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Comment by jeoeo929 | Hacker News Reader

This says more about the state of society than anything else

Profits are up, inequality is up.

That’s by design.

We should be working on making it so people can eat and be healthy, and not have to be reduced to such bottom feeding tactics.

But everyone thinks it’s mean and petty to tell kids of dead rich people they don’t get to inherit all the power.

If I learned anything getting an MS in mathematical linguistics: economics is not physics and mass delusions infect smart people’s limbic systems too.

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I'll second this downvoted opinion. The mismatch between economic good created by and economic incentive to create OSS is just tragic from a hard numbers perspective.

How do you fix it though? A large funding program? If the state or private industry were the backer, how do you prevent manipulation? The only viable models (that spring to my mind) are Spanish-Anarchist type stuff of generally funded unions of technical workers, but that doesn't feel likely.

We already have a large funding program called taxes. We seem to enjoy giving it to private interests instead of state and local governments directly.

Kind of wondering how, given that direct pipeline of transfer payments from the fed to private companies we can ever believe the “our economics is a free system of ideas.”

Prevent manipulation of the state by prioritizing policing of state acts, not average folks on the street.

Absolutely none of these ideas are new. It’s a fact of our biology that sees us favoring the mental model we know versus the unknown of a new social hierarchy. A reasonable “how to” is well detailed though.

The public must engage the political system directly and not through the business sector administrators inserted in the middle of the process via manipulation of the financial systems flow of capital.

Look what happens when there’s a half assed effort to get something like Obamacare. Imagine if the effort wasn’t so half assed?

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