711–720 of 1001 posts
Here's a fun exercise, go look at the current tech billionaires and tell me which guys (it's basically all guys) you're super stoked about having a billion dollars because they're using it to do so much good for the world? Because as far as I can tell they're just creating a massive surveilance state while engaging in naked class warfare. Whether you can "earn" a billion dollars, I'm not convinced those people should…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
False, you just make something very valuable. To get people to help you make it you offer to pay them and they willingly exchange their time for that money (or equity if they also think it will be very valuable someday or you have a record of making valuable things in the past) Who is the person swindled here? Who agreed to something and was deceived? Who was stolen from? This process is net wealth creation. The weal…
I guess the point is that to reach the billion scale, you cannot be doing all of the important part on your own... So somehow, out of all the hardworking smart people you gathered yourself with, you decide that you're the genius that needs to benefit from the market value, while everyone else just gets compensated for their time... The actual people doing the actual work, day to day, talking to prospects, building th…
The amount of negativity to this is depressing. No one seems to be contradicting anything he's saying here, instead it's just vacuous ideology "extraction" etc etc. Purposely narrow reading. I've got kids, I want people creating start ups they can work in, the alternative is too grim.
Having been on HN for 15+ years I have found it fascinating to witness the fawning and adulation over pg blog posts completely reverse and everyone has turned on him now. It used to be if you criticized anything in his blogs you’d get downvoted to oblivion. Now criticism is the norm. As far as I can tell it’s less a change in pg’s viewpoints (though the topics have evolved, and he has gotten more transparent perhaps)…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say she has ten employees. They all voluntarily agree to work for her: slavery is illegal, so people work for others on a consensual basis. Both the employer and employee negotiated and consented to a salary or wage schedule for that employee. The employer pays the agreed-upon compensation, and the employee receives it. If the company makes an unexpectedly large profit, the employer is not obligated to redistri…
> If the company makes an unexpectedly large profit, the employer is not obligated to redistribute that to her employees in addition to the already agreed-upon and paid compensation. What if they were ? That's the whole point of the conversation lol. It's like you're side stepping the entire discourse. Maybe the company should be obligated to redistribute it to her employees, or to the public, etc.
Would you want to take a pay cut if your employer was having financial problems? Why not? Because you have an agreement on what your salary should be. It is fair that it works both ways.
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PG acknowledged that growth is limited by market size. Markets to support "avogadrillionaire" level wealth may not current exist. However, there obviously exist markets to support billionaire level wealth, as evidenced by the at least 30 billionaires produced by YC, and the many others.
Markets have growth rates the same way that products do.
There are markets that can grow fast of course, but once that exceeds the overall economy it can only come from forcing other markets to shrink, and that limits the growth rate to which the fast-growing market can ultimately attain.
There is no way anyone responding to him has a lazier argument than he does.
To me, earning something means deserving something. I don't think that the current system rewards those deserving the largest cuts of the pie. If you want to argue how to get a billion dollars, sure. But to me that is different than earning it.
Yes I'm sure that's what AOC meant too but it's not much of an explanation. Who are you to decide what people deserve or earn? And if you're going to decide that perhaps you'd like to provide a better justification, one that doesn't just boil down to "a billion is really really a lot of money".
PG makes little effort to identify what it means to earn something. Some people consider effort the measure of whether something is earned. Some believe luck should be subtracted from result to get what is earned. Some say you cannot earn the benefits you receive from your genetics. No idea of what it means to earn something is given except for making users happy while "not cheating" (who decides what counts as cheat…
Someone who lays bricks, "earns" their income; someone who's wealth increases as a bricklaying company's value increases, does not.
In this sense, it is indeed impossible to "earn" a billion dollars...
The amount of negativity to this is depressing. No one seems to be contradicting anything he's saying here, instead it's just vacuous ideology "extraction" etc etc. Purposely narrow reading. I've got kids, I want people creating start ups they can work in, the alternative is too grim.
Having been on HN for 15+ years I have found it fascinating to witness the fawning and adulation over pg blog posts completely reverse and everyone has turned on him now. It used to be if you criticized anything in his blogs you’d get downvoted to oblivion. Now criticism is the norm. As far as I can tell it’s less a change in pg’s viewpoints (though the topics have evolved, and he has gotten more transparent perhaps)…
To be less glib, that amount of time is more than ample to see a generational change in a sector as fast-moving as technology. Perhaps some robust push-back on his ideas better represents the a zeitgeist of people being less happy with a maximalist winner-takes-all attitude to business or personal success.