This thought occasioned by an easy sideswipe on HN this morning against people who live in the "beach resort with the $5m+ homes", but I've heard this invoked against everyone from billionaires to developers making $100k, and it drives me *freaking batty.*
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Part of the work of the software community is taking people who have socioeconomic backgrounds where they are unlikely to have known e.g. millionaires growing up and having them build valuable things. It is hard to do this if they think all millionaires are thieves.
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You will meet millionaires working in software. That is not an exceptional outcome for people who work in the industry for large portions of their career. Indeed, the exceptional thing about the software industry is that it routinely delivers this outcome to non-executives.
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This is exacerbated by class distinctions where, in the places where wealth tends to concentrate, talking about it explicitly in an instructive manner is culturally verboten. So you end up with folks involuntarily playing a game whose rules they don't know, badly, and losing.
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Patrick, I like you but I think you’re misreading here. People aren’t upset about regular old millionaires, and wealth tax proposals wouldn’t affect them. It’s the extreme concentrations of wealth and power to multi-billionaires that are harmful, and should be treated as theft.
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Bluntly: I am not misreading. I respect if you don't think you're responsible for the things I'm reading, despite them being adjacent to your politics, but I am reading the things I am reading entirely accurately. I am not imaging conversations with friends, family, colleagues.
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When more than half of American wealth is inherited and the total value of wage theft (and that's only reported & settled cases!) far exceeds all other forms of theft, suspicion of the means by which the rich acquired their wealth is not unfounded...pic.twitter.com/pw1iFEthVv
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Illegal and immoral things like... mastering a scalable craft, and living frugally?
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HOW DARE THEY!!!
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Sure. George Lucas was immoral to create Star Wars, Oprah her TV show or JK Rolling create Harry Potter. There are all sorts of examples of billionaires becoming that rich without doing anything illegal or immoral(at least not so much more than any random person).
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