Comment by jholman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jholman | Hacker News Reader

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Well, there may be people that actually think that way (that it's okay to profit from useless things, but not okay to profit from useful things), but I think there's a less-incomprehensible version, that has to do with entitlement, perceived entitlement, perceived social virtue, that sort of thing.

I see two major halves to this.

First: No one cares if InstaSnapWhatsYo goes bankrupt, and if they do, Jan Systrom (founder of ISWY) doesn't make a heartstrings appeal that he's entitled to make money. Live by the market, die by the market, all in the game, y'all, etc. But Lars Ulrich thinks he's _entitled_ to sell 50 million records (emphasis on "sell", as opposed to "give away"), and EMI thinks they're entitled to their cut of the same. So the claims of Ulrich and EMI earn a degree of legitimate skepticism: this thing you're saying is "fair" and "just" in return for your social contribution, we can't help but notice that it's making you very very rich. My point here is that if you're nothing but a mercenary, it's hard to knock you for being a mercenary; if you're claiming social value and also have a vested interest, then this tension gets you some sharp looks. Some of that is legitimate, some of it is just sloppy thinking.

(Aside: imo, this is the same type of sloppy thinking that claims that hypocrisy is a the one true sin; if Dahmer calls Manson a bad person, Dahmer is right, hypocrite or not.)

Second: Science in particular has another problem, and that is the questionable social value of each individual scientist. Read 40 randomly selected peer-reviewed journal publications, and you're going to read a lot of useless garbage. And yet the authors of the garbage are still getting paid, and they might be making above-median wages for an American (not above-median wages for an American with 10 years of education who works 60-hour weeks, but still). I'm a pretty big fan of the net output of science, and academia generally, and think that we should increase our social expenditure on science, but I can see a rational reason for people to be suspicious of requests from scientists to increase science funding.

Sort of accidentally, I note that the entire preceding paragraph also applies to your other example of things that matter, journalism. Every sentence, except the "10 years of education".

When exactly did the record labels ask for a bail out? They complain about people taking their products for free, which is a totally legitimate thing to complain about. If people were getting into ISWY's systems and putting their databases on the Internet for free access, bypassing the revenue-generating ad mechanisms, those companies would be complaining too about it too.

while I think you probably have a point when you describe unauthorized copying of music as "taking [music businesses'] products for free," I also think it's hard to describe the mechanism of copyright (a government-granted monopoly on your goods) as something completely unlike a bailout. At least it seems a lot like a subsidy.

A copyright is a property right on an original creation. It's a government granted monopoly, but so is any other kind of property right. If you're a golf course, you rely on a government granted monopoly on land, which isn't even your original creation. If you're ISWY, you rely on a government-granted monopoly that keeps a competitor from simply breaking into your servers and copying your content.

There's nothing entitled about expecting the government to keep people from taking things from you. There is nothing obsolete about business models that rely on the government protecting you from that kind of violation.

Property "rights" only make sense if you believe might makes right. The golf course person has the papers that entitle them to the land only because of a series of violent military actions that simply claimed it, and then sold it to the highest bidder. At best it is stolen property on which some sort of statute of limitations has expired.

I mean, the freaking word "title" is right in the middle of "entitlement" for crying out loud. You can argue property law is the best of a set of bad options, but it is far from just, and it is absolutely, literally, about entitlement.

Hahaha grad students making "above median wage"? Not too many of those...

What facts can I find? Let's see. Wikipedia says that the World Almanac says that the US Census Bureau says that, across all money-earning Americans of age 15 or over, the median for males is around $30k and for females is around $17k. The median for both genders combined is somewhere between $25k and $28k.

Grad students? Clearly from my "10 years of education and 60 hours weeks" I wasn't primarily referring to grad students. However... in my understanding standard US grad student stipends are usually over $20k, plus a tuition waiver, for 8 or 9 months of work. That sounds like it's more than $30k/year (pro-rated).

Many authors are not students. NSRA stipends for post-docs are $40k-$55k. Obviously tenure-track positions do somewhere between a little and a lot better than that.

I think it's clear that the main catch in "above-median wage" is it's only above-median if the reference class ignores educational attainment. Median wages for people with graduate degrees are substantially higher.

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