Comment by tcp_handshaker
21 hours ago
>> Your image is wealthy people is cartoonish.
In the meanwhile, we can all publicly see how the the billionaires and trillionaires, behave and settle their priorities exactly, in the cartoonish way you are dismissing.
- The incredible insecurity and constant need for personal validation.
- The absurd and obsessive pursue of further wealth when it would be temporally impossible to even spend 1% of their current capital.
- The extreme level of cowardice, where an auto plant worker, can call out the powers to be, the pedophile protectors that they are. At the same time, only Jensen Huang did not submit itself, to the humiliation of standing behind face and front at the presidential inauguration...
> "The absurd and obsessive pursue of further wealth when it would be temporally impossible to even spend 1% of their current capital."
That shows profound lack of imagination. Mark Shuttleworth's founding of Canonical was a choice to expend his wealth to try to popularize Linux. So was Gabe Newell's long running efforts with the Steam Machine (dating back to the original one in 2015) and Proton that only started bearing fruit in recent years. These were business decisions you say? At the level of wealth we're talking about, the two are intertwined.
I love what he'd done for linux gaming, but man the cult of personality for gabe is strong on the internet.
gabe is not a philanthropy who want to see linux gaming happen no matter what. he's a reasonable man who saw a threat to his business when every operating system started making their own store and windows was directly trying to eat his lunch starting from window 7 and going at it the strongest in window 8 when they had their dedicated to game store directly pinned in the windows bar menu.
Microsoft's threat was more overt than that: the initial plan was for Microsoft to be the sole signing authority for Windows apps in Windows 7, while simultaneously locking down the OS from pre-boot onwards and not executing unsigned binaries. This would have killed not only Steam games, but Steam itself wouldn't be distributable. Microsoft forced Gabe's hand! Valve had to pivot away from being 100% dependant on Windows as a matter of corporate survival.
The Windows Store was introduced in 2012, 14 years ago, and promptly went nowhere; Gabe Newell is ex-Microsoft himself and undoubtedly had a good understanding of how dim the prospects and how poor the execution was for it. Yet he persisted in pursuing the Steam Machine and Proton long after it was clear that the Windows Store was a flop.
If you want philanthropy (or perhaps not), Gabe Newell has $1 billion worth of yachts and research ships.
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Given the state of ... well, everything ... it still surprises me when people pretend there's some level of modesty or decorum the rich and powerful still need to abide by at the risk of some sort of popular revolt. I guess it's a way to compensate for the material powerlessness most people actually experience (especially in politics), much like the handwringing over the Second Amendment in the US as if merely handing a town full of ordinary people guns is sufficient to defeat a modern military. Sure, it looks like nowadays you can do that with a stockpile of low budget drones because even the military industrial complex has found a way to optimize for profit by literally delivering nothing in return for extracting the lion's share of the federal budget, but even that still requires actual work like planning, training and organizing with sufficient political motivation, not just going to the range or "hunting".
The expectation of a need for decorum against all evidence almost seems like a quaint remnant of the aristocracy at this point. There's no advantage to being a nice or sensible person if you're a billionaire. People talk about "business" like it's still the 1800s and billionaires are the factory owners. The real economy (i.e. anything involving any pretense of being an exchange of goods and services in any shape or form) is now a minute fraction of the global economy. Everything else is finance. And if the nature of the finance "industry" wasn't obvious enough the US has given up all pretense to the point that members of the US government now intentionally manipulate online betting "markets" directly.
You may have needed some table manners to be able to run a tincan factory. You can let your entire ass hang out on TV 24/7 and still be a billionaire today. And people will still cheer you on like you're the inventor of sliced bread.
A slight tangent, but on your first point - defeating a modern military does not mean engaging them in head-to-head combat and coming out on top, but making it impossible for them to comfortably operate. This is how Afghanistan, with basic weapons and religious extremists running around in sandals, managed to defeat not only the US but also the USSR.
The big factor that works against military victory anywhere is that the military is left to visibly identify themselves as a means of projecting influence, whereas militants can seamlessly blend in with the population. And trying to punish the population at large to weed out the militants mostly just tends to backfire and create even more militants.
There is even modern precedent for this like the Algerian War where the people of Algeria managed to kick out the French even with the French engaging in widescale massacres, torture, and all other sorts of fun stuff that explains how anti-Western powers are so comfortably gaining influence in Africa today.
If one doesn't believe there was a conspiracy, then the assassination attempt on Trump would exemplify this - one guy with a rifle nearly single-handedly killed one of the most guarded men alive. Your average military logistics support doesn't have anything remotely like a team of secret service and police covering every single angle of attack in one well secured location.
> If one doesn't believe there was a conspiracy, then the assassination attempt on Trump would exemplify this - one guy with a rifle nearly single-handedly killed one of the most guarded men alive.
Sure, but that being a failure mode is a design choice. Look at Iran: we've seen how many decapitation strikes now? At this point there shouldn't even anyone be left that was in the original chain of command but clearly they're chugging along quite nicely because they decentralized military operations exactly for a scenario like this, knowing anyone appearing on the US' or Israel's radar too prominently was one bad day away from needing replacement.
> This is how Afghanistan, with basic weapons and religious extremists running around in sandals, managed to defeat not only the US but also the USSR.
Not quite. The US managed to "defeat" Afghanistan. The problem was just that nation building was never really on the menu. The US was extremely hands-off during the occupation because their priority was making sure more US soldiers don't come home toes-first when the war had officially been declared won than to build any kind of legacy. This also led to massive subversion of the supposedly US-backed government. There were very few incentives in supporting the US more than necessary not to get shot at, especially after it became clear the US government had no interest in rewarding the loyalty of most of the people who had risked their lives as translators and negotiators, let alone supporting the people who volunteered to join the new army or police. That's why when the US left the supposed new Afghan state just dropped its weapons and ran away and why the Taliban could pretty much just take over without much resistance.
A good counter-example is Iraq where not only did the US have to do much less work to do (because Iraq already had the concept of a powerful central government rather than effectively being a coalition of often loosely connected tribal communities), they also engaged in a lot more active nation building and had reasons to maintain a long-term presence.
If you want to see how bottle rockets vs modern hardware can also play out, look at whatever the IDF is doing at the moment. Granted, the US military being deployed against US citizens would probably show a lot more hesitance and restraint, but again that's a design choice, not an inherent property.
> And trying to punish the population at large to weed out the militants mostly just tends to backfire and create even more militants.
That assumes militants are a problem, not a calculated risk. Long-term social instability is manageable if you don't rely on popular approval as long as it doesn't disrupt supply chains enough to directly threaten the military's ability to operate. Israel for example arguably flourished for decades while having to continuously deal with militants and responding with large scale violence.
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I guess you don't observe those billionaires yourself. Is it possible the cartoonish image you assume to be obvious comes through media channels and your societal bubble layers?
Can we all agree the owner of X is a cartoonish goof?
No more than you are here.
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HN must be the only place on the web where billionaires are propped up. 98% of you, are already in the SQL result set, of the next layoffs at your big five...
Uninformed HNers grouse endlessly about the wealthy and megacorps in without understanding their actual psychology, motivations, and sources of power/income. Then they are left wondering time after time why all their campaigning and efforts against them comes to naught.
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Oh you should see the Musk-adjacent subreddits. Not to mention MAGA. Billionaires are still worshipped on the “wealth == success” basis by many, many people.
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"If it's worth your time to say something false, it's worth my time to correct it". I don't take a stance on who is right, but your dismissal here, which doesn't deal with the truth of the matter, is worse than both.
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There's literally nothing in my previous commentary which "props up" anyone. The layoffs mention suggests that as someone who may lose job I must support anything said against billionaires whether correct or not. I sincerely urge you to re-visit your position cause putting political statements above facts amounts to dumbing down oneself, with a potential to become an enthusiastic koolaid drinker if you see what I mean.
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Big difference between propping up and trying to correct an extremely naive and childish view someone has about rich people.
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the irony of you getting your panties in a bunch over being disagreed with is simply delightful. not so different than those pesky billionaires, are you?
Elon Musk runs his own media channel, which he uses to depict himself like this. Many others are run by other billionaires. State-owned media like the BBC and France24 tends to paint them in a better light, perhaps out of a desire to treat their subjects charitably and without bias.
This “billionaires couldn’t spend their money” thing comes up a lot, and it show’s a child’s idea of what people might spend money on. “$1000 a month buys more ice cream than I can eat and more toy cars than anyone can play with, and I don’t want anything other than ice cream and toy cars, so nobody needs more than $1000 a month.”
I can think of loads of things I’d do with hundreds of millions of dollars of disposable income. Make large buildings that look like how I think buildings should look, fund scientific research in areas I’m personally interested in but have little aptitude for, find artists that align with my tastes and give them the ability to realise their visions, contribute to political organisations and charities that align with my values, et cetera. Those all are basically infinite money sinks.
In the past, the ultra-wealthy did do all of these things, funding loss-making research and expeditions, monumental architecture, philanthropic organisation and artistic works. The problem might be that you think billionaires shouldn’t do some or all of these things, but that is a very different position than that they can’t do any of these things.
This comment seems needlessly insulting and also kind of obtuse?
I don’t think the GP meant that it’s impossible to dispose of a large amount of money. But it is effectively impossible to spend down a certain level of accumulated wealth by purchasing goods and services that any human being or their family could require to maintain even lavish standards of living.
The examples you gave are conversions of wealth to power, using money to reshape the world. Which, I think, is kind of the crux of the issue. Perhaps you were alluding to this at the end of your comment.
I think the actual snag though is that people genuinely believe that giving money to the government is the highest form of good.
Skirt taxes to give a billion dollars to prospective college kids through your own organization? Nice gesture, but still a greedy fuck who refuses to give up control.
Pay a billion in taxes that ends up mostly going to heavy administrative bloat? Give that guy sainthood.