Billionaires Build • Hacker News Board

Re: Billionaires Build

#791

Post by CyberRabbi » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 9:28 AM UTC

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #790

CyberRabbi wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America provides food and housing assistance for people living under extreme poverty. Once you have a stable base it’s a matter of hard work.

Based on your comments, you probably never had a need for food and housing assistance. There's a huge chasm between "extreme poverty" and "stable base" and millions of people are stuck. At least one billionaire profits from keeping people in that limbo: https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/w...

I grew up in poverty under a single mother. My family’s yearly income was never more than $10K growing up. I have the income tax statements to prove it.

I went to the absolute worst schools. Literally F schools.

Re: Billionaires Build

#792

Post by yuhong » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 9:39 AM UTC

I am still focusing on Google, in this case the only reason it can IPO is ad revenue.

Re: Billionaires Build

#793

Post by Frondo » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 9:52 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #683

curun1r wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Paul is fundamentally not understanding the argument behind “billionaires exploit workers.” It isn’t that billionaires are fundamentally bad people or that they’ve accumulated their wealth through misdeeds. But what it is is that it’s basically impossible to accumulate that amount of wealth through work. Instead, you have to be able to capture the difference between the value of someone else’s work and what y…

The Beatles did not exploit the labor of people pressing their records to become wealthy. Those same people pressed records for other artists who did not make it big, or even fell flat. Their labor input was exactly the same. The difference was in the songs the Beatles created. The Beatles created those songs, not the laborers who pressed the records. Or take Stevie Nicks, who google reports is worth $100m. Are the s…

So let the beatles pocket their billion, and we'll collect most it back at the end of the tax year. How's that?

Re: Billionaires Build

#794

Post by robswc » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:05 AM UTC

arrosenberg wrote: post #739

robswc wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How is it going to be worse if Jeff Bezos is worth $50,000,000,000 instead of $180,000,000,000? on the inverse, how much worse has it gotten since Jeff Bezos went from $50b to $180b? It keeps coming back to the fact that there is such a focus on "wealth" or whatever. That's like asking "how is this tax bad if it literally makes more tax revenue?" - the answer is that it will have unforeseen consequences (or even for…

Jeff Bezos' net worth was ~$33,600,000,000 at the beginning of 2017. I would argue things are considerably worse for the average American since then. It's not the wealth, it's the level of inequality that the wealth is indicative of. If every American had healthcare and access to quality education, housing, and food, it would not matter to me how wealthy Jeff Bezos gets. It's about the floor, not the ceiling, but the…

>Jeff Bezos' net worth was ~$33,600,000,000 at the beginning of 2017. I would argue things are considerably worse for the average American since then

Based on what metrics?

>If every American had healthcare and access to quality education, housing, and food, it would not matter to me how wealthy Jeff Bezos gets

These aren't mutually exclusive though...

>Snore. If you really want to reduce things to personal jabs, that's cool I guess. I was using myself as a stand-in for an average person - feel free to substitute any name that makes your heart warm.

If you're arguing on HN you're most likely not the average person. Even then, how would you quantify how much political "power" someone should/could have?

>Sever the links between money and political power. Limit private ownership of news organizations. Take away the tools that are being abused.

Sure. You're just going to run into problems trying to define "tools" and "being abused". And I'm saying that as someone that agrees there are problems with abuse of power.

>otherwise I would have linked more specifically

Yes, cause otherwise you'll link to something and when I do "ctrl+F taxes" it wouldn't lead me to something that argues against your point ;)

It doesn't say there how much revenue it generated. Do you have something you trust showing numbers for the revenue targets and how much it made? I find conflicting information.

>Slavery was propagated by the concentrated wealth of the southern aristocracy. They rebelled when they felt that their wealth was threatened. Similarly, in Europe, World War 1 was a war of prestige and conquest fought between a bunch of wealthy (largely related) families who had built huge empires.

You can have both slavery and wars without a "concentration of capital" as the driving factor. I'll say sure, its a factor. So is the "ability to own land" and half a million other things.

>You mocked me a bit and told me I should have the answers, but I didn't see any clear examples.

I linked to the wiki page detailing how a FTT pretty much destroyed swedish financial markets and did the opposite of what it intended to do.

>Talking about a Swedish wealth tax from 1990 is a joke.

...? Literally everything you have mentioned is several times older than something from 1990. Also... it was introduced in 1984, 1990 is when they reversed it because it was so bad.

Re: Billionaires Build

#795

Post by robswc » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:19 AM UTC

pm90 wrote: post #775

robswc wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How is it going to be worse if Jeff Bezos is worth $50,000,000,000 instead of $180,000,000,000? on the inverse, how much worse has it gotten since Jeff Bezos went from $50b to $180b? It keeps coming back to the fact that there is such a focus on "wealth" or whatever. That's like asking "how is this tax bad if it literally makes more tax revenue?" - the answer is that it will have unforeseen consequences (or even for…

Please try making arguments in good faith without invoking so many logical fallacies. Here is a good guide to avoiding them: https://thethinkingshop.org/collections/products/products/lo...

If you really wanted to be productive, you would have pointed out which arguments are fallacies.

Also, you only seem to care about "fallacies" when dealing with those you disagree with ... so please try to be less sanctimonious. Here's a link that might help you: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sanctimonious

Re: Billionaires Build

#796

Post by pvorb » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:37 AM UTC

anon9001 wrote: post #784

pvorb wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't checked those numbers, but if that 20-80% paid worker's wages, that was a good thing. Also, Amazon reduces the number of players in the market and reduces the number of jobs virtually everywhere for some hotspots. A free market cannot combat this sort of monopoly.

> if that 20-80% paid worker's wages, that was a good thing That's actually not a good thing. Something is seriously wrong if we don't value efficiency. Having many separate retail shops creates massive inefficiencies, especially for commodity products. Amazon can get most products to my house at near lowest market rates in a day or two. Sometimes the same day. The problem isn't Amazon, it's our reaction to this newf…

Did it suck before Walmart and Amazon? Probably not as much as it does today.

Re: Billionaires Build

#797

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 11:05 AM UTC

bedhead wrote: post #378

drewrv wrote: post #235

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…

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-…

If they have those admirable middle class traits were they born that way? Or is cultural and social inheritance as influential as genetic inheritance?

I used to live in an upper middle class area, and a worrying number of the people were very polished thieves. They spent an unholy amount of time fighting over inheritances with other family members and over property boundaries with neighbours. When they worked - inevitably as land owners, landlords, upmarket real estate agents, investment advisors, lawyers, company directors, horse breeders, and so on - they'd always pad their bills and expenses, inflate their prices, and cheat on their taxes.

Were they "successful" - in the sense of being very comfortably off? Of course they were.

Did they try to marry their own? Naturally - out of snobbery and opportunism if for no other reason.

Were they admirable human beings or truly productive members of society? Not noticeably. Between the drink and drug problems, the predictable infidelities and ensuing dramas, and the polished and educated facade hiding feral greed and entitlement, they looked good from the outside - not so much from the inside.

If you don't own shares/stocks to any significant extent your labour goes to supporting these people. They make a lot of money from "investments" and pretend this is a glorious, noble, and risky social service. In fact they're simply skimming money from the top of the economy into their own pockets - effectively wasting it when it could be put to work doing something innovative for future generations.

Re: Billionaires Build

#798

Post by sgt » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 11:44 AM UTC

jacksnipe wrote: post #348

sgt wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But his point is valid to millions of middle class people who still struggle to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps". I think that demographic is so large (most of the people you know, if not all, are in that group, and HUGE potential is lost), that it is worth focusing on.

This rhetoric is almost universally applied to the lower class as well, at least in the US.

I think the lower class in the US actually have it relatively darn good. They just lack perspective to see it any other way.

Re: Billionaires Build

#799

Post by Olreich » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 11:45 AM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #725

bccdee wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were familiar with the data, you wouldn't make statements like that, because heritability is a population statistic, not a constant. It varies significantly between populations, to the point where you can't make claims about it without controlling for the population you're studying. For instance, we could say that the heritability of intelligence among the children of suburban Chicago families in a particular…

If you were familiar with the data, you wouldn't make statements like that, because heritability of intelligence is largely the same across all population studied so far, and universally high. There are exceptions, e.g. Scarr-Rowe effect is most likely real, but it only seems to work on very low end of SES range, which is virtually unseen in today's America, even at the lowest end of what counts as poverty.

Via what mechanism are we testing? Did we send some kids through a good upbringing and some to a bad one in a randomized controlled way, or did we just take a survey and assume intelligence was passed down through genealogy instead of upbringing?

Re: Billionaires Build

#800

Post by Olreich » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 11:51 AM UTC

centimeter wrote: post #480

bedhead wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

Heritability studies suggest this is much more strongly mediated by genetic factors (such as IQ and time preference) than social factors.

People aren’t dumb because they got the stupid gene (barring deformity that does real brain damage). They’re dumb because they were taught to be.

The are large social circles that being smart is a bad trait. There are social circles where there is little opportunity to learn as well. There’s little differentiation between baby brains and epigenetic traits aren’t set in stone by parentage, though upbringing will have a strong effect throughout life.

You don’t inherit intelligence, you get taught to throw it away or not based largely on environmental factors, including how your parents raise you.