to pay for polluting the environment will also pollute the environment. Regulation is also necessary to pay for long term externalities and other boom and bust cycles. There is nothing new in PG take except COPE and blame shifting about the increasing inequality and other societal and environmental issues.
> So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible. "Earning a billion", to the skating coach, is like pulling off a dodeca-axel. It's not gonna happen through mere pluck, and it's probably g…
You’re suggesting that selling others’ talent isn’t legitimate “earning”? Why?