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Comment by UltraSane | Hacker News Reader

At $32,000 a year per person the Bloomberg Terminal is a deeply unfair advantage for the rich to get richer.

The entire financial industry is based around unfair advantage.

Capitalism doesn't care much about "fair". It cares exclusively about efficiency.

Not really. If you ran a restaurant instead, you may also have to buy a few thousand dollars worth of ingredients and pay thousands of dollars in salaries per year and renting a venue to make the revenue that you are making. Even a pizza delivery service may need a few thousand dollars a year for a car and its driver plus petrol, taxes, insurance. Relevant is not the cost of doing business, but the annual revenue and margins.

E.g. $32k cost of business to make $2bn revenue statistically approximates zero.

I googled the ovens used by my local pizza joint and they were 25K each and there were two of them.

Heck, the espresso machine at your corner Starbucks probably costs almost that much.

Yeah, but I think they just sell convenience and there are projects on GitHub like openbb that piece together something very similar for much less.

In finance, people who consider the cost of a Bloomberg terminal "expensive" are often considered "not serious" (small fish)... it has often been seen as a status symbol as well as a professional work tool.

youre assumming that the average person can use bloomberg profitably. thats absolutely not true. the average person gambles on crypto or polymarket

that's a perverse way of looking at the cost of a service offering.

It's the very nature of our society that money buys you increased access to tools for making more money.

Well, what would be the point of being rich, if you couldn't buy more stuff?

I swear, the audience around here these days...

> Well, what would be the point of being rich, if you couldn't buy more stuff?

One could ask "Well, what would be the point of having power, if you couldn't abuse it?"

One could, but it would be a completely-different question.

Having a leverage isn’t an abuse. It’s a tool, it’s not like you’re buying a news outlet or a local senator.

> Having a leverage isn’t an abuse. It’s a tool

Competition, and capitalism optimally allocates resources only in the presence of competition, is harmed when the playing field is not level. Make the playing field uneven enough and what looks like capitalism starts to become something entirely different.

If that were true, it would cost more than a Toyota RAV4

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