There is this podcast called Behind the bastards - in one way, it is eye opening. But it is also depressing, it does a pretty good job of shattering all our beliefs and respect for the rich and the successful.
Is it even possible today to become super successful without doing shady/unethical/illegal stuff? Everything from garden variety wage theft all the way upto buying politicians and corporate espionage?
I prefer the French approach to take care of aristocrats.
> Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
PS : Those wars started because the assembled aristocracy of f europe jumped the reforming nation.
Also, it’s not like it was all happy republicanism after the terror, there was a new elite replacing the old (Napoleons) and he was a petty noble anyway, plenty of the aristocracy stuck around, and said emperor did his best to marry into Europe’s aristocracy. Seems a bit like musical chairs, don’t you think? Plenty of France was still royalist too anyway after it all. I don’t think the narrative is so clear, except everyone realized you can’t beat down your peasants too hard.
Even Peter the Great, traveling through France in the 1700s, wondered how long the wealth disparity could last, having seen Versailles and the peasants from the road.
You can acknowledge that the values the revolution promoted are good, aristocratic rule needed reform, while still being clear that revolutions are not a peaceful thing, especially not for poor or marginalised groups. 50.000 people executed is quite some birthing pains…
And you think this helps your argument?
I think that is partially true.
But the rich are most likely to support effective political solutions (and be politely ignored).
Rich people have, in general, made America a better country, and there's a certain deference because of that.
But this isn't blind stupidity. The Sackler family is as unloved as the Manson family. But even folks who built their wealth in questionable ways (the Kennedys) tend to make America a better place.
I saw a video on Youtube where an American asked a Belgian where the "new money" families lived. The Belgian said "what are you talking about, there is no new money." Most Americans react in horror to that idea.
I dispute that strongly. How has the Walton family made America a better place? I'd say they've made it a much worse place. Similarly, Zuck hasn't "made America a better place". I'm not sure you can argue that Gates and Microsoft have.
This sounds like the same trickle down economics BS that we've been fed for decades now.
So yeah, TODAY all you have is Walmart garbage or expensive Whole Foods (in same places)
stop drinking the corporate Kool-Aid, my friend
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/walmart-pr...
> In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a given community, the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them. Low-income, young, and less-educated workers suffered the largest losses.
> They calculate that poverty increases by about 8 percent in places where a Walmart opens relative to places without one even when factoring in the most optimistic cost-savings scenarios.
I saw this first hand when Walmart showed up in my small city in the 90s. Everyone saved enormous amounts of money, complained about shopping there, and avoided working there because the pay was shit.
If you were low income and had a job outside of Walmart retail competition space, Walmart was a godsend. Think teachers, construction workers, etc.
all to serve us up cheap garbage
The local economies were shit before Walmart. There just happened to be a handful of small business owners that did well squeezing their community.
If Walmart didn’t offer better product/price ratios, nobody would have shopped there.
Some interesting books in this category: * Masters of Doom. It’s about John Carmack and the team that built Id Software * Einstein. By Walter Isaacson, author of the Jobs biography. Einstein’s 4 papers are one of the most unexpected, ground breaking discoveries in history * Houdini!!! Tells the story of the escape artist and magician, and exposer of psychics. * The Double Helix * Stress Test. By Tim Geithner who pulled the world out of the financial crisis * Man’s Search for Meaning. Surviving and finding meaning in a concentration camp
This one is rather famous for Watson's minimization of the role Rosalind Franklin played in the process of discovering DNA, and Watson himself later acknowledged his mistakes in doing so (though he never corrected them).
It was against my ethics but we sent a round of unsolicited emails to about 10,000 people in Brazil to launch a voice chat service circa 2001. It must have been a really good list (and a different time and place) because we had close to a 40% response rate. (Later we got a list that was so bad some of the emails didn't have '@' signs in them!)
There's that famous story of how reddit was initially populated with fake users too.
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I've never been able to enjoy that Viktor Frankl book, Man's Search for Meaning ,since I read an essay that pointed out how pernicious it was that postmodern people like to fantasize that everyday life is like a concentration camp -- paradoxically that fantasy undermines Frankl's own thesis
I recently read an account of a 14 year old girl (a demo that is vulnerable to Franklism, I had one in an acting class I was in) who said she thought about the Holocaust (survived by some ancestors she'd never met) every day and experienced it as a trauma. If that's what it means to "remember the Holocaust" we might be better to forget. We hear the refrain that "it must never happen again" but it happens over and over again routinely
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
and if that memory makes us think it is a memory and not an ongoing crime, it is part of the problem and not part of the solution. You can take your own experiences of your group being persecuted and apply that to justice universally (Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner gave their lives together with African-American James Chaney in 1964 to fight racism in the U.S. South) or you can use it as an excuse to commit similar crimes (kill and displace civilians) against other people. It's your choice.
The Jack Welch case (and I'd add Mark Hurd at HP) was an example of financial engineering looking great for a time--until it wasn't.
I don't know a solution to these kinds of scenarios except for having a more wise and educated populace. Perhaps trusting the people at the bottom. Big issues. Hard to solve. And in today's world, harder than ever.
I know so much more now about the figures behind the rise of the fascism before the end of WW2 because of this podcast.
Most people want to be successful because success brings happiness. But there is a level of success at which happiness starts to plateau and yields diminishing returns of happiness.
If your are willing to look at capitalism and free markets objectively[1], as just algorithms rather than moral systems (i.e. private property is part of an algorithm, not an "inalienable human right"), and you realize that it isn't moral that one's share of the pie be determined by the free market, that it isn't moral that the value of a person be determined by the free market, that it isn't moral to leverage your advantage or even hard work to grab a much bigger share of the pie even as others who because of birth circumstance get the thinnest slice or no slice at all, that it isn't moral to enjoy the fruits of cheap labor do to the desperation of the aforementioned, that it isn't moral to take advantage of your other advantages birth circumstances (e.g. being born within the borders of a wealthy country that keeps out those born in poor ones) to grab more, then you will find that material success (success as defined by capitalism) that is complicit in all the aforementioned does screw someone over.
Such a person will have a different definition of success: A life of contribution to the community done out of love and morality, not a coerced transaction leveraging one's advantages against those with less.
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[1]: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" ~ Upton Sinclair
You can sell services and goods that boost productivity and the alternative is just the status quo that produces waste. Someone that creates a successful business doing something productive is not inherently evil because of capitalism.
How many Billion dollar businesses can we name that are run ethically? Not that many, correct me if I am wrong. I suppose at some level, profit and monopoly becomes the one and only motivation. Plus if you didn’t do shady stuff, your competitors surely would, putting you at a disadvantage.
Why else would Google drop “don’t do evil” from their principles?
Whats the shady ruthless stuff from Google? They've obviously started running their business differently after the easy growth went away, but I've never heard anyone be like: they made me pee in a bottle because going to the bathroom was too much time off the line.
Mind you that only includes the most high profile (and known) stuff. Plenty of skeletons still in the closet
Of course, you don't want to leave a trail of bodies in your wake but Life's not a bowl of cherries and taking a Pollyanna approach to business won't get you very far.
My problem is with those whose __only__ goal is to make money.
No I don’t think it is - and I would argue it never was - for me it is morally reprehensible to be a millionaire.
But then again humans are complex creatures and who is without fault may throw the first stone
The mob is basically a corporation, held together by a charismatic CEO. In its later years, violence was (I think?) less common, so politics and deal-making became the norm. However, given the subject matter, they likely wouldn't whitewash the reality of it.
You got any documentaries and books/articles to recommend?
Maybe I just have a wrong view, but I don't know how to decouple from this.
Success comes from being at the right place at the right time.
Both of these statements can be true at the same time.
That being said, luck can be engineered, to a degree:
- meeting people; networking
- having access to resources
- recognizing potential opportunities and taking advantage of them
That being said, I'm by no means "successful" but I'm also not a "failure" ... I win some, and I lose some.
Even if you move from 0 to success with a very-small positive bias on your random walk, even the lower-bound on most of the results will be increasing with sqrt(n).
Don't let randomness dissuade you from effort, even maximal effort, because every thing you can do it increase your "bias towards success" will have an effect over long time scales.
Also, start early - stretch the time scale.
Tech has often been associated with novel success. That is success by inventing or perfecting a previously underrated, underestimated or wholly invented technology.
This isn’t the only type though.
There is success through persistence. In the long run, 95% of businesses fail. Simply running a component operation that outlasts competitors in a proven market can take you very far. It’s harder than it looks. Likewise this gets little traction on most media
Then there is success by accident. The one that gets most traction in media is businesses that have some flash in the pan unexpected success. These seem to be a traditional combination of luck and persistence. Along these same lines are businesses that come to fruition during a time in which they can succeed, like TikTok and the pandemic.
There is a reason young people today feel hard work doesn't reward as much as it used to. Everything is stacked against them - from student loans to crappy jobs. SO MUCH depends on luck
Not sure it'd work today, everyone and their mother seems so focus on building their "personal brand" and attaching their name to everything that it seems impossible for an author to not take credit for something that would surely make big waves.
For state level actors, sure. But generally? I don't think that's necessarily true, as long as you come up with a pseudonym that is unique, not related to anything in your real life, and you haven't already published a lot of prose under your real name.
These days you can probably do some writing pattern matching if you suspect the true name of an author but you can probably stay pretty pseudonymous unless people really want to determine a true identity. I don't have a lot of doubt I could probably publish a pseudonymous blog if I took some reasonable precautions and didn't write stuff that especially provided a fingerprint pointing to my IRL identity.
This is very cynical - but also freeing - when accepted. Do you think the yatch, billions, beautiful wife is worth your integrity? You decide.
There is a reason you have to have licenses to braid hair, cut nails, etc(and charge for it) in many US states for instance. It's not a simple license like a food worker has to do. It's much more involved.
I mean if someone is going to mess with my hair, do a manicure or pedicure they should know the basic hygiene things much like a food worker has to do. I'm good with that. Why do they need more than that? It's not because we as a society actually care that much about a person that can't braid hair trying to charge for it. It's because all those beauticians want to limit their competition.
OK rant over for the day.