Comment by areweai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by areweai | Hacker News Reader

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In the case of Microsoft, I'm not seeing it.

Being born into a 1% household and understanding the asymmetric upside that having the money and the time to speculate is far more significant than the civil and criminal legal violations on the way.

The most common way to go from one-percenter rich to .001% rich is to already have enough wealthy people generating capital in your personal network that you can raise capital on sweetheart terms to buy the labor of people who don't.

Then you sell it at a massive premium and repeat.

I think it's empirically dubious to identify the UW mainframes as the secret sauce instead of "being able to ask your mom for a meeting with the chairman of IBM followed by asking her for 80,000 dollars ASAP."

If the original creators of DOS were born into a wealthy family and on a first name basis with the chairman of IBM, do you think they would've sold it to Gates?

Trying to attribute the tech business "founding crime" feels like displacement for what is perfectly legal and accepted cultural practice.

I think you overstate the power of money. Of course it helps. But it’s far from everything. Just look at the number of rich kid fuckups or CEOs with poor backgrounds. It’s just one component that smooths risk and occasionally provides a starter network, but it’s not everything.

Having money doesn't mean you will do anything, but not having it can stop you doing all sorts of things.

>CEOs with poor backgrounds.

What's the percentage here?

.

roughly 50% i guess

Well of course. To be a CEO from a poor background, you need to work your ass off making wealthy friends early.

That's why going to an elite school is such a lifeline for people from bottom quartile backgrounds. Getting the opportunity socialize with people born at the top and be treated as a peer in an institutional environment is invaluable. That alone is worth the price of admission.

It doesn't have to be your parents, but it has to be someone with money who already knows you, trusts you, and feels like you identify with them and their interests.

Of course, you could also work your way up slowly and prove your mettle through decades of dedicated service to your employer. But I'm not sure how you'd be able to build that long track record of likability and trust to be able to raise millions based on work history when that entire history is a 3 month internship.

One can't even blame the VCs. If you're investing in things that are often partially fraudulent by design...

...do you want the getaway driver for the pump-and-dump to be a family friend you've known a long time, or a stranger that might not be a good "culture fit" for what the valuation game often becomes?

> One can't even blame the VCs. If you're investing in things that are often partially fraudulent by design...

I mean, we can blame them from systematically investing in things fraudulent by design.

> Just look at the number of rich kid fuckups or

I mean, rich kid fuckup still end up pretty good, unless they are full on addicts who committed robbery. And even then they get much better and qualified defense layer - ending with much lower punishment. But normally, they get a pretty good job through parents network and somehow muddle through.

> CEOs with poor backgrounds.

Statistically, upward mobility is low these days, people stay where they are born. So, I think that statistically there are not that many of those.

> followed by asking her for 80,000 dollars ASAP

What real life example is this from?

https://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-3/

None actually, because I didn't recall the original amount correctly and I failed to correct for inflation, and Microsoft was already doing pretty well at that point. That was inaccurate to say.

It does make you think, though. If you too are able to work hard and build an operating system or save up six figures corrected for inflation, that still doesn't get you anything. What you really need is for your mother to be a good friend and socio-economic equal of chair of IBM.

We need a better system. We tried communism and that was shit, so this is the least bad system we have.

It would be difficult for us as humans to get a better system. we are too chaotic

Automation makes full employment detrimental if not outright impossible.

Say before tractors it took 100 men to farm enough for 1000 people.

With tractors 20 men can farm for 1000.

With automation 1 man can farm for 1000 if not significantly more.

Open Source Robo Communism is the way to go imo. Sure a handful of engineers have to maintain the robots, and build new ones. And a few jobs will remain human only.

But we could easily get to 80% of the population being free to make art and dance

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.

We didn't try communism as far as I know. We hunted it down and murdered it in its cradle if I'm reading the CIA declassified archives correctly.

Why is every HN thread glazing communism now?

Are people that broken nowadays?

boo hoo I dont have the new iphone the moment it release.

Bish I was on PS1 until 2004.

Ask East Germans, Poland, Lithuania, Lativa, Estonia etc if communism or capitalism is better. I'll wait. :)

Glazing? I stated an historical fact. What doesn't math for me is why we care so much what kind of economy other people decide to have. Eastern Europe isn't soviet anymore obviously. They can make their own choices.

Communists having killed of 100 to 140 million people is sufficient reason to hunt them down.

But unfortunately there are still plenty of useful idiots, the same kind that propped up Mao, Pol Pot and Stalin.

We kill people all the time, what's the difference? Isn't it a sovereign nation's prerogative to do whatever they want? That said, it is our prerogative to be nosy and violently mess with other people's affairs too so..

> Communists having killed of 100 to 140 million people is sufficient reason to hunt them down.

How many have democracies killed?

It’s not like-for-like but how do we compare?

I would read that meta study. Especially if they verify and compare methods.

The Russian empire tried communism. It was better than what they had before or since.

The Chinese tried communism. It worked far better for them than what they had before.

The Iron Curtain was a real thing, as was the Berlin Wall. Successful social and economic systems do not need to execute their own citizens for attempting to escape.

How did Russia fair under the Czars? How are they fairing now?

In the opinion of the champaign socialists in the West. In the opinion of people who lived under that regime... Not so much.

You think life and the Czars or under Czar Putin is better?

> The Russian empire tried communism. It was better than what they had before or since.

No, it was not better. Quite objectively.

By what metrics? Life expectancy rose during communism and fell afterwords. Are you seriously going to try and argue it was better during the Czarist times?

Russia lost nearly 2 decades of development post-WWI. And had a widespread hunger in 1930-s with 4-8 million people dead (we _still_ don't know the accurate number).

Even just looking at the industrial growth rates, the socialistic economy of the USSR was inferior to many capitalistic economies starting from the same base. E.g. South Korea or Japan.

Your data about life expectancy is also plainly wrong: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.MA.IN?locat...

You are willfully missing the point. You can’t compare Russia to South Korea to claim communism bad. Russia has and will screw up every system it tries. You need to compare communist Russia to capitalist Russia. There the comparison looks much less favorable.

Also your graph proves my point. The giant drop in life expectancy is when it transitioned from communism to capitalism.

> You are willfully missing the point. You can’t compare Russia to South Korea to claim communism bad.

Why? I absolutely can. DPRK vs South Korea is an even better example.

> Also your graph proves my point. The giant drop in life expectancy is when it transitioned from communism to capitalism.

Well, duh. And capitalism _swiftly_ outpaced the previous rate. As somebody who experienced Soviet dentistry and medicine first-hand, I'm not at all surprised.

Sure then I can compare China to Somalia to claim capitalism bad.

DPRK is a chinese buffer state run by a cult of personality where South Korea is a strategic allied US country. Like yes I too would take South Korea’s position? It has nothing to do with capitalism.

Did it? Doesn’t look too swift to me. Also why not compare Chinese life expectancy now to before communism? Looks pretty good.

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