Hacker News Reader

Comment by yetanotherforg | Hacker News Reader

Thank you. Nobody ever seems to mention how much founders get to stand on the heads of engineers and scientists who were paid with tax dollars. Kind of how the libertarian musk fans ignore how much aid his companies have gotten from the t taxpayers.

In the heads of somebody who believed The Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged were bibles, there are 1 or 2 people doing 99% of all work in the companies.

View on HN

> Nobody ever seems to mention how much founders get to stand on the heads of engineers and scientists who were paid with tax dollars.

Not that anyone listens to him, but Noam Chomsky has been saying this for his whole career.

https://youtu.be/a4ZIhW5ZpaE

Most progress has come from universities, defense and government funding. These losers build an app and proclaim themselves gurus on the future. It's insane that people fall for it.

Progress doesn't come from funding, and funding doesn't come from the government. People make progress. People pay taxes.

Sure progress comes from scientists , not from idiots building b2b saas apps.

But what about the yet another distributed key store we built?

I feel like you're making fun of Riak :)

> Sure progress comes from scientists , not from idiots building b2b saas apps.

Progress comes from all sorts of places. Scientific progress come from scientists. That doesn't result in things better in my life without a huge number of other people doing things well and efficiently. Both of which includes anything people will pay for, including b2b saas apps. Try having a pandemic lockdown without Amazon-level fulfillment in place. Thankfully we didn't have to.

No not all work is equal. Progress is a rare thing. Do not equate all forms of work to progress. People will pay good money for women to fart on their faces. That's not valuable work. Neither is building shitty apps.

Scientist's work is not necessarily valuable either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize

Who would you like to appoint as an arbiter for what "valuable work is"? If certain people enjoy and pay women to fart in their faces - would you like to ban that? How about other "useless" activities that humans enjoy like video games or massages or fashion or fancy restaurants - would you like to ban those as well?

Who's saying anything needs to be banned. We're talking about who can reasonably claim to be contributing to the progress of society. Go ahead and smell the farts my friend

I'm not equating all forms of work to progress. That'd be a category error. It's the inverse: you saying only progress comes from scientists is a category error.

> Do not equate all forms of work to progress. People will pay good money for women to fart on their faces.

Depends entirely upon the quality of the fart.

Corporations seem to do a good job of avoiding taxes in a way that people cannot replicate. The ultra-rich founders also do a great job of making sure they pay a lower tax rate than the rest of us.

I think Keynes said "The worst form of capitalism is in which the public holds all the risk, and the private sector realizes all the rewards".

> Corporations seem to do a good job of avoiding taxes in a way that people cannot replicate. The ultra-rich founders also do a great job of making sure they pay a lower tax rate than the rest of us.

Focusing on the latter is fair enough. Thinking that a corporation having lots of money is bad seems completely pointless. That money ends up as dividends or higher salaries or lower prices. Tax the first two and celebrate all three.

Progress comes from individuals. MIT did not endow Claude Shannon with divine knowledge of Boolean algebra and information theory. He discovered it himself.

Claude Shannon was able to do what he was able to do because of the ample research funding and the academic environment. I have great respect for people like Claude Shannon but they require an ecosystem to be able to do their work.

There were plenty of electrical engineers at MIT working on differential analyzers when Shannon worked on his paper. Why Shannon and not them? Funding and ecosystems don't make technological revolutions anymore than they make cures for diseases. After all, the four papers that revolutionized physics in the early 20th century were composed by a 24-year old patent clerk. Someone has to do the job of thinking and putting those ideas to paper. This is a requirement of any great idea irrespective of funding or people. Thinking is an individual pursuit for an individual reward.

There is both an individual contribution and a societal contribution. No one is denying the individual contribution. But none of YC types had anything to do with inventing the internet but feel like they are the only ones who deserve it's rewards. They haven't created anything like information theory. It's mostly been about fleecing retail investors. More SBF and less Shannon

Reply on news.ycombinator.com