I've heard this story so many times.

1) A company starts by serving a real customer need, is driven by the people doing real (engineers, designers, mechanics, etc.). 2) The company gets large. The hierarchy gets deeper, decisions are made by people removed from the actual work. 3) The company either a) drives away all the people who actually enjoy quality work and stagnates/devolves b) or is bought by a large corporation, decapitated and absorbed.

How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?

Worker cooperatives exist and should be the default choice any time people get together to work towards a common goal.

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Wilder7977 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I completely agree with you.

The best answer I can give myself to your (perhaps rhetorical) question is twofold: - tech companies, for whatever reason, seem to need millions and millions of funding upfront to get started. Despite a tech company not needing essentially any asset (besides a few workstations and internet connections?). The VC era inherently created a huge distortion so that it's virtually impossible to start something without selling your soul to those who want you to be exactly like the others. You will be laughed out of the door from banks if you try to get some credit. Since the tech economy has been essentially a proxy for financial speculation, building a sustainable business that doesn't aim solely to IPO and "growth" is an idea that won't get any money to anybody. All of this to say, if workers today want to fund a co-op, as I want to, they need to wait until they have enough money saved to bootstrap it themselves. - until now, and for maybe a while longer, the job market for tech workers has been fairly comfortable, with perks and high wages. Things are clearly changing, as the streak of layoffs post-2021 shows. For a sector with low unionization and with the extreme pressure from companies to reduce workers power, I think in the next 5-10 years tech jobs will become closer and closer to other regular office jobs. Once that will be the case, the incentive to do effectively a bullshit job in a big(ger) org - which many of us do, building products that are useless when not harmful, with no social value - will not be there anymore, and I want to hope more people will choose alternative paths like co-ops and to develop products with different goals.

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martin-t 5 days ago | parent [-]

It's actually not rhetorical - I really wanna know what leads to this to-me-obvious contradiction.

One answer is obvious - every organization's primary goal is its own survival. So a democratic state will indoctrinate ("educate") children into believing democracy is the right way. But no school teaches about corporate power structures and cooperatives are so rare that they have little influence on the curriculum.

What I absolutely hated was for example when Microsoft opened an extra curricular program for students to teach them some tech skills and some soft skills and (in exchange?) they were allowed to hang posters promoting their products at school. Linux does not have the money or organizational capacity to do this kind of thing so the entrenched players have a massive advantage.

> The VC era

As a gamedev, this reminds me of how the metagame shifts as the collective playerbase learns the rules of a game - what works and what doesn't. Step 1) IRL you need to build something valuable and you get paid according to how much value you produced. 2) Then people realized you could get a bunch of these builders to work for you and take a cut from each of them - sometimes at least in exchange for providing marketing or "the means of production" but without providing any _real_ (positive-sum) work. 3) And now people realized when you have enough money you can just buy those power structures from step 2 wholesale. Oh and you can buy up housing and take a third of someone's salary too.

A radical idea would changing the law so be that workers own what they produce. This would completely invert those power structures. Need marketing? You as a positive-sum worker hire those zero-sum workers.

But we're heading in the opposite direction instead. All intellectual work has now been stolen and it being resold to people who produced it in the first place.

And then you straight up have people who wanna replace even physical workers with robots. And they sell it to people by claiming they will no longer need to work, which sounds great. Until you realize that up until that point the rich zero-summers at least still needed positive-sum workers. Even governments needed humans to oppress other humans...

> tech jobs will become closer and closer to other regular office jobs

Yep. "We" (technically long before I entered the workforce) had all the power and slowly gave it away because we were interested in the cool tech we were making and not the power struggle that the people who only extract value from us are so good at.

> building products that are useless when not harmful, with no social value

I'd like to see a graph of the percentage of people whose work is positive-, zero- and negative-sum over time. Because I suspect the latter two are growing rapidly.

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robertlagrant 5 days ago | parent [-]

> Then people realized you could get a bunch of these builders to work for you and take a cut from each of them - sometimes at least in exchange for providing marketing or "the means of production" but without providing any _real_ (positive-sum) work

This is just a classic mistake: failing to account for risk as a significant input. Any business that needs money to start needs people to risk their reputation or their money to get it going, possibly long before any profit is made.

> A radical idea would changing the law so be that workers own what they produce.

If I design a machine and you build it, who owns what?

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martin-t 5 days ago | parent [-]

> Any business that needs money to start needs people to risk their reputation or their money to get it going

Nobody is risking their reputation, that's just being over-dramatic.

Money? Sure. There's two kinds of people here:

a) Rich but not obscenely so - you can save up enough from normal work to get enough runway to start a small company which grows organically - you get a few really good people (who might even accept a lower salary than they could command it a corporation just because they want to work on something meaningful for once) and/or you do a lot of the work yourself. Then you keep building until you get income or run out of money. Factorio is a great example of this approach succeeding - but even they needed to use Indiegogo at one point and were close to not making it.

b) Those obscenely rich - those who have more money than a single person could make from positive-sum work, no matter how skilled. (Art/sport/showbusiness are interesting exceptions but are they really positive sum?) These people have so much money they don't care if they lose it sometimes, as long as they multiply it sometimes. If you fund 10 companies, each with 10% chance of success, only 1 needs to make it and give you >10x return on investment. If you own an apartment complex with 30 people and take a third of each person's salary, you can afford to fund a company of 10 people indefinitely.

As a result, the obscenely rich get a much higher chance to succeed, in turn owning more companies, in turn getting more rich.

> If I design a machine and you build it, who owns what?

Ownership does not have to be exclusive. In fact, it almost never should. It should be distributed based on the amount of work, skill required, competence, etc.

It can get complex but let's not pretend it's worse than the current salary negotiations where one side is basically blind and pair per unit of work and the other has all the information and takes a cut from everyone's output.

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robertlagrant 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Nobody is risking their reputation, that's just being over-dramatic.

Of course they are; if someone's going to get money from VCs they risk their reputation in asking for it.

> Money? Sure. There's two kinds of people here: (Rich/obscenely rich)

No - lots of VCs represent large pools of money including pension funds that service giant numbers of people. Your "rich" company example, Factio, is about the silliest example I can imagine of a capital-intensive business. Your "obscenely rich" example isn't really about money any more, but so few people are like this it doesn't really affect anything.

> It can get complex but let's not pretend it's worse than the current salary negotiations where one side is basically blind and pair per unit of work and the other has all the information and takes a cut from everyone's output.

It's impossible to tell if it's worse, as you haven't described it yet. It's likely to be worse though, as people don't do it.

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martin-t 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Of course they are; if someone's going to get money from VCs they risk their reputation in asking for it.

You are unintentionally proving me right. There 2 kinds of people starting businesses which need an investment - those risking their own money (and not reputation) and those risking other people's money (and even then, if a VC wants to judge their reputation, they should look at the details, not binary failed/succeeded).

As a result, you have rich people risking nothing of relevance to them, just playing a game where they statistically win. All the risk if borne by the people doing actual work who are not obscenely rich.

> No - lots of VCs represent large pools of money including pension funds that service giant numbers of people

And there's still some rich asshole at the top who takes a cut which represents more money (sometimes by orders of magnitude) than a person doing positive-sum work can make. So he's not even risking his own money, great, a real improvement.

> Your "rich" company example, Factio, is about the silliest example I can imagine of a capital-intensive business.

I gave it as an example of people saving up in order to quit their day jobs and start a company. How is that silly? Would people saving up to open a small store also be silly? Would a person saving up to buy equipment to open a motorcycle repair shop be silly? Because those are all things people who want to do positive-sum work do.

> Your "obscenely rich" example isn't really about money any more, but so few people are like this it doesn't really affect anything.

Funny how much noise those "few" make. Not so long ago one of them pretty much bought himself a president in a very rich country. Though I have a feeling that is one investment which didn't go as well as he planned.

I also directly know a person who owns so many houses, office spaces and companies he never has to work again and can keep buying more. And he's still several orders of magnitude less rich than the first narcissistic asshole.

Both live a parasitic lifestyle.

Here's something else you (judging by your attitude) won't like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM - to quote "1% of of America has 40% of all the nation's wealth". Does that fall under your "doesn't really affect anything"?

> It's impossible to tell if it's worse, as you haven't described it yet.

In the case of 1 designer, 1 producer, they distribute compensation according to how much work each did. Assuming design took a few orders of magnitude than producing a single item, the designer gets most in the beginning. As more items are produced, the designer gets less and producer more.

- If the producer would earn too little at first, they might agree on recalculating after a batch instead of single item,

- or the producer would go into debt owed to the designer (optionally there could be a condition that the debt is to be repaid only if the item makes enough to repay it),

- or they would both agree on a scheme which is mutually agreeable to both (licensing the design for a fixed price for a fixed number of items at first).

Point 1 is the designer as a person owns his design, there is no company which takes it because he did it "on company time".

Point 2 is all transactions and agreements are made with consent of those doing the real work.

Note that if you're unwilling to engage constructively, I am unwilling to write thousands of words in a HN comment you're just gonna passively aggressively dismiss.

> It's likely to be worse though, as people don't do it.

1) People do it, just rarely - those working in cooperatives almost always recommend the experience. Can't say the same for people in hierarchical organizations.

2) People do it rarely because most have never even heard about it. (And because there's a direct way to remove a dictatorship - those successful gain the top level of power and become the judges or right and wrong; there's no direct way to remove the C-suite - if you employ the same methods people historically used to remove dictators, even democratic governments will attack them in turn while calling it punishment.)

3) For most of history, with rare exceptions, governments were dictatorships. If we lived 200 years ago, would you say democracy is likely worse as people don't do it? This whole last sentence is fallacious.

---

BTW, if you're gonna insult me, I don't see any point in continuing this. It does not matter how covert your insults are, the intent matters.

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robertlagrant 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I gave it as an example of people saving up in order to quit their day jobs and start a company. How is that silly? Would people saving up to open a small store also be silly? Would a person saving up to buy equipment to open a motorcycle repair shop be silly? Because those are all things people who want to do positive-sum work do.

Just responding to this as it seems the simplest: a capital-intensive business is something that will need millions of dollars over many years before it turns the first inkling of a product. Excluding this incredibly important type of business, and only thinking about tiny businesses when you're thinking of the phrase "capital-intensive business" is the problem.

	▲	martin-t 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		You brought capital-intensive business into it and it's a fair example which needs more elaboration but now you're acting like that's the only example that matters. There are plenty of businesses, not just "tiny" ones as you say, which can be built up gradually without large investments. As for capital-intensive: There are 2 currencies - money and human time. You can call them resourced but it's the same thing. What I object to is that two people can invest roughly the same amount of time into something and one can get several orders of magnitude more money out of it. That goes directly against the party line that "everybody is equal". Anyway, there is clearly a conversion rate between human time and money - hourly rate. So in a system where people own the product of their work according to the amount of work, we can factor invested capital as additional work performed by the investor and reward them accordingly. We could use for example the median wage but it would be interesting to consider using the investor's past hourly wages (the more they got pair per hour, the less their investment would gain them now).

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throw10920 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> BTW, if you're gonna insult me, I don't see any point in continuing this. It does not matter how covert your insults are, the intent matters.

There aren't any insults in their posts. You're conflating someone dismantling your claims with insulting you. Which is obviously, clearly, laughably false.

You claimed something that's just wrong:

> Nobody is risking their reputation, that's just being over-dramatic.

Then they proceeded to show how you're wrong, and you deflected with

> You are unintentionally proving me right.

Then you throw in emotionally manipulative statements like

> but let's not pretend

> Both live a parasitic lifestyle.

> Here's something else you (judging by your attitude) won't like

Then link to a random YouTube video that says that the richest people in America have a much larger fraction of the wealth than they would if it was evenly distributed (which is extremely obvious), with zero actual elaboration of any sort of negative effects, then say

> Does that fall under your "doesn't really affect anything"?

And make arbitrary moral claims like

> Ownership does not have to be exclusive. In fact, it almost never should.

There's no coherent arguments here. Just angry opinions and envy and greed invoked by those that have more than you. The only person being "unwilling to engage constructively" here is the one being outraged and thinking that their outrage is a substitute for an argument, and who is unable to parse actually coherent arguments and so thinks that they're "passive aggressive dismissal".

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martin-t 3 days ago | parent [-]

> There aren't any insults in their posts.

Intellectual dishonesty is a form of insult. As is, for example, "laughably false". If you think I am wrong, you can explain why. But you choose to insult me because you enjoy it.

> manipulative statements

"But let's not pretend" is not manipulative, it's a figure of speech.

Parasitism is a fairly well defined term in biology which can be extended to sociology/economy.

"Here's something else you (judging by your attitude) won't like" - you're right, I lost patience with someone defending rich people and being dismissive without any reason.

> the richest people in America have a much larger fraction of the wealth than they would if it was evenly distributed

That's not what the video says. I suggest rewatching with a less dismissive attitude.

> And make arbitrary moral claims like

It's called an opinion. Now, entertain me, which part do you have an issue with? Do you think ownership or a product made by multiple people should usually be exclusive?

---

The rest can be summed up as you defending inequality and trying to provoke me into insulting you. I have no problem with people who work harder or more skillfully than me having more (proportionally). I have a problem with people getting themselves into positions of power which allow them to take a cut from other people's work without contributing much or anything at all.

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throw10920 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Intellectual dishonesty is a form of insult.

That's manipulative rhetoric that isn't even relevant here - not only did you not point out a single instance of their alleged intellectual dishonesty, but it's not even something you can prove in the first place because you have to know what's going on inside the other person's head. And, that's not how anyone would take the your usage of "insult" as you initially wrote it. Dishonest redefinition of your existing words.

> As is, for example, "laughably false". If you think I am wrong, you can explain why.

Because only people who have massive, fragile egos believe that they are never wrong, and so refuting their ideas amounts to attacking them personally. The vast majority of people can understand the difference between those things if you ask them about it.

> But you choose to insult me because you enjoy it.

Factually false. I did not insult you, I pointed out that one of your statements was false. It seems like you're incapable of even understanding the difference between refuting your points and attacking you personally.

> "But let's not pretend" is not manipulative,

Again, false - it's an emotionally-charged, manipulative figure of speech. I usually don't like doing this, but let's ask an LLM what it thinks, because you won't concede points (even if they're obviously true to the vast majority of humans) unless there's a citation for them, and because LLMs carry a large amount of encoded information on human speech (and because dictionaries don't carry information like this):

The phrase “let’s not pretend that…” usually carries a skeptical or confrontational tone. It implies:

- Dismissal of false optimism or denial – signaling the speaker believes a certain idea is unrealistic or insincere.

- Challenge to the listener – pushing them to acknowledge what the speaker sees as an obvious truth.

- Impatience or frustration – suggesting the topic is already settled in the speaker’s mind.

- Assertiveness – positioning the speaker as cutting through pretense or spin. It can sound blunt, accusatory, or even cynical, depending on context and delivery.

So, it is factually true that that's a manipulative phrase. It's obviously not neutral. Are you not a native English speaker? Because this is something that virtually no English speaker past the high-school level or so would fail to understand (and I'm trying to be charitable by not assuming that you're a native speaker intentionally lying about the emotional connotation of that phrase).

> Parasitism is a fairly well defined term in biology which can be extended to sociology/economy.

...which, again, is not how English speakers use this phrase in a non-biological context (which we're obviously not in). You didn't provide any definition of how it might be extended, so this is another false statement. Again - the vast majority of English speakers know that this is always used as a pejorative term unless it's specifically defined in a biological context (which you did not).

> I lost patience with someone defending rich people

Ah, so there's your agenda: you're just emotionally upset with rich people and trying to attack them through any means possible - whether it's outrage, misinterpretations of common English words and phrases, or logical fallacies.

> and being dismissive without any reason

They made concrete logical points that you were unable to respond to. Again - reduction of logic to "dismissiveness", which is a logical fallacy.

> That's not what the video says.

That's what you said, literally in the same line as the link:

> to quote "1% of of America has 40% of all the nation's wealth"

I'm just repeating your own description of the video back to you.

> It's called an opinion.

Yes, you can have an opinion that's also an arbitrary moral claim. That's not the same as an actual argument for your position.

> Now, entertain me, which part do you have an issue with?

No, I don't think I need to. I don't need to present an opinion to point out all of your logical fallacies, and in general it's useless to even try to present an opinion to someone who makes these kinds of factually false statements, logical fallacies, and emotional attacks, because if they were capable of making arguments without resorting to those things, they would have.

> The rest can be summed up as you defending inequality

Yet again, factually false. Refuting your statements is factually not the same as arguing for some perceived opposite position of whatever you hold.

> and trying to provoke me into insulting you

...what? This is not only wrong, it's just...so completely off the rails that there's no coherent response to it.

It massively undermines your positions that you can't defend them without rhetoric, emotional manipulation, falsehoods, and fallacies. Someone who can actually defend their arguments doesn't have to do those things.

You know that the point of Hacker News is intellectual curiosity, which means rational discussion, and not just emotional outbursts and fallacies, right? The entire point of this platform is to challenge each others' ideas.

If you can't take someone else challenging your ideas without thinking that they're personally attacking you (which, as previously stated, is false), or you immediately assume that someone is arguing the negative (which is also false), then you should take a break, instead of degrading the quality of the site.

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martin-t 3 days ago | parent [-]

> not only did you not point out a single instance of their alleged intellectual dishonesty

>> It's likely to be worse though, as people don't do it.

> This whole last sentence is fallacious.

I did point it out, quite explicitly so.

> but let's ask an LLM what it thinks > So, it is factually true

LLM don't operate on facts, LLM generated output is irrelevant to your assertion. (I could do the same for your and robertlagrant's replies and get the same results but I won't bother. Do it yourself if you disagree with me.)

> intentionally lying about the emotional connotation of that phrase

I don't care that it's emotionally charged. I challenge you[0] to come up with a better way to say people are getting exploited without being emotionally charged.

[0]: Oh, I guess this is also manipulative. Might be just the way people talk to each other.

---

For the record, the video compares 3 distributions - what people think it should be, what people think it is, and what it actually is. Neither me nor the video mentioned "evenly distributed" like you claim.

> That's what you said, literally in the same line as the link:

And now you inexplicably claim something else:

>> to quote "1% of of America has 40% of all the nation's wealth"

Are you arguing 1% owning 40% and even distribution are the only 2 options?

> Just angry opinions and envy and greed > outraged and thinking that their outrage is a substitute for an argument > unable to parse actually coherent arguments > "passive aggressive dismissal" > the point of Hacker News is intellectual curiosity, which means rational discussion, and not just emotional outbursts and fallacies

Please take your own advice here.

Note that ad hominems are still ad hominems even if you speak about me in third person. You claim you only attack my arguments and then conclude with this??? ;)

I am happy for people to challenge me and improve the way I can argue. I am also open to being proven wrong but then there has to be another explanation for inequality. Yes, you have no obligation to find it and I could be arguing wrong for the right position. However then refuting arguments against inequality without offering a solution is effectively supporting it - if people get the message that all arguments against it are wrong, then they will get the impression inequality is right.

---

Look, you might have had some good points in your first response and I might have assumed bad faith from robertlagrant too early because several things in his first post ticked me off. But your first reply already concluded with strongly emotionally manipulative language. Your second reply reads like you grasping for straws, any straws, to discredit me, throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. It does not further the solution to inequality in any way.

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throw10920 2 days ago | parent [-]

> I did point it out, quite explicitly so.

No, you factually, objectively, did not, because fallacious arguing is not the same as intellectual dishonesty (as can easily be learned from looking up the definition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_honesty). So, this is the first factually incorrect thing you have stated in this post.

> LLM don't operate on facts, LLM generated output is irrelevant to your assertion.

This is the second factually incorrect thing. LLMs are trained on vast corpus of human writing and so have an extremely large amount of latent understanding of tone of language. Factually, the output of an LLM is relevant to my assertion.

> I don't care that it's emotionally charged.

> I am happy for people to challenge me and improve the way I can argue.

So now you're being a hypocrite and a liar - if you don't care that it's emotionally charged, then you're definitely not happy to have people improve the way you can argue, because emotionally charged statements are not arguments.

> However then refuting arguments against inequality without offering a solution is effectively supporting it

Third factually incorrect statement. I don't have to tell the cook how he made my soup wrong if it tastes bad. I just have to say that it's not good, and that's that.

That's three falsehoods and one lie in just those parts of this comment, let alone the many others in your other comments. You have no intention to actually engage in debate or seek truth.

	▲	martin-t 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		From your link > not twisted to give misleading impressions Pretending something is worse because people don't do it is misleading (whether the other person is aware of the bias/fallacy or not) > LLMs are trained on vast corpus of human writing and so have an extremely large amount of latent understanding of tone of language [citation needed] Also https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-... > because emotionally charged statements are not arguments. Arguments can be emotionally charged or neutral. Those things are orthogonal. > I don't have to tell the cook how he made my soup wrong if it tastes bad. Bad analogy. Systematically refusing arguments of one side while not doing the same to the other gives onlookers a biased impression (conscious or not). --- You can be angry all you want and try to be pedantic to "prove it", it's not gonna change anything. This conversation is over.

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rjbwork 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>How come people will vehemently defend democracy as the only just system of governance at the nation state level but are perfectly OK with dictatorship at the company level?

Funny you should ask this. A co-worker was unironically glazing monarchies and suggested some books to me when we were drinking at dinner Friday. I was disgusted, tbh. But do not underestimate the desire of people to be ruled and told how to think and act.

	▲	martin-t 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		When I encounter this, it's usually a belief that a strong and implicitly good leader is needed so that he can somehow remove/punish all the bad people. What the people don't get is that: - Truly good people are incredibly rare. - Those who are prone to abusing power will only show their true colors when actually given power. - Power corrupts, everyone has head this. But it also attracts people who are corrupt in the first place. And of course, they will lie and pretend to be good to get that power. - What about succession? Even if their fav leader was actually good and was so "pure" he fathered (most such promoters of this assume a man) only good children, each generation the amount of his "good genes" they'd have would halve (assuming no Habsburgcest). --- IMO the cause is people knowing they are largely powerless in the grand scheme of things (barring self-sacrifice and violence which they are increasingly indoctrinated against) but this learned helplessness is so internalized they can't conceive of a better solution than giving even more of their power away.