>There is enough of the population filled with envy and greed that they'll lap up whatever a politician tells them bogie man of the day is. Historically it's been the aristocracy, Jews, immigrants, but those don't work any more, so now it's generally "the rich".
I love how the billionaires hoarding resources to entrench their own power are not the greedy ones in your telling.
Oh, I don't know any of those. The only billionaires I know of are those providing service to consumers or businesses that people can freely decide whether to pay for or not. I just subscribed to another thing on Amazon for far less in price than the value I get for it. Thanks Bezos!
The selfish people I know of are politicians and online commenters who think they're entitled to the wealth built by other people.
Okay but the quote in question and this topic generally is more than just the billionaires you know of and the value you personally get from them -- it's about how billionaires exist in the system as a whole, and what it takes to become one.
Yeah, it should be about the value everyone gets from billionaires. I would love there to be more billionaires. It would be a sign that more and more wealth is being created in society. More billionaires should exist!
> what matters is whether what they did was legal or not by the legal standard we are all operating under.
Last election cycle, the world's richest man made the nation's largest political donation to the most expensive campaign in US history. In return he was given unprecedented (and arguably illegal) access to take a figurative chainsaw (his imagery) to our institutions.
We're all under the same laws, but we are not all operating under the same rules. To quote the President, "when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything."
You should read that as a self-preservation technique. The eager use of a strawman tells us PG heard AOC's words as an attack against him personally, his business, and his friends.
So the essay is not a reasoned retort but more an emotional self-defense to soothe a bruised ego. It's to assure himself that no -- in fact he did earn his wealth fair and square, and to imply otherwise shows a lack of understanding of how this all works. But I do love this essay because it does show just how emotional and irrational billionaires can be when their wealth and egos are threatened.
Plenty of us non-billionaires are glad PG wrote this article, because a lot a success-striving people are pretty grossed out by the lie that the only way to be a self made billionaire is to do something 'bad'.
That's a misunderstanding of the original argument. It's not about billionairs "doing something bad". The claim is that the only way to become a billionaire is to benefit from an unfair economic system.
A lot of success-striving people are pretty grossed out by absurd levels of wealth inequality as well.
Sure, some folks are going to be fantastically wealthy, that's OK to a large extent.
But, we're on the precipice of trillionaire's existing in a country where literally half of the population is functionally illiterate (yes, that's the USA), where the middle class is dissolving, and where we are approaching a feudal level wealth inequality-- and all this stuff is accelerating.
I mean, I guess it's not that bad. We still have a democracy. It's not like we have billionaires re-arranging political power and public resources for their pleasure and benefit. Oh wait, we do!
So then if you're glad for it, what do you have to say about the straw man he presents? The sibling reply spells it out, but as a non-billionaire why are you willing to accept that argument?
Yes, this is exactly it. One of the things I've found sort of interesting and unique about the current generation of asshole industrialist sociopathic technologists is that they're not satisfied with all their money and power. They somehow have decided that people have to like them for what they've done and treat them like the best most awesome little boys.
I wasn't there at the time, so I could be wrong. But I feel like their robber baron counterparts 100 years ago knew that they were hated and had some idea of why. And that's why they spent so much money on parks and buildings and colleges and everything else. They could see option B was the masses coming across their lawn with sharp implements.
The hoarding resources and circumventing consumer protections is just the start of it.
Eventually it becomes rational to start buying politicians, and subsequently laws. The next obvious avenue is to then control entire government agencies like the FAA or the FCC and just write favorable laws and regulations they don't even have to circumvent.
But even that isn't the end because they're growing too fast, they actually outgrow the law, so breaking it becomes a rational, profit-driven choice. Huge fines? Regulators breathing down your neck? No worries! Just spend more money then has ever been spent in an election to their favored presidential candidate, and then they get to just shut down investigations into themselves!
But even that isn't enough -- soon it becomes a rational business-forward goal to take over the entire government; or even better become the government. First a city, then a state, then a nation. Guess what folks EVEN THAT won't be enough. Not even everything on this entire planet Earth is enough for them; they also want the Moon and Mars and the entire solar system. They will have to become God at some point for this growth to keep up, and that will still be too little for their egos to bear. Something has to give.
Oh, this is already the case. As they say, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
What's broken is accountability. No one will hold those in power accountable, so instead they mutate into criminals because they can. Then they attract the rest of the criminals and it becomes a critical mass of maniacs, kakistocracy.
One Hacker News commenter says it's worse, another retorts it's a step change and even includes emphasis! Will the first commentor retort back that it's been a double dog step change in the opposite direction? Can't wait to see how this comment thread unfolds!
It's in private beta but sometimes they have a public beta, like just last week. They were supposed to have released this month but they pushed back to October.
Also check out Adrullan Online, it's also an EQ clone but Minecraft voxel style. More like alpha status, they don't seem as far along.
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