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Comment by delusional | Hacker News Reader

I think this is what struck me as well. Hearing what I can only describe as radical anti-capitalism coming from George Hotz was not what I expected when I opened that link.

That said I have felt the same feelings expressed by Hotz in this post. I commend him for saying it.

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It’s not particularly radical is it? Maybe I’m in a bit of a bubble.

Exactly, it’s very mild first steps anti-capitalism. Nothing about class, for example.

A few posts before he shared a story of a black woman Amazon delivery driver caught on camera complaining about delivering to a rich person's large house.

He attributed this to basic monkey psychology and said it led to revolutions where all the rich people get killed and society gets poorer overall.

I read it as mocking poor people, but maybe he was trying to warn the people who get killed in those kinds of revolutions.

Cf: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2025/03/16/resen...

It's not. Communists are way more cutthroat and willing to step over corpses.

Uh what?

Call me crazy, but I think capitalism can exist without mass manipulation.

it definitely can, but the question is for how long and to what extent; historically, players with power and money will always want more and so things tilt in that direction....

Can it, if the technology is there todo exactly that? Capitalism (for me) means doing the maximum allowed in a legal framework to maximize profit.

but then what if line not go up???

I don't think it's anti-capitalist. It's anti-mass-manipulation and anti-price-discrimination, but capitalism only works to the extent that the pricing system works to provide information, both about consumer utility and about production costs.

His post is the standard small C conservative critique. It's only radical in that capitalism has seeped into far more facets of life since the last time such a position had appreciable expression within politics.

Shame they come together with casual references to burning it all down, ww3 to the rescue just because he couldn't get a hinge date fast enough.

I don't think the kind of foundational change that is needed to solve these issues has ever been done in other ways. If it can be done, it's much harder than just letting it all burn down. The people at the top of any system are not willing to change it without a fight.

If you think "the people at the top" suffer the most during a world war you're deluded. If you're willing to do that because you don't like ads or because girls aren't replying to you on dating apps, no words.

They don't suffer the most, but the point isn't to make them suffer. The point is to change the system. If the current system feels unfair or wrong in some way, people will want to change it. If the only way to change it is war, and if enough people want change, then war is what will happen. The war might make things a lot worse, but at least people are worse off together and are forced to take care of each other in a way that we haven't in a long time. The selfishness will be reduced, communities will come back, and a better system might be the result.

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