I am frustrated by discourses in the software community that suggest most concentrations of wealth are necessarily evidence of theft, partly because that is untrue and partly because it's extremely instrumentally suboptimal for builders of things to think that.
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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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all the reasoned critiques are about a level of wealth impossible without market distortion and bad behavior. people on HN are also crabs. both things can be true!
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Forgive them, for they know not what they say.
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Is social contribution of owner of $5m beach house greater than their wealth? Maybe, maybe not. But it's pretty hard to believe that the social contribution of any deca-billionaire is greater than their wealth. Deca-billionaire class war = good Deca-millionaire class war = idk
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The discourse stems from the wealth disparity in the world. People in $5m beach homes are by definition part of the “1%” hoarding 90% of the worlds wealth. It’s healthy for the community to be questioning these aspects of society.
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Studies show that beyond a certain amount, can’t remember exactly but sub-$100,000, personal happiness is not increased by further monetary gain. So once all basic and “dream” needs are met, what is the pursuit of more monetary gain but a mental illness
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I think this is about a NBA exec, which in this case is indeed a thief
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Completely agree with you - if you're involved in a software co that's valued basically anywhere from $0-$1b how can you even get any sort of economic power to do the aforementioned theft? You have no political power, and hardly any money (especially with software multiples).
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Past that, I think you can make comments that you have the economic power to make markets less effective / act as a rent taker, but really you need to be a $10b + company to do it. Lots of VC money has been wasted trying to create monopolies, with little success.
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