That’s begging the question, you have to first establish the need for protein at every meal. And I’m not even going to begin to address that digression.
So there’s a kind of filter in your kidneys that handles protein.
Over a lifetime that gets worn out.
Once it is perforated by too much protein, or if there was a problem with it, very bad things start to happen.
Having too much protein, especially the amount pushed by certain industries here in the United States, is maybe not healthy, no.
You just googled or asked a chatbot to find you an article and haven't actually read it, have you?
#1 literally says
> For people with healthy kidneys, higher protein intake is generally safe.
#2 addresses the issues of some specific diets ("very-low-carb or ketogenic diets") that "may be low in fiber-rich carbohydrates". I did not advocate for "very-low-carb or ketogenic diets". Also, it doesn't say anything about potential harms of protein itself.
#3 "It Can Crowd Out Other Nutrients"
Again, no mention of supposed "harms of too much protein", only harms of "too little everything else". I never suggested to go crazy and stop eating other foods.
#4 deals with "type of protein" that "may be just as important as the amount of protein" and is irrelevant to your argument.
#5
> A very high-protein diet, particularly one high in animal foods, can increase the risk of kidney stones, especially for people with a history of these conditions or those who don’t drink enough water.
Well, just drink enough water then. Also, I was talking about generally healthy people. I am not qualified to discuss diet choices of people "with a history of these conditions".
#6 "Protein Bars and Powders Can Backfire"
I never suggested any of this. Also, this doesn't address supposed harms of protein itself, so it is irrelevant again.
No, I'm interested in nutrition, I backed up the risks with a link. Complex carbs and simple carbs are not the same (your original dismissal). Fiber is important for everyone, there's studies that show too little fiber is the cause of a lot of nutrition issues (possibly including IBS, which is a strange relation). Too much protein is not healthy and has risks (despite your unbacked claim). Protein rich unprocessed food is fine, it'll come with fiber.
The problem is that your link doesn't really backs up your claims. #1 and #5 deal exclusively with people with various kidney conditions. #2, #3, #4 and #6 deal with issues that are only tangentially related to consuming too much protein.
All research that claims that eating too much protein is harmful is either about people with kidney disease or explores really far-fetched theoretical scenarios.
While harms of consuming too little protein are obvious and self-evident. Every tissue of your body constantly regenerates itself. Generating new tissue is impossible without protein, because protein is what it is made of.
> “We find most adults are not quite getting enough protein,” says Michael Garcia, MD, a UCLA Health clinical nutritionist.
> When you eat that protein also matters — the protein your body needs must be spread throughout the day. “We’re able to store certain nutrients, but we can't do the same thing with protein,” Dr. Garcia says. “And our bodies can only use so much protein in a sitting and a day.”
> “The recommended amount is really the absolute minimum we need to not fall into a deficient state.”
According to a link[0] provided by another commenter[1] in another subthread of this thread, maximum protein intake is about 2.5 times higher than the recommended protein intake (which is really just "the absolute minimum we need to not fall into a deficient state").
And since most people, who don't consciously control their diets, are very likely to eat closer to the lower bound, I think that telling people to "just eat more protein" is more likely to bring them health benefits than telling people to "just eat less protein"
Which is what TFA effectively does: it tells people about "underrated benefits" of replacing one meal a day by a meal that barely has any protein, which is equivalent to telling people to "just eat less protein".
I think that this article is potentially harmful to people who don't know any better, and I'm very surprised that the issue of reducing protein intake is neither addressed by TFA nor by other commenters. And that my attempt at addressing it receives so much pushback.
We all know he’s wrong. The problem isn’t that he is wrong, it’s that we have elevated the wealthy into a status where they can be wrong, have no correction, and make decisions whole clothe which negatively affect the rest of us. All while being insulated from their negative world view.
It was a generic flamewar tangent: it takes the hottest points of indignation (richness, wrongness) to a such a level of generality that nothing concrete can be said. This doesn't overlap with curious conversation, and HN is supposed to be for the latter.
It's admittedly hard to remain in curious conversation about things that are so activating, so it's quite understandable that people do it.
I usually agree with you, but in this case you're spectacularly wrong. Andreessen, Thiel, Musk, Ellison, Zuckerberg and others have contributed massively ie millions of dollars to the last federal election. They rail publicly against introspection (Andreessen), empathy (Musk), competition (Thiel), death (Ellison), regulation (Zuckerberg, Thiel) and do so on all the media available and their money buys various policies that have rather detrimental effects on the general US population (think energy). These five are just examples that prove grandparent's assessment stands. Just have a look at a list of the contributors to political donations and the search for their public statements re humanity: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donor...
Let me try one last time to get my point across, I'm an ESL, so maybe I was phrasing this wrong. It's not about those 5 or another 5. It's about how wealth negatively influences compassion, empathy and overall behaviour. There are scientific studies on that topic:
If you go along the donor list and search for remarks the biggest political donors have made you'll note that most of them are severely lacking in the 'how-to-human' department.
These are the people buying your politics. I still maintain that GP's assessment stands.
As for the comment type, there's nothing disparaging or even insulting about it. I don't know whether GP is a native English speaker, but as an ESL I can't find anything generalising or otherwise wrong with it. I have flagged a lot of comments for posters calling others Nazis or other insults or getting personal and I'm absolutely sure a lot remain. I have no feeling what kinds of failure you're reacting to here and this is grounds for general insecurity.
The point would be the same if the figure leaned otherwise, but (again, understandably) people only remember the cases that happened to strike them unpleasantly.
Tim Dillon said summarized it pretty well - can't remember or find the exact quote. Something to the effect of:
"Look around at all these things I have - how could I be wrong when I have so much?"
And that's how you get the Andreessen's and Musk's of the world stating these nonsensical things as truth. In their minds, financial success is the ultimate yardstick. The fact that they have so much wealth is a testament that their way of thinking is always right.
You don't need to look very hard to see this is what they really believe. Elon has done extremely silly things like claiming he was the best Path of Exile player in the world because he paid several people grind his account to a high-level. Having enough money to pay someone to play the game for you, is the same as being good at the game, in his mind.
What I took from the video game thing is that he thought he could fool people.
It's very obvious to gamers when someone hasn't played, it actually doesn't matter whether you have high level gear.
There's things you can't buy with money, and respect is one of them. He fundamentally doesn't understand how status works. He could, for free, just put out a video where he says "look at me, I'm a busy CEO, but I play this game even though I'm bad at it".
This is made even more interesting by the fact that musk was caught misrepresenting himself playing the computer game Diablo in the not-so-distant past. IIRC he was either buying accounts or paying someone else to stream on his behalf. [0]
As a complete aside, I beat that game along with the DLC, lvl 170 (scadu 19), all by myself, and it was by far the biggest gaming accomplishment of my life.
People who lie about things like that make me sad. It's actually a hard thing to do. Waste of time? Absolutely.
> In their minds, financial success is the ultimate yardstick.
In a loopy recursive way, it is. Cost gates what we can do and become. Paying back your costs to extend your runway is the working principle behind biology, economy and technology. I am not saying rich people are always right, just that cost is not so irrelevant to everything else. I personally think cost satisfaction explains multiple levels, from biology up.
Related to introspection - it certainly has a cost for doing it, and a cost for not doing it. Going happy go lucky is not necessarily optimal, experience was expensive to gain, not using it at all is a big loss. Being paralyzed by rumination is also not optimal, we have to act in time, we can't delay and if we do, it comes out differently.
That may or may not be true in aggregate, but for extreme outliers it's impossible to separate from survivorship bias. Are Musk and Andreeson really the most skilled entrepreneurs in the world or are they just good enough for luck to propel them to stratospheric success?
They found luck and success and continue to compound that. However it's easy to make so much money when you have that much already. Just promise the world or invest in companies that do and ride unicorns with private investments into the sunset. The risk they take now is very low.
I feel like they will never suffer the consequences of their actions in any negative way should they get it wrong.
Rarely do we see billionaires not become billionaires because they know how the game is played because they shaped the game so they only ever fail upwards.
> Just promise the world or invest in companies that do and ride unicorns with private investments into the sunset.
Yes, which is why the ranks of the very wealthy are filled with lucky grifters. They got rich by luck, then expanded that wealth with some combination of fanciful statements, lies, and outright fraud.
If you look at the entire entirety of understood history of biology:
The most ruthless always wins
That is to say if I go into a village and kill all the adults and teenagers and steal all the kids who are scared to be killed by me, then I will win in the probably two successive generations that I’ve been able to successfully brainwashing into thinking I’m some kind of God.
That is until somebody kills me and then takes over the structure. For example there are no dictatorships that last past the third generation
That is literally and unambiguously how all life operates
There are intermediary cooperation periods. But if you look at the aggregate time periods including how galaxies form it’s all straight up brute force consumption
That's not how humans came to populate areas that previously were dominated by predators who would be obviously deadly to individual humans. Cooperation and planning are what made physically weak humans dominant. That cooperation and planning developed and flourished without authoritarian structures.
A brief look at certain native American tribes might show quite a lot of talking and consensus building, like if some war chief wants a war he needs to drum up support for that. Hours of talking ensue! Not to say that ancient tribes didn't have the worst of what modern corporations have to offer as far as leadership goes, but a claim "basically every village" is basically wrong, or "bascially" is carrying a heck of a lot of weight.
All Native tribes have been thoroughly dominated and decimated into being constrained to reservations by waves of brutal colonists, that were, as I said, the most ruthless.
Read some Charles Mann. Tribal leaders if they can really be described as leaders had to work with consensus and cooperation. Modern society is much more coercive.
Among the Cherokee councils--which included both men and women--unanimous agreement was required for any group decision.
In their society, and in so many others who have been crushed by the forces of empire over the eons, the leaders of the people did not get there by murdering their way to the top. They were respected persons who were elevated to that position by the people.
Tradition tells us the Cherokee did once have a heriditary priestly class, who were called the Ani-kutani, or Nicotani. The people long suffered under their arrogance until one of them went too far, raping a woman while her husband was away. Her husband then amassed an uprising of the people and they killed out the Nicotani to the last man.
(An existence proof that it can be done, if nothing else.)
The primary issue with this is that there is a significant amount of luck involved in acquiring large sums of wealth.
It's hard to get firm numbers around this, but it's estimated around 30-40% of the wealthiest people in the world, derive their wealth almost entirely from inheritance. It's actually very difficult to measure this accurately because a lot of studies will report people as "self-made" even if they started with a small $10 million loan from their parents.
Wealth also follows power laws such that it's significantly easier to acquire more of it once you pass certain thresholds.
Take Mark Cuban - made billions selling some crappy radio service to Yahoo!. Has done effectively nothing since then except for re-investing the proceeds from the buyout. He's technically self-made but it's hard to argue he was anything other than lucky.
Sure, but this argument doesn't actually invalidate the parent at all.
To go back to your biology point:
Figures like Andreessen or Musk (or, at least in my opinion most billoniares) can be directly compared to cancer. They are EXCELLENT at extracting value from the environment they're in. If you limit your moral judgement to just that... then you clearly think cancer is wonderful, since it does the same thing!
Cancer is a group of cells that chemically signal the body to provide resources and spread themselves without restraint, avoiding internal systems that would regulate it via things like apoptosis or other signaling. If you judge a cell by how many resources it can accumulate... Cancer is wildly successful.
But the problem is that extraction without introspection, success with insight, moving without care... eventually actors like this destroy the system they operate within.
Ex - Andreessen should perhaps spend some introspection on the fact that ultimately "dollar bills" are literal cloth (or more likely... digital numbers) that he can't eat, won't shelter him, and can't emotionally satisfy him.
They strictly have value because of the system he operates within that allows exchange, and if he acts without care of that system... he might destroy it. Or it might destroy him.
---
So directly to your point: There is clearly a need for more introspection than "zero". And suggesting otherwise is unbelievably conceited. It is cancerous, and should be treated as such.
I'm damn near broke right now but it would be obvious to you if you spent ten minutes with me that I'm healthier both mentally and physically than either of those two and I can walk down any street with relative impunity and talk with any stranger I meet without concern that they'd recognize me and have beef with me over some stupid shit I did online. I know that when I interact with people it's because they want to interact with me and not my money.
It's true that the cage they live in is gilded but it's still a cage.
Sometimes I stumble across wikipedia biography pages a person like a mumblerapper who had a meteoric rise in fame and wealth only to die in a puddle of puke from a Xanax overdose at like 25. It's sad and everything but when I read it I just think "Man, what a fucking idiot..." Like sure this dude probably had a great few years conspicuously consuming a bunch of shit and showing off a bunch of money with some floozies hanging off his arm but where is he now? Dead and cold in a hole in the ground. And he died a pretty pathetic death to boot.
I don't know about Andressen but I'm pretty sure I'll outlive Musk. As risk adverse as he is for his physical safety he'll end up doing something downright stupid that ends in his untimely death. With Andressen there's a growing possiblity that enough people wise up to his destructive impact on society and a movement where people who are still physically capable but with inoperable brain cancer or something start taking out people like Andressen.
I have yet to check the prediction markets for this proposition but I would bet on Peter Thiel being the first one to mistake a fancy cup for the Holy Grail.
The curse of fame is really underappreciated. Rich and famous people obviously never talk about it in public as it is going against the narrative that builds their brands, but they feel it. They are so jealous of the quietly rich who no one will recognize. Who can still live the same life as you and I. They really are trapped. They basically have to fall of the face of the earth and age out of their appearance to have a chance of obscurity. And their line of work makes that impossible.
They can't go to grocery stores. They can't go to parks. They can't go to casual events. They can't be spontaneous and they can't be serendipitous. Any relationship they have with people is in the shadow of their image. Most people they interact with are trying to grift them in some was as they are a publicly known high value mark. People value what they can get from them vs their personality. Over time they subconsciously under stand this, start to trust no one, and rely heavily on a circle of people who happen to be in reach who may still be grifting them. It is like they live in some artificial habitat on earth, supported by staff, not actually on earth.
Oh come on. So you're rooting for the evil genius in the comic book movie? You would harm millions of people to move up the financial success yardstick?
I don't think many people would agree with such positions.
I do think that people who have succeeded financially might adopt that ethos as an ex post rationalization.
I feel like your comment is evidence that you are insufficiently acquainted with various flavors of cult-like behavior and wingnuttery. There are in fact people who sincerely believe that you don't have to eat [1], who believe it so fervently that they risk and sometimes lose their lives for that belief.
Humans are social creatures. We are biologically inclined to follow charismatic leaders, even off a cliff. In most people, the susceptibility to suggestion is much stronger than the strength of their rational beliefs. Just look at American politics, for example.
All of this is to say that if Andreessen said, "I don't eat food," there would be a small but vocal group who would see that as validation of their beliefs; there would be a think-piece in the Atlantic about the history of breatharianism; Hacker News comments about what does "food" mean, really, etc. Yes, people would take it seriously. Just because he's rich and has therefore bought a loud megaphone.
Are you kidding? People would eat that up if he said that. Soylent would sell like crazy. You'd see protein smoothie shops pop up all over the bay area. For better or worse there is a subset of people who just lap up at whatever comes out of these people's mouth.
If you were to make a list of the most important people in history how different would it be from the list of the richest people in history?
How many different occupations do you think you would find on the important list. Would it have scientists, mathematicians, doctors, engineers, world leaders, activists, religious figures, teachers?
How many occupations do you think would be on the richest list?
Do you think it is fair to judge the success of Martin Luther King Jr or Albert Einstein based on the amount of money they made?
Also doesn't help that wealth means they can own newspapers or social media to promote their shitty takes as gospel, and have armies of regular Joe fanbois, that kiss their ass and tell us how wise they are...
You say financial success as though it is completely independent of pretty much everything. "How could I be wrong, look how handsome I am"
To create great wealth in a vibrant capitalist society you have to have some model about the world you can exploit. It can be a better rocket design, some insight into human psychology that can help you raise money, or something else.
Some people fall ass backwards into money through luck, but that's rare, and people with great wealth don't have that luxury because they would squander it away and won't be able to grow what they have been given. At any extreme, you have to have both luck and skill. The best athletes are both incredibly gifted and incredibly hard working
They could be wrong on some things but to pretend they don't have a somewhat functional world model that is different enough from the consensus that it allows them to exploit it for great wealth is just naive.
I think the flip side would be "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" I prefer why aren't you happy myself, but sure, random person commenting on the internet about how the wealthiest people in the world don't know anything about the world, why haven't you exploited your superior knowledge relative to said billionaire to amass great wealth for yourself?
> Some people fall ass backwards into money through luck, but that's rare
You and I have vastly different mental models of the world. Or, at least, very different definitions of “luck”. For example, I would probably say that anyone who is rich through a “family business” has quite a bit of “luck” to thank (by my definition), except for the founder. And even then, the founder is usually “lucky” by connections (e.g. generous government contracts).
> and people with great wealth don't have that luxury because they would squander it away and won't be able to grow what they have been given
If I had to guess, it probably takes about an IQ of 90 to not lose generational wealth, unless there’s an addiction at play. Maybe even less.
So your contention is that it's easy to run a family business and manage immense wealth?
I'm going to take a wild guess, but I would bet you never ran a business. I've never heard this from anyone that ran a business. Sure they give you the whole "I am very fortunate and lucky in my life" but never "yes, it's trivial to run a business"
And my other bet would be you had never had any extended interaction with a 90 IQ individual
> So your contention is that it's easy to run a family business and manage immense wealth?
No, I said except for the founders. Real easy to be the brother or son or aunt to the family business founder and become rich.
> I've never heard this from anyone that ran a business.
I never said “not time consuming” or “stressful”, which I feel like you’re putting those words in my mouth. The first thing I usually hear from (especially braggarts) small business owners is about the biggest contract that they have, which is usually some government contract or bid that they won from Walmart or Amazon. When ZIRP dried up I heard less bragging about such contracts.
> And my other bet would be you had never had any extended interaction with a 90 IQ individual
All four years of my American public high school education. I’m saying the bottom 25% of my high school class might lose generational wealth through poor decisions (90 IQ is roughly 75% of population). I think that’s fair. We are talking about generational wealth, after all. I can think of a few 90 IQ people from my graduating class that are trust fund kids who haven’t managed to lose it all yet.
The greatest philosophers are rarely the wealthiest people. Wealth generally comes from being presented with opportunities, putting in the work to make the most of those opportunities, and being lucky enough that they end up being good. Intelligence can be an asset here, but bigger assets are knowing people already in positions of power, already having resources you can leverage, and being willing sacrifice years of your life in pursuit of wealth. Those factors don't require you to be well reasoned, logical, or intelligent.
I think Marc might be referring to "navel gazing". If introspection is so important, we wouldn't need to do experiments to figure out what is reality. He could be advocating for Empiricism. You will find quotes like "If unsure, take a decision and make it right later. Don't get trapped in analysis paralysis". Basically two camps are fighting here : those who think reality can be figured out by thinking alone. and those who think we need to get out there and collect data and analyse it.
I am personally biased toward Radical Conversatism.
Paul Dirac (1902–1984) was a British theoretical physicist and mathematician whose work on the Dirac equation (1928), which merged quantum mechanics with special relativity, predicted the existence of antimatter, specifically the positron. His approach to this discovery was deeply rooted in a mathematical philosophy that valued elegance, consistency, and a belief that nature is fundamentally mathematical, often placing him ahead of experimental validation.
Radical conservatism in physics, often associated with John Archibald Wheeler, is a philosophical approach that adheres strictly to established, successful principles—like quantum mechanics or general relativity—while pushing them to extreme, unexpected logical conclusions. It involves modifying as few laws as possible (conservative) while daringly following the math to radical insights.
> You say financial success as though it is completely independent of pretty much everything.
I never made a suggestion that financial success is completely independent of anything.
> They could be wrong on some things but to pretend they don't have a somewhat functional world model that is different enough from the consensus that it allows them to exploit it for great wealth is just naive.
It's naive to think that financial success sometimes blinds people into thinking they are generally an expert in all areas?
> but sure, random person commenting on the internet about how the wealthiest people in the world don't know anything about the world
Also, never said anything to this effect.
> why haven't you exploited your superior knowledge relative to said billionaire to amass great wealth for yourself?
How could you possibly know if I have, or have not?
Your entire reply is effectively an unrelated tangent to what I said.
Hmm, I think this statement needs some support "To create great wealth in a vibrant capitalist society you have to have some model about the world you can exploit."
Money simply invested in a market fund generally creates wealth, and that doesn't require a model of the world that's much more sophisticated than the average person's.
"Some people fall ass backwards into money through luck, but that's rare," This feels unsupported as well. How could you even attempt to quantify what percent of success is due to luck, much less establish confidence that this percent is going down?
> To create great wealth in a vibrant capitalist society you have to have some model about the world you can exploit.
As an individual? No. There's an interesting paradox here.
The paradox is that almost no matter what game you're playing, you want to play safe when you're winning and take chances when you're losing. That's what most rich people actually do, and naturally they take as few chances as they can.
But the richest of the rich, aren't going to be those. The very richest are going to be those who are comfortably winning, but still feel the need to take high-risk bets. Usually because of a pathological need to prove themselves.
A few of them, that is. For every Jobs, Musk etc. there's going to be twenty rich failsons who failed in their big bets. You just don't hear about them - why would you, they're now a much lower tier of rich.
So I don't think it's necessary to assume the super-rich has a better model of the world than average. Because of this effect, I think they're more likely to have deeply flawed models of the world, and in particular, deeply self-destructive personal values.
There are a number of recent antics from Musk and Trump in particular which I think can illustrate that well. You'd think they'd both be happier people if they were more content with what they had and weren't so eager to fuck up the world for the rest of us - but their messed up personal values get in the way of that.
I think the answer for most people is one of "I wasn't dealt the right hand of cards by fate" and/or "I don't want to spend my life acting like a sociopath and exploiting others for a small chance at great wealth."
HN posters are famously overconfident, sure, but wealth is a bad measure of success. Putin is one of the richest people on earth, but responsible for extreme political repression and global instability. Pablo Escobar did very well financially. Financial success says how well you’ve extracted wealth from others, and approximately zero about your contributions to society.
Einstein, Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, Orwell had tremendous public impact and “success”, with relatively little wealth to show for it.
Wealth gives those with shallow sense of values an easy scoreboard to look down on others, which is how you get disasters like Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed attempt at “effective altruism”, or almost-trillionaires like Musk gutting the federal government, while extracting billions in public funding and subsidies.
There's always going to be outliers, but there is this general premise that guys like Marc, Elon, and Bezos are failures in spite of their wealth. There is no way they Forrest Gump'd their way into that money.
In fact, there is a bizarre visceral hatred for all the old Netscape guys here—Marc, Brendan, and Jamie—who in particular probably hates this place back even more, even though they are directly responsible for 95% of HN posters having jobs today.
> wealth is a bad measure of[...]your contributions to society
To be _abundantly_ clear, I agree with you and your assumptions here - but, please note that you are making some assumptions here about what "success" is defined as, which might explain why other people disagree.
Sure, but with that definition parent’s comment becomes “wealth is a good indicator of wealth”, which while true certainly isn’t useful.
I’m assuming they meant to imply wealth is a measure of positive social impact, which is a bad measure for the reasons I stated. They also might mean it as a proxy for “rightness”, whatever that is, which is even more of a problem but for different reasons.
> I’m assuming they meant to imply wealth is a measure of positive social impact
I don't see any basis for assuming that (again, I say this respectfully - I hold similar values to what I'm assuming you do)
> They also might mean it as a proxy for “rightness”
This feels closer, but still not right IMO. I see it more as a claim that "success" is "ability to achieve one's _own_ aims" - personally, internally-established objectives - whereas you (and I) are trying to tie "success" to external, pro-social measures. Basically, selfishness vs. community.
Thank you for illustrating another feature of the billionaires' defensive bubble: anyone who dares criticize them from a position of lesser wealth is just "jealous" and their criticism is presumptively invalid.
There is obviously some minimum level of competence and intelligence required to be wealthy (not losing all of it), but for many becoming fabulously wealthy is as much a matter of circumstance than anything else. I would guess most people here would also be billionaires if they had the same opportunities and circumstances as Musk.
I don't think there's a minimum level of competence even. You can get very wealthy by sheer luck and timing.
Also, a lot of wealthly people aren't stupid like we think. They're evil, which is different. And being evil is actually pretty good for being wealthy. Most people are encumbered by their morality. Evil people are not, so they can do much more.
This reminds of me the following wonderful Numberphile video [1] where they compare the success of billionares to gas molecules: "everybody is just bumping around randomly but the one person that, you know, that became a billionare or something--they wrote their autobiography 'how I got here, all the great decisions I made to beat everybody'... It was just random." I've always wondered whether it would be possible to compute the expected number of billionaires with a model like this. If the number is higher than the expectation, well ok, some fraction of them are consciously steering themselves into billionaire-hood. Otherwise, it's probably dumb luck. It's a fun null hypothesis.
Everyone thinks they are right, but it’s having the grace to be able learn, be wrong and develop is the point here! Also your average HN commenter does not get listened to or promoted anywhere to the same degree!
In one interview, Mush called it the "empathy exploit".
This is the kind of person who would benefit from being raised and humanised in a village where people co-operate. Because then, as countless others have discovered, bluster and insults work only until the self-aggrandising narcissist meets someone not only bigger, but with better principles, and an actual leader of people.
There is a reason why many satisfying movie plots involve a final, usually violent comeuppance served to a self-aggrandising narcissist.
that's a stretch: andreessen got wealthy because he worked for the UIUC group in a project which turned out super popular, super funded by Jim Clark, and got massive explosion in worth. there's no sociopathy involved from him back then.
Musk made a company that jumpstarted some wealth and invested in other things which exploded.
Toto Wolff is a gazillionaire because he too made some pretty incredibly timed investments.
point is, extreme wealth results from some combination of work, timing luck, strategy, and sociopathy, but they're not all required to span the space of wealthy people.
Yeah, that's the thing; once you have a billion dollars, you are set for many lifetimes of extremely comfortable living. Allowing a single person to suffer while you have more wealth than you can spend in a dozen (or more) lifetimes is pretty cruel. I mean, I don't really see how it is significantly different than hoarding.
I've never had billions of dollars and realistically I probably won't ever have billions of dollars, but I would certainly like to think that I'd keep enough for myself to keep myself thoroughly entertained, and then give the rest away somehow.
Of course, I've never been tested with this. Maybe if I was gifted billions of dollars I'd be as evil as the rest of the billionaires.
i think your observation is consistent with the giving pledge thing of warren buffett and others, that they accrued massive wealth but want to give it away.
"Better to just not think about it" feels like the majority sentiment and a lot of people's path to their own (albeit less) success. We’ve got lots of modern phrases like "don’t listen to the haters" or "you do you" or things like imposter syndrome to support it.
Yes. One of the most important things to learn is how to introspect and actually FEEL the pain that surfaces when you do. That's how healing begins. If you never do that, you're stuck in whatever destructive patterns you use to avoid that introspection forever.
It turns out that when you actually allow yourself to feel those things, it gives your nervous system the ability to metabolize and process them.
I also think it is important to learn to feel and to separate the feeling from the acting on the feelings. In my mind this is what distinguishes an adult from a child. Sadly, I know many adults who have never learned this lesson (including members of my own family), so it's probably not a very good legal definition, although I like it as a practical one.
I sometimes encounter this phenomenon among college students in my job as a professor. Most college students have learned some form of it, but not all of them. I often think "somebody should teach them those skills" but it has always felt like it was out of scope for _me_ to be the one teaching them. I'm supposed to be teaching computer science. On the other hand, being unable to act rationally on stimulus is ultimately self-sabotaging, and will they be able to absorb my lessons if they can't get past little things like the way I look or the way I dress? This is not a hypothetical: any faculty member whose courses solicit end of semester feedback gets comments like "I didn't like his class because he seemed smug" or "I could not concentrate because I hated her accent" and nonsense like that.
I think they're reflexive people and for Andreessen the long period where he was massively invested in the shadiest crypto companies required pushing a culture of conformity.
A lot of Andreessen's investments were essentially pyramid schemes and the greatest threat to those investments was intellectual honesty & introspection.
Under that pressure from him and others a lot of the tech world shifted towards being more tribal. We saw a huge shift away from intellectual honesty and critiquing actions & ideas on their merits to instead a culture of fiercely defending founders and relentless hype.
I also believe that's why they shifted towards the political rightwing, because the more tribalist approach is presently rewarded on that side.
I've taken the position that anything the ultra-wealthy say is likely wrong, and every decision they take will negatively affect society, unless and until its corroborated by an unbiased source with expertise in the subject matter.
I think the ultra-wealthy are just operating under what they think they need to tell people in order to get the outcomes they want. You're only going to hear the truth - or something correct - if its to their benefit.
I used to think this but I think that's only true for the low-profile wealthy folks. And they voice their opinion indirectly, like through owning media companies.
The people that feel the need to be loud and in the public eye aren't necessarily playing 4d chess. It's really just an ego thing for them.
The wealthy who keep a low-profile are the smarter one's.
Yes, deciding to be famous AFTER becoming rich is a choice, and arguably not optimally intelligent.
Many in these positions get there by being really good/smart/lucky at something once and then having a war chest of capital to deploy for life.
It doesn't mean they are a polymath genius with unique worthwhile insights into all facets of the human experience. In fact, it may almost be the opposite. The hyper focus and hustle required to attain what they do often requires withdrawing from the wider world, not being particularly well read, and living in a socioeconomic/political/work bubble.
The ultra-wealthy are no different from anyone else. However the effects of their decisions - both good and bad - tend to be much larger than what most of us can do.
Yes, they are different: People who care about others are less likely to become ultra rich. You become ultra rich by mostly caring about your cut and your profits.
While there are exceptions with people who were lucky and were at the right spot at the right time, there is a different distribution of character traits compared to society at large.
I invite you to expand on your blanket statement. I posit that the ultra-wealthy are necessarily and unavoidably transformed by the lived experience of having that level of wealth: virtually any logistical inconvenience you and I currently relate to can be monied away; the proportion of strangers and near-strangers that want to interact with you deferentially and transactionally jumps; the consequences for many of your mistakes become invisible to you.
edit: I don't mean just to shoot you down here--I think there's a counterargument to be made here. It might start with "those folks really are the same as us, responding and acting as we ourselves would when dropped into that environment and surroundings". That would hinge on observing the actions and behaviors of someone who, having lived a life as a billionaire, has lost or forsworn that level of fortune and whose lives we might now judge as in the range of "normal". I think that'll be hard to find; the wealthy making public pledges to give away 99% of their wealth are still ludicrously wealthy, and to my knowledge all make that commitment to do so around when they die--not before.
I agree that the consequences are greater.
There seem to be at least two perspectives on whether wealth makes you different:
1. In 1926, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the rich “are different from you and me,” and Ernest Hemingway supposedly retorted, “Yes, they have more money.”
2. Kurt Vonnegut's obituary for Joseph Heller...
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!”
Or, as Cyndi Lauper sang it, 'Money Changes Everything'
I'm of the latter persuasion, that wealth influences one's personality in important ways.
I think the Hemingway line could read two ways. He could be saying there is no difference save for having money. Or, he could be implying money is corrupting and would lead to the same observed behaviors no matter who gets rich.
The nature of the ultra wealthy is obviously no different than the rest of us - but the nurture and environment they live is in extremely different. That they live so isolated from the broader human community, are so disconnected from routine discomforts, and so shielded from any kind of consequences is an obvious difference from the rest of us. It’s no wonder they develop sociopathic tendencies when they are materially rewarded for such behavior and have no empathy for the way the rest of us must live.
>The ultra-wealthy are no different from anyone else
The ultra wealthy are very different from anyone else. First of all, their focus gets to be about power, everyone else's is survival and making the rent. Second they have armies of ass kissers. Third, they have no job and can even own politicians. And of course their wealth isolates them from repercursions anyone else would face, and puts their experience way out of phase with the regular people.
And we should also account for the sociopathic drive that made them rich in the first place (sociopaths are overrepresented in higher status positions).
I really like the way you put it: “It’s okay to be wrong. We’re all wrong from time to time. What’s not okay is not having a way to be corrected by the outside world for a specific reason: being at the top of the political pyramid, being ultra-wealthy and surrounded by flattery, etc"
You're right, but we've never devised any system that prevents this from happening. Every single organization leads to a concentration of wealth and power. And even those ideally conceived to have counterbalancing forces, eventually are corrupted and subverted. It seems to be the steady state of reality.
This will be the reality until we come up with a way to make good decisions using direct democracy, and make that decision-making process so fast and easy that it can be used for any kind of group decision.
Concentration of power stems from our inability to make good decisions as a group of equals. We have to choose someone to make decisions for the group because there is currently no other working way to make them. Current technology might enable us to find some form of true democracy, but I'm not sure if anyone is looking for it.
There does not seem to be an easy answer for which political system delivers the best benefits.
Direct democracy has defects that have been apparent for thousands of years. I believe Plato was one of the first to argue that democracy turned into mob rule.[0] It seems unlikely that this was entirely original. Similar ideas must have been current in Athens well before his time, since they had abundant experience with demagogues and other problems during the Peloponnesian War. I don't think Plato's solution (Philosopher Kings) was correct, but it's harder to argue against his framing.
It therefore seems like a question of which approach is less bad up front and whether it decays into something worse. Personally I would satisfied with a functioning republic in the US, which is where I live. What we have now is an oligarchy.
The 51% voters are just another self-interested power center that will favor themselves and extract resources from the 49%. Not to mention that the system can be corrupted at every point. For instance, you still need police and military to enforce the results of group decisions; and at any moment they can seize power and take control, unless they're placated with preferential treatment by the system - reinventing systemic hierarchy.
There is no system that is immune to human corruption. And all the high-minded belief in the human spirit, and the good-will of democracy, falls flat with even a cursory examination of previous attempts.
All of reality clumps no? Any grouping tends to attract more grouping, because the force that created the group increases as its groups more. Be it wealth, power, or sheer mass.
This feels like a rule of the universe, from plants and solar systems to wealth portfolios.
It's a lovely idea, but that system will have to be enforced by a power structure... which will always tend to grant itself special privileges. And even before such corruption, without inherited wealth, there will still be entrenched institutions that control resources, and have a continuity of leadership, that will always be looking out for themselves and their in-group. It's just natural.
Because rich people have both the power and motivation to define it in a manner in which they still win. Wealth can be education. Wealth can be contacts. Wealth can be properties. Wealth can be businesses. Wealth can be in other countries.
He is wrong about almost everything, and especially about introspection.
But he got lucky and wrote a good-enough-for-the-time browser at just the right time.
Now, he mistakes his luck and his F_U_Money for skill and intelligence. And why wouldn't he? He can simply walk away from any situation that makes it seem he is wrong.
And the broader problem in society is nearly the entire populace has been conditioned to ignore the factors of luck and mistake monetary success with hard work and wisdom, when in fact those people are often no more than massively amplified fools.
The massive follies of most these current robber barons makes the case for taxing them out of existence. Once someone has enough money that they and their family cannot spend it in multiple lifetimes of excessive luxury, the only reason to have more is power. We should ramp up tax rates so those people cannot accumulate that power.
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. A society that fails to manage that fact of human nature dooms itself.
You're correcting him by commenting on a popular article arguing he's wrong. So it appears he has been "corrected" rather broadly and vocally
He's free to choose what to believe. He's not "insulated from his negative world view". If you're correct and introspection is to his benefit and he chooses to forgo it, it's his loss.
So I don't know what you're upset about.
I think his broader point is that people are too introspective in modern times and its paralyzing. For instance, I remember reading a blog that argues that argues PTSD doesn't exist historically. People saw terrible things, buried their children and suffered unimaginable pain but there were no concept of PTSD. He argues that its not because it was taboo (virtually every other topic that was taboo was extensively documented), so perhaps there was less introspection.
It's not just war. Take infant deaths. Absolutely devastating today, but a large percent of people went through that in the past. They even re-used the names of their dead children.
That has been the case for a vast swathe of time across history. It hurts because we had a nice couple of decades where it seemed that, not only was this not the case, but that we were directionally accelerating away from it.
I think you have put this in a correct, concise manner which I agree with entirely.
The smaller version of same phenomena I see in enterprises where musings of non/barely technical leadership of a tech org is not only considered as go-to strategy but also why previous plans and implementations which were so obviously crappy not totally replaced yet.
To put it another way, the problem is not what this idiot is saying on some podcast, the problem is that people are listening to it. For example, in the case of this blogger, listening and then taking the time to publish a web page about what was said, hoping to make money from readers
Not just elevated them, but effectively given them a free pass for anything they do.
Musk slanders a cave diver trying to rescue trapped children as a paedo? No problem! The courts said it's fine. It's just a joke bro, you should be laughing.
Andreeson frontruns pump and dump shitcoins on retail investors via coinbase et al? Don't worry about it! Conning and scamming is fine now. The dog either eats or gets eaten.
We are far too kind to people being visibily obnoxious people because they are rich.
Immense wealth or power should be difficult to hold on to. Until our policymakers understand that we'll have to occasionally resort to the Luigi method.
A salient comment on the current times. But I'll extend it beyond just wealthy people. We have given every soul a platform. At first glance, that seems like a good thing. But we've given everyone a platform where they can accumulate large followings and express a great many opinions completely unchallenged. In reality, we've built force multiplier tools that enable the dissemination of all takes, good and bad, at a rather alarming rate. And, I would argue, the average joe is a bit gullible and easy to indoctrinate. Society, largely speaking, does not receive enough education and protections against these types of indoctrination platforms that we've made. That celebrities, ultra wealthy individuals, bad actors, and random dumbasses can all use and abuse to sell some physical or cognitive junk.
We've entered the "Emperor has no Clothes; but if I just prend he does, I'll be elevated higher than anyone who says otherwise" or "Lets all try to keep ourselves out of the permanent underclass"
Yes. I mean calling them out and people take personal offense as if they are receiving handouts from them or they are that rich. They don't give a damn about anyone or anything for that matter
The penultimate sentence of this fantastic 1997 interview with Trump has stayed with me since I read it: "Trump, who had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul."
Not just crypto in the "ride the lightning that is bitcoin" but NFTs. FFS, that takes some serious lack of introspection as to assign any value to those things other than laundering money and duping the public.
Americans are weird creatures in this regard. Give them 5% of their compensation / 0.0001% of a company in stock/options and suddenly they think they have become Big Capital.
If you need to work to collect a wage to pay your expenses, you are still labor, sorry if that hurts peoples feelings, but it shouldn't.
John Steinbeck: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”
It's a big number, but it's often tied up in housing in VHCOL/HCOL areas. It also doesn't mean much re: not needing to work in these areas.
Also given retirement in US is self-funded via saving/investment instead of pension, someone who wants a comfortable retirement in many areas of this country needs $1M NW by 65 to generate a $40k/year income (above the social security payments which don't go so far) at safe withdrawal rates.
These terms are all pretty flexible - blue collar in 1950 is extremely different than blue collar in 2026.
What category would you place the following 99% of human people:
You you will lose your ability to eat and have housing if you do not show up to a place (even if it’s at your rented apartment) and spend hours doing on what someone else wants you to do
Having your body worn out before you can retire assumes retirement as a concept exists, which it doesn’t in the US. “Retirement” aka living without working, as a blue collar worker, was a middle class fantasy that only existed for an extremely small minority of people from 1949-1985. Even the ones who had their bodies worn out dealt with years of asbestos poisoning black lung all these other externalities that corporations did not care about and so arguing about this concept of retirement is moot because it’s never really a real thing.
For the majority of working people in the world they never had any type of retirement like this and for anybody who did it was a very temporary period in western society.
So while it might’ve been true in the past that the body was the first thing to break, now it’s just “can you maintain your own financial status in the future given your previous work history.”
Everybody at this point understands that there is no possible job you could as an 18-year-old in 2026 that you will be able to retire from and live comfortably in your twilight years from 65-80 with the earnings and “investments” made in the preceding 50 years of work.
Beyond that if I look around at least the “western” world there are very few of those jobs left that totally destroy your body - military, mining, construction etc… still have a lot of that (My body is ruined from 17 years of military) but it’s a shrinking group
For example most of agriculture is being done mechanically compared to 100 years ago, similarly for manufacturing lines humans are a minority in a manufacturing line at this point
I remember back in the 1990s it would take a work party of three families to cut and bail hay in Texas. I was on one of those crews for at least a couple years as a kid. Literally nobody does that anymore it’s all mechanical bailers and silege wrapping machines
Organizing years ago would have been huge for software developers but unfortunately I do think it is too late now, given the onset of AI (weakens the collective by improving individual productivity since not every developer will be onboard) and just the current political landscape. The NLRB has been gutted.
there was a before the nlrb and there were unions then. would you expect union organizers for a tech workers union to be assassinated? would you expect members of a tech workers union to be gunned down en masse? if no, then the political landscape has been so much worse than now, and unions have managed to form.
If you believe you are incapable of actually doing anything then you are correct, and you should just go ahead and submit yourself to whatever power structure you think will benefit you the most
Of course you're not here to argue, there's no precedent for what you're suggesting. Nobody has fought against Apple, Google or Microsoft and taken home a significant victory.
This leads me to believe that the power structures can't be fixed. There is no amount of protesting that can coerce private capital to take humanity's best interests to heart, that's the tragedy of the commons. There is no guerilla warfare you can wage on a totalitarian platform like iOS or Windows; you simply lose in the end, because you are malware and the OEM is always right.
Movements like GNU/FOSS win because they don't even acknowledge the existence of corporate technology. They don't "fight" against anyone or make multi-billion dollar nemeses because it is a waste of volunteer hours that could go towards building something wonderful.
Your belief that "power structures can't be fixed" perfectly illustrates what educator Paulo Freire described as the oppressed having a "diffuse, magical belief in the invulnerability and power of the oppressor". Anthropologist David Graeber noted that modern capitalism has constructed a vast bureaucratic apparatus "designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures" and to ensure that challenging existing power arrangements seems like an "idle fantasy". The idea that the platform holder holds all the cards is an ideological tool used to encourage passivity and convince you that your only option is to submit.
As James C. Scott demonstrates in his analysis of authoritarian systems, any formally organized, rigidly planned system is ultimately parasitic on the informal, unscripted practices (which he calls mētis) of the people within it. A closed system cannot survive on its own rigid rules; it requires the constant, active cooperation and practical know-how of its subjects to function.
Gene Sharp's foundational theory of power echoes this: no regime, corporation, or totalitarian system possesses inherent power. Their power derives entirely from the cooperation, obedience, and skills of the people they govern or employ. If blue-collar technologists, developers, and users collectively withdraw their skills, labor, and cooperation, even the most monolithic tech empire can be paralyzed. The power of the OEM is not absolute; it is entirely contingent on your continued participation.
You point to the GNU/FOSS movements as successful because they ignore corporate nemesis-building and instead focus their volunteer hours on creating "something wonderful."
In the study of nonviolent struggle, building alternative social institutions and alternative communication systems are indeed recognized and highly effective methods of intervention. Furthermore, creating "commons" (like open-source software) is crucial because it provides a practical model for a non-commercial way of life.
However, building alternative commons is not a substitute for directly challenging power. As Silvia Federici argues, creating commons must be seen as a complement to the struggle against capital, not an alternative to it. If you only build wonderful alternatives without contesting the power of private capital, your creations remain vulnerable to being enclosed, commodified, or crushed by the very monopolies you are trying to ignore.
Ignoring the oppressor does not make them disappear. If technologists want to reclaim power, the first step is to reject the neoliberal fatalism that views the current corporate dominance as an unchangeable law of nature. Power concedes nothing without a demand, and the limits of tech monopolies are prescribed entirely by the endurance of the people who build and use them.
Oppressors are not a monoculture. Sometimes they are extremely entrenched, sometimes they are fragile like a teacup. Sometimes they seek decelerationist and traditionalist narratives, while others seek accelerationist and neoliberal ideals. Outlining "oppression" as a dialectical certainty is why revolutionary politics die in the cradle while capitalism has Billions Served written under the sign. Reality is convoluted, and politics are not a computer that transist from "populist" to "authoritarian" depending on the program you run. Plenty of revolutionary history has taught us that.
Framing Apple, Google or Microsoft in this manner is counterproductive and does not produce any serious roadmap to undermine their behavior. The will to change has to come from the top, or else it will never be conclusively realized or codified. Change has to be genuine and desirable, or else someone else will come along to copy FAANG and take their place. This is why regulation provoked such a strong anti-intervention sentiment from businesses; it works. A USB-C iPhone was inevitable, but only once you changed incentive to punish lock-in.
On oppression's flip side, one could argue that the continued success of businesses like IBM provides precedent for private capital to aid and abet mass atrocities without ever facing real punishment. Internal revolution has never produced results in these circumstances, and I don't think it ever will. You can't rely on mushy-gushy feelings to make people do what's right, you have to lay down the law in black-and-white.
Capitalist realism is the most mushy gushy, vibes-based ideological cowardice at large, today.
Sure, oppressive power structures are not a static monolith, and they constantly morph and reinvent themselves to survive. However, the conclusion that change must therefore come strictly from the "top" via "black-and-white" regulation (or that that bottom-up revolution relies on "mushy-gushy feelings"!!) misses how both state regulation and nonviolent resistance actually function in reality.
While top-down regulation (like the EU mandating USB-C) can force specific consumer changes, relying on the "top" to conclusively lay down the law ignores the reality of regulatory capture. The state is not a neutral, objective arbiter; it is heavily influenced by the very private capital you wish to regulate.
Or is regulatory capture just a mushy gushy delusion?
If you rely exclusively on top-down regulations to protect humanity's best interests, you are relying on a legal apparatus that is constantly being bought, rewritten, and defanged by the very entities it is supposed to regulate.
Again, you correctly point out that if FAANG falls, someone else will just copy them and take their place. Sociologist Beverly Silver describes this exact dynamic as the core survival mechanism of capitalism. When corporations face intense pressure, regulation, or labor unrest, they do not simply accept defeat; they implement fixes. They relocate to regions with cheaper labor and fewer regulations (as previously discussed in this thread), and they automate or restructure the workplace to disempower workers.
Furthermore, they abandon heavily regulated or highly competitive industries altogether and move their capital into entirely new, unregulated product lines (like moving from manufacturing to tech and finance). This endless shell game guarantees that playing "whack-a-mole" with individual companies via regulation will never conclusively end exploitative behavior. Capital will simply shift to a new product cycle or a new geography to escape the new laws.
On the other hand, nonviolent struggle relies on coercion. It does not rely on converting the opponent or appealing to their morality—in fact, conversion is the rarest mechanism of success as you may already surmise.
Political power requires constant, active cooperation: it needs human resources, skills, knowledge, and administrative compliance to function. By systematically withdrawing labor, obedience, and technical skills, the working class does not appeal to a CEO's conscience; it cuts off the very sources of the ruler's power, paralyzing the system. To nonviolently coerce an opponent means to create a situation where, despite their resolution not to give in, they are physically and economically unable to defend their policies because the system can no longer operate.
> They relocate to regions with cheaper labor and fewer regulations [...] and they automate or restructure the workplace to disempower workers.
That's a total, unqualified victory. If your regulation is intended to stop people exploiting your customers or labor base, the best possible outcome is that exploitative fuckbags pack up their stuff and leave. This is what we're seeing in California, where every single Fortune 500 company is writing about how awful their taxes are, without acknowledging the damage that private capital did.
Regulatory capture is always going to be a matter of perspective, but that doesn't stop me from advocating for it. This is a zero-sum argument and you wouldn't need to reach for it if revolution was a successful premise.
> Capital will simply shift to a new product cycle or a new geography to escape the new laws.
It's a free country, let them. Someone has to water-test reality, and I'm fine letting private capital waste money on terrible ideas that they can be fined for in the long run. I don't weep for the world we might live in if Microsoft was allowed to bully Netscape and Java. They made the terrible idea, and they earn their just desert.
> By systematically withdrawing labor, obedience, and technical skills, [...] it cuts off the very sources of the ruler's power, paralyzing the system.
You haven't cited a single instance of this working. I have cited four distinct counterexamples, now.
I'm glad that you're engaging with theory, but it's not my job to simulate the myriad reasons why this hasn't worked. We have 30 years of postmodern software capitalism to examine, and at the end it says "Palantir" in extra-bold typeface. Conscientious objection didn't seem to do much in WWII, didn't change after the Snowden revalations, and today we are deeper-entrenched in anti-human software than ever.
Appealing to workers isn't enough. You have to convince the top, and revolution is how you hand them consent to exercise their monopoly on violence.
this is so funny for me to read. a few years ago, i would see programmers saying they can negotiate better deals for themselves than a union could. now you're saying it's already over, programming as a skill has a future valuation that's heading to zero.
i advise against being so sure of your ideas. maybe you think platform holders have all the cards--test it. if they fight efforts to unionize, that tells a different story.
Individuals can negotiate insane labors deals for themselves. Go ask the best-paid person you know how they got their pay package, it usually entails some form of schmoozing. Unions are for bringing the bottom-rung up to par, not for raising the top bar further.
> if they fight efforts to unionize, that tells a different story.
You are describing an industry that has outsourced intelligent labor to India and Pakistan for more than 25 years. The efforts to unionize would be like trying to save America's auto industry in 2004.
The fatalistic view that "platform holders have all the cards" and that "programming as a skill has a future valuation that's heading to zero" is a common psychological barrier in labor struggles. Oppressed or subordinate groups often suffer from a "diffuse, magical belief in the invulnerability and power of the oppressor"[0].
However, theories of political and social power argue the exact opposite: the power of any ruling class or corporation is actually quite fragile because it depends entirely on the cooperation, obedience, and skills of its subordinates. If highly skilled individuals like blue-collar technologists and programmers collectively withdraw our human resources, skills, and knowledge, we can severely disrupt or paralyze the systems that enrich the platform holders.
> If highly skilled individuals like blue-collar technologists and programmers collectively withdraw our human resources
Individuals cannot convince the Subway app, Raycast or LastPass to defect from Apple or Google's platforms. Using those platforms is an executive decision, and Senior iOS/Android engineers will not voice this minority concern or risk their job to advocate for it. Similarly, Apple and Google's platform monopolies are not designed by individual engineers, but executives that will happily pay to replace you if you feel morally unjust.
The only place where this could work is indie development, since that's the scale where developers have authority to sabotage themselves. And sabotage themselves they would - it would be like Fortnite's removal from the App Store except with ~100,000 times less public outcry. You'd go bankrupt before ever inspiring change on the platform.
Nothing about the technology changed, indie developers have long warned users to not give their OEM control over what they can install. But users don't really care, businesses told them the App Store is "safer" before they ever got to see the alternative.
Google and Microsoft employees already tolerate terrible software and immoral contract deals. It's not like you can count on them growing a conscience over working for an evil company.
They should be forced to stay at a Holiday Inn Express and meet at a Detroit Denny's to discuss the future of the world. Maybe get some perspective in the process!
If I you can project power globally , but as soon as a human is put on the ground they're disintegrated by a 100 dollar drone, how important was your ability to get there?
This is so true. There is a person popular on social media for debunking health and nutrition misinformation and "wellness influencer" BS, Dr. Jessica Knurick. I think her content is great, but even she has talked about how in order for the algorithms to pick up her content, she usually highlights something idiotic that some wellness influencer or RFK Jr. is saying to debunk it (always with citations!) She's said how if she just put forward good, evidence-based health and nutrition content that she wouldn't have near the audience or exposure she does as when she highlights how some ignoramus thinks niacin fortification in grains is bad because they can't pronounce it.
You don't think he was aware of the potential to leverage Twitter to elect a friendly president and alleviate his severe regulatory challenges? That part was just a happy accident?
Are we forgetting the part where he bought twitter because of a joke, got sued over it for manipulating twitter's stock price, tried to buy his way out by buying twitter, realized it would cost too much money and tried to back out, got sued again and finally was more or less forced to follow through on the purchase?
Are these the actions of a man following a well thought out plan to elect a president?
We all know why he did it: because people wrote on and listened to twitter a lot, and he didn't like what they said. He wanted to control the conversation that was unfavourable to him.
> He wanted to control the conversation that was unfavourable to him.
Same thing Thiel is doing for political control: attempting to inherit the religious right from MAGA -perhaps on behalf of hos protegé. Thiel's plans will likely outlive the movement's leader and/or go beyond 2028, it's a race against time to establish his bona fides while the sun shines
If they were using banned chips they wouldn't declare them in public papers. There have been multiple documented/alleged cases of chips being routed through Singaporean shell companies.
Why do apologists always resort to “are you holding it wrong”?
This person is using their ev as a car, the same way they would use any other car in their possention. Evs are presented as ice car replacements but when their lack of ability as ice car replacements is pointed out the response is “well maybe you shouldn’t do that. WELL MAYBE THEYRE NOT ICE REPLACEMENTS /rant
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