Remix.run Logo
haritha-j 11 hours ago

I enjoyed this, but the thesis is misleading. Paul’s own examples here were Facebook, apple etc. I imagine that the politicians point was that beyond a certain point, you do have to be unethical to continue that growth rate. Facebook is notorious for doing plenty of this. Apple too is known for exploiting developers.

If we extrapolate to trillionaires, we know for a fact that you need to be an all-around dousche that manipulates politics and literally cuts government funding to the poorest and most vulnerable groups to get there.

And since this post has a numbers focus, zuck is worth 195 billion. Would Facebook’s negative influence be noticeably less if they spent 194.9 billion on reducing the harms of Facebook, and zuck remained a millionaire? I believe so.

ahartmetz 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yup. Billionaire - doable without too much ethical compromise (e.g early Google). The thing is that a billion isn't much per "first world" citizen if that is roughly your market. Many-many-billionaire - would need some good example, I can only think of bad ones. The SAP guys maybe? But they aren't exactly the richest. The only bad things I've heard about SAP are "making clunky software" and "charging too much money".

hilariously 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Early Google got that money because of the eventual market capture and implied evil they would definitely do because they are an american advertising company.

brianwawok 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The first billionaire I followed was gates. He did pretty horrible rent extraction to businesses all over the world. See monopoly trials and other similar things that didn’t go to trial.

inigyou 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

One billion is huge for a citizen, are you sure you don't mean one million?

ahartmetz 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean how much you need to "take" / earn from each other citizen to accumulate the billion.

andai 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Is that the incentive structure?