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haritha-jtoday at 12:14 PM2 repliesview on HN

I enjoyed this, but the thesis is misleading. Paul’s own examples here were Facebook, apple etc. I imagine that the politicians point was that beyond a certain point, you do have to be unethical to continue that growth rate. Facebook is notorious for doing plenty of this. Apple too is known for exploiting developers.

If we extrapolate to trillionaires, we know for a fact that you need to be an all-around dousche that manipulates politics and literally cuts government funding to the poorest and most vulnerable groups to get there.

And since this post has a numbers focus, zuck is worth 195 billion. Would Facebook’s negative influence be noticeably less if they spent 194.9 billion on reducing the harms of Facebook, and zuck remained a millionaire? I believe so.


Replies

ahartmetztoday at 12:28 PM

Yup. Billionaire - doable without too much ethical compromise (e.g early Google). The thing is that a billion isn't much per "first world" citizen if that is roughly your market. Many-many-billionaire - would need some good example, I can only think of bad ones. The SAP guys maybe? But they aren't exactly the richest. The only bad things I've heard about SAP are "making clunky software" and "charging too much money".

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andaitoday at 12:16 PM

Is that the incentive structure?