Powerful Thoughts from Paul Graham (Notes from Hackers and Painters)
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Not in my experience. In general, people who know the least are the most vocal.
I'm about 90% in agreement with the thoughts as a whole. There are some statements I find patently false / seen through rose-tinted glasses, like 48:
I think there are three reasons we treat making money as different: the misleading model of wealth we learn as children; the disreputable way in which, till recently, most fortunes were accumulated, and the worry that great variations in income are somehow bad for society. As far as I can tell, the first is mistake, the second outdated, and the third empirically false.
In what way is money accumulation today different than the past? Another quote cites that spammers spam because their cost is nothing, but it incurs a cost of ~5 man-weeks per million emails on those they spam. Isn't that a perfect example of accumulating money in a "disreputable way"? And how about all the recent exposures of questionable banking practices? And pork-barrel legislation? Bribery? Monopolistic practices?
Money-making today is no cleaner than yesterday. Just because you (pg / anyone believing this) may accumulate money and use it ethically does not imply others do the same.
Modern civilization and its achievement is certainly not the result of lazy bureaucracy accumulating money on the back of hardworking pleasant. It's certainly a result of some amount of "rules of law".
For prosperity to be widespread, you need incentive to accumulate capitals, build stuff that people actually want to buy, etc.
The world is pretty fair. Just that humans can be too unfair and short-sighted.(Like caring more about relative status instead of total wealth)
Poor nations just have more corrupt bureaucracy, unethical businessmen, and lawlessness than wealthy nations.
Yes, the bureaucracy in American and Europe aren't certainly helping matters, but relatively speaking, they're still less corrupt than what you would find in third world countries.
But where I think the real losses to society come from are inheritance, and what you might call the "soft inheritance" that comes from being born in a given class. The problem with earning a lot of income is that your children are assumed to be equally good with that income, and society hands it to them without a second thought, regardless of their individual merits. Compounded over generations the effect is truly terrible.
We've done some to stem the tide, but not enough.
Plus, lists of things suck.
EDIT: Does anyone else see the irony in the score of this comment?
Things that suck:
* Lists of things
...It could involve something that is not coding, and that the forum members can judge (vote on). Like a best discussion topic / article submitted on Saturday the 26th between 9am and 2pm PST. All votes must be in by 7pm PST. Ten finalists could be selected, and the vote totals submitted to a separate random number generated for each one--highest 3 numbers win books. 1 entry per forum member who wants to participate.
I was mainly curious just how much is allowed. In a time when multimedia companies claim copyright infringement left and right, it's interesting to note the difference between print and audio/video copyrighted materials.