Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtillman | Hacker News Reader

Every cig exec lied under oath and only received monetary fines.

The comparison was not accidental. I expect a similar, meaningless outcome for poisoning children.

Cigarette makers were a dying cry of the old aristocracy. Silicon Valley is the rallying cry of the new aristocracy.

While I don’t quite believe they’ll achieve their Feudal dreams in the near-medium future. I do expect the US to transition to a much more explicitly an oligarchic republic as a large, with the pretense of “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” is largely pushed to the side.

Only solution seems to be to drop out of society to whatever degree possible.

The government and massive corporations being in bed with each other is nothing new. Different breed same species. Except tech execs think they're a lot smarter than they are.

Pretty much all execs throughout time have thought that.

It's nothing new, as it is essentially the only logical outcome of capitalism. It's not an aberration, it's an intended feature. Capital is power, and law and government is how that power is expressed and enacted over those without capital.

It's actually the logical outcome of any system with a consolidated monopoly on political power (the government). Blaming capitalism is ridiculous because alternative systems suffer from the exact same issue.

Sort of. Capitalism cannot exist without a monopoly of coercive state power backing it. So it makes sense to criticize it when that's what's actually happening. Other systems can work without coercive state power, are in fact intended to, and result in more freedom for the members of the resulting society, so I agree with your take on government generally.

Free trade and private property rights can exist without a monopoly on political power, but as with stuff like this I don't really know what's meant by "capitalism".

That being said I don't think at the present moment it's possible to have a society without some form of government, so then the question becomes "what do we do about it", and I think the answer is to limit the scope of political intervention and power as much as possible.

Cashless payments, always connected software and devices, and required app use for basic services like power, water, and heat as well as extreme data collection as it exists today makes dropping out of society more difficult than ever.

While his crimes were atrocious, Ted Kaczynski might be right in some ways. The industrial and technological revolutios have improved life dramatically for n many humans and we live in a tube of astonishing abundance, but at what cost?

aaaaannndd now I'm on a list somewhere.

the appetite of the rich always grows. the fast technological growth created more wealth than they could consume. once that runs out they'll take back what accidentally "trickled down"

most innovation since 2012 seems to be not in the technology, but the financial sector. not ways to create value, but to squeeze more from the same thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com