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Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

I think it might be time to turn back the clock a bit and revisit some of the things pg said way back when he was pitching Sam Altman to lead YC and the general reaction was "...who?"

2008: "You could parachute [Sam Altman] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king. If you're Sam Altman, you don't have to be profitable to convey to investors that you'll succeed with or without them. (He wasn't, and he did.) Not everyone has Sam's deal-making ability. I myself don't. But if you don't, you can let the numbers speak for you." https://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

2014: "Of all the people we’ve met in the 9 years we’ve been working on YC, Jessica and I both feel Sam is the best suited for that task. He’s one of those rare people who manage to be both fearsomely effective and yet fundamentally benevolent..." https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/sam-altman-for-president

Now, this isn't about pg specifically. Maybe he had reservations at the time but still thought he was making the right decision, maybe he's since changed his mind, maybe he hasn't but has pretty well moved on from this scene. Not interesting.

I'm more interested in whether Altman, and Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Bezos, and Ellison, and all the other amoral wealth-hoarders, are finally becoming obvious enough now that people might finally begin to see them as the yucky byproducts of a yucky system.

Maybe a moralistic, basically decent person couldn't get ChatGPT launched and turned in to the household topic of discussion it is today; maybe nice people can't build cheap rockets. Maybe in the future, when making an endorsement for a leadership position in some company, someone might be brazen enough to say aloud, "I believe this person is sufficiently nasty to make us all more successful."

And so then the question is, does society net benefit more from the moralists or more from the capitalists? Do we accept that Sam Altmans are necessary for cool technology? How many Altmans can we have before something goes horribly, irreversibly wrong?

View on HN

> Do we accept that Sam Altmans are necessary for cool technology?

Zooming out a bit, do we accept "cool technology" as a virtue? Should it factor into my evaluation of a person at all?

"Cool technology" here means things like dishwashers, or MRI machines, which pretty much strictly improve people's lives, not slightly better advertisement algorithms.

Pretty sure Paul Lauterbur was no douchebag and good products and inventions can come from good people.

I don't think you need to be an asshole to invent a dishwasher or an MRI machine. The usefulness alone lets you sell these. AI on the other hand...

Plenty of people are finding AI to be useful. I don't know what you're hinting at.

Invention is one thing, a product to sell is almost an entirely different thing. The more I see the more I realise that being technical is almost all the time the least important part.

You need to get people around you to succeed. In practice that means investors so that you can hire and people with the right connections so you can get sweet deals.

You need people skills not inventions. And a bit more fake it until you make it rather than correct/technical information.

That's only the VC angle. Plenty of revolutionary products will find adoption without playing the SV startup playbook. I think it's time to reevaluate the startup business "wisdom" of these past 15 years in the light of the companies and founders "role models" it has produced over that time frame. Good at making money, obviously. Holding the promise of making society better? I'll let you judge. As for me since I've read from Zero to One I have a sense I have been duped. I was once grateful for HN for opening my eyes on marketing. Now I'm hangover at how it perverted everything.

I think that this is true, and I hate it. In a previous job, I had to work with the worst (shop)-framework I have ever seen. It is very expensive, over-engineered in the worst ways, very slow and awful to use. The blatant misunderstanding of software architecture principles in that software is hard to put into words. For example: It took an experienced developer two weeks and more than 2000 LoC in more than 40 files to add a new label to a product. But the company creating this mess is good at marketing, and their events are great.

A few weeks ago one of the guys (a freelancer) who stayed in that project was on an event of a competitor to this shop framework. After that event, he said that their software was way better, but it wasn't interesting enough for him to invest in learning that system. In his opinion, their marketing is not good enough, and they won't be able to sell it to important companies.

So we are stuck with bad products because they apparently sell better than the good ones.

The developers in the company I mentioned first even knew beforehand that the software was bad. They were "included" in the decision process, and they all voted against the bad software and preferred another solution (it was before my time, and I don't remember if they told me what they actually wanted to use). But the manager who made the ultimate decision had such a good time with the guys from the bad product that he decided to go with it.

I know a lot of good developers and people who can sell themselves really well. Sadly, these two groups hardly overlap.

that's not a manager, that's an internal client from hell.

and yes, the world is full of these dysfunctional groups flush with money. (you might euphemistically call it this or that VC/startup scene)

on one hand it's great that there's plenty of room for technical improvement, on the other it needs the right socioeconomic circumstances. sometimes FOSS helps with this. (developers who spend their career working on products based on FOSS stuff at least have some chance of knowing that their efforts can might be valuable for a wider audience.)

> I know a lot of good developers and people who can sell themselves really well. Sadly, these two groups hardly overlap.

Because the best marketers and salespeople are plainly people who lie. People who lie about the capability of the product they are selling to get their customer to buy more of it. Good marketers and salespeople cripple their financial gain by being truthful. So liars get more money, so they get more customers, so they get more power. So it goes.

Software development, being somewhere between a craft, an art, and a science, is fundamentally grounded in truth. You can't bullshit your way to quality software. You can't lie to the computer like you can to a human (maybe with AI you can). So "success" in these two fields is diametrically different.

Though I bet you'll get the opposite answer on a sales/marketing forum.

You don't need to be an asshole, but if you win big enough to end up in the spotlight, you might eventually get painted as an asshole.

There is more than usefulness to it. Take what became social media later but what at the beginning was just a means for friends to have many-to-many async conversations instead of only 1:1 in an easy way. This was useful, I have no doubt about this. Yet the final product sold is something quite different, and in some cases can hurt people instead of benefiting them.

For sure. I think I expressed myself poorly; I very much do not think being an asshole is a necessity for cool technology.

I do think that "cool technology" such as dishwashers and MRI machines is a virtue and we're better of with those than without.

UNIX is pretty cool but Ken Thompson isn't an asshole (as far as I know).

I agree.

My point (which I communicated poorly) wasn't that assholes are necessary, but rather that there are reasonable definitions of "cool technology" which are an inherent virtue.

Has Sam actually caused any cool technology? It seems Loopt was kind of meh, he's just an investor in Helion. OpenAI was largely funded by Musk and would have happened without Sam and it may have actually lived up to the Open bit if he hadn't been there which would have been cooler. Now it's just another corporate.

I think your premise is false. Yes, you can give examples of people that weren't very ethical and built successful products (like Gates and Jobs), but there are numerous examples of the opposite - many wonderful products done by people and teams who did nothing wrong (yet!).

I even think believing this idea (you need to be ruthless to succeed) is dangerous. And if you behave like a boss from the 90s at some point you will be exposed. I've seen places where these people rule and they only have high turnover with the exception of these few shops where investors are funneling tons of money so employees just stopped caring.

I’m no huge fan of the bond villains in general, but this thread isn’t about Musk or whoever being a dick.

And even if it were, Musk builds the best rockets ever and stuff like that and to a first approximation knows how they work.

Mark at a minimum is the Corp Dev CEO of a generation and I’d argue more. I’d argue he is the first person to create an accurate-ish mental model mapping IRL human mechanism design into a high-fidelity digital analogy.

Bezos was at DE Shaw and called the Internet as a vehicle for commerce on the early side, to put it mildly.

Ellison saw that what we now call RDBMS was going to Be Big and substantially implemented the early versions personally.

Now this isn’t a license for any of the icky shit any of these folks have done since, but all of them put some of the points their character class rolled into “actually build something”.

Altman put all his points into manipulate if not blackmail people around me until the machine coughs up the next stair on the ladder.

I’m generally in favor of “less bond villains”, but that’s not the topic of the thread and neatly bypasses another key point which is that all the other bond villains you mentioned (and I’ve met a few of them) have some redeeming quality as opposed to, Jesus, could a fucking Kennedy get away with a farce like this?

Stop changing the subject. I know all those essays by heart. I was synthesizing them with inside YC baseball the day they were published.

No Musk builds nothing. There is a huge team he leads, consisting of engineers and scientists and they develop technology that Musk then sells. He's a glorified cars salesman. Maybe he was essential to get the rockets built, but neither did he build them, nor contribute essential technical details, so that it would be uniquely him who could do it given same financial backing.

Meanwhile the competitors are failing. He’s doing something right that’s beyond just car salesman.

In the realm of invisible monopolies and quasi-state owned the privately owned individual is only half blind.

What does that even mean? Your structural setting changed your success potential? China would disagree.

Besides… Blue origin? Boeing? These are not state owned or “invisible” yet are failing.

A pension fund is a conservative entity interested in stability above all things, with longterm planning, rulebooks, almost like a small state. The line between public and private is very blurry by now and that blurryness goes both ways. Get public funding long enough and you loose your agency to become a bureau of everything nihilitary gone.

This image should just get autoreplied any time somebody tries to (incorrectly) claim that Elon Musk is just a salesman: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXMasterrace/comments/ub1yav/bu...

lol I met Josh Boehm years ago, didn’t realize he had crawled so far up the ladder at SpaceX. I tried talking with him about programming but he struck me as one of those insufferable managerial types with no passion for the craft that had fully bought into his personality cult. I seem to recall his handle on some social media being “Baron Boehm”, which is probably a telling indication of his ego.

It's Gwynne Shotwell, COO of SpaceX, who makes the rockets fly.

I hadn't noticed that particular nominative determinism before, interesting

And yet Shotwell didn't create SpaceX, define its mission, establish its products, create Starlink or recruit the core team. Musk did all of that and tons more as well.

It's fascinating how nobody was making this claim of a non-technical Musk up until the moment he stopped being loyal to one particular wing of US politics. Now we see a concerted effort to diminish his achievements. Do you people really think this will work? There is endless testimony from people - independent of Musk and in the space industry - saying that the dude is an honest to god rocket scientist who single-handedly made SpaceX happen through sheer force of will, engineering ability and personal investment. He routinely displays a fluent understanding of orbital mechanics well beyond what any normal CEO would be expected to display. Anyone can read his bio or the testimony of people who work in the space industry and understand that Musk was (and still is) intimately involved in every aspect of SpaceX, down to detailed engineering decisions.

Shotwell meanwhile is regularly described as managing the business development side. She negotiates with customers and oversees day to day operations. This is critical work that she clearly does very well, and she has an engineering background. But I can't find examples of people claiming that she drives product development or overall strategy for SpaceX.

He is diminishing his achievements all by myself on Twitter. Like before there was doubts he was technical. Now it's clear he is not and was acting (at least regarding software). If Steve Jobs was claiming he also did the iPhone engineering don't you think people would challenge that? He lies, he gets caught up, that's it. Look at his recent exchange with LeCun, is it really politics or has he simply too much ego and lost touch and people are calling it?

> Like before there was doubts he was technical. Now it's clear he is not and was acting (at least regarding software) ... He lies, he gets caught up, that's it

Says you, random HN poster. Here's the assessment of a NASA astronaut who spent time on the ISS and who has a PhD in mechanical engineering and a degree in applied mechanics:

"[Musk is] able to have conversations with our top engineers about software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy"

But sure, him and the software engineers at NASA are all dumbasses who are fooled by an actor. Happens all the time.

Again - do you guys really think this will work? You are saying what you want to be true, not what actually is true. It's really not necessary. You can loathe the guy for political reasons and still accept that he is in fact an engineer, and does in fact know how to write software. These things are not mutually exclusive.

As for "he lies, he gets caught up". Really. Nobody making this claim is in in any position to attack someone else for getting caught up in a lie, given how brazen this claim is, how many people with direct experience have lined up to say the exact opposite, and how obvious it is that it can't be true given his achievements.

Please, stop claiming Musk isn't technical or that Gwynne Shotwell is the real leader of SpaceX. It doesn't work and makes all criticism of Musk look like ideologically motivated reasoning. There are plenty of genuine ways to criticize Musk! Attack him for being way too over-optimistic about FSD in Tesla cars if you want. Attack him for requiring logins to Twitter. But don't spread obvious lies about him - it lowers the credibility of all criticism.

Curious for your take on this: https://venturebeat.com/ai/elon-musk-and-yann-lecuns-social-...

Or this: > I personally wrote the first national maps, directions, yellow pages & white pages on the Internet in the summer of 1995 in C with a little C++. Didn't use a "web server" to save CPU cycles (just read port 8080 directly). Couldn't afford a Cisco T1 router, so wrote an emulator based on a white paper.

Or maybe this: > I mean, man, you’re in charge of the servers and the programming and whatever,” Brown continued. “What is the stack, Elon? Take me from top to bottom. What does the stack look like right now? What’s so crazy about it? What is so abnormal about this stack versus every other large-scale system on the planet, buddy? C’mon!

To which he answered: > Jackass

Or this: > They took one look at Zip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software. Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientists needed just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects into chunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into the classic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers call hairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons.

Again I’m not speaking for rocket science, but as for software engineering and ML it seems he only has surface knowledge but does enough name dropping to maintain the illusion.

What are you arguing here? That Musk knows how to write code but, in your mind, isn't a good enough programmer to ... I don't know. Do what? Run Twitter? Run SpaceX? Understand Twitter's tech stack?

The quotes you chose contain direct references to him coding, to code that he wrote himself. Where is the name dropping? Are you being confused by the reference to web servers in the first quote maybe? In 1995 the term web server meant something like Apache with CGI. Writing a custom implementation of HTTP in C was a fairly standard technique to improve performance back then. The first version of Amazon was written in C, Google's web servers were still frequently written in C++ when I joined.

I mean, you say he has only "surface knowledge" and is "acting" to "maintain the illusion", but how many programmers could knock out their own implementation of HTTP in C on their own, let alone implement BGP and all the other low level stuff you need to bring a T1 online? How many would even understand what Musk was talking about?

And what's his point? That he invented internet? Implementing a basic HTTP in C is like a first year CS lab (https://quip.com/Km9EAe5ARGZI). Without further information how do we know he is not inflating some toy week-end project any C programmer could have done back then? Also what's with specifying it's in C/C++? It was either that or assembly. Again hard to see his point. It gives me the same vibe than when he was proud of "direct flipping of CPU registers". All of this is very average if you were a hobby programmer at the time, we are not talking real world engineering like OS kernel (Linux/NT/...) or Game (Crash Bandicoot, RollerCoaster Tycoon, ...) just to name a few on top of my head.

My point is contrary to what he and his supporters claim he has has no deep understanding of the actual tech of his companies. I'm not arguing he doesn't know tech enough to run a tech company. It's common to find tech executives and VP that coded in their younger years. He might sit maybe a bit above a decent salespeople that has a good understanding of his product line, but below a Bill Gates and definitely not at the level of a ML researcher or Tech lead. He is maybe more invested that a typical CEO in day to day operations, but the aura of genius/inventor added on top is an illusion.

> What is so abnormal about this stack versus every other large-scale system on the planet, buddy? C’mon!

The "...buddy? C'mon!" framing is simply obnoxious. Who would engage with such a person in the first place?

It’s not his politics but his takeover and self-sabotage of Twitter. I think most people when they get that much wealth and power turn into assholes because they think they are indestructible (and in a way they are).

Why does anyone here care what happens to Twitter? It's just another social network. We have lots of them. Even if Elon Musk bought it just to burn it down, so what? Anyone who cares can build a replacement.

And as a casual Twitter/X user who doesn't give a damn about Musk one way or the other, I don't see the sabotage. The web site and mobile app seem to be working fine. Community Notes is great. I understand that advertising revenue is down but that has no impact on users.

I don't care what happened to Twitter now that I'm off it, but having an egomaniac not only owning but actively controlling, answerable to no one but himself, the most important digital public square in the world, is very problematic from a democratic (not the party) standpoint.

> Anyone who cares can build a replacement.

Technologically, sure; nothing special about it. But in terms of adoption and reach, no, Twitter is unique and extremely difficult to replace.

Come on, be serious. Twitter/X has never been the "most important digital public square in the world". Time to get out of the bubble and live in the real world. And while I'm no fan of concentrated media ownership, let's not pretend the previous management was any better: they actively censored and suppressed accurate, legal information in order to promote their favored political narratives. That was equally bad in a different way.

- which other social media network was as globally widespread and used for public communication by public and private actors alike the way Twitter was?

- there's a huge difference between a set of executives who are accountable to a board and shareholders, and a single person who is not, and doubly so when that person is among the wealthiest in the world, likes to shoot their mouth off, has a huge ego, and likes to exercise a great deal of control

> And even if it were, Musk builds the best rockets ever and stuff like that and to a first approximation knows how they work.

Being fed the tour guide's summary and high-level overview of an event is not the same thing as knowing how they work.

Elon Musk's virtues start and stop at the way projects were funded. He comes in, buys existing companies, pays people to continue doing the work, and that's it. It's well established that his takes are merely performative and with a substance of a pre-pubrescent edgy rant.

If there was any value in Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and the hot mess that his tenure has been, is to put the spotlight on how incidental the success of companies like SpaceX is regarding Elon Musk's influence. You're talking about the guy behind stunts like the "pedo guy" incident and yanking live servers out of their sockets as a cost-cutting measure.

>He comes in, buys existing companies, pays people to continue doing the work, and that's it.

Apart from Zip2 which he started from scratch and wrote the early code for, SpaceX which he stated from scratch, Neuralink likewise, OpenAI which he co founded and was the biggest early funder for and probably some others.

> mental model mapping IRL human mechanism design into a high-fidelity digital analogy

Could you please elaborate what you mean by that?

Mechanism design is broadly the study (with a practical as opposed to theoretical emphasis) of the way that incentives shape human behavior.

For better or worse Mark was/is able to see some deep minimal structure that allows what used to be a web page and is now a mobile app to elicit responses that bear an uncanny resemblance to the way human beings behave and interact in a setting unmediated by either a priest or a protocol. On the properties he runs people act a hell of a lot like they do in a bar or any other place where sapiens mix and match.

I’m not sure that turbocharging spinal-reflex humanity via computer networks is going all that well, which is one of the main reasons I parted ways with the endeavor once the true scope for mechanical advantage became clear, but he clearly sees things about what motivates people that Freud was throwing darts at.

I might have been one of the few true assassins he sent after people like Vic Gunderotta or Evan Spiegel and certainly he knows how to delegate the mechanics of leaving would-be adversaries on the scrap heap of history, but he knew who to send the hitters after and when.

Isnt altman the architect of chatgpt as a product. He seems on par on that genius at the others on tech

> Zuckerberg

He started off looking like a Lore from Star Trek, and then took the criticism seriously enough to learn to present as a genuine human.

Might have been around the time FB was getting named by the UN as bearing some responsibility for a genocide though.

So if anything, for him at least, the opposite.

> Altman, and Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Bezos, and Ellison, and Edison

>Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Bezos, and Ellison, and all the other amoral wealth-hoarders

Not so much wealth hoarders but products of the capitalist system where you can own a company and it may do well and become worth lots of money.

And what is the alternative? Communist communal ownership of the means of production is not really cracking along these days.

at the very least I would appreciate the sincerity of this approach. We can start having the real discussions without cosplaying as fungible hyper competent leetcode machines, and start asking which of these problems would benefit from having a weaponised sociopath at the helm.

Are we working too hard on the wrong yet interesting problems or do we just need a sufficiently amoral person to manipulate, harass and cheat their way into partnerships, sales and general interest? Do we accept such behaviour is noble if we make enough success and money from it?

> I'm more interested in whether Altman, and Musk, and Zuckerberg, and Bezos, and Ellison, and all the other amoral wealth-hoarders, are finally becoming obvious enough now that people might finally begin to see them as the yucky byproducts of a yucky system.

One of them doesn't belong on the list. Fossil fuel and legacy automobile companies killed EVs[1][2], bought all the battery patents and made sure there were no EVs made. Until Tesla made them possible, by building gigafactories so battery is not a constraint and supercharger network.

Why is the list restricted to only a few tech billionaires? Where are the fossil fuel billionaires who actively do harm? 10 million people die every year from air pollution, and fossil fuels are only possible because of $7 trillion subsidies/year.

Why isn't Gates on the list?[3] Koch brothers? Hundreds of middle-eastern fossil fuel princes? Warren Buffett who owns Coke (39 grams of sugar/can) fast food chains, cookies, candy, ice cream companies, fossil fuel companies, utilities that actively lobby against solar/wind.

Dan and Farris Wilks, Oil billionaires who are making policy changes on many issues? [4][5][6]

Where are the financial billionaires, real estate, healthcare, insurance, fast fashion, chemicals?

[1] A portion of the film details GM's efforts to demonstrate to California that there was no consumer demand for their product, and then to take back every EV1 and destroy them.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_au...

[3] That's why Gates personally intervened to scuttle the Oxford team's plan to make its publicly funded vaccine research free to all, coercing them into doing an exclusive license deal with Astrazeneca: https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/21/wait-your-turn/

[4] https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/04/institute-index-texas-fr...

[5] https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/24/politics/texas-far-right-poli...

[6] https://www.tpr.org/news/2024-02-25/three-west-texas-billion...

Musk profited of what he saw benefited him, yes he pushed forward EV technology and put other carmakers under pressure which is good. But he is an completely unhinged egomanic who has no respect for working people, even those working for him and often lies for his benefit, to workers, shareholders and reporters, this is documented hundreds of times

You are missing the point I think. The problem with individuals in the initial list is they were presented as models. The point is they are not some forces of good as it was claimed they were (along Tech / SV culture). That you need to compare them to fossil fuel princes really highlights how low they have fallen.

Great post - annoys me that Gates, but especially Warren Buffet is never held to account, I have seen Coke and similar corporations have devastating consequences on small towns all over central/south America because local food is replaced with sugary-filled and processed foods, with advertising placed all over these small businesses, so uneducated families and kids grow up drinking coke straight after they stop breast feeding, very sad.

> amoral wealth-hoarders

They're not hoarding wealth. They don't have any Scrooge McDuck cash faults. Their money is all invested, i.e. put to work creating things that people want.

> moralists ... capitalists

History shows us that societies based on morals (religious, ideological) fare extremely poorly compared with societies based on rights (free markets).

Like it or not, for a large, prosperous society you must have big business.

Walter, as you know I respect your point of view on the merits of the market in this business: God knows you’ve got about double my experience in it (and the multiple on impact is some larger coefficient I can’t even eyeball) and your opinion is logically robust, as we’ve debated before.

You’ve previously argued for the merits of e.g. the Gates fortune, and as someone who went head-to-head with MSFT in the springtime of its excellence and I’m inclined to believe the guy who was there.

In your opinion, which you know I respect as much as any hacker living, did Altman build anything or do anything of value to be a billionaire off AirBnB stock certainly less than 3, probably less than one year after Loopt was sold at a loss with Conway’s finger on the scales?

Thank you for the kind words! I do appreciate them.

I'm sorry to say I don't know enough about Altman to form any kind of opinion on him.

Ultimately it’s pg who owes this community locally and humanity globally for inflicting Altman on the world, but as much as I likewise respect pg on 99/100 things, he seems to be digging his heels in on this one, so I’m not holding my breath.

I gather anoxia is a bad way to go.

Absent that, a few other recognized OG legends like yourself looking into the matter and rendering an opinion might represent the daylight between the status quo and disaster.

Certainly he’s nothing to do with your honestly-held convictions about merit prevailing in efficient markets oriented to novel contribution.

I know you believe in markets, but I think we agree there’s nothing capitalist or meritocratic about failing up repeatedly until manifestly unqualified and ill-intentioned people wield arbitrary power off an unbroken litany of failures punctuated by the occasional success in taking credit for the efforts and achievements of others via PR and powerful friends.

If Altman has achieved success through force, fraud, or theft, then I oppose him.

If it's through selfish behavior, or hard-nosed behavior, it's ok with me. Just like there's nothing wrong with a football team who plays hard to win, as long as they stay within the rules.

Microsoft eventually defeated me in the C++ business. I don't fault them for that. They are hard-nose players, and I knew what the game was when I got into it. I'm actually friends with a few of their players.

Taking credit for what other people do is immoral, but leaders always do that, all the way up to the President.

The accusation of this TFA and many others (at an accelerating rate) is that all of theft, fraud, and force or at least the threat of some kind of force is precisely how the present situation emerged. He or entities he utterly controls are the defendants in multiple lawsuits and an SEC investigation around allegations of more or less that entire basket of levers.

As a lay observer and a figure of zero public note, I’m not held to the standard a juror is: I can draw a conclusion based on an overwhelming preponderance of evidence and lobby in my tiny way on the basis of said conclusion.

If I were a juror, I’d be held to the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt”, guidance typically annotated by a judge with specific instructions as to what it means in the context of a specific legal proceeding.

I’m not advocating for some kind of ugly mob justice (I’ve been at the mercy of unruly mobs, I do not recommend it).

I’m advocating that a sufficiently compelling body of evidence both documentary and testimonial exists to remove this person from a position in which they can plausibly manipulate the legal infrastructure itself, and public opinion likewise, and hand the matter over to duly constituted authority.

Personally? I’ll bet the rent that the ocean of evidence will persuade a fair jury, but I’m not a jury, I’m a random guy who knows how scary this technology is in the hands of people like that and is pleading with the world to stop him getting fucking laws passed and shit.

That's all very generous. Who actually needs greater than 90% of the startups coming out of Silicon Valley and the surrounding areas? Their products just get hyped up and shoved down peoples' throat.

And you're wrong. These people do have cash vaults, but they're other peoples' cash vaults. How else do you think they buy things? And they're living in their multi-million dollar mansions and yachts out of benevolence? Please.

Unfortunately, history provides us with examples of societies that confiscated the wealth of the wealthy, and even exterminated them, in their quest to make a utopia.

They all ended up as hell-holes.

I'm not really interested in repeating that history.

It is not at all necessary for wealthy people to be benevolent in order to contribute to society. Nor do they need to be nice people, nor do they need to be unselfish.

The free market harnesses selfishness for the benefit of society. It's why it works so well, as excoriating selfish people.

For example, the Wright Brothers invented the airplane so they could get rich off of licensing the patents. Dig into it, and that's the bald, unvarnished, truth. They did get modestly wealthy, but were poor businessmen. Look at what their selfishness did - glorious airplane travel! Have you ever flown on an airplane? You're benefiting from the selfishness of the Wrights.

BTW, everybody is selfish. I am selfish. You are selfish. Everyone who says they are unselfish are selfish. That's what a billion years of evolution did to us.

> Unfortunately, history provides us with examples of societies that confiscated the wealth of the wealthy

Get out of here with this melodrama.

We’re in a society that had higher more progressive tax rates as recently as the 1960’s. This isn’t some science fiction dystopia people are advocating for, just a return to the slightly fairer system we had before organized PR campaigns of the elites brought us the increasingly unequal dystopia we’re actually currently experiencing.

> We’re in a society that had higher more progressive tax rates as recently as the 1960’s.

That's only superficially true. There were a lot more deductible things in those days, like company cars and 3 martini lunches. Tax shelter investing was de rigueur then. (Tax shelter investing is an inefficient diversion of resources into unproductive investments.) Reagan traded away the tax shelters and tax deductions for lower tax rates, which turned out rather well.

Washington state has enormously higher tax rates today than in the 60s. Sales tax, property tax, estate tax, and now an income tax.

https://dor.wa.gov/about/statistics-reports/history-washingt...

Sure, and we also didn't have the fucking insanity of step-up-basis and our current approach of literally not taxing the accumulation of wealth, ever, for those at the top of the pyramid. We also had unions.

We can trade examples all day but the fact is that the tax burden on the very wealthy has plummeted and income inequality has skyrocketed. Those are broad measurable facts.

Things suck more as a result. I'm not a young guy, I've watched the change.

The step-up basis happens when you die. But then you get hit with a 40% federal estate tax and a 20% Washington estate tax on that stepped up basis.

Since you're not young, if you'd invested a modest sum in AMZN in the 1990s you'd be a millionaire several times over today. Same for MSFT. And Apple.

How does other people having more than you take away from you?

1. As I’m sure you well know the estate tax exemption is measured in 8 figures at this point, so no, you don’t “pay 40%” to the federal government. And that’s leaving aside the fact that the dead person can make billions in capital gains, spend it wildly (via loans) and never pay a fucking dime of taxes on it at all. Nobody ever does, that’s the basis issue. It’s a fucking travesty that it’s the current law.

2. I’m rich. Believe it or not some of us actually give a shit what kind of society we are building.

The real question you should be asking is how does other people having less than you within a deeply unfair system not take away from your happiness.

Thanks for being one of the good ones and for the discussion support.

It's $13 million for the federal estate tax exemption, and the top rate for Washington's is 20% of the amount over $9 million (it starts being taxed at $1m). It's a meaningless exemption if your net worth is $1b.

> that’s the basis issue

Basis is the amount paid for the stock. The basis boost happens at death. It has nothing to do with margin debt.

Margin debt isn't free. There are limits to how much one can margin. Etrade margin rates are 12.2%, which is pretty high.

If your stocks drop precipitously, which happens every few years, you're subject to a margin call where the broker will sell your stock for you and you get to pay the tax as well. If there isn't enough stock to cover the debt, the broker will come after your other assets to pay it.

Do you also think it is a travesty to mortgage your house and spend it, too? Do you think you should be income taxed every year on the appreciation in value of your house?

> a deeply unfair system

Anyone can open a robinhood.com account on their phone, buy some AMZN for $100, and margin it. The stock trading system in the US is actually very fair and democratic. It's open to all with a phone and a credit card.

> The real question you should be asking is how does other people having less than you within a deeply unfair system not take away from your happiness.

I encourage people with what I've learned about how to invest and improve their lives. A couple have listened and are now doing well, the rest continued making poor choices.

> I’m rich

Then I infer you're not that unhappy about society. The IRS takes donations. If it will make you happy, you can de-rich yourself at any moment by giving it to the IRS. If you look at history, however, confiscating the wealth of the wealthy has never done much of anything to elevate the poor.

> If you look at history, however, confiscating the wealth of the wealthy has never done much of anything to elevate the poor.

Looking at history we find that confiscating the wealth of the poor has done much to elevate the wealthy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

The poor don't have wealth to confiscate.

None of that really has anything to do with the discussion and is completely melodramatic, as someone else mentioned.

However, we have indeed ended up in a hell-hole. Again, as someone else mentioned, the U.S. in the early 20th century rose up against the capitalist thinking and companies coming out of the industrial revolution and implemented socialist policies, progressive tax structures, and aggressive anti-trust laws and lawsuits. But the capitalists have one out again and are stronger than ever and are indeed turning the U.S. into a hell-hole.

By many accounts, the U.S. is a hell-hole on the whole. It ranks low in several markings such as education, standard of living, healthcare and healthcare access, wealth equality, infant mortality (i.e., it's quite high in the U.S.), etc. The list goes on. Yes, someone will reply that the U.S. has some of the best education, healthcare, standard of living, etc. in the world. And that is true when looking at specific, local instances. But the gap is wide and as a whole the U.S. is struggling.

Are places like Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, etc. really hell-holes? I'm not saying they are perfect, but there's a reason why they rank on top in terms of health, education, happiness, balance, etc.

Education is run by the government in the US, as is healthcare. It's ironic that you blame capitalism for that.

Infant mortality rate is indeed higher than the US. I dug into it a few years back. It seems that the definition of infant mortality is different among different nations. The US has the most expansive view of it - more specifically, we try to save preemies more aggressively than any other nation, and the failures are counted as infant mortalities. Other nations do not.

Wealth equality is a goal of communism. You are not worse off simply because someone else has more money than you.

> Education is run by the government in the US, as is healthcare. It's ironic that you blame capitalism for that.

No it's not ironic, and it's also not completely correct. There's no point in having a conversation with lack of good faith statements like this. For starters, education is underfunded, and it's leached on to by corporations. Big surprise it doesn't do well. There's also lack of social support structures surrounding our education, so it's no surprise that the educational system is overwhelmed with trying to be too much while also underfunded.

And healthcare is not ran by the government in the U.S. It is almost completely privatized, so your statement is an outright untruth and purely bizarre. I have no idea what you're agenda is, but there clearly is one.

> Wealth equality is a goal of communism.

Wrong again.

> education is underfunded

This comes up in the Seattle Times nearly every day, and in the reader responses it's invariably pointed out that the funding per student has doubled in the last 15 years or so, even discounted for inflation.

> healthcare

So, Medicare and Medicaid do not exist? Obamacare isn't funded by the government for poor people? Heavy government regulation doesn't cover nearly every aspect of health care?

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." -- Karl Marx

> By many accounts, the U.S. is a hell-hole on the whole.

Many people are unhappy when they discover that a middle class lifestyle requires work.

In Seattle, the government decided that poor people are entitled to free air conditioners. A hellhole? LOL. It's almost June and I still turn the heat on.

> Many people are unhappy when they discover that a middle class lifestyle requires work.

I'm just going to stop responding, but I have to call this out. This statement shows a complete disregard and a total lack of empathy for those in the lower middle class and below in the United States. You need to take a step back and understand just how hard people have it in this country.

For example, read this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4856058/

From the article:

> In contrast, there is tremendous inequality within the US, with lower socioeconomic status groups experiencing much higher postneonatal mortality rates.

They even go on to eventually claim that the U.S. actually has an advantage during the neonatal period, which is the first four weeks of life, but has abysmal mortality pre-birth and postneonatal compared to peer countries. The reason, one could surmise, is that neonatal is when people actually see doctors. For lower socioeconomic status, the first time they might be seeing an OBGYN is when they go to the emergency room for birth due to lack of insurance, income, education, and other socioeconomic factors.

I grew up in a lower middle class family. Here's the formula for middle class and higher success in America:

1. stay in school

2. pay attention in school, learn the material

3. don't do drugs

4. don't do crimes

5. go to college (loans are readily available)

6. pick a major that pays well

It's not rocket science.

Your cite says that the differences in infant mortality shrink considerably when taking into account differential criteria for infant mortality. What the study does not address is drug abuse by the mother. The paper assumes differences are due to differential health care, rather than different lifestyle choices. Lifestyle that affects infant mortality include:

1. drug abuse

2. smoking

3. obesity

4. diet

5. alcohol use

6. absence of fathers (i.e. lack of stable family)

7. age of mother

These are all significant factors, and ignoring them and blaming the health care system is not good enough.

The formula is: be white, be male (most of the time), be born middle class.

If you can figure out which 90% we need when they are in seed stage you can become a billionaire venture capitalist. It's like someone spent their whole life searching a thousand volume library of where's Waldo books for a picture of Waldo and found him and told you where to find him and then you said, the guy is an idiot, I found Waldo right here and so could just about anyone!

That's not what I was talking about. What venture capitalists do is figure out which companies and products that they can market and sell. That doesn't say anything about what people need. People can be and are marketed and sold all sorts of things they don't need. The argument of the above commenter was that society somehow needs these companies as a sort of intrinsic need to live better lives. That's simply not true.

> People can be and are marketed and sold all sorts of things they don't need

What things have you bought that you didn't want and don't need?

I think you're conflating wants and needs. All you "need" is nutrition (food and water), air, and temperature regulation. It's reasonable to expand on that to include physiological needs like companionship, shelter and clothing. Sex can also be reasonably included as it is required for the propagation of the species. Everything else is a want. Who are we to dictate what people want to live a better life? What you want to live a better life is quite possibly different from what I want to lead a better life. Wouldn't you agree?

With extreme inequity, who's gonna make all the smaller bets?

Lost in the food fight over today's robberbarons is recognition that small and medium new business formation continues to decline.

IMHO, those are the job creators and wealth creation (vs mere wealth transfer) I prefer we boosted. I trust billionaires will somehow muddle along with or without our help.

> With extreme inequity, who's gonna make all the smaller bets?

The more large, visible winners you have in a society the more us little people are incentivized to buy those lottery tickets. Crowd funding, angel investing and small funds do exist. Or even Robinhood.

Since you mentioned Robinhood: What impact have they had? Are their users better for using Robinhood?

Robinhood enables anyone with a phone and a credit card to invest in stocks.

Of course, you can make or lose money investing in stocks. But you cannot claim that investing in stocks is only available to connected wealthy people.

If you've ever tried to start a business, you'll find that the government throws ever more barriers in your way.

> History shows us that societies based on morals (religious, ideological) fare extremely poorly compared with societies based on rights (free markets).

Adam Smith saw "Theory of Moral Sentiments" as the foundation of his later work on "Wealth of Nations", right? ie that morals were a necessary prerequisite to markets etc.

A lot of the time it does feel like the only rights that actually matter in a capitalist society are property rights of capital owners. The rest is more like "eh I suppose we could also do that if we're not too busy".

You're correct that for a large and prosperous society you need some large organizations, but it is not at all obvious that the best way to run them is by sociopathic megalomaniacs.

It seems those "megalomaniacs" are needed to at least build those large organizations. And I'd rather have them run by their founders with vested interests than bureaucrats, committees and politicians.

I'd rather not, given that their interests more often than not seem to be at the expense of my interests.

How has Amazon expensed your interests?

Most everything I buy, other than food, comes from Amazon. The local supermarket stopped selling laundry powder detergent, so now I push a button on my computer and Amazon drops off a box of Tide the next day. And it's cheaper than what the supermarket used to sell it for, too.

Even better - the AMZN stock I bought pays for it!

I was looking for an unusual art print the other day. Found one on Ebay for $40. A frame is just a few bucks from Amazon (though I did try to find one at the thrift store first, cuz I'm cheap.) I even ordered the wall hooks from Amazon.

I grew up in a small town in Kansas long ago. In between tornadoes, as a Boy Scout project, I was trying to build an electric motor. My mom spent hours driving around to shop after shop looking for the right kind of wire. She finally found it in some ramshackle garage on the edge of town. Today, it would be 5 minutes on Amazon.

Amazon customer service is shit. My wife is currently on the fifth round of disputing a charge for a product that Amazon itself asked us to dispose rather than returning it; this after trying to get them to ship the correct product four times (and every time they shipped the wrong one), before she finally gave up and just asked to do a return.

Amazon product quality is shit. Fakes are prevalent, half of reviews are fake these days, sellers use blatant fraud such as swapping one item listing for something completely different while retaining the existing collection of 5-star reviews etc.

But meanwhile Amazon's sheer size and monopolistic practices (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/...) mean that alternative choices are often simply not available.

And then that market dominance is itself built on large-scale abuse of its workforce. Which is to say, people who are my neighbors.

Ironically, I used to be a hardcore right libertarian; ancap, even. I just couldn't do it anymore because none of it was possible to reconcile with day-to-day observations. I still believe that free markets are good for the people overall. I just don't see any free markets when I look at capitalism. For a market to be truly free and competitive, there must be a balance of power between the players. We don't have anything even remotely like that - not between capital and labor, and not between large and small capital.

I've bought a ton of stuff from Amazon over the years. I haven't found it to be worse than conventional retail stores. Every company is going to have problems of one sort or another.

As for the workers, nobody makes them work there.

Cognitive dissonance in action. Why not try talking to workers there who do not have money to invest.

Even in the UK, I know people on zero-hour contracts (no security) who are working unhealthy hours and in unhealthy environments who will be replaced by robots soon enough. But there are few local jobs, partly because Amazon drains wealth from local communities, local businesses close and wealth is siphoned out to rich shareholders elsewhere, as oppose to circulating in the same community.

> who do not have money to invest

These days, anyone can buy fractional shares with robinhood.com. I.e. if you have a checking account and a phone, you can invest in AMZN. Then you'll get your share of the wealth.

> but it is not at all obvious that the best way to run them is by sociopathic megalomaniacs.

I suspect you've defined a tautology by assuming that anyone running a large organization is a sociopathic megalomaniac.

But let's take an example. Which do you think is better run - NASA or SpaceX?

SpaceX, naturally.

But being run better than NASA is not exactly a high bar. I would actually amend it to most US federal agencies, even. It's just that Americans, for some reason, assume that the way their government works is exemplar of governments in general. That is not true, to put it mildly - US is just particularly dysfunctional in that regard.

I should also note that my original point was not about a public/private dichotomy, but specifically about the "capitalist hero" cult of personality and the associated management style. You can have private companies that aren't run in this manner, where decisions are collegial or otherwise checked. You can even have private co-ops. And, of course, in many - indeed, most - cases you don't actually need megacorps to do things that need to be done, and a bunch of much smaller competing entities will do just fine without all the undesired political and economical effects.

There are countries that have discouraged big business and encouraged small business instead.

The result is low levels of prosperity, because big business drives the wealth creation in the economy. Small businesses are needed, too, as they fill in the gaps and are the future big businesses.

An economy made up of cottage businesses and local artisans handweaving baskets just cannot produce the kind of wealth that is produced from efficiencies of scale.

An artisan made car would cost $1 million each.

There is a very large scale in between "artisan" and a megacorp with a budget larger than many countries.

Economies of scale drive the prosperity of economies.

I think the question is more "do you have to be amoral to run a large organisation?"

There are endless numbers of idiots in black turtlenecks being absolute dicks to other co-working space members because they believe that being a dick is a prerequisite to commercial success. They are clearly cargo-culting something.

Most CEOs of large organisations appear to be psychopaths. Is this because you need to be a psychopath to run a large organisation? Or because you need to be a psychopath to get to be a CEO of a large organisation? (these are different things).

It does make sense that non-psychopathic founders don't build the kind of scale of organisation that we're having such problems with. A "normal" person can accept an exit at the merely "more money than you'll ever be able to spend in your lifetime" level, rather than scaling to FAAANG level. Likewise, non-psychopathic executives are probably at a disadvantage when climbing a career ladder.

Psychopathic CEOs make psychopathic decisions, based on their own mental dysfunction. We're seeing this in the Enshittification of Everything; though probably more immediately and clearly in Musk's antics at X: ego over every other consideration.

If we could wave a wand and appoint non-psychopathic CEOs at all the large tech companies, would we see them change behaviour and solve a lot of the problems themselves? Or is it inherent in the organisation culture now, or a required feature of the organisational culture in order to grow so large?

We have historically curbed the extreme capitalist tendencies that build such large organisations. We have anti-trust laws, and all sorts of regulations to control the damage that unbridled capitalism does, and break up large monopolistic organisations. Do we need to draw that line a lot lower for tech?

> clearly in Musk's antics at X

I like Musk's version of twitter better than the old version. His tweets often make me laugh.

That's kinda sad, though, isn't it? Someone with that much power and influence, running the de-facto platform for all our journalism and politics, and he's just laughable. I find that sad.

Like watching a clown performing a slapstick routine and then realising that that isn't a clown and the slapstick is an important part of our societal infrastructure.

I don't find having a sense of humor "sad".

Laughing with him or at him?

every society is based on a set of morals, the rights societies are ones that have rights in that set, it seems somewhat to be skipping a wide inductive gap to blithely say that free markets need be a part of rights based societies (assuming that by "free market" something like the modern American conception of that term is meant)

Whose morals though?

In my life time I've seen being gay or smoking weed (for example) turn from immoral to widely accepted. Kind of hard to consider these shifting sentiments as a solid foundation for anything.

Morals do indeed change with the times. Our rights, however, are immutable (inalienable).

So you still have the right to an abortion in Texas?

I addressed the issue of abortion wrt rights elsewhere in this thread.

Morals and rights are different things, though they are often conflated. The Constitution, for example, enumerates a series of rights, not morals.

Free markets are based on the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (and property).

A morality based system could be, for example, you do not have the right to the fruits of your labor, you automatically owe those fruits to others.

I'm sad that our K-12 schools never bother to explain what a free market is, given that our nation was founded on free markets.

> a wide inductive gap

A book could be easily written about it.

>Morals and rights are different things,

I guess you didn't understand the point, I did not say that rights and morals were the same things, I said that a rights society would still have the moral opinion that its rights were morally good to have, and that respecting those rights was the moral thing to do.

You can, I'm sure, recall many discussions on HN where people who come from a society with the right to free speech discussing this as a moral good and castigating other societies that are rights based, but without that particular right, as being bad for not having it.

>Free markets are based on the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (and property).

I seldom hear that particular basis given for free markets however, the basis seems tenuous.

>I'm sad that our K-12 schools never bother to explain what a free market is, given that our nation was founded on free markets.

there may be differences of opinion as to what a free market is/requires, and as to whether the free market was really fundamental to the founding of your country. It might be that your country could not really sustain too close a focus on those questions in its K-12 system of education though, best to leave it for later.

> I seldom hear that particular basis given for free markets however, the basis seems tenuous.

You seldom hear it because it is not taught in schools and is rarely discussed. Leftist ideology is taught instead.

> there may be differences of opinion as to what a free market is/requires, and as to whether the free market was really fundamental to the founding of your country

There are differences of opinion about everything, even math, and even about the Earth being a sphere. Some of those opinions are simply wrong. I did not invent the definition of a free market, you can google it.

> It might be that your country could not really sustain too close a focus on those questions in its K-12 system of education though, best to leave it for later.

Really? The poor dears cannot understand notions of rights? Research shows that kids develop a sense of "mine" long before kindergarten - nobody has to teach it to them.

My father, a college professor of business in his later years, said students would come up to him and say "I didn't think there was a case for free markets! I've never heard of one!" But they do hear a case in K-12 for collectivism.

They are hoarding wealth. They do have Scrooge McDuck cash vaults. (Look for them under "real estate holdings" as a starting place.)

The fact is they have enough money to have Scrooge McDuck cash vaults AND ALSO invest a shitload of money.

History also shows us that sooner or later, unbounded wealth disparity ends poorly for the wealthy. I hope we can find a way forward without that "solution" happening here.

You can have big business without robber barons. I'm not sure that exploitation is a necessity to produce things like chat bots, even really good chatbots. Pretending that these people are not hoarding wealth is not really going to answer the question, though.

> "real estate holdings"

Real estate is not cash. It's cash spent.

> History also shows us that sooner or later, unbounded wealth disparity ends poorly for the wealthy.

History also shows us that societies without wealth disparity end up poorly for everyone. As in starving.

> You can have big business without robber barons.

Excellent. Go ahead and build one, compete and put Scrooge McDuck out of business.

> societies without wealth disparity end up poorly for everyone. As in starving.

If this is meant to be a reference to Soviet-style communism, then all that shows is that centrally planned economies run by dictators end up poorly for everyone.

They don't end up without wealth disparity, though. In fact, USSR had the highest wealth disparity at "peak communism" under Stalin, when well-off party bureaucrats and high-ranking professionals hired housemaids - openly and legally - to clean their large apartments and dachas, while attending high school required paying money.

Another way to think about it is that USSR was a society in which capital was still controlled by a small elite, but collectively as a corporation (the Party). A particular apparatchik would be living much better than the average worker for ultimately the same reasons - because his lifestyle was financed by wealth produced by other people who did not have the claim to the wealth they produced under the law. But he didn't own his cars and his dachas personally; he merely used them so long as he retained his rank within the Party (which for many people could be a lifetime thing in practice, purges aside).

It's all communist societies. For voluntary communes, they usually break up once they discover they cannot feed themselves.

Citation needed.

Sure.

Both Jamestown and Plymouth colonies started out with communal agriculture, and starved. The Plymouth colony switched to private farms after the first year, and then prospered. The Jamestown colony failed. The San Francisco Summer of Love lasted, well, one summer, and then collapsed. The Seattle CHAZ lasted 6 weeks. The Woodstock commune lasted 3 days, then left the fields completely covered in trash and poo for others to clean up.

Find a commune that has lasted more than a handful of years. The Israeli kibbutzen don't count because they feed themselves from a government subsidy.

But hey, you don't have to listen to me. Communes in the US are perfectly legal (20,000 of them have been tried). You're free to start one with your friends. Please keep us posted how it goes!

Think about what you wrote, it doesn't make sense even at the first glance. Millions of Americans have a yearly income in excess of $1million, for those people, employing house staff is a trivial expense.

And these people aren't even considered 'rich' by the standards of truly rich people.

True, the Soviet elite, like any elite ever, had great resources at its finger tips, and high ranking bureaucrats had access to perks like luxury resorts reserved for Party officials, better cars and luxury housing, I'm pretty sure no one had the excess wealth of having a hundred million dollar yacht (or equivalent), that today's billionaires (including Russian oligarchs) have.

Edit: I'm not allowed to respond to you, probably some anti-flamewar mechanism (and downvote you, which you obviously did to me), so let my answer stand here.

You wrote:

>USSR had the highest wealth disparity at "peak communism" under Stalin

then in when I refuted your post, you replied:

>Was said inequality less than in capitalist societies? Sure

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Mine was that USSR had blatant and obvious wealth disparity, and so "societies without wealth disparity end up poorly for everyone", as OP wrote, doesn't actually describe any existing society. Was said inequality less than in capitalist societies? Sure. But people were most certainly not equal in day to day quality of life, and in fact the more rabidly totalitarian that society was, the less actual equality it had.

And yes, there was one unique way in which Soviets actually had more stratification than pretty much any capitalist society: access to some things (like special stores with imported goods) was gated not on money, but solely on official position of oneself or a family member. Thus some stuff that was nominally well within the range of what the average worker could afford with some saving was in practice just not for sale to the proles, period. In that sense, it was more reminiscent of those feudal societies in which one's social class determined e.g. what color and material one could use for their clothing.

What I wrote means that USSR had its highest wealth disparity under Stalin (i.e. "peak communism" as usually claimed by both tankies and ancaps). Not that it was the highest wealth disparity in human history; that is so obviously not the case, it hasn't even occurred to me that someone might misread it like that.

And I did not downvote your post. Please don't make so many uncharitable assumptions if you genuinely wish a discussion.

>Real estate is not cash. It's cash spent. But it is hoarding wealth.

> Real estate is not cash. It's cash spent.

No, it's an asset only barely less liquid than cash, generally deliberately shelved in a holding company for the exact purpose of hoarding wealth. You have fallen for the bullshit.

> History also shows us that societies without wealth disparity end up poorly for everyone. As in starving.

You left out "unbounded." Deliberate misinterpretation or failure to comprehend? We'll never know. Wealth disparity will always exist. Unbounded wealth disparity is a symptom of a corruptable system.

> Excellent. Go ahead and build one, compete and put Scrooge McDuck out of business.

I already have built one, and I'm quite comfortable, thanks. Putting competitors out of business isn't part of the game plan for sustainable success. Unbounded growth doesn't benefit me past meeting my financial goals. You've once again missed the entire point of my post.

> it's an asset only barely less liquid than cash

Have you ever tried to sell real estate? I have. It's nothing like the liquidity of cash. Cash I can spend right now. Real estate? It can be 6 months or more. Even borrowing against the equity takes a while. You have to spend time at the bank, get appraisals, get credit checks, and spend an afternoon at the escrow office reading 100 odd pages of contracts. Bleh.

> Unbounded wealth disparity is a symptom of a corruptable system.

A brief study of various societies will show that wealth disparity is hardly a key ingredient for corruption. Corruption in 3rd world countries, for example, is rampant at every income level. When the only way to get ahead is through corruption, you're going to get a heluva lot of it. The USSR ran on corruption at all levels. There are many books on the Soviet economy.

> Unbounded growth doesn't benefit me past meeting my financial goals

Why does that entitle you to decide what the goals should be for everyone else? What if they decide your business is too big, and you should get a haircut? Setting the maximum for wealth being what you have seems a bit convenient?

Elon Musk is the wealthiest man in the world. With his wealth he was able to start SpaceX. Would we be better off without SpaceX? Musk was also the primary investor in Tesla. He bet his entire fortune on it. Your proposal would have prevented that.

You're missing the holding company. I'm not going to teach you real estate as an asset-parking mechanism; there are plenty of articles about it you can find if you Google it instead of arguing with me about a topic you're clearly not familiar with. Here's a hint: the ownership of the property does not change. Only the holding company is modified, if even that.

Once again you're ignoring the word "unbounded." I guess we can know whether it's deliberate misinterpretation, after all.

My own agency as a human entitles me to have opinions what is or is not appropriate behavior. Your counterarguments to this are not even specious, just uninteresting scare tactics. For instance, who the hell is 'they'? It doesn't matter, because I don't have to justify the fact that I have opinions.

Humanity would be unquestionably better off without SpaceX; it's a pollution factory with a byproduct of further enriching its owner by literally setting precious resources on fire. I am not particularly impressed with Tesla's products, but at least it's not a pointless boondoggle like SpaceX. Your definition of success is apparently based entirely on financial gain, which is a bizarre starting point from which to map out an ethos.

I'm done engaging with this thread, as I no longer consider it possible that you're engaging in good faith. Good luck with your future endeavors.

> For instance, who the hell is 'they'?

That's just being argumentative.

> Humanity would be unquestionably better off without SpaceX

Yes, it's much better to have 10x more expensive rockets.

> Your definition of success is apparently based entirely on financial gain

Financial gain due to providing people with the things they want at a price they are willing to pay.

>unbounded wealth disparity ends poorly for the wealthy. I hope we can find a way forward without that "solution" happening here.

Historically there have been swings in inequality. It can just lead to people voting in left wing governments who tax the rich a lot.

Mesopothemia was based on morals as far as we know, and they lay the foundation for many technical and scientific advances. And your rights are based on religious and ideological morals. Why do you believe the debate about Roe v. Wade exists? Why do we consider infidelity so bad it can break a contract of marriage? What is marriage? Those are not laws of nature.

Your right to not be attacked, robbed, or defrauded by others is inherent, not something conferred by religion or morality.

As for abortion, the debate there rests on a conflict of the rights of two people, and there isn't any clear answer to it based on rights.

Marriage is tangled up with the rights of children. Children are not fully formed humans and we allot them a subset of the rights of adults. Marriage without children is an issue of morality, not rights.

I don't know what mesopothemia is.

>Marriage without children is an issue of morality, not rights. It was historically an issue of rights And children rights are a fairly new thing.

And no, you are wrong - your right not be attacked is based on morality, you say "attacking someone is wrong" - there is no law in nature preventing this.

But you made no point for your argument - just stepping through mine with comments.

> your right not be attacked is based on morality

The very first thing a group does when organized is to protect themselves from attack. They do this because it works. We've evolved that way, which makes it a law of nature for humans.

Communist rights, however, are not laws of nature because they do not work with humans. Humans are not beehives.

But the most compelling argument for "natural rights" is observing how well societies work that enforce them, and how well they work when other systems of rights are tried. The evidence is pretty clear.

Of course you defend yourself and your kind from harm. But that is completely separate from the fact if it is allowed. There is no law in nature preventing this. Sometimes internal conflict is solved by violence and accepted.

Your first paragraph describes a group sharing a common will and organisation based on natural instinct (like a hive of bees), your second paragraph disputes this organisation as a group for humans, decide for one it can’t be both ways.

> decide for one it can’t be both ways

Oh, it can be both ways and is both ways. See my last sentence again, about the compelling evidence that humans thrive with their rights being protected, while a beehive thrives from being a perfect communist society.

Communism requires people to behave like bees in a beehive, and that will never work no matter how fervently one believes in communism and no matter how much coercion is used to force people to be good communists.

I really don't understand what you are on about. A beehive is the very definition of 100 percent following natural law. A beehive protects it's worker when a worker is attacked, following your line of argument then, this beehive is somehow capitalist and has rights? At the same time you're arguing that this swarm of animals doesn't follow the law of nature and therefore is communist which at best bizarre and at worst delusional.

Your mashing togehter things without any coherent explanation what you mean. Also you fail to provide a simple example beyond "the evidence is clear" you don't even say what evidence you're refering to.

Bees have followed a different evolutionary path than humans, and have reached a different local optima. Communism is "natural law" for bees.

Communism works for bees, it does not work for humans, because humans have not evolved into a beehive.

> But the most compelling argument for "natural rights" is observing how well societies work that enforce them, and how well they work when other systems of rights are tried. The evidence is pretty clear.

We did not evolve with private property rights thus, by your reasoning, those are not "natural rights". I am at a loss in trying to understand what you are saying. It seem like you are trying to argue for capitalism but arguments that you give seem to favor socialism.

Natural and legal rights are well established terms that are being used, discussed and evaluated since ancient times. The term natural right precede our discovery of evolution by 2 millennia. Whether the right to property is natural right or not is a separate point and debatable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_property

The term natural right since ancient times was a religious construct that has little or nothing to do with the modern, post-Renaissance understanding of the term, so tracing a lineage here is a definitional error. In any case, what a natural right is isn't (and cannot be) a well established term, and indeed the rise in atheism is a fundamental threat to the doctrine, as most all ideas of natural law have to rely on a God to avoid the naturalistic fallacy.

God is of very little help (here), as pointed by Plato/Socrates in the Uthyphro dilemma. The naturalistic fallacy is not limited to natural rights, as Hume's is-ought is applicable to legal rights just the same - you can't logically deduce from the fact that there are laws that mandate rights a conclusion that one ought to abide by them.

Natural or universal rights does not require theism. Robert Nozick is famous proponent of the secular based position that property is a natural right.

Natural rights do really require theism to be truly natural, ie, independent of morality and society. Theism avoids the is-ought problem by forgoing the ought, with theism natural law can simply be, and whether you decide you ought to abide them is no longer so important.

Nozick's position on the existence natural rights is simply not grounded. He appeals to intuition and to the reader's morality to appeal for their existence, but he doesn't (and cannot) actually deduce their existence once he forgoes theism. He makes a few appeals to Kant, but they obviously cannot be sufficient, Kant's conditions are merely necessary. I'm very confused by your reference to Nozick on a discussion about the grounding of natural rights when Nozick himself admits that he cannot justify them - he simply assumes Locke, which himself uses a theistic argument, in ASU. If you want, I can get the quote, but I don't have time to skim it until I'm home from work.

At the end of the day, secular natural rights is an intuitive and appealing but ungrounded position that cannot be logically justified, hence why it is threatened by theism. It is no wonder that positive rights and social right theory only really emerged after the Renaissance.

> Natural rights do really require theism to be truly natural, ie, independent of morality and society. Theism avoids the is-ought problem by forgoing the ought, with theism natural law can simply be, and whether you decide you ought to abide them is no longer so important.

Hume's original text describing the is-ought problem is specifically targeting justification of ethics on god. Laws that no one is ought to abide by are no laws but nonsense.

Is murder immoral because god hate murder, or do god hate murder because it is immoral?

> At the end of the day, secular natural rights is an intuitive and appealing but ungrounded position that cannot be logically justified

Many will argue that no moral theory can be logically justified, and that the search for logical justification is category error

> Hume's original text describing the is-ought problem is specifically targeting justification of ethics on god. Laws that no one is ought to abide by are no laws but nonsense.

> Is murder immoral because god hate murder, or do god hate murder because it is immoral?

We agree here, but that isn't how religion solves the problem. Religious laws are also enforced by threats in the afterlife and violence in the present life, not merely by reason, so they do not need to solve the is-ought problem like secular laws do. Of course, religious law has other problems.

> Many will argue that no moral theory can be logically justified, and that the search for logical justification is category error

I agree completely, hence why it is impossible to derive rights that are logically justified without an appeal to God. The comment I was replying to claimed there were logically justified rights which have to follow from logically justified moral theories unless they are decreed from beyond reason, and since the latter is a category error, so is the former.

> hence why it is impossible to derive rights that are logically justified without an appeal to God

All attempts at changing human nature have failed, and it is human nature from whence rights are derived.

Parents with zero or one child believe that human nature is conferred from the parents. Those with 2+ children know that it is inherent.

> We agree here, but that isn't how religion solves the problem. Religious laws are also enforced by threats in the afterlife and violence in the present life, not merely by reason, so they do not need to solve the is-ought problem like secular laws do. Of course, religious law has other problems.

You are mixing law with moral/ethics. Secular law doesn't have is-ought problem, it is enforced by the state law enforcement forces. Pressure to abide to the laws doesn't entail or justify their morality.

> I agree completely, hence why it is impossible to derive rights that are logically justified without an appeal to God. The comment I was replying to claimed there were logically justified rights which have to follow from logically justified moral theories unless they are decreed from beyond reason, and since the latter is a category error, so is the former.

It wasn't. It was arguing for inherent rights. The claim for inherent rights can be justified. It can't be justified by logic just like it cannot be proved mathematically. But it can be justified ethically using reason.

> We did not evolve with private property rights

Yeah, we did. The concept of "mine" appears very early in children.

Attempts to raise children from birth as good communists have never worked. Nobody has ever managed to indoctrinate people into communal behavior. Even the die hard communists in the USSR still participated in the black market - this was tolerated because even the elites used it.

It turns out that human nature is not very malleable.

> Yeah, we did.

No we did not.

> The concept of "mine" appears very early in children.

The concept of "mine" also exists in socialism. How have you come to the conclusion that when a child says "mine" that it is referring to the capitalist notion of private property?

> Nobody has ever managed to indoctrinate people into communal behavior.

Are you denying the existence of families now? Humans evolved and spread in small familial groups which practiced communal behavior.

> Even the die hard communists in the USSR still participated in the black market - this was tolerated because even the elites used it.

What point are you trying to make whit this?

> It turns out that human nature is not very malleable.

If it wasn't malleable we wouldn't have capitalism as evidenced by early human history. While you at it why don't you tell us what human nature is, because there doesn't seem to be any consensus on it and you seem so confident in using it that you must have a ready definition of it.

> The concept of "mine" also exists in socialism.

Nope, even your shoes officially belong to the collective. I was told this by a former subject of the USSR.

> family

As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, children are not fully formed humans, and have only a subset of adult rights. Families have evolved to deal with this issue. Extending the family to society does not work.

> why don't you tell us what human nature is

Two excellent books on the topic:

"The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley https://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0...

"Noble Savages" by Napoleon Chagnon https://www.amazon.com/Noble-Savages-Dangerous-Yanomamo-Anth...

I can sum it up with human nature is our evolved behavior, rather than learned behavior.

> Communist rights, however, are not laws of nature because they do not work with humans. Humans are not beehives.

The laws of nature do not include any rights, unless there's some new physics I'm not aware of.

This is an argument from morality. You start with the premise that a good societal outcome is morally good and then use that to justify the rights you advocate for.

You fundamentally cannot make an argument for what something should be like without resorting to morality. Without it, you can only make arguments on what things are.

> You start with the premise that a good societal outcome is morally good

I said how well societies work, and have also used words like "thrive" and "prosperous". We have evolved to be that way, it's our local optima just like beehives have evolved a different local optima.

> you can only make arguments on what things are.

And that's exactly what I did. Humans starve to death under communism - every time it has been tried. Nobody starves due to loose morals.

> And no, you are wrong - your right not be attacked is based on morality, you say "attacking someone is wrong"

You are mixing morality with justice, which (in the modern world) is based on rights. "Attacking someone is wrong" is a moral statement, it puts the focus and the obligation of individuals to keep moral behavior. My right not to be attacked is not based on moral and not dependent on the morality or the beliefs of any other people, it is based on justice, a social contract that declare a set of a societal or universal rights granted to every individual.

And this societal rights are based on a shared understanding of what is moral and amoral, often dictated by works of religion or historically stemming from such.

> Your right to not be attacked, robbed, or defrauded by others is inherent, not something conferred by religion or morality.

It most certainly isn't. Inherent from where or what? In nature, I have no right not to be attacked by a lion or a pack of wolves, so surely this right cannot exist outside society, and then how can it derive from something outside society? Without a God, man in nature has no rights, though you can follow Hobbes and assert some principles from an idea of universal morality. I'm not aware of any serious philosopher who pretends to be able to derive any right at all without religion or morality.

Then how do you explain the universal fact that the communist notion of rights always fails?

There are clearly some system of rights that are better than others, for humans.

BTW, we kill wolves that attack us.

I don't need to, there simply isn't a universally true notion of rights, it has to be socially defined, whether you're a communist or a capitalist.

> There are clearly some system of rights that are better than others, for humans.

I certainly agree with you : but "better for humans" is a morally grounded position.

> BTW, we kill wolves that attack us.

Sure. How is that a problem?

> there simply isn't a universally true notion of rights

Yet there is. People can temporarily override human nature, but it always reasserts itself. Universal rights are based on human nature.

You can socially declare that what's yours is mine, but be both know how that will end up.

You can also pay people to be poor, but then you'll wonder why poverty increases.

Rights is well developed subject in modern ethics, and it doesn't require God or morality in the sense of "Doing X is bad and therefore immoral". But any discussion of rights is discussion of moral theory.

Modern ethical philosophers have developed ethic theories that propose secular basis for universal rights, moral theory that doesn't rely on God (Rawls is a famous example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Justice)

Nothing I am saying is at odds with modern ethics. I am literally presenting what is basically hetheredoxy. Rights can be natural or artifical (social, legal, etc...). For rights to be natural, you need to appeal to a God, or to natural morality. If you are looking for rights that aren't necessarily natural, you can derive them from a moral theory. There are moral theories that are not derived from an appeal to divinity or metaphysics, but they cannot claim to be naturally and objectively true.

So I still do not understand how we aren't saying the same thing. Rawls proposes a system of universal rights based on a particular moral theory, he does not prove that his system of rights is natural, it is artificial. In fact, Rawls is not a proponent of natural rights, he is a proponent of socially determined rights, hence his theory of the Veil that allows us to socially evaluate proposed rules.

We seem to disagree on the definition of natural rights. For a right to be natural you require that it will be granted by God or that it will be based on human nature, and by human nature you mean to say that it is a direct product of the evolution biology that have created our species. While I would grant you that it's a definition that you can find in many philosophers, following Moore, but in the current context I think that the natural/artificial distinction isn't useful for defining natural rights.

I would argue that this definition is very narrow and limiting, it introduce weird dependency on our current scientific knowledge, and isn't very useful. For instance, when Hobbes proposed the social contract theory he was discussing natural rights but today we know that his natural science knowledge was incorrect and therefore he was actually describing artificial rights. To me this makes no sense. Instead, I will propose, that rights that are derived by reason, that are universal, and that do not depend on a specific state law or the social norms of a specific society are natural rights. They are natural in the sense that they are not dependent on any state or law but are inherent. Those rights are not granted by god, and they are not artificial law propositions. They are based on universal principals of reason and the reality of human existence.

This view and this definition of natural rights is not my invention. It's reflected in the language of the universal declaration of human rights - which recognizes a set of universal rights. The declaration isn't a legal document that legislate a binding law. It recognize rights that are not (let's hope, are not yet) generally accepted by all nations. Nevertheless those rights are not based on God or born by the act of composing and publishing the declaration, those are natural rights. They are natural despite being in opposition to humans natural behavior, despite their consistent violation. It is because those rights are natural that they can serve as basis and justification for international law and justice.

Rawls theory of rights is universal, it isn't about specific social norms, it discuss human society in principle. One might say that his ethics are based on theory of the human nature.

Que? First of all, Mesopothamia is a geographical region, not a culture or society.

Second, places like Babylon had a very sophisticated legal, financial and administrative system, with tons of written evidence preserved in the form of clay tables surviving.

The Code of Hammurabi being cited as one of the most important pieces of written evidence of a code of laws in ancient times.

>They're not hoarding wealth. They don't have any Scrooge McDuck cash faults. Their money is all invested, i.e. put to work creating things that people want.

The Panama Papers showed this to be a myth. The ultra rich are in fact extracting wealth and hoarding it in tax havens.

Putting money in a bank is not hoarding it. The bank loans out the money to people who invest/spend it.

I.e. banks are not Scrooge McDuck cash vaults, either.

I think in order to have a productive discussion about morals and rights, it is essential that those two terms are defined precisely up front. Otherwise, it just leads to everyone talking in circles, because they have different ideas of what those two things mean.

For example, if someone believes that the concept of rights isn't based on morals, I'd suspect they're using a very narrow definition of 'morals'.

As I mentioned before, rights are derived from human nature, which is determined by our genes, and are immutable.

Morals are something one learns.

Societies like the Islamic society are based on both morals and rights, and have done very well in the past before post WWI colonization and divide & concquer, which continues to this day. For example, Islam is generally pro free markets, with red lines that protect the society (e.g. no usury, no lying, respect individual property, etc.).

Not being able to loan money in exchange for interest is a major impediment to free markets. Financial markets are a major enabler.

While usury is not permitted (in a broad definition: every loan that begets a benefit for the lender is prohibited), this does not preclude other contracts, such as buying shares in a project/company, or other forms of partnership. This way, the risk is better bore by both parties, and is fair to both.

Having red lines to prevent predatory behavior is important. We see the destructive results of allowing such behavior before our very eyes, from certain individuals and groups leveraging power, to entire classes of people remaining in crippling debt, fostering discord and unrest in society. Money printing (inflation), the student debt fiasco, the subprime mortgage fiasco, and more are just examples for us to contemplate.

Islam never claimed nor has a stated goal that everyone is going to be financially equal; quite the opposite in fact - different people will be tested differently (wealth and poverty are both tests). But this does not mean that we should not have a fairer playing field, one where people in the society help each other and care for each other, let alone one that is known to cause instability and predatory behavior.

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