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Modern Malaise

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141–144 of 144 posts

Re: Modern Malaise

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you gave his workers a choice between splitting the company equally with Elon and letting him have all or most of it, they would all choose to have the benefits of ownership. You can't say that someone "agreed" to something if they took the only available path.

That's post facto. What about when someone is first starting a company that could fail at any time, would workers have equally put money in and taken the risk of ownership too? People only want the rewards once they see how rich someone's company was but not when they might have to potentially lose their money if they had to invest their time and money in the beginning.

Pretty much every billionaire in existence has, at some point, taken millions of investment dollars from someone else. This is ultimately where the vast majority of their business value comes from. Compare to value generated by individuals (like book authors) which can sometimes generate millions of dollars.

That kind of individual value is more inline with the value that an individual with good judgment might be bringing on their own as an owner of an early startup who is willing to take some risks.

Basically, the risk itself isn't worth anything; paired with good judgment, the risk and the good judgment are both worth something. Really, that worth has to do with how common that good judgment is. But, most billionaires are idiots (at least at being billionaires) and their judgment tends to benefit them and nobody else. So, from a role perspective they bring negative value to a company in addition to stealing everyone's productive efforts.

You can look at how companies perform when a billionaire owner hands it off to a non-billionaire CEO. There's no sudden 20,000x value multiplier that's lost. Their role in that situation is essentially to just be privileged idiots and it's a process that's fully automatic after a certain point.

Re: Modern Malaise

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree, except corporations aren't being helped; people are. Might be through higher dividend payments to shareholders, higher salaries to employees or lower prices to consumers, but the corporation isn't a thing in itself that benefits.

Yes the corporations are a representative. Some are fully owned by a one or few people so their ethics align with those people for better or worse. Others are run by boards for shareholders but those board members ethics would come into play there. Then there are associations that lobby. So it is people but various groups acting in complex and different ways.

Calling those groups "corporations" just masks that complexity, and not in a useful way.

Re: Modern Malaise

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can’t ‘good judgement’ at the right time be worth 20000x more than a mediocre judgement at the right time? (Or good judgement at a mediocore time?) In the most extreme case, say some military general’s correct judgement to avoid launching a nuclear missile during a false alert, may be worth more than everyone else’s combined. i.e their ‘good judgement’ during a critical few seconds would be worth 8 billion times…

This only works if you're leveraging your judgement through other people. The people who put you in a position to make the meaningful judgement are just as important. For example, if the person who made the monitoring system that you're using to inform your decision didn't mess it up, then they're just as responsible for the good outcome. Same with the people who made the parts that they used to build the system and…

Leveraging other people’s work doesn’t invalidate your own work…

Even if assuming the ‘leverage’ is of overriding importance, Isn’t it fairly obvious that in this example the general could also make the wrong decision which will also leverage the work of millions, missile builders and so on, to a very negative outcome?

If that occurs, do the millions of folks who worked directly on some aspect bear collective responsibility? And the general’s decision then becomes inconsequential in the mass of millions of other decisions?

Your line of reasoning leads to an absurd conclusion in which no one’s decisions can have a disproportionate impact.

Re: Modern Malaise

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

>There's nothing wrong with income inequality. People are just envious. It isn't envy some feel when they can't afford medical care for themselves and those they care about. This applies to a lot of things in additional to medical care. If they ultra wealthy lived under the same system as everyone else then perhaps, but they don't. They have oversized influence of most every aspect of our lives which isn't conducive…

None of what you said has anything to do with inequality. You're just jealous.
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