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Comment by jdimov9 | Hacker News Reader

You seem to have all of your values backwards.

Technological innovation CREATES value, doesn't destroy it. It necessarily disrupts the status quo and pisses people off, and that takes courage, but does not make the innovator a bad person. It makes them a very courageous person, worthy of all admiration.

On the other hand, you might call a bad person someone who expects that everyone else is obliged to feed him. One who throws "responsibilities" at those who refuse to work for him. One who morally manipulates people into doing what pleases him. I'd call this a bad person, although I personally don't believe that evil exists, so I am more likely to call that person plain stupid.

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>You seem to have all of your values backwards.

What you seem to mean by this is that I haven't taken Ayn Rand's teen fantasy novels as a central religious text upon which all knowledge, thought, and discourse are based.

Sometimes the status quo is better than what replaces it. Uber is removing a cartel and replacing it with a single-company monopoly. Is that good or bad? It's reasonable to argue both sides. In the present time, it looks like it's good for almost everyone. But the consequences of rewriting laws for a particular company so it can gain total control of a socially necessary transportation infrastructure are far-reaching. Technology does not 'necessarily' do anything good or bad. It is a tool and all it 'necessarily' does is create new options for people who happen to have access to it (generally wealthy people). Sometimes those options, if chosen by the wealthy, make life worse for people without access to that same technology (the non-wealthy). Not always of course, but it's something that should be considered.

'Disrupts' is just a weasel-word to spin the accurate description of what is happening, 'destroys', into something that is axiomatically good. In fact it's dishonest to use this terminology; you need to show the particular change is actually good and describe what you mean by good (good for everyone? Good for rich white yuppies with smartphones?) before you are allowed to describe it as good, something many people in tech seem to forget.

And in your previous post you rejected the notion that you should ever consider the consequences your actions have on other people in society; now you seem to be trying to weasel your way out of it with some pseudo-religious tripe about how innovators are gods and everyone who destroys is courageous and worthy of "all admiration". I am at this point reconsidering the value of continuing this discussion since when blind religion meets thoughtful consideration, blind religion invariably wins; especially when it's religion fueled by narcissism and a visceral need to justify one's own selfish childishness. But I've written it already so I'll leave it here.

Ok, so you're not stupid, you're actually a very thoughtful guy. You just really irritate me by throwing all these labels at me.

First of all, I have never read Ayn Rand and am not familiar with her work (perhaps I should, you're not the first person to throw me into that bucket).

Second, I don't subscribe to any mainstream religion, so don't call my arguments religious. Every position that I hold has come from my experience. I am a very pragmatic person and consciously choose what to believe based solely on the utility that each belief provides to me. In that sense I am selfish and narcissistic, yes - I don't take these as offences.

One of the beliefs I have (and I think everyone should have, especially entrepreneurs) is that my wellbeing and my happiness is more important than anyone else's. Does that make me an asshole? May be it does. But it also makes me productive and valuable to the very society that you are so concerned about. Much more so than if I did the mistake of putting society's widely diverse needs before my own.

So do I care about my fellow human beings? Yes, very much so.

Am I going to do something that hurst my self interest in order to please anyone else? No, never. That would be irresponsible.

"Uber is removing a cartel and replacing it with a single-company monopoly" This sums up the uber situation very well.

I think that, regarding the HN libertarian "wealth creator's" topic,(to try and be as sympathetic as I can be) there is a tendency to see societies flaw as a lack of wealth, rather than an unequal distribution of wealth. Quite often, married for allegedly fixing the first problem (within the framework of entrepreneurialism) exacerbate the latter.

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