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| ▲ | csallen 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Accepting money from willing customers, who are paying you for access to some technology you created that they find valuable, is not theft. Quite the opposite, it's almost always two happy parties engaging in an exchange that each of them finds advantageous. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Quite the opposite, it's almost always two very happy parties engaging in an exchange that each of them finds advantageous. When I buy an iPhone from Apple, I suspect quite a few folks in the mines, factories, shipping, and retail chain that gets those "two happy parties" connected aren't so happy. They are, however, deeply important to the transaction. | | |
| ▲ | csallen 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > I suspect quite a few folks in the mines, factories, shipping, and retail chain that gets those "two happy parties" connected aren't so happy. Okay, if you're going to make such a claim and trust in it, then can I presume you have answers to these two questions? 1. In a world without Apple, what would these people be doing that would make them happier? 2. What exactly is stopping them from doing that now? | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > What exactly is stopping them from doing that now? I think the rise of China demonstrates they're certainly trying. | |
| ▲ | esarbe 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 1. Not being forced to work in the cobalt mines, I suspect. 2. Economic coercion. The people are forced by the capitalist system - that was shaped by capitalist interests - to participate in a system they don't have any say in. They cannot even opt out. | | |
| ▲ | csallen 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 1. You didn't answer the question. You said what they wouldn't be doing. What would they be doing that would be making them happier? 2. You didn't answer this question either. What specifically is stopping them from opting out? Who is putting a gun to their head and saying they can't live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle or be a subsistence farmer? The answer is nothing. People are largely making these choices themselves, because they're better options, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who's read a bit of history. |
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| ▲ | satvikpendem 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They are working for money, often in jobs paying more than others in their local economy, when they otherwise wouldn't be. | | |
| ▲ | lkjdsklf 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s still exploitative. The point is that the “gains” are overwhelmingly absorbed by the top. There’s no reason they couldn’t pay them a much bigger share of the profits and raise up that entire part of the world. But yet, they don’t. Because that would cost them some of their own wealth. I’m not even saying it should be equally distributed. The disparity is insane right now though. | | |
| ▲ | csallen 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > There’s no reason they couldn’t pay them a much bigger share... Why should they pay more than market worth? When you go shop at a store, do you pay double the price tag just because you can? No, you don't, because that would cost you more of your wealth. Does the average person in a first-world country donate half their wealth to the average person in a second-world countries? Does the average person in a second world country donate half their wealth to the average person in a third world country? No, and no. It's not really a common thing in human nature to give up a lot of what we have in order to support those who are less fortunate. You might say that's sad, but imo it's still a fact. What is curious about human nature is how, despite this lack of behavior on our own part, we expect those who have more than us to give us what they have. Market wages and prices are fairly set, largely due to supply and demand. > The disparity is insane right now though The disparity is better than ever imo. I'd rather live in this time period than any other, thanks to technology, which is a great equalizer. It provides amazing quality of life improvements across so many areas, from education and healthcare to entertainment and food; then capitalistic competition absolutely demolishes the costs of this tech, to the point where prohibitively expensive tech becomes affordable to billions. Today, a middle class person can eat a cheeseburger that's just as good as what Bill Gates is eating, drive a car that's 99% as good as his, travel to the same places he travels to, wear clothes that are just as good as his, read the same books, watch movies, listen to the same music, go to the same plays, etc. The rich sit in slightly bigger chairs, enjoy slightly shorter waits, and many other improvements that historically would've been considered negligible compared to the gaps between kings and peasants, nobility and servants, owners and slaves, rich and poor. In fact, the richest are having to resort to paying insane prices for useless luxury goods and brand names just to differentiate themselves. Or paying outrageous sums for luxury toys like yachts and planes that most wouldn't even want. | | |
| ▲ | satvikpendem an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Exactly, thank you. I can't believe how many people like this there are on a forum that's ostensibly about startups, but I suppose HN has long since stopped being about startups now. | | |
| ▲ | lkjdsklf 36 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The entire reason I disagree with the way wealth is shared is because I workedi n startups for years. I worked my balls off to make millions for CEO founders and other asshole investors and only got a pittance of the wealth that they made off my work. |
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| ▲ | lkjdsklf 14 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Why should they pay more than market worth? That's the whole moral and ethical difference. Paying them their market worth is the minimum. The entire argument is that when something is wildly successful, that success should be shared with everyone. Not necessarily equally, but not as insanely disparate as it is today. > When you go shop at a store, do you pay double the price tag just because you can? No, you don't, because that would cost you more of your wealth. I'm not sure if you're aware, but your delivery driver is not an eggplant. There's a fundamental difference between a good you purchase and labor. One of those is an actual human being. For two, I and many others do choose where we shop based on how their employees are treated and how they get their goods. Ironically, it was literally the business model of Whole Foods before Amazon bought it and ruined it. For three, I'm not a billionaire. So what I do isn't remotely relevant to any part of this discussion. > The disparity is better than ever imo. I'd rather live in this time period than any other, thanks to technology The disparity is literally, mathematically, the worst it's ever been in human history. That doesn't mean I wouldn't rather live today than another tiem period. That's not even really an important question. The question is how do we make tomorrow even better. How do we allow more people to enjoy the riches that technology has granted us? Those are the real questions. > What is curious about human nature is how, despite this lack of behavior on our own part, we expect those who have more than us to give us what they have. Except that isn't true in the slightest. For one, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the ask. The ask isn't that CEO should give everyone a bunch of money. The ask is that everyone who works at amazon should have more of an equity stake in the company and that likely means giving the CEO less equity. In amazon's case that would mean jeff gives less equity to himself in the early days and more to other workers (or you know.. a union that owns shares.......). I don't really agree that it's the same thing. but even if we want to say that it is the same thing. I don't want anyone to give me shit. I'm relatively well off. I don't need more. I want the wealth to be shared with more people because there are a lot of people who aren't as well off as me. Also, my actions do reflect my values. It's just, I'm not a trillion dollar company so it's not that much impact. > Today, a middle class person can eat a cheeseburger that's just as good as what Bill Gates is eating, drive a car that's 99% as good as his, travel to the same places he travels to, wear clothes that are just as good as his, read the same books, watch movies, listen to the same music, go to the same plays, etc. Outside of music and movies, this isn't even remotely true. Even as someone that is on the very upper side of middle class, I can't eat at the same restaurants as Bill Gates. I'm literally not allowed. I can't buy the same clothes. They literally won't open the store for me. I can't see the same plays, tickets are near unobtainable without connections (not to mention the cost of traveling to venues). Not to mention, a big part of the problem, because of some of these ultra rich nerds, the middle class is smaller and smaller. |
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| ▲ | ceejayoz 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Arbeit macht frei! | | |
| ▲ | sophrosyne42 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You are not a serious person | | | |
| ▲ | satvikpendem 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Ah yes, people working for money, often more than they could make in other jobs in the local economy, is now slavery or concentration camp level conditions. I wish people here would actually live in a second or third world country before saying things like this from the comfort of their air conditioned house. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Slavery would still be slavery if you got paid $0.01/day, so there's clearly some kind of threshold we all have for "good, fairly compensated work". | | |
| ▲ | satvikpendem 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | If your local economy pays you $0.001/day instead, then congratulations, you now make 10x more than everyone else. It doesn't matter how much a dollar is worth elsewhere in the world, because purchasing power parity exists. It's like me being mad that on a hypothetical Mars people make a million dollars a day, that does not affect me whatsoever. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > If your local economy pays you $0.001/day instead, then congratulations, you now make 10x more than everyone else. Sure. The kapos at concentration camps got better food and treatment, too. That doesn't make it a fair, happy, or good arrangement. | | |
| ▲ | satvikpendem 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm not going to continue with someone like you who'd equate concentration camp contidions to working in a factory. It is simply highly disrespectful to those who've actually lived through or died in them. Have a good day. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > equate concentration camp contidions to working in a factory Oh no, not accurately stating history! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour_under_German_rul... > The use of slave and forced labour in Nazi Germany (German: Zwangsarbeit) and throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II took place on an unprecedented scale. It was a vital part of the German economic exploitation of conquered territories. It also contributed to the mass extermination of populations in occupied Europe. Titrating the nastiness of it from "will definitely kill you" to "will make you die miserable, broke, and broken" isn't, IMO, a great fix. People are not required to be satisfied with a tiny pittance just because it's more than their neighbor has. | | |
| ▲ | satvikpendem 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Not sure what you're talking about, I explicitly said those are concentration camp conditions, so obviously yes Nazis murdered many people while making them work in factories. Seems like you think I think they didn't. But modern factory conditions are nowhere near what that regime did. If you want to know, work in a factory. That is what I mean by not equating concentration camp contidions to working in a modern factory. | | |
| ▲ | inigyou 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Do modern factories hire enough people to absorb the whole population as workers? | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > But modern factory conditions are nowhere near what that regime did. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53481253 > Reports by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the US Congress, among others, have found that thousands of Uighurs have been transferred to work in factories across China, under conditions the ASPI report said "strongly suggest forced labour". It linked those factories to more than 80 high-profile brands, including Nike, Apple and Gap. > China, which is believed to have detained more than one million Uighurs in internment camps in Xinjiang, has described its programmes - which reportedly include forced sterilisation - as job training and education. | | |
| ▲ | satvikpendem 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | China is a different story altogether. They're not democratic so of course you'd expect to see things like that. | | |
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| ▲ | ToValueFunfetti 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You seem to be missing a very important part of that history when you make this comparison, and it's a part that I can't imagine you aren't aware of. Not stating that is not "accurately stating history", it's lying by a vile glaring omission. The US also rounded up racial undesirables into camps and used them for labor, but there's a reason that Roosevelt is looked upon more fondly than goddamn Hitler. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > The US also rounded up racial undesirables into camps and used them for labor This was also bad, yes. > there's a reason that Roosevelt is looked upon more fondly than goddamn Hitler Sure, but "less bad" isn't the same as "internment good", and the winners write the history. I am a fan of FDR! But he did some miserable shit to win a war that needed to be won, some of which we cringe at now. A handful of Nazi war crime prosecutions fell apart because Allied troops widely did the same thing, for example. | | |
| ▲ | ToValueFunfetti 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | This doesn't respond to my point at all. I tell you that it is ahistorical, dishonest, and disrespecful to equate subsistence farmers being forced into subsistence factory work by globalization and economic conditions with the holocaust, the mass deliberate extermination of Jews, Romani, Slavs, the disabled, etc. because one uses slavery and the other uses something that you consider comparable to slavery. Your answer is that less bad things are also bad? Sure, yeah, but they're nevertheless less bad and shouldn't be treated as equal. Not to make light of poor working conditions, dirt wages, and child labor. They can be and should be addressed. But they're not genocide and throwing out a "Arbeit macht frei!" is gross here. | | |
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| ▲ | GTP 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Let's make a concrete example. I'm from Italy, currently living abroad. The salary I was getting where I am now, was almost double what I was offered in my home country. We're told that the cost of living in Italy is also lower than other EU countries. While this is true, it isn't half of the rest of the EU. I'm now in a situation where I could go back to Italy, but the above is one of the reasons that makes me doubt wheter it would be a good outcome or not. This is to answer your point about purchasing power. With an Italian salary (considering the same tech job), my purchasing power there would still be lower than my purchasing power here with a local salary. | | |
| ▲ | satvikpendem 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, it can go both ways depending on the specific purchasing power, I never said otherwise, just my point that in many areas of Asia where factories are, people make way more than their local economy even if it might be less than the US. |
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| ▲ | miyoji 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This isn't the question. The question is how much value do they add? If it's more than the money they're making, the people paying them are stealing. You don't like this because it makes it impossible to make money as a capitalist, but that's the entire argument. Making money as a capitalist is always unethical, because it necessarily involves stealing the value of someone else's labor. Just because you can pay someone $1 to do something that makes you $10 doesn't mean it's ethical. It isn't, ever. | | |
| ▲ | satvikpendem 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not everyone subscribes to the labor theory of value, so I question your premise fundamentally. | | |
| ▲ | miyoji 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | There is no labor theory of value, only a value theory of labor. It's funny though, I hadn't read a word of Marx but the first time I understood that I was being paid $15/hr to make websites for a guy who was charging his clients $100 for that same hour of my work, I immediately understood everything about it and its innate truth. I got into the business myself and figured out exactly what value the CEO and the salespeople were bringing, and let me tell you, brother, it wasn't $85. It wasn't even $15. You can call it whatever you want, but you will never convince me that guy wasn't stealing money from me. | | |
| ▲ | satvikpendem 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It is an economic term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value > I got into the business myself Exactly, as capitalism intends. If you don't want to make employee wages then you take on the risk and capital and do it yourself, and are thus rewarded for it. Ironic, if you were actually a socialist you would've tried to help your fellow workers but you instead are the capitalist now. | | |
| ▲ | miyoji an hour ago | parent [-] | | No, I've never been a capitalist. I don't make money on speculation or other passive deployment of capital. I work for my money. I am no longer in business as a solo operative, but I was never interested in hiring other people to exploit and I don't think I ever will be. But at the time it made more sense to remove the useless leech from the equation because that asshole didn't add any value, and none of the owners of any of the businesses I've worked at since have, either. They've destroyed plenty with idiotic decisions, though. | | |
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| ▲ | zeroonetwothree 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
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| ▲ | 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | inigyou 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Before the chokepoint capitalist: you go to a store and pay $20 for an average-quality product. The value chain benefits by getting $20, you benefit by getting the product. Mutual exchange of value. After the chokepoint capitalist: the store has closed so you go to a website and pay $30 to receive the crappiest version of the product in 6 to 10 business days. The website gets $20, the value chain that does 100% of the work (the website didn't add value, just stuck itself in the middle of your transaction) gets $7, the post office gets $3, you get the product. Mutual exchange of value. This "mutual beneficial exchange" stuff is like that xkcd alt text on free speech: it's as if the best argument you can make to support a political position position is that it's not literally illegal to express support for it. "It's a mutually beneficial exchange" is saying the best thing about a transaction is that it's not literally a scam. Seems we should aim a bit higher than that if we want a society that works, yeah? | | |
| ▲ | stouset 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is the key insight. Chant “mutually beneficial exchange” all you want but the system and its players have done everything possible to ensure that everyone at the bottom has as little leverage and as few alternatives as humanly possible. |
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| ▲ | ToValueFunfetti 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't think most people would use this definition. It covers gambling/lottery winnings, finding buried treasure or a gold mine, and paying someone to file your taxes and splitting the extra deductions they found. Really, it includes employment at large- the only 'non-theft' employment would be that which provides no net benefit to the employer. There are parlances where these are included intentionally and they share a starting syllable, but to the common people this is not a definition of theft. | | |
| ▲ | inigyou 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why do people keep assuming that employers don't do any work? Management is work. Is an employee stealing if they receive any net benefit from their employment? |
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| ▲ | mannanj 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Everything is a rich man’s trick. - Documentary |
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