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WombaT
Northern Ireland23931 Posts
Has Musk hired some genius engineers? Well yeah he has, he himself is absolutely not one of them. He has a skillset, sure absolutely, I’ve never heard him expound in any kind of setting that’s given me the impression he’s doing anything other than throwing money at things he thinks are cool and giving it to smarter people to make work. Which isn’t a bad thing I might add, people need structure and funding to work off, but this idea he’s some super genius visionary is just such a stretch to me. | ||
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Husyelt
United States814 Posts
On July 24 2021 12:19 WombaT wrote: It’s not reductive when Space X is so frequently held up as a standard bearer for private, commercial enterprise in this domain when they actually got pretty hefty government funding. Has Musk hired some genius engineers? Well yeah he has, he himself is absolutely not one of them. He has a skillset, sure absolutely, I’ve never heard him expound in any kind of setting that’s given me the impression he’s doing anything other than throwing money at things he thinks are cool and giving it to smarter people to make work. Which isn’t a bad thing I might add, people need structure and funding to work off, but this idea he’s some super genius visionary is just such a stretch to me. He has a skillset, sure absolutely, I’ve never heard him expound in any kind of setting that’s given me the impression he’s doing anything other than throwing money at things he thinks are cool and giving it to smarter people to make work. This is drastically simplifying things. Elon Musk didn't just hire genius people to then form a team. Many entrepreneurs and ex-NASA people have tried to create what SpaceX has become. All of them have failed. None have even got to orbit. Even Blue Origin, (and that is with a budget of 1 BILLION a year, compared to the measly 100 million for the first three years.) And they started years before SpaceX. As of now their tourist ship went straight up and straight down with a nice old parachute. SpaceX can dual land reusable boosters on drone ships with pin point accuracy every time. 1 Starship has the potential, right now, of sending close to a hundred astronauts towards Mars. That is fucking bonkers. Musk handpicked everyone starting from the very beginning. Every single day he was making decisions with the team and removing and adding people. There are plenty of examples in the book where Musk made the right calls design or plan wise and there are also examples where he flat out was wrong. But that's ok, because the results speak for themselves. | ||
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XenOsky
Chile2211 Posts
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Simberto
Germany11342 Posts
On July 24 2021 20:15 XenOsky wrote: not a single person in the history of mankind has become rich by its own work... they always exploited someone else. There is some level of wealth that a person can reasonable reach by their own work. I don't know exactly where that level is, but it is far below one billion $. Just as a thought experiment. If you earned an hourly salary of 60$ after taxes and so forth. And you worked every hour of the day, every day of the year. And, of course, you don't spend any money, ever. To earn one billion dollar this way through lots of honest, well-paid work, you would have needed to start working roughly when Julius Caesar invaded Gaul. | ||
Liquid`Drone
Norway28562 Posts
The crazy part to me isn't that some individuals, given the opportunity, are sufficiently greedy to find themselves with billions of dollars. The crazy part is that there's any degree of political support for it. It is so blatantly obvious to me that if a company with 10000 workers could make $60k for each worker and $100 million/year for the top guy/owner or make $10 million/year for the top guy and $69k for each worker, then the latter is a far superior option, and I genuinely don't understand how people are okay with the former. But this is no real reason to dislike billionaires on a personal level, it's a reason to fight politically for stuff like increased taxes on speculation (I'm sure someone smarter than me can distinguish speculation from investing), abolition of tax havens, enormous inheritance taxes above a certain level, saying CEO payment can only be X entry level pay (which would mean that a boss would have to increase wages around the board to increase his own wage), that kind of stuff. | ||
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Zambrah
United States7127 Posts
If we all hated billionaires more we'd be more willing as a society to do what needs to be done to make sure billionaires don't exist at such horrible societal expense. | ||
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NewSunshine
United States5938 Posts
The fact that these people have so much wealth that you literally have to come up with mental techniques to wrap your brain around just how fucking rich they are should be enough for them, they don't need all of America/the world fawning over them for their pursuits to have been worthwhile. Unless those pursuits entail so much exploitation of systems and people that if you have to confront that for even a moment your psyche would collapse. I dunno, I'm just some dude trying to barely eke out what billionaires have decided I deserve to get. What do I know. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland23931 Posts
On July 25 2021 11:46 NewSunshine wrote: Billionaire worship is definitely something well-ingrained in good ol' capitalist America. It's pretty simple, the system enabled people to get this absurdly wealthy, so they're going to use that power to influence the system so it paints that status quo in a positive light. Billionaires are the pinnacle of hard work, The American Dream, they're geniuses and visionaries, etc. etc. etc. The way Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, etc. are socially fellated on a daily basis because they're some kind of paragon of American/Capitalist virtue and heroism is pretty nauseating to me personally. The fact that these people have so much wealth that you literally have to come up with mental techniques to wrap your brain around just how fucking rich they are should be enough for them, they don't need all of America/the world fawning over them for their pursuits to have been worthwhile. Unless those pursuits entail so much exploitation of systems and people that if you have to confront that for even a moment your psyche would collapse. I dunno, I'm just some dude trying to barely eke out what billionaires have decided I deserve to get. What do I know. I wonder sometimes if billions is literally too much money. Not just in moral terms but, literally in terms of being too much to process, hence why they tend to sit on the money. In a crude reframing of Stalin’s ‘1 death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic’, are billions literally too ridiculous an amount of wealth to even contextualise? I’d initially said discounting the moral terms, which also exist and in the assessment of which I 100% agree with. If ever there’s an indictment of capitalism (in my mind anyway) it’s giving individuals so much money they can’t even mentally fathom how much money they have, never mind use it in a sensible sense. | ||
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Simberto
Germany11342 Posts
A million is something i can reasonably think about. I could buy an amazing house for a million. A billion sounds kind of similar to a million, so i can probably buy a slightly better house? No. I could buy 1000 amazing houses. That is a whole village made out of mansions. How can one reasonably spend that kind of money? I can think of stuff to do with a million that would improve my life, but at some point, my imagination is basically capped out. To spend billions, you need to go into ludicrous territory. Megayacht, personal jumbo-jet, stuff like that. | ||
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Liquid`Drone
Norway28562 Posts
Which doesn't really make it any better. | ||
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NewSunshine
United States5938 Posts
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NonY
8748 Posts
america could do that and still have extremely wealthy people. whether wealth should be extra concentrated in a few businessmen or not is more of a question of whether you want one person to have so much investing power or you'd rather have that power spread out over more people. i'd much rather see 1000 more half billionaires than 2 guys with 500 billion. even though these people have vast amounts of personal wealth, most of the net worth is more of a measure of economic power than it is personal wealth. there are a lot of very valuable companies in america and someone has to own them. the wealthiest guys own fairly large portions of some of the more valuable companies in the country. it's as simple as that. i think most of us here can agree that nazgul is a good guy. and taking liquid from being a bw clan to the organization it is today was a good thing. what if liquid got more and more valuable to the point that his share in liquid was worth $200B? now he's a bad person because he doesn't sell his share and donate that money to the needy? what if he just wants to keep running the company he built until the day he dies? what's wrong with that? or step down from running it but he still wants to own it. maybe he's paying himself a modest salary and all profits get invested back into the business, so he never even lives a life of luxury. he's a bad person because a magazine says his net worth is $200B even though that's all he ever did was start a company and run it to the best of his ability? i just dont think there's anything inherently wrong with owning large shares of extremely valuable companies, especially when most of the time it's the founders who own the most of these companies, so they literally made the company and put a ton of the work in to make the company that valuable. they earned the right to ownership of that company. the fact that the company's value has been evaluated and you can multiply that by their percent ownership in order to come up with a "net worth" to apply to them personally is just so abstract and weird. it's primarily the government's role to make sure the way its citizens' businesses operate is beneficial to society. so there's a lot of work to be done for workers rights, taxing these corporations properly, adherence to ethical standards, anti-monopoly actions, etc. | ||
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Zambrah
United States7127 Posts
i think most of us here can agree that nazgul is a good guy. and taking liquid from being a bw clan to the organization it is today was a good thing. what if liquid got more and more valuable to the point that his share in liquid was worth $200B? now he's a bad person because he doesn't sell his share and donate that money to the needy? what if he just wants to keep running the company he built until the day he dies? what's wrong with that? or step down from running it but he still wants to own it. maybe he's paying himself a modest salary and all profits get invested back into the business, so he never even lives a life of luxury. he's a bad person because a magazine says his net worth is $200B even though that's all he ever did was start a company and run it to the best of his ability? Nazgul would be a bad person because he is not the only person who would have made Liquid worth so much money, if HypotheticaLiquid had say 50 staff, and theyre making 75,000USD a year on average and Nazgul is worth 200B in stock options then thats bullshit. On average those 50 staff should have around 4B of that stock worth (with some arbitrary wiggle room for basic differences in position, etc.) instead of Nazgul having 200B of it. Nazgul is also free to run his company til the day he dies without having to hoard colossal amounts of wealth. 200B also isnt an entirely arcane idea, its not like there aren't ways to leverage that stock into actual purchasing power, those stocks are valued at 200B, you can very easily go to a bank and say, "give me an X dollar loan, heres X worth of stock as collateral," and then the basically mystical stocks have some concrete monetary functionality. Also I take issue with the idea that one person has to own all of these colossal companies, why can't the actual people who do the actual bulk of the actual work at these companies own proportional amounts of the company? Why is it necessary that a Bobby Kotick gets to have billions of dollars in stock and bonuses and other bullshit, but someone like, say Renaud Galand, or Ben Zhang, or Arnold Tsang wasn't seeing an infinitesimal fraction of that wealth despite being some of the most important artists who helped establish Overwatch's aesthetic? What about all of the people actually producing the games? Why is it that these people shouldn't have a proportional stake in the company so that Bobby Kotick can have a colossal stake that makes him a multi billionaire? especially when most of the time it's the founders who own the most of these companies, so they literally made the company and put a ton of the work in to make the company that valuable. they earned the right to ownership of that company. This is the weird Lionization of The Billionaires mindset. Its ignoring all of the people who put a ton of work in to make the company valuable in favor of the handful of people who started the company. Metzen and Morhaime and Didier have all done a ton to establish Blizzard as a huge powerful AAA studio, but there are TONS of people through Blizzard's tenure that have done the majority of the actual work in making the games that makes Blizzard huge and rich. These people don't see fuck all of a cut, when people like Kotick reap the rewards of their ass busting labor. The amount of money that Morhaime and the like made is absolutely and completely disproportional to their actual singular input into Blizzard's success. Teams and teams of artists, programmers, sound designers, game designers, marketing people, graphic designers, building maintenance people, etc. etc. etc. etc. have helped make Blizzard's games the incredible successes that they are, and these people never get to see a fraction of the wealth that the founders (or Bobby Kotick, not a founder but still reaping grotesque amounts of money from the work of others) have despite doing a significantly higher proportion of the work. | ||
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NonY
8748 Posts
On July 26 2021 07:17 Zambrah wrote: Nazgul would be a bad person because he is not the only person who would have made Liquid worth so much money, if HypotheticaLiquid had say 50 staff, and theyre making 75,000USD a year on average and Nazgul is worth 200B in stock options then thats bullshit. On average those 50 staff should have around 4B of that stock worth (with some arbitrary wiggle room for basic differences in position, etc.) instead of Nazgul having 200B of it. Nazgul is also free to run his company til the day he dies without having to hoard colossal amounts of wealth. 200B also isnt an entirely arcane idea, its not like there aren't ways to leverage that stock into actual purchasing power, those stocks are valued at 200B, you can very easily go to a bank and say, "give me an X dollar loan, heres X worth of stock as collateral," and then the basically mystical stocks have some concrete monetary functionality. Also I take issue with the idea that one person has to own all of these colossal companies, why can't the actual people who do the actual bulk of the actual work at these companies own proportional amounts of the company? Why is it necessary that a Bobby Kotick gets to have billions of dollars in stock and bonuses and other bullshit, but someone like, say Renaud Galand, or Ben Zhang, or Arnold Tsang wasn't seeing an infinitesimal fraction of that wealth despite being some of the most important artists who helped establish Overwatch's aesthetic? What about all of the people actually producing the games? Why is it that these people shouldn't have a proportional stake in the company so that Bobby Kotick can have a colossal stake that makes him a multi billionaire? This is the weird Lionization of The Billionaires mindset. Its ignoring all of the people who put a ton of work in to make the company valuable in favor of the handful of people who started the company. Metzen and Morhaime and Didier have all done a ton to establish Blizzard as a huge powerful AAA studio, but there are TONS of people through Blizzard's tenure that have done the majority of the actual work in making the games that makes Blizzard huge and rich. These people don't see fuck all of a cut, when people like Kotick reap the rewards of their ass busting labor. The amount of money that Morhaime and the like made is absolutely and completely disproportional to their actual singular input into Blizzard's success. Teams and teams of artists, programmers, sound designers, game designers, marketing people, graphic designers, building maintenance people, etc. etc. etc. etc. have helped make Blizzard's games the incredible successes that they are, and these people never get to see a fraction of the wealth that the founders (or Bobby Kotick, not a founder but still reaping grotesque amounts of money from the work of others) have despite doing a significantly higher proportion of the work. of course the situation will seem weird when you omit all the people who start businesses that fail. all the failed businesses have to be included in the calculation for what kind of compensation the founder of a successful business has earned plenty of people have had the opportunity to start their own businesses with a combination of their own savings, loans from banks, and capital from private investors. but instead they opt for a steady paycheck at an existing company that will keep them financially secure and keep their lives simple, but may never make them wealthy the people who start successful companies get to use a fraction of the value they create to live the rest of their lives in total luxury and use the rest of the value to invest in other businesses. they're continually trying to direct funds toward companies that will use them well and increase in value. it's not inherently evil until it turns out the companies are using bad business practices to the extent that your ideas could work, they are already in practice. like if you were to judge who contributed to the success of the company and compensate them more? bonuses and incentives. and new employees already receive shares as compensation, or are given employee stock options. for example, in reality, by the time liquid market cap is $200B, nazgul's share would probably be pretty small, so his net worth would be maybe $10-20B, and many of the early employees would have gotten quite wealthy as well. that's how it is with most of these companies with gigantic market caps. probably 50 of the earliest employees received enough of their compensation in shares that they could sell them and retire wealthy ultimately, i agree with you that compensation is wacky. i think if a particular artist or game dev thinks they were ultimately the crux of the success of a certain game, then they need to bet on themselves and start their own company. my position is that in the absolute worst case, if you have some kind of universal basic income in the country, and all basic needs met, then life isn't so bad even at its worst. and then you can pursue your passions or pursue wealth and it's all gravy from there. but the billionaire hate has a lot of false notions behind it and people ought to be careful to criticize the correct things -- the things that are actually causing harm -- and to think about what realistic alternatives are | ||
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Zambrah
United States7127 Posts
ultimately, i agree with you that compensation is wacky. i think if a particular artist or game dev thinks they were ultimately the crux of the success of a certain game, then they need to bet on themselves and start their own company. My point there though is that no individual is the specific key to success, its the teams and people coming together that makes something like a video game excellent. Its not on an artist or a programmer to make their own game because even if they did strike it lucky and make the next big thing and make 10 billion dollars that would also assuredly be at the expense of everyone else who helped make the game great. Its about the whole team and not one person or even five people. Teams, hundreds, or thousands of people make something like Overwatch a smashing success and having Jeff Kaplan (as an example, I know he doesnt make like, Kotick money or anything) take in hundreds of millions while everyone else gets, like 200K a year is some bullshit because its a gross skew of how much a single person contributed to a project. to the extent that your ideas could work, they are already in practice. like if you were to judge who contributed to the success of the company and compensate them more? bonuses and incentives. and new employees already receive shares as compensation, or are given employee stock options. for example, in reality, by the time liquid market cap is $200B, nazgul's share would probably be pretty small, so his net worth would be maybe $10-20B, and many of the early employees would have gotten quite wealthy as well. that's how it is with most of these companies with gigantic market caps. probably 50 of the earliest employees received enough of their compensation in shares that they could sell them and retire wealthy America is definitely not distributing wealth to the extent that wealth distribution works, like not even kind of close to a little bit. Nazgul and like five other randos being worth 20B is also still super awful though. Given we're comparing this to the real world, then while Nazgul and the five randos are billionaires the majority of the rest of the people who put the work in to make HypotheticaLiquid were making like 100K a year and were receiving stocks in the like in comparatively paltry amounts. Like yeah, sure, theres nothing inherently evil to having a lot of money, but contextually have billions of dollars in the modern world is extremely damaging to society and morally bankrupt. Doubly so when you consider the wealth you've bled out of others to get to these kinds of ludicrous sums of casheesh. my position is that in the absolute worst case, if you have some kind of universal basic income in the country, and all basic needs met, then life isn't so bad even at its worst. and then you can pursue your passions or pursue wealth and it's all gravy from there. but the billionaire hate has a lot of false notions behind it and people ought to be careful to criticize the correct things -- the things that are actually causing harm -- and to think about what realistic alternatives are I agree we need a way, way higher baseline for living life and UBI would be astounding, that being said, you can't have these things when wealth is being sucked up and concentrated into the highest sub-strata of society, and having UBI or the like would negatively impact the wealth hoarding of these Modern Day Dragons. Jeff Bezos cant have his workers on UBI because he'd lose a fuck ton of money, so hes going to make sure politicians dont want UBI, and since politicians dont want UBI we'll never get it. There are a lot of complicated factors that make billionaires and how they interact with society fucked, but they're just 100% absolutely a scourge to our modern society. | ||
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NonY
8748 Posts
i feel like "everyone on the team of a successful product is making unique and essential contributions" instead of a few key people carrying the product beyond competing companies' products is an opinion your position demands that you have but it's just not reality. if you're gonna stick with that, i guess we just disagree on it the idea that it's impossible to pass a regulation that harms a business because the business would surely lobby enough to prevent it... i mean i get that it can happen, but saying some shit like that which has countless counterexamples seems like you're trying to communicate to me that you're not making intellectual arguments here, but rather having a bit of a rant. in the same vein it's really not impossible for america to have UBI and still have a small number of people with more wealth than everyone else. saying something like that feels like such a defeatist exposition, not a discussion i came into the thread to try to cut through that and provide a perspective from which billionaires did nothing wrong but i feel like you've used me as an excuse to rant cuz you're not even attempting to circle anything you're saying back to answering the op. especially poetic language like Modern Day Dragons lol i feel fucked with | ||
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Zambrah
United States7127 Posts
i dont understand how you're getting from 'it's impossible to fairly compensate everyone's contribution' to 'having billions of dollars is morally bankrupt I get there via it being okay for one employee to make 100,000USD a year and one employee to make 1,000,000USD a year, but when people are making 50,000USD a year and the handful of dudes at the top are raking in billions of dollars its not okay. Theres some number in between that million and multibillion where it starts being not okay, but I can't definitively answer where I think that is, maybe half a billion? Maybe 100 million? Somewhere around where the amount of wealth you have stops meaningfully impacting your quality of life and starts to become hoarding money for the sake of having lots of money. i feel like "everyone on the team of a successful product is making unique and essential contributions" instead of a few key people carrying the product beyond competing companies' products is an opinion your position demands that you have but it's just not reality. if you're gonna stick with that, i guess we just disagree on it The contributions dont need to be unique, only essential, like World of Warcraft at it's height needed its large team of people to bust ass to push content regularly otherwise the game has content droughts, which means players get bored and drop their subs, which means the games not making them money. You NEED the raw manpower (very specialized manpower in many many cases for game dev, WoW's visual art teams, sound design teams, encounter design, and cinematics teams being all world class and the parts of the game that people consistently enjoy even during WoW's rough patches) Bobby Kotick isn't making World of Warcraft successful, the developers are (were?) making World of Warcraft successful. Bobby Kotick isn't doing doing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of work on World of Warcraft, and his grossly inflated pay is at least on part buoyed by Blizzard underpaying it's workers. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-03/blizzard-workers-share-salaries-in-revolt-over-wage-disparities https://twitter.com/akajcroix/status/1218944437356769281?s=20 I think we are just going to have to disagree here, but the US has had plenty of times in history where people of Jeff Bezos' wealth didnt exist because of tax rates, and higher pay rates, etc. the absence of these things is why people like Jeff Bezos are absurdly grotesquely wealthy, because (2.) they're not paying their fair share to the government or their employees. The man is valued at over 200B dollars, and between Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffets, they own more wealth than the bottom half of the US population. https://inequality.org/great-divide/bernie-3-billionaires-more-wealth-half-america/ the idea that it's impossible to pass a regulation that harms a business because the business would surely lobby enough to prevent it... i mean i get that it can happen, but saying some shit like that which has countless counterexamples seems like you're trying to communicate to me that you're not making intellectual arguments here, but rather having a bit of a rant. in the same vein it's really not impossible for america to have UBI and still have a small number of people with more wealth than everyone else. saying something like that feels like such a defeatist exposition, not a discussion You're misrepresenting my point though, its absolutely 100% possible for the US to have UBI and have some number of people who are better off than others, not even a small number, but like a fair couple of percentage points of the population. The problem is its not possible to have the US we have now, the one where (1.)billionaires and their companies pay fuck all for taxes and actively lobby to prevent things that damage their bottom line, such as a minimum wage increases (15 is a joke, it should be tied to inflation, which would settle it closer to 23 dollars an hour,) UBI (take a look at how companies like McDonalds are doing without sub-living wage labor to leech off of) any number of things that would improve the life of the average US citizen and harm businesses, and have any meaningful change in any acceptable (to me anyways, like within 10 - 20 years) time frame. When billionaires and huge companies can throw money at politicians and cozy up and go, "look, we need you to not let X happen, itd be bad for jobs, heres a bunch of money for your campaign, thank you!" Then yes, it becomes very hard for any positive legislation to pass, especially when half of the country's politicians are actually batshit insane so the margins you need to swing are so thin that it only takes one Joe Manchin and/or one Kristen Sinema to screw over anything positive for an entire election cycle. I'm not saying its impossible, but I can't sugarcoat it likes its some problem that has any easy solutions, "just vote" isnt a solution, "wait it out" isnt a solution, "push for progressive politicians" isnt a solution. There are some examples, but at the same time wealth stagnation has been a huge problem in the US and the colossal gaps in wealth didn't happen totally separate from the increased ability for moneyed interests to exert extreme influence over elected officials. (cough Citizens United cough Cough? Maybe gag is more appropriate for my feelings about Citizens United, lol) And to reiterate some parts that relate to the OP, + Show Spoiler + 1. exploitative of people's poverty and powerlessness, 2. Another possibility is that maybe they're just not as important as they're made out to be? After all, what is 10 or 20 billion compared to the budget and spending of the government? And about Modern Day Dragons, + Show Spoiler + play Shadowrun Returns if you're into isometric RPGs, fantastic series of narrative driven games and CEOs of Megacorporations are often literal dragons, since being the CEO of an enormous corporation is how one accrues wealth in modern/futuristic settings, it makes sense that a creature fabled to sleep on enormous beds of hoarded gold in the dark ages would instead opt for the more modern version of hording gold. Seriously, Shadowrun is really good if you're at all into cyberpunk, fantasy, good narratives, or isometric RPGs. i came into the thread to try to cut through that and provide a perspective from which billionaires did nothing wrong but i feel like you've used me as an excuse to rant cuz you're not even attempting to circle anything you're saying back to answering the op. especially poetic language like Modern Day Dragons lol i feel fucked with I'm not trying to fuck with you, but at the same time I can't say that I think the perspective that billionaires do nothing wrong is something I can personally accept on it's face. I mean sure, you can argue they're not doing anything explicitly illegal, and if you put them in a total societal vacuum without context you can say theres nothing inherently evil about having 200 billion dollars, after all its just an arbitrary number of money. However, in the US theres massive wealth inequality, wages have stagnated, a huge portion of the US has been negatively impacted by the conditions that allowed these Modern Day Dragons (I'm sorry I can't help it, I love the imagery too much) to exist. What makes a billionaire immoral is that they exist at the expense of a vast number of people. Billionaires don't have to exist, and the world as we know it would be much better if the wealth they had was instead shared more evenly between their employees and the US citizenry at large. Anyways, to end my rambling windbag-ness, I'm not trying to be an ass or intentionally antagonistic, I'm just passionate about wealth inequality in the US (since Im poor, definitely not biased btw) and I think you bring up a lot of things that people at large believe about billionaires as true, that I believe is part of why billionaires have come to be allowed to exist as they are, and that I disagree with, which makes for interesting conversation. For me, at least, I know my version of interesting conversation can be exceptionally tedious or groan inducing for someone less emotionally invested than I am, lol | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States22737 Posts
Capitalism is a mythology and people like Bezos, Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg, Koch, Buffett, The Waltons, etc are its rightful heroes, the problem is in the underlying mythos. A core reason it stands as an ostensibly sensible way to organize societies is because the people who benefit from the massive concentration of wealth have also consolidated political and social influence and use it to reinforce this mythology in the populace. | ||
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NonY
8748 Posts
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WombaT
Northern Ireland23931 Posts
On July 27 2021 01:16 NonY wrote: i dont understand how you're getting from 'it's impossible to fairly compensate everyone's contribution' to 'having billions of dollars is morally bankrupt' i feel like "everyone on the team of a successful product is making unique and essential contributions" instead of a few key people carrying the product beyond competing companies' products is an opinion your position demands that you have but it's just not reality. if you're gonna stick with that, i guess we just disagree on it the idea that it's impossible to pass a regulation that harms a business because the business would surely lobby enough to prevent it... i mean i get that it can happen, but saying some shit like that which has countless counterexamples seems like you're trying to communicate to me that you're not making intellectual arguments here, but rather having a bit of a rant. in the same vein it's really not impossible for america to have UBI and still have a small number of people with more wealth than everyone else. saying something like that feels like such a defeatist exposition, not a discussion i came into the thread to try to cut through that and provide a perspective from which billionaires did nothing wrong but i feel like you've used me as an excuse to rant cuz you're not even attempting to circle anything you're saying back to answering the op. especially poetic language like Modern Day Dragons lol i feel fucked with I don’t think even most actual billionaires ever set out with even the slightest sliver of ambition to be a billionaire. They had drive, they had cool ideas, they had some desire to be in charge of their own destiny and, of course some desire to make a few bucks while they’re at it. But hey they end up being billionaires and as GH alluded to it’s so structurally normalised and celebrated as a success story that it’s not seen as fundamentally unethical. In part it depends on the billionaire too, conceding that IMO there shouldn’t be billionaires full stop. Gives you power, clout and connections to do various things, within limits of course, as per the normalised structure of how ‘the natural way of things’ is perceived or whatever. A Jeff Bezos can’t wave his hands and fix America’s various ills, as much as people want to quote ‘if he donated x of his net worth (which isn’t even necessarily possible) there’d be no homelessness’ or whatever. What he did absolutely, until relatively recently have control over was dictating the conditions and pay of lower level Amazon employees, who in a time of pandemic and retail closures and a big bump in online shopping contributed to make him considerably more wealthy. But he decided to subject the people that make his wealth possible to relatively low pay, poor workplace conditions and monitoring of fucking piss breaks. While sauntering into space on a vanity project, so yeah he individually probably is a bit of a prick. Others as people I don’t think you can level it at them, but they’ve essentially been handed an unfathomable amount of wealth and power and sycophants probably surround them at all hours, and yeah they’ll do good works absolutely but within a framework that accepts billionaires existing as a good thing. A (sensible) argument against the tempting idea, in an era of relentless political gridlock and antagonism of some kind of technocratic benevolent dictator, is one a pragmatic one, that no singular human will necessarily make the right calls regardless of intellect or good intent, and secondly that allocating such power in and of itself is sidestepping democratic processes and accountability and that is inherently a bad thing. But when the idea is proffered, along similar objections that billionaires have too much outright power and a lack of accountability by their subjects, it’s ‘they’ve earned it’ or ‘they’re job creators’. Sitting firmly within the capitalist paradigm and not going full socialist (for once haha) I don’t think you have to go to UBI at all. If things like cooperatives, or hybrid models employing external shareholders and enfranchised workers were more commonplace bargaining power would be more equitably distributed. You can raise wages pretty considerably in basically any industry where workers have bargaining power, have actual stake holdings in companies etc, and you have additional bonus externalities like people working for companies they have actual stakes in, never mind more subtle but impactful elements like the mental health benefits of actually feeling part of a company rather than an interchangeable minimum wage drone. As it stands, and is getting worse you have an underclass of workers who, in their way contribute to vast conglomerates but just cycle around minimum wage jobs with increasingly poor conditions and no particular financial incentive to work beyond the bare minimum to keep their salary. Anyway hope that wasn’t too much of a diatribe like, have appreciated your counter arguments in this thread. As I said I lean to genuine socialism but, in the absence of much progress there I don’t think a considerably retooled capitalism wouldn’t be a significant improvement for, basically everyone. Innovation would not suffer, it would thrive under systems that would enfranchise more people in its successes. | ||
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